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In February I spent a week doing prayerful accompaniment at Oak Flat (Chi’Chil Bildagoteel) in Arizona, sacred land of the Western Apache. Sarah Augustine and the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery encouraged Mennonite Men to pursue training to accompany Apache Stronghold as they advocate for the protection of Oak Flat and their religious freedom. I did the training and have served on the accompaniment team. This February I joined a Mennnonite teammate at Oak Flat for daily prayer walks, camping on the land, communicating with and supporting Apache Stronghold, and experiencing God’s creation firsthand.

Each time I’ve gone to Oak Flat has been transformative. For a Midwesterner it has taken multiple days, multiple visits, and learning from the Apaches to get acclimated and begin to realize just how full of life this sacred land truly is. Even without verbal explanations, simply being at Oak Flat inspires gratitude, reverence, and prayer. That said, if Apache Stronghold had not shared history and background with me, I would not even begin to understand the depth of its sacredness.

Photo: campsite occupied by the author and other allies from The Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. Photo credit: Tim Nafziger

As a white male settler and a visitor, no one owes it to me to teach me all the facts, history, and symbolism of this place. I have been taught enough and have personally experienced enough to have my heart swell with love for God’s creation as experienced here. My heart breaks at the thought of this land being transferred to a foreign mining company, knowing this land would collapse into a crater and Apaches would be cut off from coming here. Oak Flat is considered by Apaches to be a female mountain, a source of water, food, medicine, shade, a home to many creatures and to angels. Ancestral remains are buried in this land. Ancient petroglyphs carved on canyon walls are still visible. Important ceremonies and prayers take place here, ceremonies where Apache creation stories are reenacted. Boys and girls come here for coming of age rituals to be oriented and welcomed into adulthood and more fully into their community. This is a place of storytelling, family reunions. If Chi’Chil Bildagoteel is destroyed, Apache religious practice is destroyed forever.

Oak Flat contains low spots where water sometimes collects, allowing large Emory Oak trees to grow. Some of the tree trunks are three and four feet in diameter. Curved and wide-spreading branches hang low, inviting people and birds and other creatures to find respite in their shade. These trees are sometimes referred to as ‘grandmother oaks’ and said to be between 300 and 600 years old. I imagine the bumps, curves, and scars on their trunks have many stories to tell. In the summer these giant oaks produce acorns gathered by Apaches as a food source. I have had the pleasure of being offered delicious acorn soup made from acorns collected at Oak Flat. These abundant acorns not only feed people, they also feed acorn woodpeckers, orioles, jays, and javelina. I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing hawks, ravens, towhees, cardinals, finches, hummingbirds, and small lizards rest in their branches.

Settlers like me may not have trees nearby that were alive for hundreds of years, providing food to feed our community. We likely don’t have trees under which our people gathered for dance, prayer, family reunions, and birthdays for hundreds of years. And, I would wager, we likely don’t have trees that our people intentionally let grow for hundreds of years without cutting down for lumber. We likely don’t fully understand the gratitude held by indigenous peoples, don’t regularly thank God for trees that give us food, shade, shelter, and home to birds. Our Apache sisters and brothers do.

What if we Anabaptist Christians learned to view trees with a kind of reverence and kinship that led to protecting them, letting them live to old age? What might we learn about God by caring for oak trees, fine examples of God’s creation? Have we pondered the importance of trees named in the Bible?

Join me, join Mennonite Men, join Apache Stronghold as together we consider the love of God the Creator shown by creation. May we learn that places, mountains, trees, people, places of flowing waters have meaning and significance beyond their utility, that God’s special places can’t be destroyed and simply recreated elsewhere.

I hope we as Christians learn and tell stories about trees, find shelter under trees as a place to pray to God, and inspire children to enjoy trees.

Join Mennonite Men in remembering Oak Flat. Pray for Oak Flat, its Apache defenders, and for the Supreme Court justices who are considering whether to hear the case of Apache Stronghold.

​Growing up I had been provided opportunities to play and work outdoors in forested settings. Whether the oak-hickory forests of southern Michigan where my parents owned a cottage, or the forested slopes of the Four Corners Region of the Southwest where my family resided several times during my adolescent years. The latter experiences shaped my intention to pursue a professional forestry degree in the west and then work for public land agencies in the Rocky Mountain region.

During my undergraduate studies I worked for a federal land agency during weekends and summers as a temporary employee. The working experiences I had, while valuable, caused me to reassess by life goals and how my Mennonite Anabaptist values might play a role. As a result, I took a two-year break prior to my senior year to explore ways I might serve the church within the context of my future professional endeavors. This led me to working with Amigo Centre, a Mennonite-affiliated camp in southern Michigan, as their land manager. During this break from undergraduate studies in the late-1970’s, I had the opportunity to begin planting trees on a tract of land my family had acquired at the north end of Goshen, Indiana. Forty years later this tract became part of the Pathways Retreat. (Image right: 60-year-old white pine planting- Amigo Centre)

From these early experiences emerged my life mission: ‘To show persons their integral relationship with the building of God’s kingdom and the dynamics of His Creation’. I pursued this mission by directing my vocation as a professional forester toward working with private landowners— both individuals and Mennonite organization-owned properties. This has included a forty-eight-year relationship with Amigo Centre stewarding their land—including a sixty-year-old white pine planting and, more recently, using forestry practices to rehabilitate their native oak-hickory forestland severely-damaged from a recent straight-line windstorm.

I also had the privilege of providing forest resources education to adult audiences as a Michigan State University Extension forester, and to young adults as a Goshen College environmental sciences faculty member and Director of Land Management at its Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center. Now recently retired from Goshen College, I continue to stay active in pursing my life mission by doing consulting work with private landowners and Mennonite-affiliated groups that own land.

As I reflect back on almost fifty years, I am grateful to witness the Mennonite Church more fully responding to ‘the Holy Spirit beckoning us toward the restoration of all things in Christ’. There are many emerging expressions of creation care by individuals and organizations within the broader church—much of which has been led by the younger generations. While we might struggle to differentiate between what is the work that is ours to do and what is the work that is God’s to do, I have great hope for the future. I have witnessed this hope when engaging with private landowners, college students and camp staff, and supporting initiatives such as Mennonite Men’s JoinTrees. More recently I was gratified to connect Camp Friedenswald, a Mennonite-affiliated camp in southern Michigan, to JoinTrees resources for the afforestation of 13 acres of cropland. (Image left: Adventitious sprout- Dominican Republic)

So, in my experience, what has ‘hope’ looked like? During my graduate studies I spent time in the Dominican Republic (DR). As with many developing economies, native forest cover was being exploited for its wood to make charcoal for cooking. Mennonite Men’s JoinTrees campaign has been active in countries such as this to reforest degraded lands and support community agroforestry efforts. In the DR I captured an image that represented the ‘hope’ that can be found in the resiliency of nature—vegetative shoots on a tree that had been cut for charcoal production. These shoots developed from adventitious buds. They remind me of the hope found in the scripture commonly read during Advent…. Then a shoot will spring up from the stump of Jesse, and a Branch from his roots will bear fruit (Isaiah 11:1).