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Books

Medicine Wheel for the Planet by Jennifer Grenz

Lucy Weir takes a wheel of healing for an intellectual spin.

Can we heal the planet, and ourselves, through the use of an ancient system developed among the tribal peoples of Canada? Many, including the author of Medicine Wheel for the Planet (2024), the agroecologist Dr Jennifer Grenz, might question why a person such as me – white, descended from colonial settlers in Australia – has either the audacity or sense of irony to engage critically with this book. But I am also a student of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo, and of notions of enmeshment, agency, and compassion, and my work has focused on the ecological emergency, so I have more than just a passing interest in the subject matter.

Before I critically engage with Dr Grenz’s exploration of her personal odyssey through the falsehoods and abuses that were the legacy she received as an Indigenous woman, I want to set down my wholehearted recommendation of the book. This is something of a 180° turn for me, as I initially felt a lot of resistance to its challenging imagery. I also had some concerns about the effectiveness of her approach, in the face of the enormity of the political, social, climate, biodiversity , and even personal, fragmentation and collapse that now threaten us existentially. I do have a small criticism – that the text can feel repetitive in places. For instance, Grenz comes back to the same idea of ‘Eden philosophy versus stewardship’, in numerous guises. Maybe though it’s like a drumbeat, coming back to the same theme, the same idea, but with different rhythms (or examples). Otherwise, I strongly recommend buying this book, because it contains far more good ideas and great writing than I can convey in this short review.

The book proposes adopting Indigenous wisdom, and a corresponding reorientation of our worldview, and thus of our role in the societies and communities in which we find ourselves. It is loosely based on the notion of the medicine wheel, a device or stone structure used in many First Nations cultures both for identifying the source of a problem or disease, and for discovering the way to heal. In particular here, its use is suggested to heal the connection between people, and land, and all the creatures who live in, or on, the land, water, and air. This is a topic in which I am very interested, and something I’m writing about too, in the context of my own family and a massacre that took place in Australia in 1838. I know about the evils of colonialism, and I could not agree more with Grenz that we need, somehow, to decolonise our own minds.

There’s much to say about Grenz’s analysis of what we – both settler and Indigenous – need to do to decolonise ourselves. On the one hand, there’s the possibility of using imagination to explore one’s own ancestral history in a way that allows one to reconnect with place. Of course, this is rather more difficult for settler descendants, who have often become so detached from place as to be barely able to associate with any one area. (Perhaps that’s why sports clubs are so popular: the longing for belonging?)

Critical Spins

My reservations about Grenz’s analysis are interrelated, but can be roughly divided into three concerns.

Healing Totem Venantius J Pinto

Firstly, social evil did not start with Western civilisation. Indigenous people also had wars. There was slavery in Inuit, Icelandic, and many other indigenous cultures. Women were often treated as trade items, and were kidnapped and enslaved when there was inter-tribal or inter-group rivalry. In The Sealwoman’s Gift (2018), for example, Sally Magnusson tells of an Irish slave girl brought to Iceland, as well as of Icelandic captives taken and sold into slavery in Algiers. In Surfacings (2019), Kathleen Jamie tells of a Yupik woman captured from another village who escaped and alerted her people to where she’d been held. That village was razed or abandoned shortly after. Aboriginal people could also be brutal to one another and to the land, at least in certain contexts, like the mass killings of aurochs in Europe, or woolly mammoths in North America. The myth of the ‘Noble Savage’ perpetuated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is just that: an idealised vision of humanity. No society has ever lived in perfect balance with its surroundings. We’re all human beings. Grenz certainly recognises this at one level. We don’t need to look back through rose-tinted glasses. Yet, in a sense, that’s what she does. That’s a problem for two other reasons: a) It recreates the sort of dichotomous ‘war’ of good versus evil that religious and political fundamentalists of all stripes have been fighting since their inceptions; and b) If it’s a question of whose story wins, then indigenous tribes are faced with almost unimaginably poor odds against those whose narrative is that theirs is the God-given right to plunder a place and render it maximally profitable for those special few whom God has blessed as ‘his people’. Perhaps it’s pointless to even try to consider how those with such a mindset might reorientate how they see the world. However this reorientation is the question towards which the book points us.

Certainly I agree with Grenz that culture arises from the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are, and that for those of us brought up with ‘settler mentality’, the story must change. Much of Grenz’s work is to connect head to heart: to connect the personal, and in her case her unearthing of the disassociation she’s endured by virtue of the historical abuses suffered by her people, with the theoretical; and, inevitably perhaps, with the political.

Most importantly, Grenz lays out the best argument I have yet encountered for the ecological approach known as stewardship. Her work took me back again to discussions I’ve had over the years with Emeritus Professor Robin Attfield, who has written extensively about the stewardship approach from a Christian perspective. I found Grenz’s approach compelling; humans are not apart from nature. Societies that have endured for millennia without destroying the sources of energy and food that make such endurance possible have done so precisely because of their stewarding of plants and animals. Of course this has been with the welfare of the human community at heart, but that welfare is not seen as separate from the welfare of other species, and indeed, of ecosystems.

Grenz herself stresses the need to take the wisdom of each worldview, scientific and Indigenous. She talks of people like myself with settler family histories becoming allies by decolonialising ourselves. But I also think that there’s a temptation to take a binary turn, and paint the whole settler mentality as toxic and the whole mentality of aboriginal people as benign. It’s a comfortable way to divide the world – good, and evil, right, and wrong – but is it ever really that simple? And it also leaves us with another dilemma: how do we fight an information war when that very act may fuel the explosive tensions that already exist in contemporary society? ‘Fighting fire with fire’ springs to mind.

One criticism that may be leveled at Grenz’s ‘inclusive’ approach to problem-solving is: could it get things done? Where is leadership accepted from? Could anyone, even non-Indigenous, give leadership? Compared with the spearhead of a single individual at front of a force, with everyone else trailing in the wake (and, I’m sure the leader would say, reaping the benefits), the inter-relational approach is messy, slow, and makes little progress. Or does it? Isn’t this exactly how systems, and species, have survived, over millennia – through mutual accommodation? Through stewardship on the part of humans? In other words, through learning to live within limits?

A linguistic change Grenz suggests is saying healing instead of restoration of the land. I felt an inner resistance to this, but she’s right. There are different kinds of healing, and they’re connected. I changed my mind on this one. Another linguistic suggestion is from natural to legacy – something transmitted or received from the past. This I think is very important.

Conclusions

I hope that I brought a perspective to the book that recognises the enormous power of the approach advocated by Grenz. We could review our perspectives around the medicine wheel, that is able to value, but nevertheless comes from elsewhere. Yet it creates its own singular viewpoint on the issues that concern both her, as an Indigenous woman, and me, as a woman of settler descent.

A last spoiler (but buy the book!). Grenz writes: “How often have any of us asked, ‘What can I do?’ as we watch another devastating wildfire, or flood, or slide, or see communities with food shortages.” She says sending money is not enough, meaning that it’s too disconnected. We need to be able to work on the land, where we are. And she says this to the oligarchs who run our world: “We must demand that those who control the land start including us in her care.”

According to the Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (who makes a very strong case for it), there is a certain inevitability to history, in the sort of way that a landslide is inevitable. And yet, periodically, we wake up. We change direction. We pivot. We need to do that now with settler mentality. We need to talk about this mentality, and how to decolonise ourselves. This book gives us a fine blueprint for that, and for living at peace and in relationship with ourselves and all other species and systems on this earth, our home.

Lucy Weir received her PhD in Environmental Philosophy from University College Cork in 2014, and has published three books related to the ecological emergency.

• Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing, Jennifer Grenz, Univ of Minnesota Press, 2024, £21.15 hb, 280 pages