Looking out at Eloheh. Photo Credit: Jim Sequeira
Indigenous Wisdom Offers an Alternative to Empire’s Greed and Speed
Carl Jung once observed that the greed and speed of Western culture was like a virus that could destroy the whole world. Sitting on my porch at Eloheh Farm & Seeds in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, watching the oak savanna we’re restoring, I’ve come to believe he was right. But I’ve also discovered something that gives me hope: the antidote has been here all along, embedded in Indigenous ways of knowing that predate empire by thousands of years.
The Infection We Can’t See
We are like fish swimming in water who don’t realize we’re surrounded by water until someone pulls us out. The water we swim in is empire consciousness—a way of thinking so pervasive that we mistake it for reality itself. It operates on a simple logic: hierarchy, transaction, speed, and accumulation. More is better. Faster is better. Power over others is how you survive.
This has infected our spirituality too. The marriage between Christianity and empire runs deeper than most realize. It didn’t start with Constantine, though that’s when it became formalized. Around 100 A.D., under severe Roman persecution, church leaders began contextualizing their structure to mirror the empire’s hierarchy—bishops like field marshals, pastors like centurions. They were trying to survive, trying to relate to the dominant power. But domination and oppression runs through Western Christianity like the threads of a blood-soaked tapestry. Once you compromise with Caesar, you lose what’s essential to the faith. You lose the revolutionary teaching that the last shall be first, that we don’t lord over one another but serve each other.
The Medicine of Sacred Disruption
This is where the tricksters come in—those sacred clowns that every healthy culture needs. I see the prophet Ezekiel this way. Some call him priest, prophet, and poet, but I’d add another word, one that Richard Rohr used in his book The Tears of Things: “quirky.” Ezekiel is a trickster bringing us a sense of imbalance, of discombobulation. He changes the ordinary into the extraordinary and makes us look at things differently. He’s a truth-teller, but not in the way you expect truth to be told.
I remember watching a bean dance ceremony down in Hopiland with a friend. The Kosharis—sacred clowns—were moving through the crowd of men renewing their vows to walk in a good way. One Koshari started pointing at a guy, and everyone was laughing. I asked what he was saying. My Hopi friend translated: “He’s asking why, if this man claims to be so religious, people see his truck parked behind widow so-and-so’s house every Friday night—and he’s married.” Truth-telling at its best. Funny, but deadly serious. Sometimes we need that altered reality to shake us into understanding what’s really happening.
Right now, in this political moment, many people feel utterly helpless. The systems feel too big, the corruption too deep, the machinery of power too entrenched. We watch the news and feel the weight of what’s happening, but we don’t know what to do that would actually matter. This feeling of powerlessness is itself part of empire’s water—it wants you to believe that only grand gestures, only people with platforms, only those with access to power can change anything.
But the trickster works differently. The sacred clown doesn’t go through the front door of the palace. They come in through the side, through the unexpected, through the small gesture that reveals the emperor has no clothes.
Here in Portland, near where I live, we saw this perfectly when Trump sent federal troops these past few months. There’s a saying that captures how different cities responded: When the federal troops arrived in Los Angeles, they said “we will fight them.” When they arrived in Chicago, they said “we will fight them.” When they arrived in Portland, we said “we will make them watch 12 hours of improv a day!”
And that’s exactly what happened. The streets filled with people in inflatable frog and shark costumes. Grannies showed up in rocking chairs, knitting calmly in front of armed officers. Crowds of 1980s disco roller skaters appeared out of nowhere. Every morning, people brought doughnuts and coffee to the troops. This was sacred clowning at its finest—resistance that refused to meet violence with violence, that instead used absurdity and humor to reveal the ridiculousness of sending armed forces against people offering pastries.
These acts of holy disruption work because they don’t play by empire’s rules. Empire understands force meeting force. It knows how to respond to violence with greater violence. But what does it do with grandmas knitting? How does it respond to people in shark suits? The cognitive dissonance is the point. These acts pull us out of the water of empire logic and help us see the absurdity of what we’ve been accepting as normal.
Your acts of disruption don’t need to be loud or dramatic to pull people out of unreality and shake them into seeing what’s true. It’s the neighbor who, when everyone else is posting outrage on social media, shows up with soup when someone is sick. It’s the person who interrupts a conversation where someone is being dehumanized—not with a lecture, but with a story that reminds everyone of their own humanity. It’s the family that turns off the news one evening a week and invites others to share a meal, to be known. It’s the community that plants a garden on abandoned land and shares the harvest, demonstrating that another way is possible.
When you slow down to the three-mile-an-hour pace of walking with your neighbor, you’re disrupting empire time. When you share rather than hoard, you’re disrupting empire economics. When you honor the personhood of someone the system deems disposable, you’re disrupting empire logic.
The powerful hate this because they can’t control it. You can’t legislate against neighbors caring for each other. You can’t build a wall against stories that humanize. You can’t militarize against people who’ve decided that relationships matter more than winning. You can’t shoot at someone offering you a doughnut without revealing exactly what you are.
Story Them…
Tricksters often work through symbols and stories because those are technologies that circumvent the logic of empire. There’s something that happens when you write things down—that written thing becomes THE truth, rather than the story becoming a living truth. Indigenous peoples have been sharing stories since time immemorial, not because we care whether they “really happened” in some modern scientific sense, but because the point is not the truth OF the story, but the truth IN the story.
It is a sacred act to be a storykeeper. My wife, Edith, and I spent three days this past summer with Lenore Three Stars, interviewing Lakota elders from morning till evening. These were people telling stories from their families and tribes—stories thousands of years old, still being told. We were elated to sit there and hear these things. It was one of the most sacred experiences we had ever had. Our people know how to keep stories, as I’m sure ancient Israel did, and other ancient cultures too. They had story keepers.
There’s something subversive about oral tradition. The written word can be controlled, edited, burned, rewritten by those in power. But stories passed from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, carry truths that slip through the fingers of empire. This is why, throughout history, dominant cultures have tried to silence the storytellers, to suppress the languages, to interrupt the passing down of memory. They know that stories are how people remember who they are when the official narrative tells them to forget.
So, in this political moment, your act of resistance might be becoming a storykeeper. Tell the stories of people who’ve been erased. Tell the stories of times when communities came together. Tell the stories of the grannies knitting in front of federal troops, of neighbors who showed up when it mattered, of small acts of solidarity that remind us we are not powerless, that this is how empires crumble—not all at once in some dramatic revolution, but slowly, as people remember there’s another way to be human together.
The Vision of Eloheh with Creation
This brings me to what I’ve spent decades rediscovering: a construct that exists across Indigenous cultures in North America and, I believe, throughout the world. In Cherokee, we call it Eloheh. The Navajo call it Hózhǫ́. When I did my doctoral work, I interviewed leaders and others from 45 different Indigenous groups across the U.S. and Canada. Every single one said, “Oh yeah, we have that [construct].”
Eloheh describes a state of being when all is as it should be, as it was created to be. It means people are at peace, not at war. The earth is being cared for and producing in abundance, so no one goes hungry. People are treating each other fairly, and no one is a stranger for very long. Some call it the harmony way.
This isn’t self-help spirituality about pursuing your own happiness. In fact, pursuing your own happiness probably won’t make you happy. It’s about universal responsibility—responsibility to all creation, to each other, to future generations. When we make decisions, we look seven generations down, to our great-great-great-great-grandchildren, and ask how this will affect them. We’re so addicted to getting what we want right now, within our span of attention—maybe 24 hours. We don’t realize what it’s like to be in a culture that sometimes waits decades and generations for things to happen.
Let me ask you this: What would we call a relationship that’s just one-way? Narcissism, maybe. A stalker. It’s not healthy. It’s dysfunctional. Western people are beginning to say, “Oh, nature matters, creation matters. I see God in nature.” That’s good. But it’s still a one-way relationship. What is the agency that nature has FOR us and TOWARD us? What makes it not a one-way relationship?
God’s “grace’, Creator’s “presence”, Universal “spirit”, flows through creation and gives us so much—the ability to calm us, inspire us, feed us, shelter us. How can we ignore that and say, “This relationship is just for me”? We have a serious obligation to take care of creation, because this is God’s gift being expressed directly to us. When we understand how Creator works through nature and that this is meant to be a two-way relationship, we come much closer to harmony.
The Practice of Slow Transformation
Someone once spoke of the “three-mile-an-hour God”—the pace at which Jesus walked with his disciples. Americans are so addicted to this fast-paced life. We want everything done not just in our generation, but in our lifetimes, in our span of attention. But when we learn to talk with one another, to dialogue, to learn about each other’s families and what makes us cry and laugh, we become more apt to work on a consensus basis. Everyone has a voice. It gives everyone dignity.
When I was a pastor in Carson City, Nevada, we eventually ran our church this way. We met once a month, and everybody got to share. Yes, things slow down. They don’t move as fast. But that’s not a detriment. That’s a blessing. We have time to think. We have time to think about how human the other person is. We have time to build relationships. We don’t need to agree on everything, but we need to love one another.
I used to think if I became this great speaker, traveling the world telling thousands of people the message, things would change. That’s not how things really change. Here at Eloheh, we’re a demonstration farm, a demonstration model and school. I encourage people to start exactly where you are—in your own church, your own community, your own affinity group. Begin to treat yourselves, each other, and those non-human creatures around you with the kind of respect and love we’re talking about.
It’s about mustard seeds, right? If you use your imagination, a picture’s worth a thousand words. If you can begin to enact this in your own community in any small way and let it grow, that’s how things really change.
The Way Forward
There’s a verse in Ezekiel that captures this whole vision: “I will treat you as respect for my own name requires, not as your own conduct deserves.” God’s only measure is God’s self. This is the God who runs toward us, not waiting for us to earn it. This is exactly what we see in that story from Luke 15—the prodigal son has his whole speech prepared, but the father doesn’t even hear it. All that matters is the love, the kindness. God treats us according to who God is, not according to who we are.
And if that’s true, we have an invitation to be that way toward each other. Toward all of creation. Toward the seven generations to come. This is the harmony way. This is Eloheh. This is the alternative to empire’s greed and speed. It won’t make headlines. It won’t trend on social media. But it will change the world, one small garden, one conversation, one restored relationship at a time.
The question isn’t whether you can stop the infection of empire consciousness everywhere at once. The question is: where will you plant your mustard seed today? What small act of sacred disruption will you offer that helps someone—maybe even yourself—see through the unreality we’ve been swimming in? How will you slow down long enough to remember that you are not alone, that you are part of a web of relationships that extends back seven generations and forward seven more?
The empire wants you to feel powerless. The trickster knows better. Maybe today your resistance looks like putting on a shark costume. Maybe it looks like knitting in a rocking chair. Maybe it looks like offering coffee to someone who expects a fight. Maybe it looks like planting seeds, sharing a meal, telling a story that’s been passed down for generations.
Start where you are. Begin small. Trust the slow work of transformation. Harmony is waiting.
Editor’s Note: Previously published on Randy Woodley’s Substack on January 6, 2026.
