-Ira Sirkar Harritt

How would you act differently if instead of seeing the water, land, air, and all the beings we share our beautiful world with as resources, you saw them as relatives? This was a major theme of the workshop presented by Dr. Daniel Wildcat on April 26 at the Anita B. Gorman Conservation Discovery Center.

The Exercising Indigenous Wisdom for Responses to the Climate Crisis was organized by the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council as part of the Climate Council of GKC’s Earth Fest 2025.  The Interfaith Council held the workshop because we believe almost all of the world’s faith traditions hold sacred humanity’s relationship with creation and that our faiths’ beliefs can help guide us in responding to the climate crisis, which is a threat to us all.

In past years, the Interfaith Council organized Earth Day forums providing multiple faiths’ teachings about caring for nature and responding to the climate crisis. This year we decided to provide a deeper understanding of Indigenuity, Indigenous wisdom derived from millennia of careful mindfulness and attentiveness to place.

Our decision was a good one as Dr. Wildcat’s workshop was insightful and challenging. He began by acknowledging that indigenous peoples are diverse and each tribe is a product of power and place (as proposed by Native American theologian Vine Deloria, Jr., a mentor and friend of Dr. Wildcat). Power being life and recognizing that human diversity is a function of biological and ecological diversity and based on our living in a deeply relational world.

He explained that we live among natural relatives not natural resources and posed the question: If the only time you visited your family was when you asked for a handout what would your relatives do?

He challenged us to not only think about our inalienable rights, but to think about our inalienable responsibilities as human beings responsible to our kinship with the larger world of natural relatives.

Dr. Wildcat reminded us of “Natural Law.” Indigenous wisdom teaches that Natural Law recognizes that if we do not pay attention to our responsibilities and relationships with the natural world, we will have to pay a price. Dr. Wildcat shared some wisdom of a Polynesian elder, who explained that the lesson that the ocean had taught his people was not about fixing things but healing relationships.

He also reminded us that we are not alone in following this natural law. All of creation will help us. All creation is alive: from the billions of beings and microbes in the soil and water to the more spiritual level of seeing the Great Spirit in all of creation or what other faiths may call the “Face of God,” the Divine, or by other names. We need not repair the imbalances we have created alone, but we need to ask the help of all of our relatives.

Dr. Wildcat concluded the workshop with one of his poems:

“Beauty surrounds us,

much ugliness, too.

Our wise ones tell us this- Both are real

But only one is true

The question is which

one defines you?”

 

“And with that truth in mind

The ancient ones teach

in this world of time and space

We live our lives most fully

When mindful of power and place

Always remember ugliness grows

When we forget—Beauty surrounds us.”

Video recordings of the “Exercising Indigenous Wisdom for Responses to the Climate Crisis” workshop can be found at the following links:

Part I is Dr. Wildcat’s presentation including a Q & A.

Part II is a summary and closing comments.

 

Click this link for a collection of faith statements about caring for creation an responding to the climate crisis: https://kcinterfaith.org/faith-statements-on-caring-for-creation/

And thanks to our workshop cosponsors: MO Department of Conservation’s Anita B. Gorman Conservation Discovery Center; Climate Council of GKC; Bridging the Gap; Kansas City Indian Center; Resilient Activist; Heartland Conservation Alliance; Sustainable Sanctuary; PeaceWorks KC; and Buttry Center for Peace and Nonviolence