/prod02/channel_1/t4_pending/media/hngr/Corple-Reflection-header.png)
Dr. Danielle Corple
My wrought iron chair sat on a patch of grass at the conference center in Rio Negro. I munched on my beef empanada. I sipped my coffee. I journaled about our time with Memoria Indigena, with the Indigenous leaders from across Central and South America who had gathered to share about their cultures, churches, challenges, and their hopes for their communities.
Coming from so many different regions and backgrounds, we needed to connect across language. Not only did Memoria Indigena staff tirelessly translate, they showed us how to sketch images, cut out pictures, and add onto each other’s creations in our efforts to share and understand each other. As I sat with my coffee, reflecting on this time, I found myself writing circularly, repeatedly coming back to redocument the moments of joy, expressions of solidarity and gratitude, the images of children, drawings of church communities, hills, trees, animals, plant life, pictures of triumph and hope.
.jpg)
I thought about my upcoming class that I had been preparing on the plane. We would be discussing media “frames”—or how writers highlight some aspects of a story and erase others—some parts are in the figurative “picture frame” and others are left out.
The indigenous leaders hadn’t erased the darkness from their frames. It was there, but it further spotlighted what was truly at the center—life, growth, resilience, solidarity, preaching, protesting, young people mentoring young people, and—over and over—the beauty of reciprocity and mutuality.
The center of this frame was “abundance”—despite the dispossession of land, violence, and discrimination faced by so many who shared. I believe strongly that an abundance frame is a Kingdom frame. It stands in contrast to a scarcity frame, which turns relationships and land into resources that must be hoarded for survival. A scarcity frame fuels the kingdoms of earth, where extracting and colonizing builds power. Abundance echoes the Kingdom of God declared by Jesus in the New Testament, where those exploited by earthly kingdoms are liberated, the poor are rich, the mourning are comforted, and the land is healed.
The time with Indigenous leaders, especially their emphasis on reciprocity and abundance, helped shape the class I mentioned before, one I’m now wrapping up as the semester wanes. As students have been learning about racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. context, they have been examining the effects of zero-sum mindsets (where one group’s “winning” comes at the expense of another) versus mindsets of collective flourishing. The core metaphor is a drained swimming pool, taken from the author, Heather McGhee, who writes about the end of racial segregation in the U.S. When forced to desegregate their communities, many local municipalities shut down community resources, like public swimming pools, rather than share them with people of all races. The “drained pool” is a tragic picture of the effects of zero-sum thinking, where rather than share resources, both groups lose as a result. No one swims now, at least not for free, and certainly not together.
The Indigenous leaders shared about extraction, violence, addiction, abuse, and forced removal from their homes. These are the sorts of harms that easily fuel a scarcity mindset, that shape us into “us versus them,” winner take all, calculating and competitive and suspicious of everyone. Yet the leaders resisted this approach, clinging to generosity, solidarity, sharing, and community, even at great cost to themselves. I come back to these memories regularly, as I did while journaling, returning to a picture of the Kingdom where our flourishing is always collective, never at the expense of one another.
Thank you, Memoria Indigena, for bringing us together for this shared learning, the fruit of which continues to grow beyond our time in Colombia.
Communications
Reflection written as part of Stott Fellows 2024