Review
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Title: Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to North American Indigenous Interpretation
Author: T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and H. Daniel Zacharias
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Genre: Religious Non-fiction/Biblical Studies
Year Published: 2025
Number of Pages: 222
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 979-1-5140-0756-3
Price: $26.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Christopher Hoklotubbe and H. Daniel Zacharias’s “Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to North American Indigenous Interpretation is a breath of fresh air. Chris and Danny are generous and open-hearted throughout the book, offering compelling insights and modeling what it might mean to have a rich, embraced sense of “Turtle Island hermeneutics.”
The book truly is an invitation, structured in a way that demonstrates Danny and Chris’s commitment to building relationships with the reader and asset-based theology.“Asset-based theology looks to the riches not only of the Western Christian tradition but of Indigenous nations’ pre- and post-Christian experiences as well. Rather than seeing Indigenous culture and heritage as deficits to condemn and root out, they are seen as places to find wisdom to walk in a good way as Jesus-followers” (25).This approach defines the entire book and comes through especially in the choice to open with several chapters that delve into some of the joy and truly “good news” that can be found in Christian scripture when viewed through the eyes of Indigenous people and Turtle Island–the God-saturated nature of Creation, the inter-relatedness of all living things, the necessity of honoring your community, and more.
After these chapters have laid the foundation of what Turtle Island hermeneutics has to offer all readers of the Bible, Chris and Danny turn to some of the pain and suffering that the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island have faced, particularly at the hands of settlers–such as the Trail of Tears, broken treaties, stolen land, and boarding schools. They then use these experiences to also provide new light and knowledge for interpreting the Bible.
The book is written primarily for two audiences: Indigenous Christians and white, Western Christians (mostly Protestants). However, Latter-day Saint readers have much to glean from the book, and I would love to see an explicitly Mormon-rooted extension and application of many of the ideas here. There are many resonances that Latter-day Saint readers will find with their own theology (emphasis on connecting with ancestors, power of dreams/visions, plants and animals having some agential “intelligence,” thinking about covenants/treaties, etc.), and potentially to some of the cultural experiences–I was quite moved by the book’s modeling of asset-based theology and the holy reclamation of that project.
Throughout the book, Danny and Chris provide rich new readings of scriptural passages that I have read countless times, filling them with new life. Interpreting Jesus’ entering the wilderness as a vision quest, following the “enfeathered” God of the Holy Spirit as a Dove; seeing Jesus finding a coin to pay taxes inside a fish as creation partnering with the marginalized to subvert the power of the oppressor; and Leviathan being one of God’s favorite pets. They also make doctrinal concepts new by reading them alongside Indigenous stories and ceremonies–in particularly insightful ways with the Atonement and the Sun Dance ceremony and story of Corn Mother (62-64).
I loved spending time with this book and have been enriched and inspired doing so. Towards the end of the book, Chris and Danny write that “Jesus celebrated and entered fully into the ceremony of his people, even while transforming it and imbuing it with a new meaning. Indigenous followers today follow Jesus’ example in engaging their culture as the gospel imbues their practice with new meaning, whether smudging, sweat lodge, powwows, or pipe ceremonies” (183). This full-hearted embrace of tradition and ceremony, particularly traditions and ceremonies that have been denigrated by others, is incredibly powerful and I think demonstrates the way forward for all of us.
Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to North American Indigenous Interpretation by T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and H. Daniel Zacharias is a smart, powerful, funny, moving, and open-hearted call to all followers of Christ to see the world and scripture anew. I hope I can engage my own culture and ceremonies imbued with new meaning, transformed in the light of the good news. May we all “come and get [God’s] love.”