Decolonizing the Western Worldview: Interview with Cherokee activist/scholar, Randy Woodley

JANUARY 3, 2020

by KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME

Over the last few months, I have been writing more and more often about the need of people in Western civilization to pay attention to indigenous wisdom and knowledge. In that spirit, my first post of 2020 is an edited transcript of a phone interview I did with Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, a Cherokee activist/scholar, in December 2017.

Woodley has authored several books including “An Introduction to Postcolonial Theologies,” “The Harmony Tree: A Story of Healing and Community” and “Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision.” When I met him in Portland in 2013 he was farming outside Newberg, Oregon, and employed as a Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture at George Fox University/Portland Seminary. Currently, Woodley and his family are working to establish Eloheh, an Indigenous Center For Earth Justice, in eastern Oregon.

This is an abridged version of the full interview, which is included as a chapter in my book, “The Failures of Farming & the Necessity of Wildtending.”

Kollbri terre Sonnenblume: The book that I’m working on starts from Jared Diamond’s thesis that agriculture could be called a wrong turn for the human race. But looking at the Americas, you can see that there were cultures that did not get into agriculture, so there’s still examples there, not only of ways of doing things but ways of thinking about the world and ways of relating to the world that have been lost to Western Civilization for many many centuries.

Randy Woodley: Let me start off by saying that though I really like his book Collapse, with his more famous book I disagree with a minor point. His understanding of why civilizations take over other civilizations and mine are different. His is that when the technology is there to advance over other civilizations, that’s what’s going to happen. What I would say is that there’s a particular Western worldview—and I’m not an expert on any other worldview except the Western worldview as it relates to the Native American worldview—there’s something endemic in the Western worldview that says that you have to use your power over others. So we differ about that because hundreds and hundreds of cases on Turtle Island where people had the ability to take over others but didn’t. Now there’s some where they did as well. But I don’t think that there is a causality, if you will. So he sees the world through that lens and I differ with that.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/03/decolonizing-the-western-worldview-interview-with-cherokee-activist-scholar-randy-woodley/