The work of CrossCurrents and its parent organization The Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life (APRIL) has highlighted issues of inter-cultural contact between different religious communities that has dominated the field of religious studies for the last 50 years or more.² Along these lines, our work extends that of historian of religion Charles Long, for example, who examined religion’s role in settler-colonialism and the oppression of Indigenous Peoples. In Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) this reached a peak around the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. In more recent decades, multiple academics and activists have been focused on the DoCD.

…maybe the problem with religious freedom is simply that it conceals deeper political controversies—about reproductive justice in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) or Indigenous sovereignty in Smith. Indeed, when the question of Indigenous sovereignty has been recently brought in front of the Supreme Court, in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), it was a Trump appointee—Neil Gorsuch—who wrote the celebrated court decision in what is considered to be “probably the most significant Indian law case in well over one hundred years.” Maybe the problem is not Trump’s court; maybe the problem has always been religious freedom.

Read more at the Berkley Center.

As we are now confronted with environmental devastation, global pandemics, an economic system that fosters chaos in the world, and an inability to think clearly or collectively toward a viable way to the future, perhaps it is time to pick up where the Founding Fathers left off and continue to learn from the Haudenosaunee. What better time than now to consider the ancient wisdom of our ancestors who, for thousands of years, sustained a more equitable way of living in proper relationship with the natural world? Who better to model a world where women reside at the center of deliberations and nature exists as our relative—not just a resource?