Water, Place, and Indigeneity: Three Glimpses of Christian Spirituality

Abstract

Water, Place, and Indigeneity: Three Glimpses of Christian Spirituality Lisa E. Dahill (bio) As the rain begins, we tip our faces to the sky and drink it in…We’re made of water, life itself, made of water from the very first cell pulsating in the ocean, its first membrane surrounding that first interior fluid, dividing the waters within the membrane, as life first came into being, from the waters outside that first cell. Earth is made of water cycling endlessly from microbial cells to glacial ice to pine sap to Jesus’s saliva, and this morning’s coffee, a child’s diaper, a rattlesnake’s venom, sweet nectar in a bee’s stomach. Imagine, in fact, your whole life immersed: freshwater, saltwater, freshwater. Imagine you are a salmon. Such is the premise of philosopher Martin Lee Mueller’s Being Salmon, Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild, an immersion into the intersections of human and other-than-human (in this case, salmon) life-worlds in this shared planetary world of ours, this world of endlessly complex symbioses and dependence, predation and birth.1 The worlds Mueller evokes are watery, strangely and mysteriously so, inviting readers to ponder the experiential texture of sentience on the other side of that horizon of water-surface. The wild intelligence of underwater lives lived three-dimensionally along gradients of temperature, salinity, oxygenation, and light has beckoned to human communities in every place, as they pray to, evoke, ritually embody, and reverently hunt and eat these finned and scaled kin. Though we are land animals, our most primal experiences take place in the water, source of all life. Womb-waters, ritual waters, body-waters, rain-waters, living waters: humans too are made of water. Christian baptism draws us deep into Earth’s hydrology at the outset and heart of our faith, and discipleship is a baptismal journey to the end. I have reflected long on these baptismal/Earth connections2—yet I had never dwelt so deeply in the water as I did through Mueller’s salmon, both in their complex alterity and as a mirror of our own crossings of waters and worlds as we move through our lives. One might assume we water-baptized Christians would make the cherishing of fresh, clean, pure water and its free availability and natural abundance in every place our highest moral value—but of course the opposite is the case, and the systematic suicidal desecration of Earth’s waters stands among the gravest crimes global capitalist systems have enacted against life on this planet. [End Page 172] Those of us who are over-privileged in this global economic order benefit from structural forces making invisible water, air, land, and the thick layering of interwoven lives on whom our lives depend.3 As this economic order begins to fracture under climate change, coronavirus strains, and mounting outrage at the racism it enacts, we can act in the gaps to create new economies of justice and shared wellbeing. We can search for alternative worldviews that break our accustomed value hierarchies and reveal every human as kin; all creatures and waters, rocks and trees and fungi our relatives, siblings on this fragile planet. We can renounce the Christian privilege that underlies centuries of theft of indigenous lands around the world, ongoing to this day, alongside genocides against native peoples.4 The baptized can learn from and with the Standing Rock Sioux, Autumn Peltier and the Anishinaabe of the Canadian Great Lakes, the Kichwa and Kofan peoples of the Ecuadoran Amazon, and countless others, to be Water Protectors, renouncing the fossil-fuel industry and every other force threatening our shared sacred waters. We need a lived spirituality of water. This issue’s themed section brings together rich reflections on the place of water and the waters of place in Christian spiritualities inseparable from Earth, justice, community, and ceremony. Its three authors take up the call—ringing urgently this early summer of 2020 as I write—to people in social locations of dominance to reflect critically on our relationships with those our privilege has far too long effaced: people of color, indigenous communities, other creatures, and...