The Ecowomanist Theology of Rev. Dr. Melanie L. Harris

Welcome to Wonder Cabinet

0:00Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. A couple of years ago, I spent a magical few days with a group of women environmentalists, conservationists, field biologists, and activists. Women who spend their days working urgently and sometimes desperately to change how humans treat the earth. This was a writing retreat in northern New Mexico. They were all working on books during the day, and at night... Take a plate, take a squash. They cooked for each other.

0:30These are stuffed with acorn squash. They're stuffed with quinoa, pepitas, cranberries, and lots of cheese. Yum! Watching an ethic of care develop among women who hadn't even met each other before was remarkable. And we have an apple crisp. Oh, good. Gather round. We need another bottle of wine, or we get it? It really hit me, something which of course should be obvious, that how we treat the earth and how we treat each other should be the same. Sharing food, sharing heart, sharing gratitude.

1:04Thank you so much. Thank you so much. This is so beautiful.

Introducing Melanie Harris

1:08Our guest today is someone who's thought a lot about that and who was at that dinner table. Reverend Dr. Melanie Harris, H-A-R-R-I-S. I was born in Denver, Colorado. My parents are John Arberia Harris Sr. and Naomi Olivia Harris. She now goes by Reverend Doctor as well. Melanie Harris is a professor of Black Feminist and Womanist Theologies at Wake Forest University and Divinity School. She's the founder of Eco-Womanism, an environmental philosophy and theology rooted in the experience and history of Black women and women of color, including her own.

1:43My mother was raised during Jim and Jane Crow in the height of the segregated South, and my father's parents actually were those who migrated during the Great Migration to come all the way west to Deerfield, Colorado. One of 30 Black settlements that really began as Black-owned, Black farming community. We did have access to land, had access to farm, had access to green space, which is remarkable. Remarkable because many African-American children grow up without a deep connection to a natural environment.

2:19In many African-American communities, depending on which generation you're a part of, there have literally been attempts to erase the remnants of slavery, the memory of cotton, for example. And so there are kind of intentional ways African-American families have, in an attempt to protect children, have actually limited children's capacity to even understand growing and how things grow. Melanie's work shows us another way, a restorative path that reclaims ancestral legacies of Black environmental stewardship and spiritual wisdom.

2:53While also grappling with racism, trauma, and the complicated layers of land and memory. What are your earliest memories of feeling connected to nature? My mother used to sing to the roses in our garden and to the plants. And so I learned how to express the spirituality through the African-American spiritual tradition and song in conversation with the earth. What did she sing? Ah, she would sing anything in the tradition of African-Americans.

3:26It's very traditional to have a hum as a way of grounding the soul, but also grounding sound. So oftentimes the songs would be humming, the humming of a tune of an actual gospel song traditionally. Do you do that yourself? I do. I do. And do you grow things? I do. I have a small garden. We live in a community of a lot of green hands and a lot of community hands. And so it's been a gift to share different recipes, but also plants, practices, and growing practices with neighbors.

3:59I just love this image of you tending your garden hands in the dirt and just humming or singing. Is that what it's like? It is. It is very much like that. I think for many peoples of African descent, music is a core connector to the ancestors and a core connector to our religiosity, sometimes even our theologies. And so that groundedness in the image that you just evoked of hands in the dirt, but also hands in the depth of the soul, those kind of movements dance together in the communing of earth and the communing of spirit.

4:34So I guess I was wondering then what that feels like if your hands are in the dirt and you're tending growing things and you're singing while doing that. What does that feel like for you? It's a real deep question in part because so many people are looking now for ways to connect with earth. As you mentioned earlier, we've been in this wonderful circle of women writers. Many people have had a disconnected reality with the earth. And so this connection in eco-womanism, and this is not original with me, Bell Hooks and many others have written about this.

5:09But it's important for black self-recovery to be aligned with planetary recovery. The work of protecting the earth and protecting the self is worth getting our hands dirty for. And in some sense, that worthiness is an important part of recovering the essence, the value, the worthiness of the black self in a white supremacist culture, whereby the black self is often told that they are inferior, that they do not have value, that they do not have worth. So this is a really important time, not just for racial justice, but also for environmental justice.

5:46And eco-womanism is one step in that direction.

Spiritual background and womanism

5:49So I want to talk a little bit more about your spiritual background. Yeah. Did you grow up in the church? I did. I grew up in the Christian church. My mother was the daughter of a black Baptist minister in the South, and my father's family was Methodist. So the African Methodist Episcopal Church is the church that I was raised in. I was later ordained in that tradition, and that's my home tradition in the Christian church. I came up at a time where there were women in the pulpit, which was really radical.

6:24So you remember sitting in the church and listening to women preach. That is extraordinary. It is. It is. So I have to admit, as a girl, I was introduced to a very feminist and womanist way of being in the church, that women did have authority. I don't think I knew about all the sexism that those women were facing in the reality of their own lives as ordained women. So womanism, the word was coined by Alice Walker in her wonderful collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens.

6:56Am I getting this right? That is correct. Alice Walker was the person who coined the term. She's really considered the mother of womanist thought. She was a mentor. You know Alice Walker? Yes, yes. How did you even meet her? I mean, my generation grew up thinking of Alice Walker as a kind of goddess. Yes. She is a goddess. Yes, she is a goddess. Probably as a girl, I was introduced, like most of my age, to The Color Purple pretty early. Steven Spielberg's film, The Color Purple, was a kind of mapping of cultural awareness for many African-American families.

7:32And so many of us knew the movie by heart. We knew all the lines by Oprah Winfrey, et cetera, et cetera. I actually was introduced to her as a thinker at Spelman College when I went away to college and really had a chance to do a deep dive into black feminist thought. Spelman is an African-American women's college. At the time, Janetta B. Cole was the president, a powerful anthropologist, exceptional leader in higher education. And so I was introduced as a thinker to black feminist thought as not just a way of being but also a way of studying and of learning.

8:09That kind of awakening you do as a young woman and a young thinker. I went to a women's college also, Bryn Mawr. And when you have a chance to study with those extraordinary and powerful older women in an institution that has been a women's institution for a long time, for me it was life-changing. It sounds like it was for you. Yeah, I think the sisterhood that I understood there has followed me all of my life. It's one of the reasons why I cherish women's voices so much and so deeply. I had a professor later in my life as a master's student, Vincent Harding, the religious historian, African-American, who did a lot of work on the civil rights movement.

8:47He was the one who penned many of the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. He and Alice Walker were connected through the movement. And so later it was he who made the introduction. When was the first time you met her? I met her for the first time in Atlanta. She was doing a book reading, and that was a very exciting moment for me. She was very humble and embracing and very loving and honoring. And I think we both remember that day of introduction being a really sacred moment.

9:19Are you two still very much part of each other's lives? She has been a wonderful mentor. I'm really grateful for her work. She's adopted quite a lot of us. She has many, many daughters, which has been a deep, deep gift. She is an extraordinary mind and prophetic guide, particularly in the work of environmental justice, but in everyday things, everyday women's lives. And so, yeah, her wisdom carries me in very deep ways.

Defining eco womanism

9:47So your contribution to womanism is to, you know, layer in the earth. What does eco-womanism mean to you, and how did you even, you know, what was your path into this? Eco-womanism is an approach to climate justice and environmental justice that really centers the voices and perspectives of women of African descent and women of color more broadly, in part because these are the voices that have often been ignored in the wider environmental movement. And so we do see this kind of layer of systemic racism in the history of how the environmental movement, at least in the United States, but also globally, that has silenced a lot of women of color.

10:30And so what we do in eco-womanism is to really focus on the climate solutions, for example, that come from Wakari Mathai, that are coming from the work of Alice Walker, that are coming from many, many women of African descent. A lot of the work that I do now is to think about earlier African-American women, Harriet Tubman, for example, through the lens of her as an environmentalist, rather than just as someone who is a woman pioneer. I don't think a lot of people think of Harriet Tubman as an environmentalist.

11:01Yes, yeah. Well, we know so much about her journey, of course, and her founding work and her work of liberation and the Underground Railroad. But what we often don't consider is that it was her brilliance and her agricultural knowledge that was able to read trees, for example, to read the direction of the moss and how the moss was growing on trees in order to know which direction was north. We often don't think about the ways in which she had to know the lands, had to know the swamps, had to know and be able to navigate in order to help people get to freedom.

11:32Can you say more? Sure. I think in our culture, there are intentional ways of silencing women's knowledge and wisdom. And those have been in place for a very, very long time. And so oftentimes, it's women that have to take the lead in highlighting those voices again and helping women to recognize they can get through very difficult times and challenging times in their own personal lives and also the community lives because women have done it before. One of the gifts, I think, of Harriet Tubman is that she has been adopted and sometimes appropriated, right, in the ways that we think about women's history in the United States of America, in ways where her race has been whitewashed throughout a lot of different contexts, some of them kind of white liberals, some of them abolitionists, some of them black.

12:22But she had to have the wisdom on how to navigate all of those in order to continue to fund the Underground Railroad movement. And so when we focus on her, just her for an example, we find not just conceptual maps, but also wisdom maps. And what do you mean by wisdom maps? Wisdom maps in terms of recognizing that she had to have an extraordinary discernment, a spiritual discernment on how to work with different people, on how to be able to commune in her own spirit.

12:53She was a Christian. And so, again, we see the African cosmology, that there is this interwovenness between communing earth to human, human to spirit. There are, in many African cosmologies, three different realms, the earth realm, nature realm, the spiritual realm where the ancestors are, where God is understood, where spirit is understood, and the human realm. And so earth, nature, human realms are all interwoven. They're all interconnected.

13:24This is very much akin to the way that we think about cosmologies in many Buddhist understandings. And so Thich Nhat Hanh's phrase, for example, interbeing, has deep resonance with an African cosmology. And so how much do you think Harriet Tubman would have personally been drawing on African cosmologies? Well, we know that she, you know, we know of her, we know enough history about her, and we also know enough of what she shared, that her Christianity was very important to her, that her spirituality was very important to her.

13:54We also know a lot from the historians of African religion, that there were particular African remnants that were still very, very much present in African peoples, who basically brought over these kind of religiosities, spiritualities, even practices from the African continent. Even as they crossed over the African-American women, not just, you know, immediately preceding her, but also following her, did talk very deeply about a God who was bigger than racism, a God that was bigger than the slave trade, a God that was bigger and more powerful.

14:37So that's a good question. Now, I believe that looking at her life through an eco-womanist lens helps us to wrestle with these theological questions, what might have been going on in her mind. When we think about another environmentalist who I consider a proto-eco-womanist is Fannie Lou Hamer. And Fannie Lou Hamer, of course, worked very, very deeply in the civil rights movement, confronted a lot of sexism, even in the civil rights movement. Towards the end of her life, she really recognized that she might have to step back in order to do the freedom and liberation work that she was most interested in, and really confronting poverty by creating freedom farms.

15:16She was the one who actually really created this model of pig farms trying to eliminate poverty in the deep, deep, deep South. And she did so in a very radical way because she invited white people into the process of liberation. We don't think of her as an environmentalist, you're right. We don't. Yeah. Or a warrior in food justice, but she is one. So eco-womanism is not just about charting a future path. I love it that it's about essentially finding a lineage that was always there, just hidden.

15:51Hidden in some ways, right, but also intentionally hidden. There are lots of systems and lots of groups and lots of people who would like African-Americans to assume that they have no lineages to the environmental movement or that they have no connection. And so a lot of, in a lot of ways, eco-womanism is a corrective to that. It's a kind of counter-memory or counter-narrative in that sense. Sometimes where you talk with someone shapes the conversation in ways you don't even realize at first.

16:25No wonder the coyotes are howling. Melanie and I met at Ojo Caliente, in the high desert of northern New Mexico, an ancient site of healing hot springs. And this is the sound of the creek flowing in the Mesa River bottom. A miraculous sound to hear in a desert landscape. We'll talk about religious symbolism, divine motherhood, and Melanie's own connection to this landscape after the break. Hey, it's Steve.

17:00I am so glad you're with us, and I have a favor to ask. This is a new podcast, and we're really hoping to reach more listeners. So we'd love for you to tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet, and it will really help when you give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. And if you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up at wondercabinetproductions.com.

The beauty to burden paradox

17:26I'm talking with Rev. Dr. Melanie L. Harris, a professor of black feminist and womanist theologies at Wake Forest University. She's the author of Eco-Womanism, African American Women and Earth Honoring Faiths, and the editor of Preaching Black Earth. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about a wonderful, I just think it's such a moving piece you wrote called Sacred Blood Transformation. You know, those eco-memories we're talking about, some of them are filled with violence and pain.

17:59Yeah, you're absolutely right. One of the theorists who's helped me the most in unpacking this is Kimberly E. Ruffin. She really does come up with a concept called the beauty to burden paradox, and it's essentially this naming of the fact that for most African American environmental history, we have racial trauma that's also environmental trauma. So when we think about the scene of the lynching tree, for example, we have an image of sheer racial trauma, the lynching of typically black bodies,

18:34usually with a white mob, you know, celebrating the destruction of this black body. And the tree is exploited or woven into this racial violence. And so when we peel back a layer, there are at least three components in this image, that there is the white mob and the descendants of the white mob, the black body and the descendants of that black body and their families, and then the earth herself, the earth through the tree. Why does it matter to talk about the tree?

19:04I think it matters in part because of the reality of exploitive nature. That form of terror not only makes the tree complicit in terror against the black body and black community, but it also is terror to the black body and the black community. So when we think about reparations then, it's not just the white mob and the descendants of that group and the descendants of the black lynched body that need to be in conversation. What also needs to be repaired is the relationship between the lynching tree and the black people.

19:36What also needs to be repaired is the relationship between the white mob and the tree. Right. Yeah. I think the reason we don't, in this society, we don't often think of the tree as having a voice is because of how disembodied most white understandings are from the earth. There is a different understanding of the earth being something only to be consumed, only to be used, only to be exploited. But in most indigenous cultures and African-American, indigenous religious tradition, etc.,

20:09the earth is understood to be brother, to be sister, to be mother, to be father, to be in relationship or in deep kinship with. And so there is something dangerous about the logic of domination and how it informs then other logics and other practices such as white supremacy. And I think it's in part because it disconnects the earth being from the human being. And so then how do you deal with the fact that Christian theology has been part of that logic of domination?

20:41How do you deal with that personally? You're ordained in a Christian church. Yeah, this is the work of Christian theology. The Greek or Christian theology is not just to study God talk, but to examine critically God talk. I was trained at Union Theological Seminary. And so a very deep way of understanding liberation theology from James Cone and many others is to really critically bring racial analysis, bring gendered analysis, bring queer analysis to the text.

21:12Eco-womanism is also particularly unique in that it's not a Christian-centered perspective. And so many women of African descent who do work in environmental justice practice more than one, sometimes one, but more than one religious tradition. And in my work, most of that shows up in Christian Buddhist practice, whereby people of color, particularly African-American women in the middle of trying to survive in a white supremacist society, which is very sexist and racist, et cetera, the way to come to peace of mind often happens

21:48through a practice such as prayer or meditation or breathing meditation. And so many people of color find breathing meditation particularly helpful and also healing. And for many Black Buddhists, this is how they have come to Buddhism. It's not that they reject necessarily all of the Christian beliefs. Some do, some don't. But there is something beautiful about being able to reclaim your mind in the middle of a racist context.

22:18And so the contemplative practice of meditation ends up becoming a vehicle through which peace can be brought. You know, there are lots of different connections between liberation theology and Buddhist practice, as particularly engaged Buddhism. So it helps us to see both the present moment, the work that's being done by many other Buddhist women who are here, for example, the work that's being done in Black Buddhism and womanist Buddhism, but to also go back in the same way we were talking about before to recognize there was something Martin Luther King Jr.

22:52noticed in Thich Nhat Hanh. And there was something Thich Nhat Hanh noticed in Martin Luther King Jr., that there was some connection between the nonviolence of the civil rights movement as a major piece of the movement and the non-harming way of being in Buddhism that Thich Nhat Hanh certainly lived into and taught most of his life. That's really beautiful. Going back to the lynching tree and the image of the tree, I don't know what to do with how to read the kind of horrible symbolism of the black body on the tree and Jesus' body on a cross.

23:29It feels like a kind of obscene mirror image. James Cone will write a whole book about it, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Oh, of course. And they are the same. It's the same horror. It's the same terror. And it's the reason why so many African-American peoples do practice a particular kind of black Christianity because they trust the power, the resurrection power, the resilience, the power of Jesus' story, in part because Jesus knew the sorrow, the suffering, and the crucifixion.

24:03He knew the pain of being completely tormented to the point of complete annihilation. And many black peoples deeply identify with the crucifixion story of Jesus Christ. And many peoples of color globally identify. And this is one of the reasons why Christianity continues to be a really important religious tradition for many peoples who are oppressed, not just African-American, but certainly in Latino and Latina life across the world.

24:34This is one of the gifts, I think, of how Christianity, when taught and understood through a liberationist lens, it can still have towards working through climate justice. So, you know, earlier to your question, how do we deal with or work with Christian hegemony and how do we deal with the weight of the history of Christianity? In most liberationist paradigms and perspectives, it's not okay to throw away the entire tradition,

25:05in part because for many black women, for many people of color, the image of Christ, the capacity of Christ to cultivate a radical love and a radical compassion for the oppressor is necessary towards moving through a moment of white supremacy or microaggression at work or wherever it happens. To be able to call on the model of that kind of compassion is crucial for surviving a context that doesn't necessarily want you to live. And what do we do then with the tree?

25:41Because we were talking earlier about the generation of African-Americans who had been enslaved and then began the Great Migration and how many descendants wanted nothing to do with the land. How do you rebuild your connection with a tree when one of those eco-memories might be of a lynching tree? How do you then heal your relationship with trees? That kind of healing can happen through practice. It can come through trauma-informed practice. It can come with careful attention to the need for healing

26:15and healing deep, deep trauma. Bell Hooks talks about in her work, Sisters of the Yam, in a wonderful essay, Touching the Earth, she talks about the fact that she didn't necessarily inherit a green thumb. And so, you know, at that point in her life, living in a very small apartment in New York City, it was everything she could do to get this little plant to stay alive in the window. But that movement towards Earth, that movement towards reconnecting with something else growing, helps her to reconnect to her own childhood,

26:48seeing the vastness of beauty in gardens and farms, in her own family lineage. Many peoples of African descent, even today, have a chance to be able to recover their relationship with Earth. Nurturing this, cultivating this, providing opportunities and spaces, safe spaces for this, is crucial, particularly for those of us who are in the moment of recognizing that without the Earth, we will not be able to be free.

The divine feminine and the desert

27:17Coming back to the women's piece, do you have, personally, a concept of the divine feminine, a divine feminine that is meaningful to you? I do. In many, both traditions that I practice most, most of the feminine divine is crucial. I think I've been gifted. I went to Spellman. And so many of these images were, Yes, they were introduced to me very, very early in my thinking life.

27:50I also have a very powerful mother. And so I have often known the divine, the love of God, the love of the essence of Buddha nature through my mother. Now, she's not perfect and nor am I.

28:05But I have known love primarily through my family and many of the women in my family. The men, too, but a lot of the models of living life and surviving and thriving in a real, real deep way of resistance, but also rest, of recovery, and also being able to be fully present to the self and to others. That has mostly come through the women. So I'm the great-granddaughter of ministers, great-grandparents I never knew.

28:37And I grew up feeling that the church really had nothing to offer me as a young woman, that I saw male divinity, a male God, a male spirit, and an image in Mary of a woman who received. It just didn't feel like there was any kind of divine feminine. Does that make sense? It does. It's a very helpful question. I think sometimes the answer comes in the question itself.

29:07It's an invitation to consider that I come from a lineage of Alice Walker and The Color Purple, and I come from people, black peoples, where the feminine divine has always been cherished in some way. So your sharing reminds me of this scene in The Color Purple where Suge and Celie are in conversation, and Suge essentially tells Celie, and I'm paraphrasing here, that until you get the white Quaker oat box image off of your brain as the image of God,

29:41you won't necessarily feel the experience of the divine. And that to really allow yourself to experience the divine feminine through earth, through The Color Purple, is one of the most important ways to be able to then unlock the mind, to decolonize the mind in the language of Alice Walker, to be able to recognize not just the divinity in earth, but the divinity in you. And so this is one of the tools of patriarchal Christianity, but also patriarchal religion, not just in Christianity, but in a number of religious traditions,

30:13is to separate the woman's identity from the divine. And so it is by reading The Color Purple or being in circle with other women and recognizing other women's stories, by cherishing these women's stories that I think we can reconnect, even if we've not been raised with them, even if we don't have them in our own lineage. It doesn't mean that appropriation is, you know, helpful. It's not. But I think that there is a power in wisdom sharing, of listening to other women's stories,

30:44and to recognize how did they put their life back together. Because inevitably, living the human life, a woman's life is going to fall apart. Everything that she knew, everything that she depended on, will likely come to pieces, in part because a woman emerges and grows and evolves into a new being probably every seven years.

31:05I think that's the divinity, but also the reality. One is always emerging as a woman's spirit, and so one's always expanding, always growing. At a practical level, if I'm somebody who has not had that deep connection with the earth and with nature that you described growing up with, how do you cultivate that, begin to rebuild or regrow it? One of the gifts, I think, of the Eco Woman's Method

31:36is to start with what you have, to start with the memory that you may have. So to think about the last time, even if it was when you were a child, that one of the connecting points that you had with the earth, sometimes it's remembering the beauty of a sunset or where you were when you were happiest and noticed a kind of balance of energy in everything around you. If one can identify just that, just a memory, then the next step is to really reflect on what was happening then.

32:11You know, where was I? How do I put myself back into that place and space? And to also begin to reflect, how do I create this moment for the next seven generations? And I think the reality is, with climate change happening as quickly as it is, we can't guarantee right now that even the moment that we had as a child with the earth will be able to happen in the next seven generations. So that opens up an invitation for us to think,

32:41what is it that I can do to create at least some nurturing of this same kind of eco-memory for multiple generations?

32:51Last question. I'm just curious because we're here at this place with, you know, these natural springs. What has come to your mind while you've been here? We're in the desert, so water has a particular life form and power here. Seeing the beauty of the desert, I think, is key. When I first started coming to New Mexico on a normal basis and doing work here, I had to shift my northern and northeastern viewpoint

33:24and theology around flourishing and green because the beauty of the divine feminine appears differently in the desert.

33:35And so knowing the curves of the mountains and knowing the colors of the mesas and knowing the sharpness and the beauty of the cliffs is how the divine shows up here differently than the green of the east. To be able to see the ocean in the sky in New Mexico is key. And what becomes important then is the transformation or changing of the eye rather than the changing of the space.

34:07I have indigenous roots in Cherokee and Blackfoot, but the indigenous peoples of Okewinge and the Tewa communities here in New Mexico are deep spiritual teachers and I feel a deep kinship to the Tewa peoples here. So that's how I experienced the land. I experienced it as full desert and the full beauty of the desert. And in many different times in my life, particularly when I was bereft and had no answers on what was to come next

34:39or how to move, it was only by being in the desert that I was able to hear the deep echo, the deep silence, and to hear in that silence an earth resolve and answer.

34:55So a lot of healing has happened for me here in part because of the love that I experience here. That is the most beautiful answer. Thanks for the question. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for the time, ma'am. Thank you so much.

Credits and closing thoughts

35:09That's Reverend Dr. Melanie L. Harris, a professor of black feminist and womanist theologies at Wake Forest University and Divinity School. She's the founder of Eco-Womanism, editor of Preaching Black Earth, author of Eco-Womanism, African-American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, and an accomplished singer and musician. Thanks to the Center for Humans and Nature for sponsoring this episode and to the Calliopeia Foundation for funding it. And as always, thanks to our audio engineer,

35:40Steve Gottscher, and digital maestro, Mark Rikers. I'm Steve Paulson. And I'm Anne Strain-Champs. You can send us email at wondercabinetproductions.com. We're always glad to hear from you. Until next time, be well. Look at that. einer. One. One. Two. Two. One. One. Two. One. One. Two. One. One. One. Sure. One. One.