This review of Medicine Wheel for the Planet by Jennifer Grenz was published in the summer edition of Simon Says, by the 911吃瓜 Retirees Association
Three colleagues recommended this book to me. They were from Biology, Criminology, and Engineering, so I鈥檇 say it鈥檚 currently influential across academic disciplines鈥攁nd deservedly so. In Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing (2024), Grenz asks those of us who are settlers to rethink our assumptions about 鈥渘ature鈥� and 鈥渨ilderness鈥� in significant ways, and I certainly have because of reading it. The book is first and foremost a personal account from an Indigenous person who works in Plant Biology and specializes in invasive species, telling how she moved toward a more Indigenous way of interacting with plants and also the healing of her spirit. Secondly, it鈥檚 an analysis of the harms that European-derived 鈥淓denic鈥� ideology can do both to the planet itself and to human efforts to mitigate the damage.
Jennifer Grenz is a woman of mixed ancestry from Lytton Nation, who works at UBC in Forest Resources Management and has a farm in Parksville on the Island. Her PhD is in Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems, and although she was trained in Western Plant Biology, she has spent some years reconnecting with Indigenous ways of being in the world and learning to listen to the plants she has tried to nurture or remove from ecosystems.
In Medicine Wheel for the Planet, Grenz is firmly trying to correct what she labels an 鈥淓denic鈥� approach to ecology in settler ideology: our assumption that there used to be a perfect balance in what we call 鈥渘ature鈥� and our assumption that what we should be doing is trying to recreate that, in order to undo the harms we鈥檝e done. Grenz tells us that balance is always movement and change, not a static idyllic state, and she asks us to rid ourselves of thinking that humans are separate from the rest of creation, that cities are separate from farms are separate from wilderness.
Too often, she tells us, settler peoples and governments believe that before they arrived in Turtle Island there was a static and utopian wild natural state, where all the species were 鈥渘ative鈥� and the ecosystem was therefore in balance. The guilt of introducing invasive species such as Scotch broom (or wiping out existing species such as bison) makes settler folks want to kill the broom and return non-urban and nonagricultural land back to how it was before Europeans started messing things up. Grenz tells us that Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest themselves introduced invasive species for human benefit. For example, did you know that red cedar, huckleberries, and hazelnuts were all species moved from elsewhere to this area by Indigenous peoples? When people
travelled, they took seeds and nuts with them as gifts, exchanging them for others. With these traded species and ones that were already in the environment, local First Peoples made 鈥渇orest gardens,鈥� places where they carefully nurtured and controlled species useful for food, clothing/technology, and medicine (see also this article in Science). They added salmon roe to streams where they wanted to increase fish populations and made clam gardens. All of this went unrecognized by European colonizers, who, not seeing tilled fields or animals in paddocks, believed that the Indigenous peoples had done nothing to 鈥渋mprove鈥� the land, so it was okay for Europeans to take what was
supposedly 鈥渨ilderness鈥� from them and develop it.
Grenz asks us to stop thinking of urban spaces and Western agriculture as separate from what we call 鈥渘ature,鈥� and to stop trying to barricade our gardens from the weeds and invasives. Instead, we need to find out what those plants are good for. Grenz found a medicinal plant to help her daughter amongst the plants she regularly weeded out of her farm garden, for example, and has been trying to undo that barricade in her own mind and on the land. We can only move forward, especially as the climate changes, finding out what invasive species are useful for, while trying to keep them from harming other good plants.
The sections of Medicine Wheel for the Planet reflect the directions of the wheel, stages in human life, stages in Grenz鈥檚 journey, and potential stages of the reader鈥檚 relationship with the more-than-human. This draws the different motivations of the book together effectively. The book also contains oral teachings Grenz has permission to share in print form, as well as stories from her own life, and these strengthen our understanding of Indigenous ways of learning.
In the final section of her book, Grenz asks us all to give back to the lands, waters, and creatures with our time and work, instead of just assuming our tax dollars pay other people to care for the planet. She encourages us not just to support activism and environmentalism, but to get our hands literally dirty, to volunteer in caring for a local park, to work in relationship with all our relations. It鈥檚 a well-written book, thoughtful and heartfelt, and it helped me to adjust some of my thinking about 鈥渘ature鈥� and planetary ecology. I recommend it.