Philip P. Arnold’s book The Urgency of Indigenous ValuesOpen Access via JSTOR is a clear and urgent intervention into religious studies, Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, and the ongoing critique of settler colonialism. Rather than treating Indigenous lifeways through the limited category of “religion,” Arnold argues for the language of Indigenous values: a framework that better names land, relation, ceremony, reciprocity, responsibility, ancestors, nonhuman beings, and future generations as part of a living moral world.
The review highlights Arnold’s grounding in Haudenosaunee traditions and his long relationship with Haudenosaunee communities in central New York, especially the Onondaga Nation. It also traces the book’s critique of Western categories that separate religion from politics, ecology, land, and public life. Arnold’s concepts of paying attention, habitus, and exchange give readers a practical vocabulary for thinking beyond extraction, commodification, and domination.
At its center, The Urgency of Indigenous Values argues that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of relation. The problem is not only what modern societies do to land, water, and nonhuman life. The deeper problem is what those societies have been taught to believe land is. Arnold connects this crisis to Christian colonialism, dominion theology, and the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, while also pointing toward Indigenous values of attention, reciprocity, restraint, and responsibility.
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