Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days Reconnecting with Sacred Earth (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2022).

As I announced at the beginning of Lent, I have taken on the project of reading one short two-page chapter (or reflection) from Indigenous Christian Randy Woodley’s book Becoming Rooted, first as part of a Laudato Si’ Lent but to continue onwards into the Easter season. This week I reached the midpoint in that journey, so I wanted to share some thoughts on the book so far. I’ll discuss the book as a physical object, as laid out in the introduction, and in each of the five groups of ten chapters that I’ve read thus far.

First of all, the physical design of the book is itself appropriate. If you’re going to be picking something up once a day for 100 days, it should be both the right size and a good construction. This book is small; it fits comfortably into my hand. But it’s not too small, so that I can barely open the pages. At the same time, it’s sturdy. The hardback is strong, and it can handle being put on and off a shelf repeatedly without worrying about getting dinged.

More importantly, what is this book about? Per the title, what kind of roots are we looking at? The diagnosis of rootlessness is wide (from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, to Joseph Ratzinger’s Without Roots). What have we in mind for this present little book? Evidently, as the subtitle explains, the connection we are seeking to make is one that, in its own way, though not its expression, was dear to Joseph Ratzinger, “the green pope,” anyway: a lack of contact with and familiarity with the earth, our common home.

Randy Woodley lays out in his introduction (pp. 1–7) the primary question: “What does it mean to be rooted in the land?” (p. 1) To this end, the question of indigeneity is indispensable. Everyone is indigenous to some place, and everyone’s ancestors have been indigenous to some place, whether that be the same place or another.

One of the early indications of an ongoing theme comes in the introduction, when Woodley speaks of “the Indigenous people who live with the land upon which we now live” (p. 3, emphasis in the original). Note the contrast. We can live on the land. We can live with the land. They are very different attitudes. We should be clear about the distinction and become conscious of the manifestations of the two psychological and ethical dispositions in our own lives. This book, in essence, serves that very purpose: helping us to make this discernment one day at a time, one theme at a time, two pages at a time.

From this point onwards, the book is divided into ten sections of ten chapters each. Each chapter is approximately two pages (a few are three), begins with a quotation from another source (frequently an Indigenous person, Christian or not, with their ethnicity and tribal family identified, but also the Bible and traditional Christian authorities through the centuries and from our own age), and ends with a short reflection question to spur both thought and action, for the two, as is typical of Indigenous philosophy, are not help to be separable (i.e., show me what you do and I’ll tell you what you believe).

The first group of ten chapters is called “Learning to Know All Our Relatives.” Woodley is a Christian (a Baptist). He believes the world has been created. He’s happy if you don’t, though. You can still acknowledge that things are connected. But as a Christian, he thinks that Creator made the world, and that we are all brothers and sisters. Examples in these ten chapters include fractals (particularly but not exclusively in plants), water, “the earth’s skin,” plants, and animals. We must learn to listen to this chorus. It is not a cacophony. There is a “harmony way” embedded in what our senses bring to us of the natural world. This is one of Woodley’s central theses across his many books. The Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (North America) all have in common some underlying philosophy of harmonious and reconciled relations among Creator, humans, animals, plants, and the earth—a veritable “community of creation” (p. 26). These are values that we need to learn to listen to coming to our senses. We have to train ourselves to appreciate, then assess and follow through. It is a big challenge if we have been raised in Western patterns of thinking. But the book promises to guide us one day at a time.

The second group of ten chapters, “Celebrating the Community of Creation,” carries on with deeper-dives into the themes exposed in the first ten chapters. One key point is how everything is connected. “There is nothing singular in the whole of creation” (p. 39). Yet everything is unique: “Even among identical twins, there is a world of difference” (p. 41). Seeing connections doesn’t mean homogeneity. It means diversity. Throughout this section, reading it as a Catholic, I thought so much of Pope Francis. “Everything is connected” is a leitmotiv of Laudato Si’, and one of the Pope’s favourite images for globalization is the polyhedron of many sides fitting together to make one whole, conceived of as a kind of anti-sphere (where a sphere indicates that every point is the same distance from the centre, i.e., homogeneity) (cf. Evangelii Gaudium 236).

With the third group of ten chapters, we get a shift in focus, and the title itself makes that obvious: “Accepting the Invitation to an Indigenous Worldview.” In diversity, everyone’s experience and view counts. But not everyone’s experience and view is equally away from homogeneity and towards diversity, away from rootlessness and towards rootedness, away from living on the land and towards living with the land. This section opens with a chapter titled: “We are still here” (pp. 57–58). And everything flows from that. Indigenous people can’t be treated like and responded to as an idea. Their presence and continuity matter to everyone. Lived values tackled in these chapter include place, “the circle,” bartering, intentionality, and humour. Some of these are more challenging than others for a Western worldview, but all may generate some resistance. Two pages a day is a good rate at which to listen.

The fourth section continues on with themes already developed, discussing acts of “Seeing and Naming Indigenous Splendor.” This is a more direct call “to expose the fallacies of the Western worldview and the theologies that result” and “to empower Indigenous people, who will guide us to a better future” of “spiritual discipline” (p. 84). People who have absorbed over generations a process, however fragmented today, of living with our land must be given highest place, not just in dialogue, but in leading our way through the morass that we are in. It’s hard to argue against. But it’s challenging to put into effect.

The fifth part of the book announces a cataclysmic end to thirty chapters on Indigenous ecological theology: “Realizing the American Dream Is an Indigenous Nightmare.” This leads us through the “doctrine of discovery,” accepted as simple fact and cultural behemoth by many of our contemporaries (pp. 105–106), and the degree to which thinking about war and peace has become so distorted from pre-colonial times (pp. 107–108). There is one chapter on trauma or, as the author calls it, “postcolonial stress disorder” (PCSD) (pp. 115–116). Another discusses the contributions of ancient civilization in the Americas (pp. 109–110). Towards the end, we are asked to “tread lightly,” for “the soil under your feet… has a long and significant history” (pp. 117–119). Of course, these are not ideas. They’re reflections. Imagery abounds. We are invited into a broad panorama of human thinking and imagination. This is no mere abstraction. To that end, summary doesn’t do it justice. We can only read the book slowly and reflect and put into action.

I have just started on Part Six, which tackles one of the myths of the Enlightenment head-on: “Learning the Limits of Progress.” But reviewing this will have to wait for another day—sometime about seven weeks in the future, by my calculations…