What can climate activists learn from stories from around the world?

This is the second of a three-part miniseries on the power of story in our work to create a better reality.

Last week’s post On… Story shared the research of policy expert, Alex Evans, about why we need better stories to help halt climate change.

Evans argues that the ‘Myth Gap’ experienced in Western culture has left us bereft of common narratives to glue society together. He also offers some suggestions as to what kinds of stories we would need to start telling in order for us to better unite against global threats, such as climate change.

*We need better stories if we are to unite against global threats, such as climate change.*

It’s a great book, but it does have a significant gap of its own; what of the wealth of stories from cultures across the world that can teach us how to bring unity, challenge our destructive tendencies, and help us to evolve into better versions of ourselves?

Need we re-invent the wheel when we have the leadership and experience of other cultures that maintained a rich tradition of storytelling, often as a means of building resilience in the face of oppression?

So this week I am sharing some living, breathing examples of cultural stories that are playing themselves out across the world right now in order to offer some inspiration, hope, and direction of travel for these challenging times.

Enjoy!

Malidoma: To Make Friends With Strangers

Last week I was recommended to read a book that I have not yet finished but which was so extraordinary that I wanted to share it with you in this post anyway.

‘Of Water and the Spirit’ is written by Malidoma Patrice Somé who was born in Burkina Faso in the late fifties and was kidnapped at the age of four by a French Jesuit Priest. Malidoma subsequently grew up in a Catholic school until he escaped at the age of twenty, and, in order to be allowed to return to his tribe, he underwent an initiation ritual that easily could have killed him.

*Malidoma Somé’s book, ‘Of Water and the Spirit.’*

Malidoma, whose name means ‘to make friends with strangers or the enemy’, has since dedicated his life to acting as a bridge between these two cultures, sharing the spiritual wisdom of his culture with a world in desperate need of healing. In the opening page of his book he writes;

‘As my name implies, I am here in the West to tell the world about my people in any way I can, and to take back to my people the knowledge I gain about this world. My elders are convinced that the West is as endangered as the indigenous cultures it has decimated in the name of colonialism.’

Malidoma’s work speaks to the vacuum of stories and traditions in the West with a conviction that the self-transformation of these practices are essential if humanity is to overcome its self-destructive tendencies, such as those that result in climate change.

One of the most striking comparisons he makes between the two cultures is how, for his people, there is little differentiation between reality and story. The supernatural and spiritual are part of everyday life and, even though stories abound throughout his culture, there is no specific word for fiction.

When showing his tribe an episode of Star Trek, for example, Malidoma found that it was actually impossible for him to explain that the film was fiction and not real. The only way he could convey a sense of what fiction is was to describe it as telling lies.

Such is the richness of the storytelling tradition in Malidoma’s Dagara culture.

Like Evans, Malidoma believes in the power of these practices to help us overcome the immobilising guilt and shame associated with the West’s responsibility for the exploitation of and violence against both indigenous people and the earth, which will be the subject of next week’s post On… Story #3.

But in this week’s post, I would like to turn next to the story of Thanksgiving which has been celebrated by families across North America and beyond this week.

Thankstaking or Thanksgiving?

I celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time last year when my American-born friend gave me my first experience of pumpkin pie, and various other thanksgiving traditions.

It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar tradition to me as harvest time was celebrated in the church of the village where I grew up as a time of giving thanks for the summer’s bounty (and I’m sure I’m not alone in being unable to think of Harvest Festival without the following verse coming to my mind; we plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land, but it is fed and watered by God’s Almighty Hand...)

There are, however, two cultures involved in the story of the first official ‘Thanksgiving’ when the pilgrims and Native Americans were believed to have shared a meal together in 1621.

So this week I found myself listening to the ‘All My Relations’ podcast, called Thankstaking or Thanksgiving about the ‘real story of Thanksgiving, from the Indigenous Perspective.’

The podcast hosts, Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene, explore the implications of the colonial context omitted in the story of the first Thanksgiving, one of the few collective stories that remains in parts of mainstream Western culture.

Thanksgiving in Indigenous culture, for example, is not something to celebrate once a year, or even once a month, but every single day as a way of life.

*Thanksgiving is one of the few storytelling traditions that remains in parts of mainstream Western culture.*

And Thanksgiving is therefore an opportunity for Western culture to reflect on the ways that it is built on taking, or more accurately stealing, from indigenous cultures and from the earth, and to work towards reconciliation by focusing on how to give back.

This touches again on the themes of guilt that are woven throughout any stories that look beyond the dominant story told about itself by the West, and which is necessary to bring healing to a fractured world.

The Complexity of Storytelling

An Indigenous perspective on storytelling also sheds light on the complexities of attempting to share stories across cultures; an art that needs some urgent honing as the world heads closer towards living in a global community.

Sometimes telling our stories can be incredibly costly, and this is one of the reasons why Evans might have been wise in his choice to focus on stories that the culture he is writing for is far more familiar with (the Bible).

The use of stories from other cultures, for example, can become a way in which colonialism persists today, through cultural appropriation; using something from another culture, often for commercial purposes, without due respect for the full significance and implications of that tradition.

This can create some complexities around the way we choose to engage with stories from other cultures in our climate activism.

*An Indigenous perspective on storytelling also sheds light on the complexities of attempting to share stories across cultures.*

The secularisation of Western culture is directly linked to an increase of interest in spiritual practices, traditions, and ways of seeing the world, including stories, that have their origins in other cultures. This can include anything from mindfulness to crystal healing to yoga to grief rituals.

The vacuum of our own cultural and religious traditions caused by the rise of rationalism has, perhaps not unsurprisingly, fuelled a hunger to search for frameworks for a meaningful human existence elsewhere.

But this can be problematic because many of those practices have become commercialised, and in doing so contributed to rather than challenged structures that are harmful to their cultures of origin by perpetuating cycles of unequal or unsustainable resource distribution, for example.

The Burden of Storytelling

Another complexity of storytelling is that the stories of those currently on the frontline of climate impacts come at an immense cost.

As I wrote about in last week’s post, to elevate these stories is a powerful means of making climate change real to those of us not yet feeling the full impacts and therefore moving us to action.

But there are also several pitfalls that this approach can lead us into;

It can perpetuate, rather than challenge, notions of ‘observer and object’ as the industrialised countries look on with, in the main, passive sympathy at the experiences of those in the Global South.
Sharing of these stories can actually cause emotional shut down leading to climate inaction as feelings of guilt and shame overwhelm the listener.
Asking those who have experienced climate change first-hand to retell those stories can cause retraumatisation.

For more information about this, there is an excellent article in SAGE Journals about the problems of authentic storytelling in anti-racist and anti-homophobic education.

Malidoma writes of this when describing his difficulty in telling his own story;

‘The things I talk about here did not happen in English; they happened in a language that has a very different mind-set about reality. There is usually a significant violence done to anything being translated from one culture to another.’ (p.2)

So my next offering is from an example of cross-cultural storytelling that has touched me personally and which extends a challenge to the West with an incredible grace.

Moana

Dr. Winston Halapua is a Tongan-born Fijian who served until recently as the leader of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, and who I had the privilege of getting to know when we were both speaking at a festival a few years ago.

Dr. Winston and I first met briefly to prepare for a panel discussion I was to chair and where he would be contributing as a speaker.

Dr. Winston suggested we take a walk and I had set off at great pace, also talking at speed, with my mind absorbed in the preparations.

I remember quickly feeling a little foolish as I realised I was in such a rush that I was in danger of very nearly walking, and perhaps even talking, alone.

Dr. Winston had held his steady pace which resulted in a kind of gear change within myself as I realised he was far more interested in us getting to know each other than in whatever dialogue I was intent on manufacturing for the public discussion later.

This, I am slowly realising, is very much part of my own heritage of hustle and hurry that tends to come with whiteness.

Dr. Winston’s invitation to connect with me, which resulted in a wonderful dialogue, is also an invitation that he extends beautifully in his book, Waves of God’s Embrace.

You might be familiar with the subject of the book, moana meaning ‘ocean’, from the Disney movie released in 2016.

*Dr Winson Halapua’s book, ‘Waves of God’s Embrace’.*

Dr. Winston’s writing implores the global church he is a part of to learn from the traditions of his Polynesian culture by exploring how a sustained reflection on the ocean can shed light on what is needed in our efforts to halt climate change; a phenomenon that he and his community is living with every single day, despite contributing virtually nothing to the cause of climate breakdown.

He shares, for example, the wisdom of storytelling, or telanoa, which is ‘to value different stories, different voices, and different contexts as gifts’.

Telenoa has been used to resolve complex political conflicts in several Polynesian islands by providing a safe forum for deep listening, creative space, restorative justice, and flourishing dialogue.

Dr. Winston speaks of how the sea, which is both one whole and also five oceans made up of countless individual waves, is the model for community dialogue. I wonder if perhaps there is something here for us to learn from in healing from the divides that have opened up around Brexit on our own little island.

Theory into Practice

In The Myth Gap Evan’s advice about how to tell better stories about climate change were; a longer now, a larger us, and a better good life. But Dr. Winston’s writing brings this theory to life, bearing witness again to the leadership role of those on the frontline of climate impacts.

Of a longer now, for example, he writes;

‘Waves danced before humanity came into existence. Waves will continue to dance whether humanity is conscious of the great dance or not. Waves will dance and dance forever.’ (p. 47)

Of a larger us he writes;

‘Waves indiscriminately embrace… waves follow one after another. Unceasing, relentless, embracing, they give and give and give.’ (p. 13)

And of a better good life he writes;

‘Moana provides a larger and dynamic metaphor that encourages us not towards static thinking but rather towards the flow of ideas and the embrace of differences.’ (p. 14)

And the grace with which Dr. Winston writes to churches in industrialised countries, whilst also describing what it is like to watch the communities he loves sink beneath the waves of a rising ocean, is a reminder again of both the power and burden of having a vital story to tell.

Stories Beyond Words

Of course, stories don’t always come to us in words.

For the more visually-minded there is a wonderful website called Artists and Climate Change which I would highly recommend.

Of particular interest to me is a series called Imagining Water which shares the work of artists from all over the world and of all genres who are focusing on the topic of water and climate disruption.

*New Dawn fishing trawler where I lived until I was five and spent much of my childhood.*

Water is an especially powerful metaphor for me personally because I grew up on a boat, but water is also a universal symbol for rebirth and cleansing.

It’s an especially powerful metaphor in the context of working with our guilt and sense of short fallings, which is what I’ll be exploring next week.

**About Me** I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.

Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.

On… Story #2