A Song for Deep Snow: Braiding Narratives for Creation Repair

Abstract

Extractive ideologies have led to a condition of climate change that threatens all life as we know it. Many congregations in the Western world mostly feel the faint warning of climate change. By contrast, Native peoples recognise climate change as fulfilment of an Elder’s warning that the weather is “growing old” — our climate grows strangely warm. This paper argues that indigenous practices of mutuality and reciprocity between human and non-human beings is a kind of strategically aligned storytelling. Native storytellers, like Peter John-Xadalt’eyh, “braid” together vulnerable communities, including non-human, for a sustainable ecology, forming empathy and knowledge between different tribes, human and nonhuman. In the context of this journal, this article explores how his testimony informs thinking in homiletics on topics of place, interdependency, the beautiful and the grotesque, and the problem of hope. As a piece of a larger project, I close the paper with some thoughts about how we, as teachers, might equip our students to “see the sound” of the sermon.