AllCreation: Exploring “Sacred Relationship”

Happy Fall! I am super fortunate to be exec. editor / producer of the new edition of AllCreation.org. Click here to view our official announcement.

This issue explores the Native American sense of “Sacred Relationship” with Earth’s other living creatures. I send my heart-gratitude to guest editor Vance Blackfox (Cherokee) and the all-Native American team of contributors he assembled, including four young women who are changing the world.

This content matters to all. Here’s our table of contents:

Sacred Relationship

1. Overview and Introduction — Guest editor, Vance Blackfox
2. Love on the Land — Keynote by Kim Smith
3. Right Relationship — Janene Yazzie
4. I Am the River — Amber Morning Star Byars
5. The Deer Woman and A Collective Return to Equality — Isabell Retamoza
6. Sacred Relationship — Vance Blackfox
7. The World We Used to Live In (excerpt) — Vine Deloria, Jr.
8. Braiding Sweetgrass (excerpt) — Robin Wall Kimmerer
9. There There (excerpt) — Tommy Orange
10. Sargassum is Sacred — Vance Blackfox
11. The Refuge — Gwich’in People of Alaska / Patagonia
12. Native Reads — Vance Blackfox

###

“Our creation stories call us to collectively return to our ancestral understandings of spirituality and existence as we strive to restore balance and equality. Equality across identities. Equality across species. Equality across all life on earth.” — Isabell Retamoza

“Moments like this, with the eagle, occur daily at camp… I am constantly reminded that in this place and all places, I am not separate from nature… We should be out on the river and sleeping on the earth. We should be working with the land, preparing food for one another, telling stories, and singing songs… Everything I need to learn is right outside my door. All the best teachers exist in the natural realm.” — Amber Morning Star Byars

“Where do the stars know your name? Where is that place, that moment where you had that first memory of looking up to the stars and recognizing that you’re this speck in the universe? How can you use that to reclaim your connection as a human being living on this Earth, tied to an interdependent and interconnected relationship to everything from the stars in our universe to the soils under your feet… We need relatives that are willing and able to stand in defense of all sacred life and do it in a way that is meaningful, authentic and genuine.”— Janene Yazzie

“We weren’t worshiping the tree, or the land, or the plants, or the animals, or the waters — we were giving thanks to and honoring the tree, or the plants, or the animals, or the water.” — Vance Blackfox

“What led me to this work is my hope to start building my own homeplace. I hope that my siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews will move home, too. For that reason, I have to connect the dots of the trauma on the land/our communities and the trauma on our bodies. All I had to do was look at my current reality, what’s in my own backyard?” — Kim Smith