The genocide hurts the heart of the perpetrators as well, because it is such a stark contrast to who we are as human beings, inherently collaborative, inherently community focused. And for you to kill people, that’s a wound on your heart. And so they have that generational would as well! They carry the generational wound of genocide as well. And by not reflecting on that, and by not growing from that they’re stagnant.
Raquel Ramirez, page 54, We Are the Middle of Forever
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first heard about this book from a episode of the Last Born In The Wilderness podcast which in turn I heard about through a friend. That podcast episode made me interested enough in the book that I went ahead and placed a order for a physical copy through a local book store.
That was in September 2024, the book has been sitting unread on my shelf until this week. And with the semi-challenge this year of alternating between non-fiction and fiction, I finally got around to reading it. Let’s get into it.
The Book
Let’s get the basics out of the way – this book is a series of interviews with various North American Indigenous people of various kinds from different “communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life.”
As such there is a lot here to take in and reflect on, and it is simply not feasible to understand all of it in the limited time I have to write this review so I’ll try my best to summarize my feelings and thoughts on the various concepts covered in this book.
The first concept I gleaned from this book is a critique of the phrase “We have never been here before” in regards to our relationship to climate change. Reading the interviews in this book made me realize that this is simply not true, the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island have long since fostered a deeper connection and understanding of the land and environments they have lived in for a long time. The umbrella term mentioned in the book is Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).
One significant example of TEK as is talked about in the book is the practice of controlled burns of forests as a way of clearing out the forest and preventing larger wildfires. From what I understand the recent amount of large wildfires in North America have at least in part caused by regulations that prevent such traditional controlled burning by Indigenous peoples.
Another concept talked about in this book is how individualism, nihilism and its children the capitalist and colonizer mindset results in a great degree of harm to our environment. This was mentioned by one of the folks interviewed, Raquel Ramirez. As I understand it, this mindset stops us from truly understanding the damage we are perpetrating both on the environment and ourselves.
Along those lines:
I don’t believe in the interpretation of ‘Darwinian evolution’ that life is about competition….Life is about cooperation. It’s about kinship. Yet the narrative of competition and individualism became valorized.
Melissa K. Nelson, We Are the Middle of Forever
Zooming out a bit, there is a throughline here that various North American Indigenous cultures and their thought patterns lean towards a more communal way of being as opposed to individualism. In such philosophies, a strong understand and connection to one’s environment is a natural extension of being in community with your fellow human being. The land is as much a community member as a member of your tribe.
Along those lines it follows that the hierarchical modes of existence with the planet are something that we need to shift away from.
We need a paradigm shift of understanding that we aren’t in this hierarchy with Mother Earth, that we are in the sacred hoop. That’s something that still needs to shift. It’s how we right our relationship with Mother Earth.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo, We Are the Middle of Forever
And last interview of the book titled “Medicine” with a Indigenous elder who chose to remain unnamed.
I hear people talking about ‘the environment’ like it’s a separate thing, and it’s not. We are the environment. We are the sum total of everything that’s on Mother Earth and there’s no way around it.
Medicine, We Are the Middle of Forever
The one critique I have of this book is as a result of its structure, since this book is a series of interviews, it can be hard to follow what a person is saying especially as the interviews are transcriptions of what people are saying and people sometimes ramble when they talk. As such, some of the interviews here are harder to follow than others and took a few re-reads of sections for me to get an idea of what the person is saying.
Conclusions
I think this book does a good job of covering a breadth of thoughts on climate change and our relationship with the planet we live on. I appreciate that the book talks to all kinds of North American Indigenous people from all walks of life. There is a lot to chew on and I think this is a book where you have to really sit with the lot of the ideas presented.
The end of the book has a section with discussion questions which I found useful in gathering my thoughts for this review. I am appreciative of any book that gives me new/different ideas and concepts for me to think about and as such I am glad I read this book.
As I am wont to do, I’ll close this non-fiction review out with a quote.
In order to really heal from something, it has to be acknowledged. You can’t heal when everybody else is telling you that it doesn’t exist. You need the. other people to acknowledge what is happening.
Tahnee Henningsen, We Are the Middle of Forever
Tahnee here is talking about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s movement but I think that concept applies to a lot more than that movement.
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