By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (October 1, 2023), a

So, land.  A big topic.  My wife was recently asked to open a Michigan Climate Summit Conference hosted at Oakland University where she teaches with a formal land acknowledgement and after giving greetings in her native tongue of Kapampangan from the Philippines, the traditional homeland of the Ayta, she offered the following:

I’ve been asked to do the Land Acknowledgment to set the tone for our gathering today and it is fitting that I do so because I, too, am a settler here on Turtle Island. As one Mohawk scholar once said to me once, “It doesn’t matter if your people were brought here through historic colonization, as far as Native peoples are concerned, you are still settlers.” Something I’ve had to sit with for a long time and ponder.

And as protocol goes, it is settlers like myself—not Native peoples—who must acknowledge whose land we’re on—that we are here on Native peoples’ stolen land. And we name this truth not just as pro forma, but as part of the discipline of facing into—and beginning to unlearn—our settler privilege—recognizing that our presence here on this land as non-indigenous peoples means we are beneficiaries not only of native genocide and dispossession, but of other kinds of historic oppressions such as African slavery, U.S. imperialism abroad, and the ecocidal clearing of forests and decimation of wildlife habitat in order to build our cities that’s part of what is driving climate change.

So here is OU’s official Land Acknowledgment:

“Oakland University resides on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe, known as the Three Fires Confederacy, comprised of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. The land was ceded in the 1807 Treaty of Detroit and makes up southeast Michigan.

In recognizing the history and respecting the sovereignty of Michigan’s Indian Nations, Oakland University honors the heritage of Indigenous communities and their significant role in shaping the course of this region. Further, we recognize the wrongs done to those forcibly removed from their Homelands and commit to fostering an environment of inclusion that is responsive to the needs of First Peoples through our words, policies, and actions.

The preservation and perpetuation of customs and traditions of Indigenous nations are essential to our shared cultural heritage. A deep understanding of Native peoples’ past and present informs the teaching, research, and community engagement of the university in its ongoing effort to elevate the dignity of all people and serve as shared stewards of the land.” Unquote

Lastly, I shouldn’t fail to mention that, as a gesture of good faith, OU has taken the step of rematriating a portion of land back to the Native community for use as a Native American Heritage Site (at the intersection of South Oakland and Library Drive)—what I’m hoping is only the first in the many steps toward full repair of our relationship with our Native kin.  

Afterwards, she was immediately approached by a member (Kathleen Brosemer, Environmental Director) of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians who said that when it was announced that a Land Acknowledgment would be forthcoming, braced herself and prepared to cringe, having heard too many that were actually offensive. But Lily’s, she said, was the first that actually did some truth-speaking that was more than just “cover” for the continuing occupation (and later on she even asked for a copy).  That cringing expectation and its provisional relief is the baseline for everything else to be said this morning.

Combined with the lectionary reading today, there is much to ponder.  But most crucial for our situation is a clear implication, even in our land acknowledgments—so hard for us even to see much less believe—that land speaks.  And acts.  It both cries and curses. God in the mix is merely verifying.   It is the land that is described as having a “mouth” and thus swallowing Abel’s blood.  But doing so, only under great protestation!  And it is land that decides the soil-relation Cain shall have to wrestle with, ever after.  And all of this is profoundly indigenous in its orientation and ramification.  God is not the major actor here.  The land is. And indeed, if we read carefully, we can see that Abel becomes the primal “Holy Ghost” of the tradition.  What do I mean by that? 

Abel will hover over the biblical text and the history it codifies from this Genesis beginning to the very end of Revelation, as the figure of disappeared indigenous peoples across the ages.

And that ghosting is ironic in the extreme.  Abel never says a mumbling word. Only his blood speaks—and then, only as a double-voiced duet with the soil.  But when Jesus names the line of prophetic ancestry he understands himself to be channeling—ventriloquizing—he begins with Abel. He names Abel the prototype of prophets. Whose speech from moving lips the text never records. A prophet without words—as the forerunner of the One to be known as the Word. And later in the tradition, in the letter to Hebrews, the author says Abel is “speaking” still.  And then in Rev 18, as the fall of Babylon is envisioned—the archetypal city, emblematic of all cities—the reason given is . . . Abel’s blood.  The city falls, because “in her was found the blood of prophets . . . indeed, of all who have been slain on earth” (Rev 18:24). Hmmm. Where was this blood found inside Babylon? Did they have a lab, keep vials—or rather pools, ponds, entire lakes of the gore?

What Rev 18 details is all of the stuff stockpiled in the city—the cargo, the jewels, the clothes, the wood, the metal, the wheat, the cattle, the chariots, the slaves, the millstone technologies, etc.  But what is asserted is x-ray vision.  Look at your I-phone, what do you see?  Plastic?  Look again.  Cobalt?  Copper?  Platinum? Look a third time. The sweat and labor and struggle and yes, blood of the people, including 10,000s of children, displaced from their land in the Congo, then hired—for as little as a few dollars a day—to dig in the ground literally with their hands, for the coveted metallic ore, ending up covered in toxic dust, hardly able to make ends meet today, slated to die early tomorrow. Urban infrastructure the globe over is coated with blood, is fabricated with blood, is corrugated with blood. Whose? Abel’s!

Who is Abel? A pastoral nomad living by means of herd animals in a semi-arid landscape, away from the city-centers of enslaved labor, where workers are coerced into growing crop for elites and dying early.  Pastoral nomads—the first resistance movement ever initiated by our species, reacting to urban oppression by taking their animals and walking out, re-learning the land by way of animal-herd-teaching and wild-land-provision, no longer building walls, paying taxes and rent, working from sunrise to sunset to provision a life of comfort and fat for leisured elites, and then dying early, of drudgery, of disease, yes, of debt.

Abel—figure of indigenous peoples the world over, who still live close to the soil, whether as similar nomad roamers with their animals like the Maasi of Kenya (photo above) or the Sami above the Arctic Circle north of Scandinavia, or as subsistence farmers honoring the varied plants they attend with ritual thanksgiving for being their mothers (such as the Maya and Navajo do with corn), or the island-hopping Moken fishing off the coast of Thailand without needing any assistance from the government post-2004 Bande Ache because they were just fine, thank you, or hunter-gatherer Hadza of Tanzania, savvy-enough to survive for millennia in the Lake Eyasi basin in the central Rift Valley, etc. Abel hovers over the tradition like a ghost of holiness, speaking loudly in disappeared silence!

And even more loudly raging, in the silence of the sunset and the brooding of the moon? The land Herself. Choked with blood. Abel’s blood. But not only! Choked with cattle blood. Fish blood. Honeybee blood. Elephant/octopus/cheetah/owl/ orangutan/wolf/centipede/beluga/sturgeon/swallow/crocodile/frog blood! Blood of oaks and birch and eucalyptus; of saw grass and palmetto and saguaro and tundra!  Blood even of bacteria and riddle of riddles, maybe even viruses? Do viruses have blood?  Or the equivalent thereof?  Don’t know but I do know the “war against viruses” is not a war we want to win—unless we want to disappear ourselves.

But yes, blood—Pacific Ocean-blood and Great Lakes Basin blood and Mississippi River blood—the waters of the planet, fresh and salt alike, are the Earth’s very lifeblood. And as feminist writer Kate Marvel recently wrote—we should never have called it “Earth”—this place where we live.  It is 71% water.  I live on a planet called “Water.” But now called “Blood.”

And the land itself is being forced to drink it! From our very limited, very new, very “wet behind the ears” point of view, we think this Cain-Abel blood-letting is a very old timey story, talking about something that is lamentably, “just human nature”—always been part of us, always will.  But from the planet’s 4.5 billion-year-old point of view, it is an immanently new report. Even from the biblical point of view, this “land-now-drinking-blood” anomaly was not always there; it began with Abel killed by Cain. Pastoral nomad killed by monocrop farmer. Renegade resister killed by state power. Back behind it, are eons and eons where that particular kind of land-violation didn’t happen. And then it did—once we began farming.

And the land responds. It curses. It mobilizes an imprecation. It utters a bane which becomes a ban.

We’ll suss out the ban first. How deal with ground that is cursing you? Well, what does Cain do?  He goes away.  He founds the first city. His bloodline develops metallurgy, which is to say, tools and weapons for the sake of expansion and protection. And that whole venture then steamrolls an entire planet over the next 5,000 years and ends in the Rev 18 debacle we have already skimmed. It makes the whole planet one big, connected city, full of infrastructure and technology and armature that envelopes the urbanized populace in more and more layers of removal from the natural world and the land.

It becomes one vast prosthetic—now called the mall and the internet. Now called New York and London and Beijing and Moscow and Manila and yes, Detroit. To support it—not enough that we are drying up the world’s rivers, polluting the earth’s air and oceans, and using up the earth’s sands (yes, there is a sand crisis—too much concrete being made).  Just a month ago there were New York Times articles on a looming emergency for food production because we are draining our aquifers (but hey, no problem, just pray for rain; only takes a few thousand years to refill) and the growing push to access heat from below our feet in geothermal drilling, using water to frack and crack rock six miles down . . . wait, using more water?

But the ban began with a bane. The field, Genesis 4 says, no longer yields its strength to the tiller—an interesting characterization from the beginnings of monocropping a millennia ago, given that indeed now we have decimated our soils so the plants they grow are less and less robust and nutritious. We are only now recognizing scientifically that the very future of the globe hangs in the balance on whether we can recover the vitality of the soil. Soil quality decides destiny.  A mere teaspoon of healthy soil has literally more than a billion living creatures in it!  But not where we do industrial agriculture, which chemically massacres the soil. So now our food production is itself killing our food! Curses are tricky things . . .

But equally telling is the way Cain describes his chosen fate: “Behold, thou hast driven me this day away from the ground; and from thy face I will be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me” (Gen 4: 14).  Let’s go slow for a moment and just focus on the link here between “ground” and “face.” Being “driven”—interesting word: in Mark’s gospel, the text says Jesus was driven by a dove into the wild.  Same idea—opposite direction! Cain, however, is driven away from the land, which means he will also “be hidden from a face,” he says.

Whoa!  Did you catch that? It does not say a face will be hidden from him, but he will be hidden from a face. Land as bearing a particular “face.” And the city as a form of hiding from the land.  The reality these few words open up could occupy us for the next four hours, or really, a lifetime (and actually it should). But I only have a few minutes left here, so this will have to be short and pithy. We are not indigenous, so when we hear this, we instantly think “metaphor.” Land doesn’t really have a face. We know better, scientifically!

But let’s listen for a moment to one indigenous voice that became Christian without letting go of being Lakota. Vine Deloria Jr. was a theologian-lawyer writing prolifically and profoundly until he passed in the early new millennium.  Among his writings is one short piece called “Reflection and Revelation” in which he sketches out the deep difference between settler colonial understandings of land and those practiced by many Native groups (For This Land, 250-260). Native groups dwelling in place across multiple generations would almost invariably code that place of living in story after story, linking their community experience with topographical features, and weather events, and plant growth, and animal appearances, and water flows, and bird songs, etc. such that merely to walk across your ancestral landscape was to be immersed in memory after memory after memory of your people’s identity. And most of it was not human.  That Deloria called “reflection.”

But he was at pains also to characterize a completely different experience of that place that also almost inevitably emerged, sooner or later.  And that experience was one, he says, of being in a particular canyon, or grove of trees, or bend of river, or outcrop of rock and suddenly having time stand still and the hair raise on the back of your neck, and be overcome with dread, and experience an inescapable sense of “being watched.” As if that particular topography did have a face, but that face was not human, not decipherable by human eyes, not “locatable” in human words or perception, but very much “there” and looming and forbidding. A “being watched” putting you as human being in question, as “object” and out of place.”

That is to say, “Land”—a very particular piece of land, a very specific place—suddenly asserting itself as “sovereign, as belonging only to itself, as off-limits, where humans are not wanted, not permitted, and if they persist in trespassing such, at risk of their lives in some inchoate, not very calculable, but very real way.

 For Deloria, knowing land that way—as Alive and having Its own place of Inviolable Sanctity, not “for” humans, though maybe also a sanctuary for some other animal species, who might be its guardians and watchdogs—that way of knowing land was essential to “being human”! 

And arguably, that way of knowing land is very much in play in the biblical tradition in its underground witness, under the surface of its scribal representations serving the reigning political authorities and landlord class. The biblical text in its hushed sub-text, its vernacular root, is full of nearly erased indigenous witness. And this text about Cain being banished from land is one of them.  The land has a face. Actually, many faces—each particular to a given particular place. Abram will be accosted by an oak face; Jacob, a rock face; Moses a bush face. And in each case, those faces will say, in effect, stay away; verboten; forbidden; off-limits—except in dire emergency and then maybe offering counsel or medicine, but only at great risk.  

So—what to do?  We are offspring of Cain, hiding from land. Would we seek to halt the flight “away”? Then acknowledge the blood we have shed, the genocide we have precipitated, the holocaust we perpetuate, even now, because it is on-going. Cain is still running. Time to side with Abel. How? Listen to his speaking. But I only hear silence! Precisely! We have to learn a new language, which isn’t only “human,” but also what is under our feet. But that means being taught. Yup. But who knows the tongue? Ah, now we get to it. Where are we? Not Palestine. Wawiiatanong (where it goes around”).  Oppenago (“where the waters meet”). Numma Sepee (“place of the sturgeon”).

The land, you see, has already spoken—but not Hebrew. Or English. And it won’t speak in a legalese called “fee simple title,” supposedly granting “ownership” as “property.” It won’t speak from within an incarcerated condition. It has to first be freed. That means “given back” from whence it was stolen. The prison door has to be opened. And the lock is called “The Doctrine of Christian Discovery”—the medieval delusion that Christians own all of the land on the planet, that is then just waiting for them to “discover” and take over and re-make as property.  High time we discovered the key and turned it. But that is another ten sermons. And a lifetime of resolve and work. I hope we start.