A Watershed Moment

Untangling ourselves from entitlement, dominion and doctrine

I am the 6th generation of my family to live along the Mississippi River. In the grand scheme of people indigenous to a place, this is a tiny smidgen of time. However, for European immigrants to North America, it is unusual to be settled in a place for so long. Most of my ancestors lived along the river in Dubuque, Iowa. I grew up in the Duck Creek watershed, which flows directly into the Mississippi River.

My sisters and I do not live as close to the Mississippi as we did growing up (about a mile up the hill), but all three of us live within 5 miles of a fairly large tributary (the St. Croix and the Des Moines) or the Big River itself. I learned from Dr. Ihi Heke, a Maori population health and wellness leader, in this interview that our place shapes us. There are mountain people, ocean people, river people, and others. A fellow river person, he notes that river people are stubborn, but not confrontational. If they meet an obstacle or someone telling them they can’t do something, they simply go around. 

Recently, I was listening to Kimberly Ann Johnson and Stephen Jenkinson speaking about European immigrants to North America. They spoke about how we never land, that we never find that place that feels like home, that place where we belong. Similarly, Wendell Berry notes that American Christians have no place to lay their heads. They are eternal strangers to the landscape because the only Holy Land is one they may never see. 

We know that other people are so attached to their place in the world that they would die rather than leave it, but we can’t conceive of that. How do we move from that lack of attachment? Can we become attached? Storyteller

Martin Shaw

writes about how we can’t be from a place we are not from, but we can be of a place: 

To be of a place, to labour under a related indebtedness to a stretch of earth that you have not claimed, but which has claimed you. To be of is to hunker down as a servant to the ruminations of the specific valley, little gritty vegetable patch, or swampy acre of abandoned field that has laid its breath on the back of your neck…To be of means to listen. To commit to being around. It’s participation, not as conqueror, not in the spirit of devouring, but in the spirit of relatedness.

I live in the Willow River Watershed in Western Wisconsin.

It drains into the St. Croix River, which meets the Mississippi River near Prescott, Wisconsin. Last week, I had the pleasure to spend some time at the crown jewel of our watershed, Willow Falls. I joined some fellow artists to sketch and paint the falls. While there, I couldn’t help but think of a fellow Substacker (I think it was

Amy Stewart

?) who encouraged others to declare themselves Artist-in-Residence of their beloved local wonders. That got me thinking that the ongoing presence with and beholding of these special places is an act of Watershed Discipleship. 

In the book Watershed Discipleship, edited by Ched Myers, he describes the concept of watershed discipleship as a “triple-entendre”:

1. It recognizes that we are in a watershed historical moment of crisis, which demands that environmental and social justice and sustainability be integral to everything we do as Christians and citizen inhabitants of specific places; 

2. It acknowledges the bioregional locus of an incarnational following of Jesus: our individual discipleship and the life and witness of the local church take place inescapably in a watershed context;

3. And it implies that we need to be disciples of our watersheds.

Between this awakening experience at the falls and some alienating experiences at church recently, I have been listening carefully to what I am called to do. As a youth, I left the church for multiple reasons, but one of the big ones was the discordance between what I understood Jesus’ priorities to be (justice, equity, inclusivity, walking shoulder to shoulder with those suffering, our interconnectedness with the wider world) and the Church’s understanding of Jesus’s priorities (exclusivity, judgment, dominion over the wider world). I thought I had outgrown that tension, or at least come to terms with the fact that God and the Church are not the same thing. I thought I had matured enough to be able to find sufficient value in the Church’s rituals as a means to interact with the divine that I could hold those benefits as true while not negating the past and current injustices perpetrated by the Church. I’m less certain of that now. I have been listening to what it means to follow Jesus’ example within the Willow River watershed and what it means to be a disciple of the Willow River. 

I am not ready to relinquish Christianity to those that would exclude certain human and non-human people from God’s story. I think that Christian faith does have something real and potent to offer in the face of the apocalyptic moments we find ourselves in. As Thomas Merton said, “Christian hope begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff in the face of the unspeakable.” However, as Myers notes in Watershed Discipleship, that hope can pull us into action and solidarity or it can pull us into denial. 

In order to stay in Christianity in action and solidarity, we have to understand the history and context of the Church. We must understand how and why the church has come to treat people, land, and the rest of creation as subject to oppression or pillage. Myers identifies three main philosophical errors that form the scaffolding for this view: 

1. Since the time of Constantine, spiritual or doctrinal matters have won out over earthly or bodily matters. The assumption is that salvation occurs outside of or beyond creation. 

2. Since the Doctrine of Discovery, in the late medieval era, there has developed a theology and politics that endows Europeans with an entitlement to land and resources. This applies both to colonization and resource extraction. It can be seen historically in imperialism and conquest, but continues in the modern day through capitalist production and consumption without limits. This entitlement also removes any obligation to restore degraded land or natural communities (including human). 

3. Since the Enlightenment, the presumption has been that humans rule over creation and has encouraged technological development that benefits humans (and often a small subset of humans) at the expense of the rest of life.  

Watersheds found themselves part of this conquest. In fact, a 15th century papal bull laid the groundwork and provided the motivation for the Lewis and Clark expedition. In Watershed Discipleship, Katerina Friesen explains that, “This was not a heroic, morally neutral expedition as I learned in public education; rather, it was a race to take the entire Pacific Northwest. The discovery of the mouth of that river created a claim over not only Oregon country (the drainage system of the Columbia River), but also any adjacent coast.” 

How do we unwind ourselves from these entanglements that form not only the water in the fishbowl we are swimming in, but probably all of the air in the room in which that fishbowl resides. It is so hard to see the other possibilities. 

First, we need to examine the state of the places we are in. In Watershed Discipleship David Pritchett notes, “Where watersheds follow the natural contour of the land, the urban grid levels it…This geometric configuration allowed for city planning that controlled the movement in and out of the city, as well as managing the population. Straight lines allow military or police personnel a long line of sight and effective movement from one location to another. However, this efficiency blinds us to the limits on our consumption in a given geography. Pritchett describes:

Geographer John Wesley Powell predicted this problem [that west of mid-Kansas agriculture would be difficult because annual evaporation equals or exceeds annual precipitation] and proposed an alternative to the grid. Instead of partitioning lands according to the Land Ordinance of 1785, Powell suggested creating “watershed commonwealths” organized by a nested pattern of watersheds. These watershed commonwealths would ensure that residents would have decisive control over their own scarce water, and be able to mitigate their own water conflicts. Further because settlers would have to fund and manage their own water resources, the population of the western lands would remain low enough to be supported by the limited water supply. 

Instead, we continued using the grid and developed irrigation systems. Irrigation causes salinization (increased saltiness of the soil), especially in areas that are already dry. When the soil becomes sufficiently salty, nothing will grow and the area becomes desert. We can see that working within the constraints of a given watershed, rather than against it, offers the opportunity to “live within our means” in resource usage.

Second, I wonder if we can revivify our language. Kimberly Ann Johnson and

Tad Hargrave

discussed this on her podcast last week. Hargrave noted, “You may not learn to speak an indigenous language, but can you learn to speak English indigenously. It’s not that you have to change the language, but can you learn to bring more beauty to your speech and language, more eloquence, and speak in a way that is honoring of where English came from, because even though English is certainly a language of the marketplace, it also came from older sources.” 

He went further, quoting Martin Prechtel: 

People say, ‘those people don’t speak very good English. So what? English is not very good to speak. English is un-language that was invented in the 12th century to subjugate all of the diverse cultures of the British Isles who were forced to amalgamate into a synthesized British people by speaking English. There is no such thing as pre-Christian English, English was invented specifically to Christianize Britain. Its development started as a colonial tool, and it has never grown out of it. It’s not important or possible to decolonize a colonial language because it will always be done in a colonial way. The best thing is to make a colonial language work for a natural existence as a servant to something itself cannot grasp, but which gives life to other lifeways that do grasp it. That’s what Caribbean Creole and New Guinea pidgin does. It detoxifies the empire's poison by making English carry delicious sounds with a lot of rhythm of the type it was originally invented to nullify.

I have been driving my daughters nuts recently by saying “good night” and “sweet dreams” and “I love you” in as many languages as I know how (mostly Swahili and Spanish, with a little Japanese). Its unfamiliarity becomes a sort of song. Jeannine Ouellette writes about defamiliarized language fairly often, how using language in unexpected ways conveys a newer and a deeper truth to what you are speaking of. 

This is where I think becoming the artist-in-residence of your home place becomes discipleship.

Willow Falls

When you are present and beholding a place, the way you describe it becomes poetry. You love that place more and your love reverberates, building the love of others. Similarly, art allows us to reimagine our culture of how we interact with a place. This can happen even with urban areas where access to local bodies of water may be more difficult. In Portland, an organization called City Repair is trying to unwind how streets and cars on those streets divide houses from one another. They are engaged in “intersection repair”, creating visual art at intersections. This accomplishes 3 things: 

1. It slows traffic creating a safer environment for playing in yards or walking. 

2. It provides opportunities for neighbors to interact and work together.

3. It allows communities to take back the street as a public space. 

Artists bring attention and wonder to the more than human residents in a watershed. They bring new ways of imaging culture, and their attention and wonder enhances the love we all feel for our home place. 

Third, as your witnessing becomes love, your roots can grow strong and deep even though you have been transplanted. As Myers says, “This is because you are fighting for a way of life, not just against one. Conversely, it is difficult for the placeless to stand for or against anything of lasting significance.’ In Watershed Discipleship, Katerina Friesen notes that her experience as a missionary with the Ikalahan people in the Philippines opened her eyes to the lack of roots in her life. She was unsure there was a place for which she would put her life on the line as the Ikalahan had to prevent logging, resort construction, cellphone towers, and mining. She posits the question, “What if all mission, whether domestic or international, urban or rural, first required ‘reconciliation with our home place’ as a foundation for proclaiming the gospel.” Such a reconciliation would transform our relationships as we would enter from a place of the humility rather than superiority. 

As such, restorative justice must be a part of a discipleship relationship. It is important to acknowledge that restorative justice is as much for the perpetrator as the victim. Completing a process of repentance and reconciliation allows the perpetrator to step away from guilt and shame and back into belonging. This reconciliation applies to human and non-human communities in our watersheds. Because we fear anger and rejection or because we have felt shame in religious communities, repentance and reconciliation can bring up some really hard emotions.

John Wolfstone

presents a framework for repairing relationships. His 8 step process includes: 

1. Remember Healthy Framing - Conflict is an invitation for deeper intimacy

2. Tend Your Own Feelings Towards an Open Heart

3. Reflective Listening

4. Ask if You Heard Them Correctly and if There is Anything Else

5. Offer Empathy

6. Feel the Grief of The Rupture

7. Offer an Apology

8. Recommit to the Relationship Through Sharing How You Will Show Up With More Care in the Future

I can think of very few examples of mainstream religious communities reconciling with those they harmed in good faith. In the Catholic Church, specifically, the infallibility of the Pope seems to actively obstruct this, as harms caused by the Church are often not acknowledged until those involved are dead. I think this lack of repair is one of many reasons that so many people have moved away from organized religion or any spiritual belief system at all. Within organized religion, we typically think of reconciliation to God or between people, but reconciliation extends to all of creation, Friesen quotes Colossians which says, “For in Christ, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile Godself to all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” 

One way we can start the process of repentance is through pilgrimage. Friesen describes a pilgrimage that the Mennonite community in the St. Joseph River watershed in Indiana undertook. The land they occupy was cleared of Potawatami people by the US military, who forced the Potawatami people into Kansas in 1838 on the “Trail of Death”. She says, “By traveling the via crucis [way of the cross] of the Potawatami in this pilgrimage, we were better able to see what we formerly were blind to, open our hearts to mourn the dislocation of native cultures, and ask God to show what repentance requires of us today. 

In my area, the impact of the US-Dakota war continues to shape the Twin Cities and southern Minnesota to this day. It resulted in the largest mass execution in American history. Hundreds of other warriors were sent to Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa (right next to my hometown). Most Dakota people were displaced to South Dakota. I know Dakota people rode this route to commemorate what was lost. It makes me wonder whether a similar collective pilgrimage is in order. 

There are a few other practical ways we can show our watersheds more love. We can de-pave parking lots and driveways to slow, spread, and sink water run-off. This also prevents harm to wildlife and slows the spread of pollutants into waterways. The first practical step I am going to take is to start a local food map. I hope to include both where wild edible foods are (Black Walnut trees, Raspberry bushes, Nettles, of course) and also where local food producers are. This may become another opportunity to make it artsy and beautiful. 

I write today about watershed discipleship from the Christian perspective because of this lovely book Watershed Discipleship, but also because of my own grapplings with, “Am I a Christian if I believe X and church leaders believe Y?” I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I think we can, and possibly must, become watershed disciples regardless of our religious ideology. It is a tool to feel rooted in a place, solve problems on a manageable scale, repair damage we’ve caused without becoming immobilized by shame and self-loathing, and experience awe and wonder right where you are.