Book Review "Medicine Wheel and the Planet" : Jennifer Grenz www. upress.umn.edu (presspr@umn.edu)2024

Jennifer Grenz: Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Towards Personal and Ecological Healing. Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London. 2023 Jennifer Grenz writes an activist autoethnogrphy, almost an occupational memoir. Grenz 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. Jennifer Grenz turns to the University to learn and get legitimating degrees. It is commonsense to realize that native peoples/ tribal communities/nations have survived climate change and mass migrations, so will surely have knowledge to help humanity through the present crises. Grenz found that as an environmental activist, there was an emphasis on following given procedures. Nature, however escaped the grids, and plants turned up where they were least expected. The Himalayan Berry 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 conifer saplings were dead, and the berries were back. Many such instances of heart break led her to pursue a university degree to find solutions. Quite often, her co workers would not believer her findings from the field regarding adaptation practices of plants. Grenz began to ask new sets of questions which she shared in conferences. If the Himalayan Berry provided food for humans and fauna in cities 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 its possible that the birds and bees as migratory pollinators and seed distributors carried the plants forward. It was unnerving for her to see that field procedures, often made by her, as a native/indigenous practitioner, using Western science categorization and classifications undo the “scientific” known and the “given” by the application of 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 use 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 recognize and classify plants. Here, too, with the extinction of tribal languages, and the knowledge systems that they carry with them intrinsically is now lost. It is in this context, that she devises a new terminology for ecologists where nurturing, caring, 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, emphasizing 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” as used for tribal communities. However, as Malinowski pointed out in his book, “Magic, Science and Religion” that, 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. Grenz suggests that conventional ecology oscillates between a ‘live and let live’ policy, contrasted by militarized forms of exclusion or inclusion of indigenous practices. Instead, she would wish 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 is sociability and responsibility. This involves reciprocity, friendship links and conversations, a 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, 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 in to active responsibilities to the environment? It is in Ye’yumnuts, in Vancouver, the territory where she had collected her data, 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 the respect to mortuary sites where ancestors are buried, as well as socialization 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 artifact contributes to the design as a whole. Dr Susan Visvanathan is the author of “The Children of Nature” (Roli 2010). Her most recent books are “The Wisdom of Community” (Bloomsbury India 2022) and “Work, Word and the World” (Bloomsbury India 2022) Book sent to Aleppey by Minesotta Press, for favour of review