Treaty and Covenant: Creating Space for Hope.
Whether it was Indigenous peoples of North America, Central and South America, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand or elsewhere who received early Dutch, French, Spanish, British, and other European explorers, well established treaty making, or similar traditions guided Indigenous responses to the newcomers. Sometimes, treaty traditions that were encoded in wampum belts or other shared evidence of agreement, predated European contact by centuries. These practices were embedded in the oral traditions of the various nations, ensuring that relationships of people and the land would be clearly understood and a means of relational renewal provided. For Indigenous people, these historic practices and understandings served as a template for new sacred agreements with European nations upon their arrival.

Each people and nation, whether Indigenous or European, had their unique understandings of sacred ‘relationship-making’ institutions and ceremonies, reflecting the special genius of each. Recognition that treaties, covenants, and testaments are the most sacred and binding agreements of community and individuals, witnessed by the Creator or God, as each nation conceived such a being, was a commonality that should have portended peaceful possibilities of new relationship.

Failing to connect in this way—a meeting of differing philosophies and frames of reference, cultural connections and drives, yet with a common human spiritual ontology, and parallel traditions of peace-making, underlies the failure to achieve the Haudenosaunee Kayanerekowa (Great Peace), the Mäori notions of Te Tatau Pounamu and Hohou-rongo, the Cherokee Nvwatohiyadv (Harmony Way), the Australian Indigenous understanding of Makarrata (The Coming Together), the Lakota Cangleska Wakan (Sacred Hoop), and virtually all other such conceptions of relationship.

Explorations, rediscoveries, and experiences of implementing these ancient relationship-making processes was the focus of the NAIITS 2021 symposium, and is the substance of this volume. In the varied presentations concerning community, treaty, relationship, kinship, intercultural lifeways and more, this volume’s pages are filled with experience and knowledge. My prayer is that we are led to wisdom and wise actions through them.