Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Towards Personal and Ecological Healing

Grenz, Jennifer. Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Towards Personal and Ecological Healing. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London. 2024. (pp 280) Hardcover (ISBN: 9781517916466) $39.95. Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Towards Personal and Ecological Healing Dr Jennifer Grenz is from a native community located in the town of Lytton, in British Columbia, Canada. They were peoples/nations who travelled up and down the Thompson and Frazer rivers, and then, with the history of colonial conquest in the region, became integrated among the ranchers of the Shuswap (Bushcreek East) area. Educated at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia in Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems, Dr Grenz identifies herself as a Nlaka’pamux Indigenous woman. Like her great-grandmother, she has connections with the local land practices, including recognition of flora and fauna in her native language. As a scientist and university fieldworker, she was able to bring about a union between her lineage worldview and the classificatory knowledge of science. She writes in the Introduction, “I created a comfortable cognitive dissonance that allowed me to engage in traditional knowledge and cultural practices while maintaining my credibility as a woman of science” (Grenz 2024: 3). The Introduction chapter places the context of her adaptive journey into professional spaces, and the chapters that follow are intriguingly titled to place the big bang moment of revelation when she discovers that she has to unlearn all that she knew. She has written an informed book on race politics, class hierarchy, and subjective Indigenous assimilation to dominant mores. She bravely advocates unlearning the given scientific axioms and speaks on behalf of marginalised communities. She seeks to draw the reader into the language of assertion by those who have been historically bypassed and, through new scientific ecological premises, invoke the knowledge of local communities in independent and harmonious ways. Jennifer Grenz writes an activist autoethnography, almost an occupational memoir. She knows everyone in her environment of salvaging ecology from the great crushing lethargy of colonialism and capitalism. Yet, her ancestral memory surfaces, though she was robbed of it, by the process of assimilation. Her grandparents hid their native roots from the ledger keepers of colonial imperialism. The trauma of knowing who they actually were is replaced by relief in discovering hidden-from-sight grandmothers and the humanist ability to keep the genealogies alive. She turns to the University to learn and get legitimating degrees. It is common sense to realise that native peoples/tribal communities/nations have survived climate change and mass migrations, so they will surely have the knowledge to help humanity through the present crises. Grenz finds that as an environmental activist, there was an emphasis on following the given procedures. Nature, however, escaped the grids, and plants turned up where they were least expected. The Himalayan Berry Rubus armeniacus was an invasive species that turned up in British Columbia. She and her team members would pull them out and plant conifers. When they returned to examine their restoration project, the conifers were dead, and the berries were back. Many such instances of heartbreak led her to pursue a university degree to find solutions. Quite often, her coworkers would not believe her findings from the field regarding adaptation practices of plants. Grenz began to ask a new set of questions that she shared in conferences. If the Himalayan Berry provided food for humans when growing wild in pavement crevices, why pull them out? We know that the Arctic Circle is a concentric circle of migration patterns from Mongolia onwards, including the Himalayas and Europe, so it is possible that the birds and bees carried the plants forward as migratory pollinators and seed distributors. It was unnerving for her to see that field procedures, often made by her as a native/Indigenous practitioner, using Western science categorisation and classifications undo the “scientific” known and the “given” by applying intuitive knowledge through induction. Grenz’s ‘big bang’ moment comes at a time of family illness, when she discovers that the invasive species that she routinely pulled out as a scientifically trained ecologist are actually potent healing medicines in the Indigenous systems. She also discovers that some plants, termed invasive weeds, are butterfly attractors. A sudden conversion is embarrassing, to say the least, as she has a relational attitude to plants and talks to them. So, it means talking to the ‘enemy’, as weeds are considered to be in invasive biology activism. Many such transformative and intimate moments happen in the book, as she uses stories, legends and dreams and draws on conversations with native elders. One is reminded of Levi Strauss’ “Savage Mind where he describes the large vocabulary of native children and their ability to recognise and classify plants. Here, too, with the extinction of tribal languages, and the knowledge systems they carry with them intrinsically, is now lost. It is in this context that Grenz devises a new terminology for ecologists where nurturing, caring, and protecting become the new terms invested in traditional knowledge systems, rather than referring to stakeholders’ privileges. She provides a gentler terminology, where “healing” is used as a substitute for “restoration”, arguing that many workers who are enlisted in conservation work, who put in long hours in arduous work environments would prefer such a celebration of their skills. She writes, emphasising that we must have “a language that ensures that Right peoples and relations are not missing from conversations that determine what happens to those lands, waters and resources.” (Grenz 2023:146) Part of the problem with old terminologies is that they remain as they are. Grenz faces some difficulties with the term “garden” used for tribal communities. However, as Malinowski pointed out in his book Magic, Science and Religion, for the Trobrianders in the Pacific Islands, people’s horticultural practices or ship-building techniques are as efficient as their reading of the stars, or their ability to travel long distances by water to trade in ceremonial arm bracelets, shell necklaces, fish and yams. In Jennifer Grenz’s ancestral lands, scholars find archival and archaeological residues of many types of fruits and vegetables that would have travelled long distances. She suggests that conventional ecology oscillates between a ‘live and let live’ policy, contrasted by militarised forms of exclusion or inclusion of Indigenous practices. Instead, she would wish for a relational ‘webwork’ that demands conscious relationality. By this, she means networking with an understanding of shared interests and motivations. Here, material culture is a reconnaissance of terms/translations inviting both conscious as well as latent knowledge systems to be in interaction. Some of the things that Grenz underlines in her theory of networking are sociability and responsibility. This involves reciprocity, friendship links and conversations, and knowledge about the needs of the earth couched in the intimacy of interactions. As an activist, she knows that the paid labour that goes into ecological awareness is a pittance. The funding dries up, the jobs are varied, and the same person is in-charge of cleaning latrines as well as taking visitors around, sweeping, collecting seeds and planting and watering. Can tourists, cyclists and people visiting forests to walk their dogs be called into active responsibilities to the environment? It is in Ye’yumnuts, in Vancouver, the territory where she had collected her Ph.D. data on Indigenous ecology and world views, that Grenz sees the sacred snake Sisuital, two-headed and unnerving. Her community translates this vision as a learning device, where she is told to adapt to the present while invoking the dream time of the past. Contradictory though this is, it helps her to forge the significance of local histories, going back to 2,500 years ago, and accessible through carbon imaging. Yet settler colonialism has its heavy imprint, which she attempts to understand through concepts of invasion and theft. This tragic loss is the underpinning of memory, where amnesia and assimilation shadow the family history of those who seek to fit in. Ecological sensitivity demands both, respect to mortuary sites where ancestors are buried, as well as socialisation of the young into the symbiosis between community livelihoods and nurturing the land. It is this mutual dependence between people and territory that is the most sensitive of debates for Jennifer Grenz. The work of committees is often autocratic and oligarchic while collating individual responses gets the greatest diversity in terms of planning ahead. What she calls an “assembly of knowledges” depends on the unique configuration that does not call for mixing or syncretism, which, in fact, respects the individual. (Grenz 2023: 231). This methodological insight comes from the Indigenous crafts of mosaic work/beading, where each individual artefact contributes to the design as a whole. Jennifer Grenz has written an excellent book useful to activists and academics alike. The concluding section returns her as an expert to her father’s village, where lands and cemeteries have been lost to raging forest fires. As she comes to terms with her emotions, she analyses her totemic memories and invites humans to become amphibians to understand the earth for all its splendour and creativity. Since so much of earth is understood in relation to water and land, and island ecologies and geologies have taught us much, it is a very good advice.

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