Turtle Island Project warns against religious imperialism, racism, polluting the planet

Turtle Island Project fights religious intolerance, racism, and other social issues that threaten the future of mankind

First Nations peoples asked to submit topics for Native American roundtables

(Munising, Michigan) - Exploitation of the earth, spiritual terrorism, religious imperialism, and racism are some of the modern day injustices that two pastors will battle with a new Michigan project that promotes respect for Native American culture and the environment.

Two Midwest pastors have started a national debate on a wide variety of social issues that they believe threaten the future of society and the planet.

"The Turtle Island project will combat what I call spiritual terrorism," said project found Rev. Lynn Hubbard of Munising, MI.

"There is a lot of spiritual intolerance of other people's religions - whether that's the indigenous Native American religions here in the United States or Islam or Judaism or what have you," said Rev. Hubbard., pastor of the Eden on the Bay Lutheran Church along Lake Superior in Munising.

"Anybody can take that attitude towards life - it's my way or the highway - my religion is right - your religion is wrong - and it's that sort of spiritual terrorism that is destroying the world in which we live in," Rev. Hubbard said.

Rev. George Cairns, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, said a "change in religious consciousness is necessary."

"I am deeply concerned that much of humankind and the Earth as we know it will be gone by the end of this century," said Dr. Cairns, a professor of Practical Theology and Spirituality at Chicago Theological Seminary.

"We are in a time now when dramatic changes are happening on this planet and it is a critical time for people of faith - religious people - to act now," said Rev. Cairns, chairman of the Turtle Island Project.

The Turtle Island Project (TIP) will address a wide range of Native American issues including white influence on American Indian heritage and values, said Rev. Hubbard,

The TIP got its name from Natives Americans who first called the North American continent "Turtle Island."

The TIP will hold biannual national and regional conferences and local seminars to discuss environment and American Indian issues. The meetings will be held this fall and next spring and are called the Grand Island Conference and Retreat Program.

Rev. Cairns said it's important to reverse the negative impact man has had on the environment by learning from earth-based religions "and part of that process is to deeply engage our Native American - our First Nations friends - as our teachers."

Each regional conference will be preceded by Native American roundtables, the agendas being determined solely by American Indians who contact the TIP.

"One of the consequences of racism against First Nations people has been the silencing of their voices and the eagerness of Euro-Americans to speak for them - robbing them of their own freedom of speech - that we value so much," Rev. Hubbard said.

"As a result much of the Native American experience has been filtered through the lenses of a foreign culture that - not only doesn't have the right to speak for them but also lacks the ability to speak to the most fundamental realities of native experience."

Dr. Cairns said "many American Indians are still living in oppressive conditions - and having their voices freed can only happen - if they direct the conversation themselves."

"Americans Indians absolutely must have the lead in the kind of discussions they would like to enter into," said Cairns, who taught has taught "centering prayer" for over two decades including at a Native American cultural center and a maximum security prison.

TIP conferences will provide venues for listening to the voices of Native American peoples." Rev. Hubbard said. "It is our belief that the dialogue can contribute to the betterment of both communities and is a conversation that is long overdue."

Rev. Cairns agreed.

"We think that the conversations with native peoples about their relationship to the Earth will help us reconnect with our much earlier roots of consciousness of nature that were part of Euro-western traditions in the past but now have largely been marginalized or even lost," Cairns said.

Rev. Cairns said he hopes the TIP inspires Americans to rediscover "very early dimensions of Earth spirituality that have been integrated into Christianity but later have been lost."

"We started to distance our self from the earth as early as the late Paleolithic times - when we moved from hunter gatherers and later became industrialized and increasingly turned nature into an object for us to consume rather than a subject for us to relate to," Rev. Cairns said. "We are not trying to turn back the clock to the Stone Age - but a change in consciousness must begin if our planet and we are to survive."

The first regional conference is (Thursday-Saturday) September 13-15, 2007 at the Eden on the Bay Lutheran Church in Munising. The hours are 7-10 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. Friday, and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. on Saturday.

The Native American roundtable opens the conference on Thursday, followed by two days of presentations and debate by Rev. Dr. George Cairn, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary. Dr. Cairn will discuss Celtic and Native American spirituality, and post-modern science.

Rev. Cairns said the Celtic people who lived in Ireland and Scotland integrated earlier beliefs into an Earth-based Christianity and "understood God to be a present in all creation."

"The Celts believed God to be constantly recreating the world and they had an intimate relationship with nature," said Rev. Cairns, who lives in Chesterton, Indiana.

While studying for his doctorate in South Dakota, Rev. Hubbard became friends with Lakota people on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Indian reservations, the latter was the scene of the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, which claimed the lives of many innocent Lakota women and children.

Both reservations are beset by extreme poverty, teen suicide, high infant mortality and other social problems.

The TIP organized the successful August 12, 2007 benefit concert for America's oldest/first American Indian battered women's shelter in Mission, SD that has served the Lakota Rosebud Reservation for nearly 30 years.

Two Upper Peninsula folk groups, White Water and Duo Borealis, held the free concert for the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society at the Custer Lutheran Church in Custer S.D. The WBCWS battles domestic violence, teen suicide and sexual assault.

Figures from the Rosebud reservation alone are shocking: 21 rapes in the past 18 months; over 600 attempted teen suicides and 15 deaths during the past two years - most teenage boys.- triggered a recent "state of emergency" declared by tribal officials

Poverty, depression, a lack of jobs, drugs, alcohol and other social problems are among the reasons behind Rosebud teen suicides.

The concert was one of the first non-political events to ever bring racial healing between whites and Native Americans in Custer - where racism by some whites is generations old, said Dave Melmer, a reporter for the national Indian Country Today newspaper who lives in Custer.

Melmer said the concert was "a courageous effort" and a "big small step in improving race relations."

The TIP hopes to create a profound change in environmental thinking, Rev. Hubbard said.

The planet is facing an environmental crisis that must be repaired or humans will "bring about our own destruction because of the abuse of nature," Dr. Hubbard said.

One of the pillars of the TIP is the creation of a new North American Theology that the pastors hope will encourage religious tolerance and a new respect for nature.

"We are concerned that our current individual and systemic western consciousness is disembodied and ill," Rev. Cairns said. "We have distanced ourselves more and more from nature - nature has become much more of an ‘it' rather than a ‘thou' - it's an object rather than a subject - this is increasingly being sped up by the modern technological world."

Rev. Hubbard said Christians can learn from other religions.

"Christians have been so empowered for so long their religious imperialism is subconscious," Rev. Hubbard said. "To enter into authentic spiritual with other cultures is to become aware of your own limitations."

"Today, in America, God's children have different skin, colors, genders, languages, sexual orientations and theological ideas," Rev. Hubbard said.

"Those who have had power and control over the church must now scoot over and make room for them in our pews - and maybe, heaven forbid, actually listen to what they have to say, listen to their voices," Rev. Hubbard told a recent gathering of religion writers and scholars in Ann Arbor. MI.

God has been revealed to all religions and Christians need to "learn that spiritual wisdom is not the sole possession of any one people," Hubbard said. "Wisdom is the recognition of multi-cultural and dialogical nature of the truth - in dialogue with one another we achieve spiritual truth."

Christians should "open our ears and hearts to their testimony, and to the witness of the Love of God in their lives, not just ours," Rev. Hubbard said. "It is the opening of the heart and mind to the genius and insights of others."

During recent elections conservative Catholics and Protestants made "strange bedfellows" as they voted against homosexuality, abortion and showed "their intolerance of other people's religions," Rev. Hubbard said.

Christians who have "benefitted from the power structures of the church have defined what the gospel is to everyone," Rev. Hubbard said. "We have defined that through our own Euro-American vision of who we are, who God is, and our relationship with nature - at the exclusion of everyone else - period."

Americans, he said, "stand at the brink of a communications revolution and a fundamental spiritual transformation."

Dr. Cairns said it has "been clear to me for many years that contemporary Christianity is disembodied Christianity - because its been really shaped by culture - more than the institution has shaped culture."

Late Native American activist and author Vine Deloria Jr reminded "the Euro-American community that they have yet to listen to what Native Americans have to say either in terms of the environment or their own struggles as a people, Rev. Hubbard said.

"Native American spirituality is based upon spatial understandings of God while Christianity is based upon temporal understandings of God.

"Spatial metaphors for God have to do with the revelation of the divine life in a particular place - this mountain - at this stream - at this time," Rev. Hubbard said. "While the temporal metaphors for God has to do with the idea of time - that ‘once upon a time there was a great revelation of God' some 2,000 years ago for the Christian religion - and since that time - there have been no new revelations."

Dr. Cairns said "that place is extremely important in Celtic tradition.".

"There is a sacredness to particular places - people relate to them deeply - we have lost much of that in contemporary American culture and we have lost much of that in our religious institutions," Cairns said. "Almost any place can be sacred to an individual depending on who they are and where they are on life's journey."

"One of the places I have found sacred is on the streets of a bad inner city neighborhood talking with homeless folks," Cairns said. "The conversations we've had are very profound - there was an openness and a kind of reciprocal learning that took place in those conversations that I think was sacred."

Rev. Hubbard said the earth was not created to serve man.

"The creation myths of the Hebrew peoples - the very origins of Christianity - was this understanding that human beings are a special creation and that this Earth was created for them," Rev. Hubbard said. "And that's quite a different understanding than what many Native American peoples have."

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Related websites:

Turtle Island Project main website:

http://www.turtleislandproject.org [1]

Turtle Island TV (blipTV):

http://turtleislandtv.blip.tv/ [2]

Turtle Island TV (youtube):

http://www.youtube.com/MunisingWhiteHorse [3]

Turtle Island (myspace):

http://www.myspace.com/TurtleIslandProject [4]

Turtle Island Project websites/Blogs:

http://groups.msn.com/WhisperingTurtle [5]