Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality · Forrest Inslee

Being a Good Relative in the Community of Creation, with Randy Woodley | Ep. 129

·39 min·2 clips

Woodley says American Christianity helped justify Native subhuman status, land theft, and genocide with scripture.

1. Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality features Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley on Native theology, land, and environment. 2. Forrest Inslee hosts Woodley, who is identified as a Kituwa Cherokee teacher, theologian, activist, farmer, and author of several books. 3. The episode asks what a Native framework for creation care can change in Western Christianity and environmental practice. 4. Woodley describes a 21-year vision that began with a dream, moved from Carson City, Nevada to Cherokee country, and later led to a center in Kentucky. 5. He says that Kentucky site became a farm, a community, and a school, with weekend schools that drew 40 or 50 people at a time. 6. Woodley says roughly half the participants were Native and half non-Native, including pastors to Native people and missionaries. 7. He names Richard Twist, Terry LeBlanc, Ray Aldred, and Fern Cloud as part of the teaching circle around the project. 8. Woodley says a group of paramilitary white supremacists with a .50 caliber machine gun forced the community off the Kentucky property. 9. He says he later moved to Oregon, worked at George Fox Portland Seminary, and tried smaller versions of the same vision in Newburgh and Yamhill. 10. He identifies Aloha Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Aloha Farm and Seeds as the current form of that work. 11. Woodley says people leave his gatherings transformed because they experience ceremony, teaching, dirt work, and the “big picture.” 12. He contrasts that embodied learning with a Western model that mostly transfers knowledge into the head. 13. Woodley says interest in his book Shalom and the Community of Creation and Indigenous Vision surged again after years of relative quiet. 14. He argues that the Western worldview, through Platonic dualism, produced hierarchies, greed, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism. 15. He says that worldview also helped justify climate disruption, social injustice, and the idea that humans are above nature. 16. Woodley links environmental collapse to closed systems, while describing nature as adaptive, diverse, and ordered through what looks like chaos. 17. He says decolonizing evangelicalism is not about rescuing evangelicalism, but he leaves room for the church to decolonize and indigenize. 18. He also says many 20- to 45-year-old students want to reject the traditional church while hanging on to God. 19. The conversation is interview-based, reflective, and direct, with repeated returns to theology, history, and lived community practice. 20. People drawn to creation care, Native theology, or church decolonization may want it; readers seeking a light devotional chat may skip it.

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