Healing Bodies, Mending Earth
April 29, 2024
An Interview with Graduating Student Jessica Hopkins
Jessica Hopkins speaks quickly, passion bursting, as she describes her studies at Garrett. Graduating this May with a Masters of Arts in Public Ministry, time in seminary offered space to explore her own Choctaw heritage while simultaneously learning about the gifts that indigenous theologies can bestow on a traumatized Earth and people. “I’ve been exploring the impact of the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny and historical trauma,” she begins. “Not just on our legal systems, but the ways those forces traumatized indigenous communities and especially indigenous bodies.” She makes clear, however, that this history cannot be separated from harm against ecosystems. “Healing and identity are rooted in nature as well as self,” Hopkins explains. “So healing bodies also means healing nature.”
While she’s now passionate about indigenous and eco-theologies’ promise to start unwinding this violence, she confesses that this was not her mindset when she began her seminary journey. “I came to Garrett really cynical and apathetic,” Hopkins says. “I graduated college after the election, after COVID—under the theft of people’s rights—everything that’s happened in the past few years. I didn’t know what I believed in anymore.” Encountering indigenous scholarship in the classroom, however, helped return her to her own body—offering hope that didn’t ignore the impact of colonial violence, but also refused to let oppressive forces have the final word. “I’m pretty sure in every class I’ve taken there was at least one indigenous source to read,” she says. “We know the history, but to see how other indigenous people are using Christian theology as a vessel for healing was so powerful.”
In her own thesis work, she wove deep incarnation—a theology developed by scholars like Elizabeth Johnson—with Mark Mooney’s eco-somatic theory, looking particularly at how these forces intersect women’s lives in relationship to the natural world. “God is enlivening creation,” she notes. “Everything is filled by the Holy Spirit—from the energy in your body to the energy throughout all life. That’s how we connect, but when we cannot feel our own spirit, we cannot create connection with nature, and that’s a source of so much suffering.” Recovery, in this framework, requires us to knit back together those relationships. “In order for healing to be fully embodied, it must include the rest of creation,” she says. “We must equally confront the extractive industry, corporate slaughterhouses, the fishing industry—all of it is deep injustice because the Creator’s Spirit appears in each animal that is slaughtered, every fish losing its home.”
As she developed this theology, Hopkins found comfort and wisdom in collaboration. “Mark Mooney was actually my field education advisor over the summer,” she exclaims with joy. “I got to meet with him quite a few times—so cool. And Dr. Eberhart helped me understand creation as more than rocks and trees and water; as an entity with its own life force.” Perhaps even more important, however, were chances she had to study in circles of wider indigeneity. “I got to travel to Healing Our Spirit Worldwide in Vancouver and NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community in Manitoba,” she gushes. “It was so amazing to be there, to learn from indigenous people from Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway—you name it—to focus on the process of mending, not just the harm.”
What she discovered throughout the program was a fundamentally different way to understand the world. “It’s a complete paradigm shift to consider that animals don’t only have their own right to life and habitat, but that they are creative and have feelings, too,” she observes. “Water becomes not just molecules you have to drink, but an essence with its own spirit; mountains aren’t just resources to be mined, they play a role in creating and sustaining your reality.” Changing how she viewed non-human kin helped her better know our interconnectedness. “If you lose the salmon, you lose those nutrients and you lose cultures and ways of life,” she says. “But also the river is going to decline, and as the river declines the forest will decline—a slow violence that will destroy everything we have.”
But if that interconnectedness draws our attention to what is threatened, it also calls us to see power for new life. “Indigenous people are willing to put their bodies on the line for creation as they have throughout history,” Hopkins says. “When people recognize the river, the fish, everything in creation as a brother or sister that they’re willing to die for, that’s true sacrifice and true love. There’s so much emerging deep collaboration that recognizes this is our planet; humans and Earth must start working together.”
This conviction draws her back to her own Christian faith. “Jesus didn’t go and conquer he went and lived with the community,” she explains. “It’s a call to spend time with and become part of both people and the entire web of creation that carries God’s Spirit.” This theology offers hope for healing the planet, but it’s also reciprocally helped reintegrate her own identity. “It means I don’t have to choose between being indigenous and being Christian,” she concludes. “I don’t think the Creator would ever ask anyone to choose.”