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Inga Marie Nordstrand, a Saami delegate from the Church of Norway, offered an indigenous perspective in her response to the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams' 22 July 2010 keynote address at the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Eleventh Assembly, 20-27 July 2010, in Stuttgart, Germany. © LWF/Erick Coll

22.07.2010

“Gifts of Food From the Land are Spiritual Gifts”

Climate Change is Both Threatening Traditional Livelihoods and Encouraging a Return to Spiritual Connectedness with the Land, Says Sámi Delegate

STUTTGART, Germany, 22 July 2010 – The prayer for daily bread is perhaps an invitation to be spiritual “in a way that embraces our connectedness to creation,” Ms Inga Marie Nordstrand, a Sámi delegate representing the Church of Norway, told the Assembly. Perhaps it is an invitation to “humbly receive and affirm daily bread as a merciful gift to be shared.”

Responding to the keynote address of the Archbishop of Canterbury The Most Revd Dr Rowan Williams today, Ms Nordstrand described the impact of climate change on the livelihoods of indigenous people in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Siberia and northern Scandinavia, where communities have traditionally depended on fishing, hunting, gathering and reindeer-herding for their “daily bread.” It is well known, Ms Nordstrand said, that the sea-ice hunting culture of the Inuit is under threat. But climate change is badly affecting the livelihoods of other communities too. Fish are relocating, weather patterns are becoming much less predictable, the spring migration of the reindeer is affected, and there have been “explosive” caterpillar attacks.

Ms Nordstrand told the Assembly that in one Alaskan community, in response to the impact of climate change and on the advice of their elders, young people were learning to develop a spiritual relationship with the land. Now they are “greeting the land as they go out harvesting, and affirming the gifts of food from the land as fundamentally spiritual gifts.”

She concluded that daily bread is “not only a commodity” but also “a spiritual gift, a sacrament of the earth that affirms our fundamental connectedness with all created life, a gift of God’s mercy that connects us with the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all life.”

(272 words) 

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