Place and Land in Anglican Theology: Intercultural Theology in a Global World

Abstract

Aspects of Anglican theology have in the recent past emphasized the importance of place. Indigenous knowledge and worldviews speak of the centrality of land. Tessayshis places place-based thinking alongside land-based thinking to argue that these distinct ways of thinking can be mutually enriching and challenging. The essay limits itself primarily to Anglican-related authors while also contextualizing this theology within a broader scope of thinking about place. The paper concludes with suggestions for ways in which place- and land-based thinking can enrich Anglican approaches to ministry and mission, particularly in relation to the Doctrine of Discovery and ownership of property.

In 2019, the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada adopted a resolution asserting that

The People of the Land, the Indigenous Peoples of our Land and Nation, stand in a unique place of witness to the living relationship between life and Land. Indigenous Peoples . . . are a special model and concern for the Church and its work. ¹

For some decades, the Anglican Church of Canada has been engaged in a process of repentance and reconciliation that, however imperfect, has demonstrated the way in which Indigenous peoples are a “concern for the Church and its work.” ² This has included significant steps toward the formation of a self-determining Indigenous church in Canada. What has been less clear is how Indigenous peoples are a “special model” for the non-Indigenous church, that is, in what ways Indigenous ways of knowing and being have enriched the whole church. In this paper, I develop both the parallels and differences between ideas of place that are rooted in the non-Indigenous Anglican tradition and ideas of land that are constitutive of Indigenous identity to show how a land-based ethic can be an enriching model for the non-Indigenous Anglican church, particularly against the backdrop of a de-placed and globalized world. In investigating the cross-currents and inter-weavings of these themes, non-Indigenous Anglicans may find an orientation to the world that is profoundly missiological for the time—and places—in which we find ourselves. Moreover, in the conjunction of place-based and land-based thinking, I see an opportunity for movement toward an intercultural theology for an intercultural church.

My interest in a land-based ethic began prior to my ordination and theological training when I lived for some years among the Iñupiaq of western Alaska. To spend even a little time with Indigenous peoples is to become aware of the way in which land is constitutive of community identity, through, for instance, seasonal patterns of movement or the provision of food and shelter. In the years since, amid a growing climate crisis, it has become increasingly clear that non-Indigenous people must attend to and learn from this centrality accorded to the land. Yet, as a non-Indigenous person I proceed with caution. Non-Indigenous people have at times distorted Indigenous cultures through the creation of what has been called the “ecological Indian,” or the belief that Indigenous people in North America are somehow more in tune with the natural world. ³ Likewise, there is the danger of romanticization and a de-contextual misappropriation. Historic experience demonstrates the danger of non-Indigenous people taking from Indigenous communities without understanding the fullness of Indigenous ways of life. As Vine Deloria, Jr. once warned, specifically in relation to the land, there is a danger that non-Indigenous people who write about the importance of the land may not “really think deeply about what land and sacredness are, and . . . be content to receive the simple poetic admonitions and aphorisms that pass as knowledge in the American intellectual cafeteria.” ⁴ Moreover, the scope of both place-based and land-based thinking is potentially enormous, posing a challenge for an essay of this length. I proceed, therefore, perhaps foolishly but hopefully with caution.

In the essay’s first section, I explore some of the key points about place-based Christian theology, with a focus on recent work by Anglican authors. I am aware that this represents a significant narrowing of the field, though this is necessary in an essay of this length. I then turn to explore some important aspects of Indigenous practices related to land, again limiting my focus primarily to Indigenous voices within or related to the Anglican tradition. (I appreciate this is a slightly arbitrary designation for a people for whom denominational distinctions may be less meaningful.) In conclusion, I suggest some of the ways in which a land-based theology usefully broadens the horizons of place-based thinking in ways that have the potential to be enormously beneficial to Christian witness. I also provide examples of how this could be true, particularly in relation to the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery as well as the practice of the offertory in the Eucharist.

Anglican theology and the centrality of place in a global world

The nature of economic, cultural, and social organization in the twenty-first century favors global structures and flows. The ease of long-distance travel and communication, economic relationships that span the globe through complex supply chains, and the power of multinational corporations and the consequent homogenization of demand all demonstrate the priority of the global. This global and connected world brings with it many benefits, but among its losses is that of place. A global world tends to obscure the value and integrity of local, particular locations and contexts. This trend is contrary both to much of human history, in which local places were of great importance, as well as many aspects of a Christian tradition that has historically emphasized the importance of place in relation to ministry.

Challenges to this global-oriented thinking are long-standing and proliferating. So-called agrarian authors, such as Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, have defended the importance of particular place as the ground (literally) for healthy and integral living. Theologians such as Ellen Davis, Norman Wirzba, and Willie James Jennings have drawn on agrarian and other thinking to make place central to their accounts of Christian identity and ministry. ⁵ Other authors have explicitly reinvigorated place (and the related concept of region) as the basis for Christian mission. Ched Meyers has adopted the insights of bioregionalism as the basis for his call for “watershed discipleship,” that is, the importance of being disciples of Jesus first of all in the watershed in which one finds oneself. ⁶ Other authors associated with the “new parish” movement have explicitly adopted one of the Christian tradition’s greatest markers of place to develop a missional agenda for the church. ⁷ At a time when global flows put the importance of local place under threat, there are many voices in the Christian tradition arguing in favor of place as the ground of Christian witness.

One of the sources of the resurgence of interest in place in Christian theology is a doctoral dissertation and later book by John Inge, an Anglican priest and then bishop, who wrote in the late 1990s and early 2000s, just as there was new political awareness about globalization in a post-Cold War world. ⁸ Inge begins by noting how “place” has an immense array of possible meanings. His focus is on physical places that are distinct from “space”: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” ⁹ Inge’s focus on place came from a sense that global economic structures tend toward a “loss of place” that can be “dehumanizing.” ¹⁰ Modernity privileges space over place and time over both. Global flows of culture, trade, and more tend to ensure that individual geographical places are “realigned in relation to new global realities.” ¹¹ This devaluing of place tends to have the greatest impact on those who are most marginal, such as refugees or migrant workers. Inge calls this devaluing of place “one of the barbarisms of today’s world.” ¹²

Place is a natural theme for Anglican theology, given the Anglican tradition’s roots in Benedictine monasticism and the Church of England’s historic commitment to place through parish ministry. Yet the riches of a renewed place-based theology have been insufficiently received within modern Anglican churches, particularly in North America. Thus, in this section, I focus on Inge’s work as well as that of Andrew Rumsey, a parish priest in the Church of England, whose work is a theological exploration of “parish.” Both authors are, therefore, from within an English context, and both write with an awareness that the parish system itself can seem under significant threat, a theme sounded in other parish-related writing which I do not directly engage in this essay. ¹³ In my overview of Rumsey and Inge’s work, I focus on several key themes. The first is the way in which place establishes community and helps Christians come to terms with Christ’s command to love one’s neighbor. Second, this view of place is scripturally grounded and inherently Christo-centric. Third, place-based thinking also helps the world understand itself by providing common ground for common living. It challenges market-based and national forces that act against local communities. Fourth, the authors also acknowledge the potential for the deformation of place and thus the need for place to remain a penultimate, eschatological reality that is permeable and open to change and development.

Inge grounds his argument in what he calls, repeatedly, a “relational view of place.” Places are created by the relationships between the people who have that place in common: “any conception of place is inseparable from the relationships that are associated with it.” ¹⁴ This is not explicit in Inge’s work but an important implication of this view is that places are created, not given. Places derive meaning from the human interaction that happens within them. Rumsey writes, “No sooner have we seen a certain place than we tell ourselves a story about it, before enacting that story and mapping it on to the place we behold.” ¹⁵ This gives the work of place formation an imaginative element: communities of people imagine themselves in a place together and then enact those relationships with one another and in relationship to the place. There is an ongoing interaction between the community of people and the place where they find themselves: Christian community becomes an embodied network of relationships grounded in a particular location. Both Inge and Rumsey naturally point to the parish as an example of this.

This relational view of place is grounded in the Bible. Inge studies the Old Testament and sees it as, in part, the creation of “storied places”: places have meaning in the Hebrew Scriptures because of the events that have happened there, the relationships formed there, and the stories told about those places. ¹⁶ While this argument is relatively clear in relation to the Old Testament—think of Jacob awakening from his dream and declaring, “Surely the Lord is in this place” (Genesis 28:16)—it can be harder to see at first in relation to the New Testament, which has sometimes been characterized as representing a loss of place. ¹⁷ But both Inge and Rumsey argue for an ongoing placedness in the New Testament. The Incarnation is a reminder of the importance of the specific and concrete, and Jesus through his ministry takes the place of humanity on the cross. More importantly, the eschatological vision of the New Testament is a place-based one. Jesus says he is “going to prepare a place” for his followers (John 14:2). The vision of Revelation, building on an earlier vision in Ezekiel, is of an eschatological place, the new Jerusalem come down from heaven: “the final promise, in the New Testament as in the Old, is of placedness.” ¹⁸

Place thus provides the grounds for a neighborliness that is to be characteristic of Christian witness. By being in a place and being aware of the relationships with other humans who share that place, Christians are taught who is near to them, the literal meaning of neighbor. The attachment to place, thus, offers Christians the grounds for their ministry and contribution to the broader society, and at a time when it is urgently needed. Inge laments the “impoverished state of affairs” that works against neighborliness in modern society and sees place as a key site of Christian counter-witness: “If members of Christian communities could learn to be good neighbours to one another and to the larger communities of which they are a part, they would have something infinitely worthwhile to offer to the world.” ¹⁹ Likewise, Rumsey argues that Christians need to be rooted in place because it is only then that they can receive from and offer to God the whole of life in and of that place. This, in turn, leads to new meaning for the neighbor-love commandment. Being grounded in place allows Jesus’ commandment to “become particular when placed within a ‘neighbourhood’ of proximate relations that allows for peaceable encounter with those different from us.” ²⁰

But it is not simply in terms of Christian love toward the other that place is important. Place is also important because it helps the world figure itself out. People, and not just Christians, need a sense of belonging and they cannot have this without a sense of place. As such, the church’s ministry in a place allows “the world [to] find its true place by virtue of the Church’s action and presence.” ²¹ This can happen because Christian-based places can be areas of “common ground” in which all people in that place, whether members of the Christian community or not, can learn what it means to belong. This “common ground” is a necessary and vital counterpoint to the “common worship” that is an equally vital part of Christian ministry. ²² Through the church’s ministry in a place, all people in that place can learn that neighborhood is not simply a name for the area where they live, but “an ethos—a way of living locally.” ²³

This ethos is particularly important in the midst of the de-placement of modern society. This de-placement can be traced to the rise of the nation state which draws attention from the local in favor of the national, and to the influence of the market, which works against particularity and toward global homogenization. Inge argues that the modern consumer economy relies on placelessness through its focus on a non-particular identity. The more that consumers are the same, the easier it is for the market to serve the greatest number of them. Place can be a necessary antidote to this. To those who want to move past the market, Inge argues for a recovery of the idea of inhabiting place precisely because in a revitalized sense of place, we will be able to form, nurture, and foster new identities. ²⁴ Likewise, the local place can help broaden the horizon of its members beyond the nation state:

what the local church is to the Catholic Church, the local human community is to the entire human community—not the nation state. Thus, the church can witness to the fact that stressing the importance of the local does not mean a disregard for the universal, but can set it, rather, in a proper context. ²⁵

It is precisely this context—which the nation state and the market would strip away—which place-based community provides.

Although place is central to the construction of community identities and to recovering a rooted and grounded Christian ministry, both Inge and Rumsey are clear about the potential dangers of place. The adjectival form of parish is parochial, which in modern usage is rarely a complimentary term. Erecting boundaries of whatever kind around places can make them cloistered, narrow, and deformed communities. Rumsey worries about a nostalgic sense for the parish and points out the ways in which in the past even church-based place-oriented activities such as the beating of the bounds have been used to exclude and divide. ²⁶ In creating itself as a community in a place, that group of people can also exclude those who they deem not to belong there.

This caution introduces an eschatological element into place-based thinking. Precisely because the eschatological vision is a place-based one, any human place will of necessity be “penultimate.” ²⁷ This requires a humility and incompleteness about the creation of places and a constant dialogue between what now exists and what ultimately will exist. In their places, Christians seek to enact their vision of the places that one day will be, where rivers flow from a city and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Rumsey writes,

The vocation of the Anglican parish is, therefore, to give spatio-temporal expression to the “new place” in the midst of the old—a task that, crucially, involves the demotion of the past and present places from their claim to ultimacy, which is the very root of territorial idolatry. ²⁸

The implication, therefore, is that rather than being bounded and closed, Christian places are permeable places in which the community is continually being formed and reformed. It is expected that many communities that inhabit their places well will come to know and defend their places from external forces. But this cannot go so far as to become an idolatry, in which the people believe they possess the place and seek to see off all challenge and change. ²⁹ Rumsey, in hearkening back to what is in some ways a pre-modern vision of place, also welcomes postmodern critiques that challenge the placelessness of modernity. In particular, he argues that postmodernity teaches the importance of “deconstructing the social forces that determine where the lines are drawn” and advocates “a more fluid conception of social space than traditional concepts of boundary might allow.” ³⁰ A permeable place is not an unbounded place. It is rather a place that is constantly attentive both to those within the place and those seeking to join. Rumsey writes:

The only escape from the fatal desire to possess the land, as the biblical narrative attests, is to relinquish it, to “give up one’s place” for God and neighbour in order to receive it afresh in the kingdom. This is an eminently hopeful calling, offering both resolution of nostalgia and release from the idolatry of homeland, to which the parochial tradition is chronically prone. ³¹

Rather than, for instance, seeing England as equivalent to Jerusalem, the call for Christian place-based ministry is to use the place to re-orient the community to the new Jerusalem. ³² At a time of widespread global migration, the permeability of Christian places is especially vital in the way it affords welcome to newcomers and invites them into existing place-based communities that are, by that welcome, continually reshaped, reformed, and renewed.

Here, it is important to remember the etymological roots of “parish.” The word comes from the Greek root paroikos, the one outside the house or city walls. More broadly, the word means something like alien, stranger, wanderer, or exile, as in, for instance, I Peter, where readers are addressed as “exiles” and enjoined to “live in reverent fear during the time of your exile” (1:1, 1:17). The very word used in English to describe the rootedness of ministry in place comes from the word that expresses the alien nature of Christian existence in a fallen but redeemed world. The dynamic interplay between parish and its Greek root is a helpful guide for Christian ministry: be rooted in place, but ensure that place is open to new wanderers as well. Rumsey makes this explicit:

That the Church employed and adapted a term essentially denoting those who do not belong to describe a new kind of community is as enticing a piece of ecclesiological paradox as one is likely to encounter—brimming with potential for imaginative reinterpretation. ³³

This brief summary of these authors makes clear the importance of what place-based Christian ministry has to offer in a global world, in which more people than ever are on the move and many are feeling displaced or in exile. Through its placedness, the Christian community reminds all people about the importance of roots and provides concrete expression to the command to love one’s neighbor. Inge writes that Christian communities need “to help the rest of the world to recover some imagination about what place can be, for how we imagine communities and places of the future becomes part of what our future is.” ³⁴ The implications of such a view for Christian ministry are far-reaching. In brief, place-based ministry is more expansive than a ministry that focuses simply on the congregation: a parish priest is qualitatively different from a congregational chaplain. But place-based ministry is also inherently circumscribed and limited precisely by its emphasis on place. Christian communities cannot engage in all issues that a modern world may surface but can by contrast focus on the people and the relationships in the place where those communities are found. Rumsey highlights the way in which place-based Christian communities can renew civic life in local communities, for instance. ³⁵ And there is a need for renewal: while the parish is an ancient formation, the forms of ministry in modern parishes need not be so ancient: place-based ministry is constantly renewing itself to be “intelligible in the contemporary situation.” ³⁶ The importance of parish as a particular expression of place remains generative for thinking about the future of Christian ministry, and the new attention shown to it is indicative of this trend. Yet I believe this conversation could be further enriched by adding a new partner.

Land and Indigenous worldview

The conquest and colonization of North America by European powers was an exercise in place-making. It revealed little of the idea of place as permeable and its inhabitants as sojourners but instead was an exercise in boundedness and enclosure. Early colonialists in what is now the United States and Canada, for instance, built stockades around their communities to distinguish the new places they had created. ³⁷ Colonization was also the context in which European understandings of place, including those dominant in the Anglican tradition, came into contact with Indigenous understandings of land.

Place and land are related but distinct concepts. Not all authors agree. Inge and Rumsey use the words in a largely interchangeable fashion, with Rumsey spending time speaking about the landscape of an area and its natural topography. Rumsey calls land a “social construction as much as a physical reality.” ³⁸ Yet I see two important distinctions. First, places are created by the relationships and by the stories told by the people who dwell in those places. While place interacts with the natural world, ultimately places are of human origin. By contrast, land, as I use it here, has an irreducible givenness about it. It is the ecological and geophysical substructure on which place is formed. In Christian terms, land is ultimately of divine, rather than human, origin. Yet, I do not mean to suggest that place is not important to Indigenous peoples: specific places on the land matter as well, particularly for religious reasons. Thus, a further distinction is that places tend to be primarily, and narrowly, anthropocentric. Land, as we shall see, is rooted in a more holistic approach to all of Creation. It is important not to push these distinctions too far. Place and land can be intimately related, as the Scriptural witness makes clear. In England, parish ministry has historically been supported by glebe land, for instance, and tithes were rooted in what the land could produce. The social well-being of those in a place is linked with ecological well-being, as research and advocacy about environmental racism have made clear. But land is worthy of being considered distinct from place and it is that which I seek to do now.

To limit the scope of this section, I focus on Indigenous understandings of land as developed primarily in three sources. The first is the work of Vine Deloria, Jr., the Native American scholar and activist, who grew up the son of an Episcopal priest, was theologically educated, and, for a time, was himself heavily involved in the Episcopal Church. ³⁹ The second is the work of Ray Aldred, a Cree theologian and pastor who teaches in theological education in Canada. The third is my own experience with Cree communities in the James Bay region of northern Quebec, which I supplement with anthropological literature about these communities. ⁴⁰ What I offer, then, is not comprehensive but specific and particular to these contexts. In my depiction of the Indigenous relationship with the land, I highlight how the land grounds a communal Indigenous identity by providing an orientation to an ongoing journey, how that orientation is not just to human life but to other-than-human life as well, how the land provides the basis for a rejection of commodification and exploitation, how the land introduces new ideas of sacredness, and how the land introduces the importance of living within limits.

For Ray Aldred, identity begins in relationship with the land or, in his Cree language, askîhk. It is a specific piece of land:

Part of living in a good way, with your relatives who are Indigenous peoples, is recognizing the specificity and holiness of this land, this place. Askîhk is never a general, abstract thing. It is always a relationship to specific land, with specific animals, and trees and plant, and relations. ⁴¹

Deloria likewise calls the land the “centre of the universe” for the people who live on it: “the people who hold land in this way always have a home to go to. Their identity is secure.” ⁴² The relationship with the Land is so close as to provide meaning and guidance. Carlson, a non-Indigenous anthropologist, writes of observing his Cree friends move through what Carlson considered to be wilderness:

There was a sense of connectedness, of selflessness in relation to their surroundings that made the bush that Daniel and Charlot moved through a different place from the “wilderness” that I traversed. It would probably be better to say that they were moving through a different story. ⁴³

In testimonies from Cree survivors of Canada’s residential schools, I have heard repeatedly that it was only by returning to the land that these survivors were able to regain the culture and identity that had been taken from them in residential schools. ⁴⁴ One survivor told me how when he returned to his Cree community after a seven-year absence, he immediately went to “the bush” for two years. “It was the land that gave me my culture back and reminded me who I am,” he said.

The identity that is found in relationship to the land is not an individual identity but a communal one. Cree life in the James Bay region, for instance, was for many generations structured around small family groups who would spend winters on the land hunting and then gather in larger groups during the summer. Hunting—a primary expression of relationship with the land—grounded Cree social organization and was itself grounded in the community’s relationship with the land: “Full knowledge of the smallest details of the land was crucial to successful hunting over the course of a winter.” ⁴⁵ That communal identity stretches over generations. Aldred writes,

Shared identity is based upon a shared narrative, leading to a partnership that embraces care for the land. The land is the soul of our Nêhiyaw [Cree] people. The life that we live is for our grandchildren . . .. In order to ensure the well-being of our grandchildren, we must care for the land. ⁴⁶

This emphasis on community being formed on the land has echoes of what we have seen in Anglican place-based theology. But the Indigenous view is significantly broader. It recognizes that humans are not the only life on the land. Carlson describes the James Bay Cree in this way:

What they mean by land is the entire multidimensional web of beings that occupies eastern James Bay: people, animals, plants, earth. So their story is one of place but also one of the complicated relationships—physical and metaphysical, human and other-than-human—that have shaped land and people together. ⁴⁷

I have heard from Cree hunters speaking about, for instance, the role of the beaver in their landscape: the beaver can be hunted for its fur and meat but also plays an important ecological role in creating habitats for other creatures. Its significance is not just in the income it can generate but in its place within the entire ecosystem of the land. The breadth of this recognition marks an important difference from place-based thinking and moves away from an almost exclusive emphasis on the human life in a shared place.

Understanding land in this fashion leads to a conscious and deliberate relationship with all life on the land. Deloria writes,

The Indian lived with his land. He feared to destroy it by changing its natural shape because he realized that it was more than a useful tool for exploitation. It sustained all life, and without other forms of life, man himself could not survive . . .. They well understood that without all life respecting itself and each other no society could indefinitely maintain itself. ⁴⁸

This leads to a fairly blunt dictum: “The land use philosophy of Indians is so utterly simple that it seems stupid to repeat it: man must live with other forms of life on the land and not destroy it.” ⁴⁹ From their position on the land, these Indigenous authors can point to a difference between their relationship with the natural world and how they see the relationship of non-Indigenous, settler peoples in North America. Deloria argues that “the white man . . . appears as a perennial adolescent . . .. He does not listen to the land and so cannot find a place for himself.” ⁵⁰ Elsewhere, his language is stronger. He criticizes white people for destroying life (human and otherwise) on the land in the name of progress and civilization. He writes,

Progress is the absolute destruction of the real world in favor of a technology that creates a comfortable way of life for a few fortunately situated people . . .. The Indian lived with his land. The white destroyed his land. He destroyed the planet earth. ⁵¹

What has been striking as a non-Indigenous observer is what might be called the intimacy of Cree relationship with the land. On several occasions, I have heard Cree hunters describe their trap lines and hunting areas with a granular level of detail, highlighting creeks, rocks, trees, places where fish spawn or moose are found, or pointing to places of particular family importance, such as where a child was born or an elder died. The Cree call their land Eeyou Istchee, which is usually translated as “the people’s land.” Carlson observes that it could just as easily be “the land’s people.” The phrase, he writes, does not

seem to describe a physical territory so much as a complex relationship between land and people, where neither one has control of the other and where “land” means not just ground but all the various beings with whom the Cree interact. This is the land in all its totality. ⁵²

The depth of relationship with the land means that Indigenous peoples struggle to understand how land can be privately owned or commodified. This was documented many times during colonization, but settler populations insisted on imposing private ownership, even as Indigenous people found this idea “ludicrous.” ⁵³ The reasons to reject private land ownership are multiple: if land is held in common, no single individual can own it. More significantly, the people’s relationship with land is understood to be one that has a temporary quality to it. This is particularly true for a people like the Cree whose way of life often meant they were on the move. Aldred uses the Cree word pimâcihowin (journeying) to help describe the proper relationship with the land. Cree understand themselves to be “journeying through the land.” ⁵⁴ This challenges the idea of ownership because one is not tied to a particular location. Aldred recalls being told: “A person can only possess what they can carry on their back . . .. Can you own the land? The land carries us.” ⁵⁵

Perhaps the most significant change for James Bay Cree in the last fifty years has been establishing clear ownership rules and rights to land. The 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement was reached to permit the government to realize the economic potential of the water and forestry resources in northern Quebec and led to the integration of this previously remote environment into a broader regional and global economy and the sedentarization of Cree life. The original and subsequent agreements established different categories of land in Eeyou Istchee and gave Cree different rights to each of these categories. Many traditional trapping lines and hunting grounds ended up outside the zone in which Cree had complete control of the land. The result has been that land claims settlements have turned some Cree into land “managers” who have needed to master mapping software and learn how to conduct themselves in meetings governed by Western rules of order so that they can defend their use of the land and maintain relationship with all life on it. It is, on the one hand, impressive to visit a land management office in a Cree tribal council and see the detailed maps these land managers have produced and the voluminous paperwork they have to generate to preserve traditional land use. But it is also to realize just how far from an Indigenous understanding of the land these practices are. By dividing and categorizing the land, land claims agreements have tended toward commodification and ensured that Indigenous peoples need to relate to land through non-Indigenous categories.

Indigenous approaches counter the commodification of the land through understanding the land as a gift. The Indigenous authors considered in this paper advance this view but it is perhaps most clearly expressed by the Indigenous author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. She offers what might be called the parable of the wild strawberries to demonstrate how the land is understood as a gift. As a child she picked wild strawberries every year for her father’s birthday. They shaped her view that the land is a gift that came to her through no action of her own: “you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears . . .. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery.” ⁵⁶ Understanding these strawberries as a gift, she practiced self-restraint and tried not to take too much. She contrasts the gift economy with a capitalist economy of private property, in which self-restraint is not a virtue. On such a view, private property is necessary for the accumulation of profit and so the idea of land as gift is rejected. Kimmerer asks, by contrast, how we can come to understand the Land and the earth as a gift again and “make our relations with the world sacred again?” ⁵⁷

It is this idea of sacredness that provides space for further reflection. For Aldred, the land is sacred because it comes from the Creator, as do the relationships on the land which are also sacred. An appropriate response, therefore, is one gratitude and thankfulness. ⁵⁸ Deloria writes at length about the importance of sacred places, an emphasis that Inge, Rumsey, and others would share as well. For Deloria, however, the places he refers to are natural parts of Creation and not human-created. By experiencing “the uniqueness of places and survey[ing] the majesty of lands,” communities are able to understand more about themselves, though not always in ways they can articulate: “Land has the ability to short-circuit logical processes; it enables us to apprehend underlying unities we did not suspect.” ⁵⁹ Deloria again contrasts this with the “white man’s” approach to land, which seeks mediation through technological means. Technology can complexify the relationship with the land and stand in the way of the “simplicity” of the relationship. But by relating to the land through technology, the land is reduced to an object: “Consequently any apprehension of the sacredness of land must be filtered through our mechanical devices, and consequently we attribute to landscape only the aesthetic and not the sacred perspective.” ⁶⁰

An ethic rooted in the land means that the people—only one part of the life on the land—do not set the terms for life on the land: the land itself does. Aldred writes, “In order to live long in this land, journeying on this land—you have to live in the way this land lets you live.” ⁶¹ Carlson sees evidence of this as well, noting how James Bay Cree do not make large stores of food: “Too large a store implies a loss of hope for the future of the human/other-than-human relationship.” ⁶² It is this hopefulness that Carlson identifies as a constitutive part of Cree relationship with the land. Hunters speak often of whether they have been “lucky” or not and Carlson sees this as an expression of hope: hope is

an active emotion through which an effective relationship with the environment can be created . . .. Hope is a vehicle by which the hunter impresses his will and ability upon a contingent world of individual relationships, and his luck is a representation of the effectiveness of his hope. ⁶³

This sense of contingency with the present but also an orientation toward the future leads to gratitude and contentment now, and a humility and “happiness with simplicity.” It is an expression of trust and faith in the depth of the relationship with the land and the sustenance and future it will provide. ⁶⁴

This consideration of the Indigenous relationship with the land, brief as it may be, not only highlights some important points of overlap but also, and more importantly, contrast with the place-based view developed earlier. While both place and land, as I am using the terms in this essay, argue for the way in which a communal identity can be grounded in a location, the land view understands that identity to involve not just human life, but non-human life and non-life as well. Places are created. The land is understood as a gift, with limits attached to it. Who the giver of the gift is may differ, particularly in relation to how explicitly theological the account is, but it can be traced to the gift of Creation and the Creator behind that. Regardless, the role of humans is to give thanks for the gift and learn to live within its limits alongside the other members of the community on that land. Place-based theology does not seemingly engage with these questions. Place-based theology does offer critiques of globalizing economic flows, but an ethos rooted in the land offers a deeper critique of dominant capitalist models of relating to nature. The idea of the sacredness of the land, its status as a gift, its non-ownership, and its limits introduce new and valuable ideas that place-based thinking alone does not capture. The eschatological vision of place-based theology offers the grounds for a permeable understanding of place but one that is still human-centric. The eschatological element of land-based thinking, with its emphasis on humility and simplicity, offers an ethic that includes all of life on the land.

Place, land, and Christian witness

In recent years, Anglican and Episcopal churches have seen new models of ministry and mission that are linked with place and land. The growing prevalence of church gardens and other agricultural ministries literally roots Christian communities more deeply in both their place and land, opens possibilities for a gift economy, and connects them to other life, human or otherwise, in that place. ⁶⁵ The watershed discipleship movement seeks to make Christians disciples of the watersheds in which they live, and in doing so connects Christians with the places and land where they dwell. ⁶⁶ I want to suggest two further ways in which taking the land seriously as a theological category might offer new possibilities for Christian witness.

In 2009, the Episcopal Church was among the first churches to formally renounce and repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. This view, that Christian explorers from Europe had the right to claim land that was occupied by non-Christians because it was terra nullius, or the land of no one, was widespread during the colonization and conquest of North and South America and has had a long historical legacy. (The Anglican Church of Canada repudiated the Doctrine in 2012, as did the World Council of Churches.) Repudiating this doctrine is an important step but the way in which it has been done reflects the limits of western thinking. The Episcopal Church General Convention resolution repudiating the Doctrine argued that it is opposed to “our understanding of the inherent rights that individuals and peoples have received from God.” ⁶⁷ Likewise, the pastoral letter that then Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori wrote on the Doctrine of Discovery focuses on the impacts it had on people. ⁶⁸ These are vitally important recognitions. But these official documents fail to recognize that it is not just human life that lives on the land. Non-human life is there too and has been similarly damaged and deformed by the impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery. A land-based ethic, rather than one premised in a western worldview of individual and community rights, would recognize this. The extent that the churches’ repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery fails to understand this is a measure of the extent to which the church has failed to internalize thinking rooted in the land.

From the perspective of land-based thinking, the Doctrine of Discovery has a faulty premise, namely that land can be owned. Central to the Doctrine of Discovery was establishing ownership for the exclusive use of a monarch and his people. From this flowed the evils that Jefferts Schori and others have rightly condemned. But the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery has not led to the recognition of this underlying problem: by insisting on ownership, the Doctrine of Discovery imposed a vision of relatedness with the land that is incompatible with Indigenous worldviews and may, as is becoming clear, be incompatible with sustainable human life in God’s Creation. Perhaps the reason for this is that to question private property is to question a pillar of western society. But if Christians are serious about renouncing and repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, revisiting the idea of land ownership seems a logical next step. In a paper of this length, I can offer little guidance for what the impacts of this might be. In Canada, at least one diocese has begun to take steps to use the proceeds of the sale of church property to fund Indigenous ministry. ⁶⁹ There remains ample room to explore the church’s relationship to the #LandBack movement as well as the connection between the growing movement for churches to pay reparations with the reality of the church’s complicity in the displacement of Indigenous people from the land. ⁷⁰ Particularly, at a time when many churches are being forced by financial circumstances to reconsider their relationship with their property, the call remains to seek a deeper relationship with the land and the life on the land rather than one that is rooted in notions of private ownership.

Pursuing the implications of repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery can lead to expansive and seemingly improbable outcomes. Because of that, I want to shift to something much smaller and already present in our worship to show how place and land are already present in our worship services, if only we can acknowledge this potential. The offertory is the moment when bread, wine, and money are brought forward and offered to God on the altar. It is a moment that serves as a reminder of the nature of God’s gift—that it is God who gives all of Creation from which the congregation receives what is necessary to return thanks to God. The offertory is a reminder of my dependence on others, on God’s Creation, and above all on God. Before I can celebrate the Eucharist, I need to acknowledge and be reminded of the web of relationships of which I am a part, which are rooted in particular place, and which find their origin in God. If we are serious about what the offertory means, then Christians are called to be people who take place seriously. The bread and wine (and the flour and grapes behind them) come from some place specific on the land. It is time to start asking where. It is in deepening our connection to our place and our land—a direction in which we are pointed by the very act of offering our gifts before God every Sunday—that we can frame a response to the realities of the world today. ⁷¹

In June 2023, as I was completing the initial draft of this paper, the self-governing Indigenous church of the Anglican Church of Canada approved its new governing documents. As a foundational element of their life and faith, the documents name this:

Our individual Nations are built on relationships where everyone within the nation and all things throughout the Land and Waters are treated as relatives. We now become a Sacred Circle, through Christ, where our relationship to the Land and Waters and our way of being Nations is a guide and pattern for our discipleship, fellowship, and unity. ⁷²

These words serve as a helpful coda to this paper. Land is already connected with the existing Anglican theological tradition and offers a challenge to Christians ministering in a globally interconnected world.