Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges

S. Lily Mendoza · George Zachariah

Feb 2022 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges is a pioneering attempt to contest the politics of conquest, commodification, and homogenization in mainstream ecotheology, informed by the voices of Indigenous and subaltern communities from around the world. The book marshals a robust polyphony of reportage, wonder, analysis, and acumen seeking to open the door to a different prospect for a planet under grave duress and a different self-assessment for our own species in the mix. At the heart of that prospect is an embrace of soils and waters as commons and a privileging of subaltern experience and marginalized witness as the bellwethers of greatest import. Of course, decolonization finds its ultimate test in the actual return of land and waters to precontact Indigenous who yet have feet on the ground or paddles in the waves, and who conjure dignity and vision in the manifold of their relations, in spite of ceaseless onslaught and dismissal. Their courage is the haunt these pages hallow like an Abel never entirely erased from the history. May the moaning stop and the re-creation begin!

About the author

S. Lily Mendoza is Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and Executive Director of the Center for Babaylan Studies, a movement for decolonization and indigenization among diasporic Filipinos. Her publications include Between the Homeland and the Diaspora (2002; Philippine ed., 2006), and Back from the Crocodile’s Belly (coeditor, 2013; Philippine ed., 2015).



George Zachariah is Wesley Lecturer in Theological Studies at the Trinity Methodist Theological College in Auckland, New Zealand. His publications include The Word Becoming Flesh (2021), Faith-Based Health Justice (coeditor, 2021), and Alternatives Unincorporated (2014).