Dr. Dani Lin Hunter, NCEJN Research & Education Manager
Hi everyone! This past week I had the opportunity to visit the beautiful mountains of Cherokee, North Carolina, to attend the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Protecting Mother Earth Conference. It was a time of reflecting on and healing from past harms, praying and strategizing over an onslaught of coming threats, recommitting to solidarity and showing up for others in their fights, and dreaming about the future in which we want to live.
For me, the biggest takeaway was a deeper understanding of indigenous people’s spiritual connection with their environmental work. This was something that I had heard about, read about, and had been taught about, but not something that I had seen and experienced. Witnessing and observing morning prayer around the sacred fire and hearing story after story about the role of prayer in their movements challenged my own practice of separation between faith and work.
When I first started at NCEJN, I asked God to teach me about his justice and prayed daily that industries and regulators would change their hearts and ways, that contamination would leave people’s bodies and land, and ultimately, that God would bless the members of our network. Over the past few months as to-do lists have lengthened, this spiritual practice that I once had has dwindled. Yet, I found myself grieving that loss and feeling challenged to rejuvenate that connection between my faith and work.
Another lesson from the conference was the reminder to dream. We had long conversations about indigenous just transitions and how indigenous peoples around the world were fighting for them. One night at dinner, someone asked the question, “What impossibility are you fighting for?” It came from the acknowledgement that some of our current victories felt impossible to overcome 30 years ago. A few impossibilities included no sacrifice zones, regulating bodies that prioritize communities over profits, regenerative economies that benefit people and the environment, and a world where you don’t have to wonder “What’s in the water?”
As I reflected on this conversation, I remembered to pray: “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” – Matthew 17:20
For me, addressing these impossibilities requires both prayer and action. My renewed commitment to each of you is not just to show up to support your advocacy work with my skills as a researcher and educator, but also to support those actions through prayer: to tell the mountains of polluting facilities, pipelines, greedy corporations, developers, etc. to move, and to believe in my heart that they will.
