She thinks Eve’s story is unfair. But Kimmerer compares fruit to vegetables as Eve is a created mortal, whereas Skywoman is at least some kind of demigoddess. The comparison is unfair as well because she only focuses on a part of the Biblical story. The Bible has been regarded as a story in four acts: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration/Glorification. Eve is centerstage only for the Creation and Fall, she doesn’t live to see redemption, though she receives the promise of it.
The icon of the Resurrection depicts a risen Jesus pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs as he smashes the gates of Hell and death. This Kimmerer doesn’t mention at all. It should be noted that Kimmerer is Potowatomi.
The rest of the book is good. She stresses the indigenous ways of relating to the world and much of it is commendable. “For all of us, becoming Indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual depended on it” (9).
Permission to use seems stressed among Native Americans. Given the Animist nature of their beliefs that all things are persons, they ask permission before harvesting, killing or using part of some creature or even rocks. Whether one assents to this idea of the personhood of all things is irrelevant to the cultivation of humility before the natural world. Why shouldn’t we at the least think through the consequences of our use of some natural thing, be it animal, vegetable, bacterial, or mineral?
Where Christianity and Native spirituality overlap is that the world is a gift (and everything contained therein). Though this seems to be lost at a practical level among many Western Christians. “Culture of gratitude must also be cultures or reciprocity…”(115).
Especially touching are her tales of the weavers of ash baskets (and she’s not referencing long dead people, but people she has interacted with). They obtain their material from black ash logs and suss out from each tree whether it gives its permission to be harvested.
Circling back to her people’s creation story, contrasted with the Biblical one, there is cooperation and compassion present as the animals who live on the earth (at the time, an all-water planet) help Skywoman by creating land for her from the mud at the bottom of the lake. That certainly fits into St. Paul’s admonition to the church in Galatia to “bear one another’s burdens.”
The Church, and the world in general, could do worse than respecting the land “and all the fullness thereof.”
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