An Introduction to North American Indigenous Sermons
During the waning years of the COVID-19 pandemic, my co-author Danny Zacharias and I traveled across Canada and the United States, respectively, to interview First Nation/Native American ministers, leaders, and medicine men on how their Indigenous heritages and lifeways inform how they read the Bible. We sat through many sermons in the process, many of them creative and inspiring, some indistinguishable from conservative Baptist preaching on hellfire and the need to repent. We captured much of these stories and sermons in our book, Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to Indigenous Interpretation.1 We never intended our book to be the last word, but only a good word. Our stated hope for the future of Indigenous interpretation on Turtle Island is made manifest in the sermons that follow: to encourage more good words.
From the earliest encounters with missionaries, First Nations peoples on Turtle Island have interpreted and preached on the Bible through their own lenses. William Apess (Pequot; 1798–1839), a Methodist minister, was an early advocate for equality and the ordination of ministers of color. In his 1833 essay, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” Apess asked: “Did you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs? … Did not he who completed the plan of salvation complete it for whites as well as for the Jews, and others?”2 Arthur Wellington Clah (Tsimshian; 1831–1916) was an itinerant Methodist missionary who preached throughout the territory now known as northern British Columbia. Upon returning home from one such preaching tour, he discovered that the local government had stolen and given away a parcel of his family’s land. In an affidavit, we find Clah’s sermonic answer: “I read in the Bible that God did not approve of Ahab taking the land from Naboth. So I don’t think that God is pleased with the way the Government has taken our land.”3
It is important to say at the outset that there is no singular Indigenous or Native American interpretation of Christian Scripture, just as there is no singular African American, Latine, or, for that matter, Christian denominational interpretation of Scripture. As of 2026, there are about 575 tribes in the United States that are federally recognized and roughly 619 First Nations tribes recognized by Canada, including the Métis, the Inuit, and the Innu.
The decision to title this piece “Preaching the Bible on Turtle Island,” instead of “Native American Working Preacher,” was to highlight how Indigenous preaching can be grounded in story and place. Calling this land Turtle Island instead of North America reminds us that this land is storied land and holds names older than “the United States” and “Canada.” Many tribes along the Great Lakes, including the Anishinaabe, Haudensaunee, and Wabanaki/Abenaki peoples, share creation stories about how this land rests on the back of Turtle and that emphasize the lessons around our interdependence with our animal kin. Of course, most North American Indigenous people don’t call this land “Turtle Island,” as many of our nations have other names and stories for the land. But the point stands: We all interpret Christian Scripture informed by the stories, lands, cultures, and experiences that hold us.
In my experience, Indigenous interpretations of the Bible, or “Turtle Island hermeneutics,” at their best begin with the core assumption that Creator did not ignore the Indigenous peoples of North America until European colonizers “introduced” God to them. Rather, Creator has always been present on Turtle Island and made a mark on the stories, ceremonies, lands, worldviews, and lifeways of its Indigenous peoples. After all, God indicates that he has worked with nations outside of Israel all along (Amos 9:7).
Turtle Island hermeneutics reads biblical narratives according to frameworks and categories that align with and arise from our Indigenous heritage. Recognizing that no culture, including our modern US and Canadian cultures, is pure and without faults, a Turtle Island hermeneutics approaches our culture from an asset-based lens, which first asks what is true, beautiful, and good about our ceremonies, lifeways, histories, stories, and values. A Turtle Island hermeneutics joyfully celebrates our culture and is invitational in its tone, as much as it also is unafraid to tell the difficult stories. In the end, the goal is always for restored harmonious relationships—between Indigenous peoples and settlers, between humanity and our created kin (“all our relations”), and between all of creation and the Creator.
In this special Turtle Island edition of the Craft of Preaching, you will find a range of sermons, sermon notes, and articles that illustrate a spectrum of Indigenous prophetic preaching. In each of these entries, you may notice elements of what Danny Zacharias and I have described as the Medicine Wheel of Indigenous Interpretation. This wheel includes four quadrants that represent what we might call domains of authority that we dance through in our interpretations of Scripture: Scripture, Cultural Traditions, Creation, and Our Hearts and Minds. It’s like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral—but Native (Danny would say “better,” but that’s his joke). For a detailed discussion of this, I recommend checking out our first chapter in Reading the Bible on Turtle Island.
I’m so delighted to introduce my brilliant friends to you. Each one is a member of an Indigenous tribe and holds a doctorate in theology or biblical studies. I like to think of my friends as Native Unicorns within the world of the church. And, dear readers, please know it is the heart of the post that we not be unicorns, but that this work and that which is yet to come will inspire other Indigenous preachers, theologians, and biblical scholars to join us in the dance so that we become less rare. Each of these scholars is also a member of the Indigenous Theological Initiative, a program of the Indigenous Theological Circle, which is committed to mentoring leaders and advancing Indigenous theological studies for the flourishing of Indigenous congregations.
Anna M. V. Bowden (Choctaw) reads Jesus’s parables (Matthew 13) in light of Indigenous stories that derive from our ancestors’ experience of and relationship with the land and their animal kin. Bowden illustrates how Jesus’s parables, read as Indigenous stories, can be useful for decolonizing and disrupting systems of power, reconnecting us to our communities, and recovering what has been lost. Read her contribution here.
Kelly Sherman-Conroy (Lakota) reflects on how interpreting John the Baptizer (Mark 1:4–15) as a heyókȟa, or “sacred cloud,” within the Lakota tradition can open up a fresh lens for thinking about the prophet’s message of repentance and legacy for our own times. Sherman-Conroy directs our attention to the hope and new possibility that can be found in the midst of chaos and sacred disruption. Read her contribution here.
Carmen Lansdowne (Heiltsuk) draws lines between Naboth (1 Kings 21) and historic Indigenous leaders, like Elijah Harper, who resisted and refused to sell out. Lansdowne reminds us that the violence of the empire is not just direct, but that it’s in bad-faith paperwork and bureaucracy. We are invited to carry forth the no of faithful Naboth. Read her contribution here.
Robert O. Smith (Chickasaw), similar to Lansdowne, connects the story of Ahab and Jezebel’s violent theft of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21) with the stories of the US government’s bad-faith acquisition of Chickasaw lands and the resulting violence of the forced removal of the Chickasaw from their lands. Smith points our attention to the lines of global Indigenous solidarity that exist not only between the Chickasaw and Palestinians, but that connect to all engaged in liberation theology. Read his contribution here.
As an added bonus, I encourage you to check out the work of our sister theologian Lisa Dellinger (Chickasaw): “My Family Fought for This Country. We Won’t Celebrate It.” Here, Dellinger reflects as a Chickasaw follower of Christ on the complicated and celebrated legacy of Native American service in the military in light of stories of US violence and land-theft against Native people that are omitted from the sanitized stories that the US tells about itself.
I’ve also included a summarized version of a sermon I preached at a Thanksgiving service: “It’s an Indigenous Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown.” In this sermon I discuss how a spirit of thanksgiving permeates many Indigenous ceremonies and stories, the other stories we need to tell around Thanksgiving that illuminate why this day is a day of mourning for many, and how the story of Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 (Matthew 14) illustrates how we can still give thanks in the midst of mourning. Read the abridged sermon here.
Notes
- T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and H. Daniel Zacharias, Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to Indigenous Interpretation (IVP Academic, 2025). Small portions of this overview are reused and reshaped from passages in this book.
- William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” in The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequod Tribe (James B. Dow, 1833), 57.
- Arthur Wellington Clah, “Affidavit of A. W. Clah (An Indian),” in Letter from Methodist Missionary Society to the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Regarding the British Columbia Troubles (Toronto, 1889), 43.
