Feature story
Host Lyn van Rooyen, WCC publications coordinator, speaks with Lori Ransom, WCC Indigenous peoples consultant; Prof. Anne Pattel-Gray, a descendant of the Bidjara Nation in Queensland and a renowned Aboriginal leader within Australia and internationally; and Chief Edmund Stuurman, from South Africa, who is the senior Khoi leader of the House of Klaas and Dawid Stuurman and the Gamtouer Ethnic Community.
Ransom is editor of the report, while Pattel-Gray and Stuurman are contributors.
Van Rooyen poses questions about why Indigenous perspectives are so valuable in work related to climate justice, and why land justice is so important.
“Laws were given to us as to how we relate to creation,” reflects Pattel-Gray, whose contribution to the publication is entitled “Freedom from Colonial Christian Oppression.”
We are connected to country,” she says. “As I’ve grown, it’s become obvious to Indigenous peoples that we all have similar relationships to the land, spiritual connection to the land, and laws that govern our relationship to the land—and this relationship is one that is reciprocal.”
Stuurman, who penned a contribution entitled “Biodiversity and the Recyclable Indigenous Umbilical Chord,” reflected that, in South Africa, Indigenous people are, by identity, a pastoralist people—and now they are left with land injustice. “We haven’t been consulted—and how can Indigenous land be distributed or taken into custodianship by the government without our consent? We still own these lands. We gave the names to the land.”
Ransom encouraged readers to absorb the poetry and artwork in the publication. “There’s so much value in looking at the world through Indigenous eyes,” she said.
The report is the fruit of a seminar with members of the WCC Ecumenical Indigenous Peoples Network Reference Group funded by the German Federal Foreign Ministry in October 2024.
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