We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth

by Dahr Jamail (Editor), Stan Rushworth (Editor)

Overview

An American Library Association Notable Book

A powerful, intimate collection of conversations with Indigenous Americans on the climate crisis and the Earth’s future

Although for a great many people, the human impact on the Earth—countless species becoming extinct, pandemics claiming millions of lives, and climate crisis causing worldwide social and environmental upheaval—was not apparent until recently, this is not the case for all people or cultures. For the Indigenous people of the world, radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story that is many generations long. They have had to adapt, to persevere, and to be courageous and resourceful in the face of genocide and destruction—and their experience has given them a unique understanding of civilizational devastation.

An innovative work of research and reportage, We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. The book draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, We Are the Middle of Forever brings to the forefront the perspectives of those who have long been attuned to climate change and will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620976692
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	61,640
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Dahr Jamail is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq as well as The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption and (with Stan Rushworth) We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (both from The New Press). He has won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism and the Izzy Award. He lives in Washington State.

Stan Rushworth is a teacher of Native American literature and the author of Sam Woods: American Healing, Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain, Diaspora’s Children, and (with Dahr Jamail) We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (The New Press). He lives in Northern California.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Early Warnings xi

The Interviews: Editors' Note xxii

1 President Fawn Sharp 1

Strength

2 Gregg Castro 16

A Sense of Permanence

3 Ilarion Merculieff 30

Living from the Heart

4 Raquel Ramirez 48

Awareness

5 Lyla June Johnston 61

Trust

6 Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte 73

7 Terri Delahanty 96

Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine

8 Steven Pratt 108

Returning to Fire

9 Marita Hacker 124

Change

10 Shannon Rivers 140

Balance

11 Edgar Ibarra 159

Healing

12 Alexii Sigona 180

Stewardship

13 Tahnee Henningsen 193

The Courage to Remember

14 Melissa K. Nelson, PhD 210

Dispelling Delusion with Alchemy

15 Kanyon Sayers-Roods 229

Cultural Competency

16 The Honorable Ron W. Goode 247

Restoration

17 Corrina Gould 263

Recognition

18 Natalie Diaz 283

The Capacity of Language

19 Melina Laboucan-Massimo 301

Paradigm Shift

20 Medicine 315

Acknowledgments 341

Editorial Reviews

Praise for We Are the Middle of Forever:
“A refreshingly unique and incredibly informative collection of vital Indigenous wisdom.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Insights like these, and dozens more, deserve deep attention and will hopefully spur readers into action to save the planet and themselves.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“We Are the Middle of Forever does something incredible with time: it covers millennia of Indigenous history, grounded in conversations across the arc of the pandemic, all while giving the broadest platform for intellectuals whose visionary work today makes them ambassadors from the future. This is a book whose reading is medicine, a beautiful invitation to a more sacred world in the company of some of the brightest stars of contemporary Indigenous activism.”
—Raj Patel, co-author (with Rupa Marya) of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

“A timely and necessary volume that includes the perspectives and honesty of seasoned thinkers and powerful new voices. We Are the Middle of Forever is, at its core, a call to stop, listen closely, and think and act with humility when it comes to identifying and applying Native-sourced wisdom and solutions to the problems facing humanity.”
—Tsim D. Schneider, citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, assistant professor of anthropology at the Universityof California, Santa Cruz, and author of The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse

“Twenty heartfelt Indigenous reflections invite us to contemplate relationships and reciprocity, kinship and connection, responsibilities, and obligations. They encourage us to challenge our own colonial assumptions in the hopes that we can ‘find the tools we need to fix what we’ve broken’ while we still can.”
—Martin Rizzo-Martinez, author of We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California

“These testimonies are exact, explicit, essential, clearly from the heart, articulate in their ways. When we finish reading and incorporating each word, we will know how to live. The path we are each called to walk will be clear.”
—Deena Metzger, author of A Rain of Night Birds

“This book proves what many already know to be true, but which many more need to hear: Indigenous people are the heroes of the climate justice movement. The contributors to We Are the Middle of Forever ask us to join them in a march towards a future that has been prophesized—a glittering future of abundance, cooperation, and peace. Whether or not we follow their vision will determine the fate of all.”
—Melanie Yazzie, co-author of The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth

From the Publisher

★ 2022-01-04
A welcome compilation of interviews with Indigenous Americans about climate change.

Jamail is a Martha Gellhorn Award–winning journalist, and Rushworth is a California-based teacher of Native American literature. As the editors demonstrate, all of the contributors to this dynamic collection are rooted in ancient cultural philosophies that radically challenge non-Native ideas about climate change. “For the Indigenous people of the world,” writes Rushworth in the preface, “radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story many generations long.” Jamail goes on to point out that Native Americans have already witnessed massive destruction in the past few centuries, ranging from the annihilation of the buffalo from the Great Plains to the decimation of Native populations “as a result of sanctioned settler mayhem.” Consequently, Indigenous Americans are uniquely equipped to philosophically and practically tackle climate change. At the heart of these interviews is a rejection of current practices. Before colonization, Native peoples like the Hopi spent centuries perfecting systems that successfully cared for the Earth. This balance was disturbed by European colonizers who created what Ilarion, a Yupik elder, describes as a “reverse society” or “inside out society.” Ilarion argues that the only way to cope with climate change is to reject Eurocentric notions of “normal” and to adopt Indigenous ways of thinking and being. Interviewees suggest a variety of abstract and concrete avenues for doing so—e.g., Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte’s recommendation to alter our relationship with clock time or Quinault President Fawn Sharp’s idea to use Native knowledge to preemptively shift her constituents' homes to flood-safe areas. Throughout, contributors remind us that the Earth has survived for billions of years and will survive for billions more; humans, however, may not. Readers will be impressed by both the depth and breadth of the interviews as well as the contributors’ evocative, vivid storytelling and palpable emotion.

A refreshingly unique and incredibly informative collection of vital Indigenous wisdom.

Kirkus Reviews