Avoiding despair
Indigenous scholar shares ways to rise above gloom and doom
Dr. Daniel Wildcat in October 2022 at the First Americans Land-Grant Consortium. Photo by Melanie Lenart
As we face a daily assault of issues designed to impart immobilizing despair, it’s important to stay strong enough to do what we can in resistance to Trump and gang. This piece (originally posted on February 7) is about overcoming despair, with advice from an Indigenous scholar.
Many of us reached a breaking point in our peace of mind during the pandemic lockdown. My own low point came during July of 2020, then deemed the hottest month in the Tucson, Arizona, in the instrumental record going back to 1895.
While facing weeks of temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, my spouse and I could see thick smoke billowing up like a replenishing mushroom cloud from the Catalina Mountains about 40 miles to our north. At night, we could see the ember orange of the fire itself.
One night, I emerged from my home office to see flames dancing across another mountain about 20 miles to our southeast. Sierrita Mountain was also on fire? It was too much.
Like many others dealing with wildfires and smoke, I found it increasingly impossible to imagine our planet surviving the ongoing onslaught.
Despite good reviews, my climate change book, Life in the Hothouse: How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change, hadn’t made a dent in our dangerous activities. Not only were we, the people of the world, adding more heat-trapping gases every year, but we continued to take down the forests and wetlands crucial for adapting to the higher temperatures.
I felt like a failure. All that work studying and working on forests and climate and writing a book did not, in the end, save the world. It felt like how all the care-taking and healing prayers that I directed at my sister Cheri had not saved her, as I wrote about earlier. None of us could keep` her from dying of a fast-moving cancer.
I became acutely aware that people, and planets, can reach a point of no return—much as the American democracy we treasure faces a threat that could lead to its demise.
Finally, in September of 2020, soon after August displaced July as the hottest month in the Tucson record, I found an antidote, thanks to Daniel R. Wildcat of Haskell Indian Nations University.
A Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and author of the book, Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, Wildcat had been working at the climate change forefront for decades. I first met him while working as a researcher. I attended a 2008 climate change conference he organized to bring together Indigenous knowledge holders and conventional scientists.
In 2020, I was working as a journalist again, writing a feature story for Native Science Report about a conference involving a group he helped found—the Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Change Working Group. Wildcat called it “the other IPCC.”
With climate change grief weighing heavily on my mind, I asked his thoughts about the despair some of us felt.
“We all kind of have our moments of feeling down. But here’s my answer to that. If you’re an Indigenous person, and you’re on this planet in 2020, you realize that little more than 100 years ago, we were supposed to be the vanishing Americans, and you say ‘We’re still here.’
“In your weak moments, you start feeling sorry for yourselves—you know, everyone can have that moment where they have their own little pity party—and then you think about your grandparents. And you think, ‘Oh my God, what am I complaining about? Look at the struggles they went through. So what I need to do is really get with it.’ You have work to do.”
While not an Indigenous person myself, I appreciated the reminder that most of us do have it easier than our ancestors. One set of my grandparents arrived here from Poland in the wake of World War I. The other set, whose ancestors immigrated from Croatia and Ireland, died young, leaving my mother to raise her younger sister.
By comparison, I certainly did have it easier.
Soon after that conversation, I got another unexpected lift by participating virtually in the inaugural National Tribal and Indigenous Climate Change conference. The conference brought together members from more than 200 U.S. tribal nations with Indigenous peoples and their allies from 30 different countries.
Being a Good Ancestor was a recurring theme. One after another, speakers described how they used that concept to maintain hope. In short, they were not judging their success on whether they succeeded in changing the temperature trajectory. They focused on acting in the best way possible as individuals, working hard for coming generations.
I found my spirits buoyed more than they had been in years—all during a conference that highlighted climate change. Somehow speakers managed to maintain a positive attitude, and focus on what we could do about it.
“There’s always something you can do.” as Wildcat said. “Is it going to change the world? Maybe a little bit. But you can avoid fatalism because you realize we’re not completely in charge in the first place. Who do you think put you in charge of everything? We have incredible humility in our intellectual traditions.”
Touché. It was refreshing to let go of my guilt about not turning things around—for the planet or for Cheri. I could only do my best. The outcome was not mine to control.
Another recurring theme at the conference involved seeing everything in the natural world not as “resources” but as relatives—even the air, even the water—as Indigenous peoples tend to do.
As history has demonstrated, people treat the planet and its inhabitants quite differently when they see everything as relatives. The forests and wetlands ranged far and wide across this continent under the care of the First Americans.
So being a good ancestor is being a good relative—not only to people, but to nature. It’s keeping future generations in mind when taking action.
It’s easy to see why Indigenous peoples respect their elders. Their elders are not trying to sell the country or planet off to the highest bidder.
While it may seem like there’s little we can do as individuals to bolster our faltering democracy, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has laid out a substantial list of helpful activities. Starhawk describes actions groups can take.
The theme Being a Good Ancestor resonates with me.