Jennifer Grenz is a Nlaka’pamux Indigenous ecologist, scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management at UBC. She has traveled extensively across North America presenting keynote lectures on invasive species management issues, environmental policy, and effective environmental communication strategies to different professional organizations and government agencies.
In Medicine Wheel for the Planet, Dr. Jennifer Grenz invites us into a new relationship with the idea of land healing, both in practice and intention. Sharing her own journey to balance Western science and an Indigenous worldview, Grenz is an inspiring guide into a revisioning of the role we all can play in taking care of Mother Earth as we learn to deeply listen – to Elders, to ourselves, and to the various voices of the land itself.
Interviewed by Amy Reiswig
Amy Reiswig (AR): Medicine Wheel for the Planet emerged from your PhD work. What pushed you to take your ideas further and write this book? And what did this non-academic format allow you to dig into and expand?
Dr. Jennifer Grenz (JG): Yes, the book came out of my PhD research. In fact, a lot of the expansion based on the PhD was content that had to hit the cutting room floor in the PhD editing process as it was not “academic enough”. This was heartbreaking for me, as to me, those were some of the best and most important parts! I’m not sure I would consider my work a non-academic format, but instead, a culturally appropriate format. As an Indigenous scholar working in academia, I find myself often in the tension between what is considered academic and how we share knowledge as Indigenous people. Storytelling is at the core of our knowledge sharing, and being able to freely embrace that through this version of the work has been such a gift and so healing.
AR: One of your main threads is the difficult journey of learning to unite head and heart in your professional ecology/land healing work, the risk and also the release of applying both Western science and an Indigenous worldview. Was there a similar balance of risk and release in bringing both professional and personal stories – including from your family — into your writing for a public audience?
JG: Being able to write for a public audience was an incredibly freeing experience and provided a surprising contrast to the pressures I have felt bringing together head and heart within my work as an ecologist. All I wanted was to be able to give voice to the struggles I faced both professionally and personally. I wanted people to see and understand more of the nuance and struggle of reconciliation in real time. Through the process of sharing through writing the book, I feel a complete release from feeling the pressures of finding any kind of balance working between worlds. I feel now that I can come to my work exactly as I am, and I hope that others can find such inspiration through sharing my life’s journey.
AR: The book emphasizes the need to recognize our relation with the Earth and all the other beings upon her. How can urban people, disconnected from the land and its systems, put on the “relational glasses” and see themselves in your idea of humans as balancers of Mother Earth? How can they be wrapped into this work?
JG: As someone who was raised in Metro Vancouver and lived much of my adult life there, I wrote with so much purpose to reach those of us feeling the disconnection that can come from urban life. I hope that my book has provided tangible ideas and can act as a catalyst for them to be intentional in both finding and creating such relational connection in their own lives and communities. So many people have shared with me that they have the feeling that they want to do something meaningful for the environment, but they don’t know what or how, or it feels overwhelming given the state of our world. I hope my book offers perspective that contributions need not be huge, that starting with small things that create and strengthen relationships with lands, waters, and people can be life altering for us personally and become a collection of ripples to bring a tidal wave of great change.
AR: You directly address the reader many times, including reminding us, near the end, of our new responsibilities, saying “You must promise me….” Are you hoping this book itself gives readers the experience of practicing the respect, relationality and reciprocity — three principles you identify as key to Indigenous research — required for a reoriented worldview?
JG: I think my hope was to find a way to make a personal connection to every reader, that I could help them to feel the freedom to embrace and practice the three Rs. I think so much of our conditioning from this individualistic society we live in holds us back from being able to fully embody and live by these. In knowing how much my own life has changed in centering these as core to my being, I just really want others to feel that same beautiful transformation I have experienced.
AR: I love the quiet, reflective moments you share of planning your own food garden and of even coming to accept the blackberries for their gifts. How can the lessons in your book be applied in our own backyards?
JG: Just sitting in these spaces and letting the land, the plants, the insects, the birds teach you lessons. I used to plan in ways that asserted the plan on the space instead of letting the space speak to me about what it wanted and needed. Now I sit quietly and think about how I can shape spaces to meet the needs of all relations. It feels now like the space has a say in what it will be shaped into. Not fighting but working with it. We need to give ourselves more time to sit, to breathe, to take it in without the pressure of some kind of rapid transformation being the outcome. There is so much beauty in an intentional and slow shaping of spaces as we allow ourselves to get to know them in ways we never even thought of.
AR: So much of your journey is about learning on and listening to the land. You’ll be reading at one of the forest walk events at the nature sanctuary of W̱MÍYEŦEN, and I’m curious how reading your work outside under the trees – which you beautifully call “the standing people” – might be a different experience for you as an author. Is there a special something that happens when people come together to read and listen to stories in nature?
JG: There is a magic even within this question because of the power of the magic of being on land together. In my culture, the land is our university. I can meet with Elders and knowledge keepers in an office or boardroom and learn so much, but when we are doing the same on the land together, there is a greater depth to that learning and a greater feeling of connection between us and everything around us — the land; the water, the winged, the four-legged, the finned, the spirit world. Our senses come alive when we are on the land, we cannot help but feel and be open to awe, wonder, and a greater depth of connection, the most perfect place for sharing stories together.