Commissioned & presented by the Goethe-Institut Toronto with designto
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"All of our values are expressed through Nature, and then Nature teaches us how to behave.”
- Herb Nabigon, Anishinaabe Healer & Author of The Hollow Tree
“If the eye were not sun-like, how could we ever see light? And if God’s own power did not dwell within us, how could we delight in things divine.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Preface to his Scientific Studies
This three-part workshop and conversation series
Cultures, Climate & Care is concerned with the interwoven pattern between the quality of how we live and how the world responds to us. While the opening quotes by Nabigon and Goethe point to the potential of culturally fostering mutually beneficial relations with nature, the reality is that today we are collectively experiencing the destructive potential of uprooted ways of living. In Europe record wildfires raged, while in Germany a coalition of activists protects the Hambach Forest and confronts climate injustice. On Turtle Island (North America) that is home to this series, forest fires across the west brought a smoggy haze to large swaths of the continent, while Indigenous Land Back and Anti-Pipeline protests call for resistance and renewal. Arising with these calls has been an awareness of how systemic racial injustices haunt us with the ongoing colonial abuses against Indigenous and Black peoples, women of colour, their children and the Earth.
The Goethe-Institut Toronto has invited Prof. Tim Leduc, associate professor in land-based social work at Wilfrid Laurier University, and elder Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs to open our new Goethe Air Space. Designed along biophilic concepts to facilitate explorations between the natural, cultural and digital realms we inhabit, the Goethe Institut’s new green plant wall will guide this workshop series into reflections on the interrelation between culture, land/trees, climate change and an ethic of care. An exchange with German respondents will help weave connections and insights from Toronto to Germany.
This teaching series is ideal for people who:
- Want to reflect on the (inter-)cultural dimensions of climate change and environmental justice.
- Love the idea of creatively engaging our land/tree/climate relations for values and knowledge that can inform how we live.
- Are interested in exploring the colonial roots of today’s climate changes and Indigenous insights on what a holistic response entails.
You can expect to leave the series with:
- Holistic ways of culturally relating to land, trees and climate.
- A feeling of creative and culturally appropriate ways of renewing our nature relations.
- A renewed sense of the mystery underlying our land/tree/climate relations.
- Reflection activities for fostering care in nature relations & change in self (community, culture, species, planet).
- Fostering creative courage through the support of our natural relations in this time of climate change.
Session 1: Culture
March 8, 2022
“Our relatives who have come from across the water, you still have work to do… The land is made up of the dust of our ancestors’ bones. And so to reconcile with this land and everything that has happened, there is much work to be done” -- Anishinaabe Elder Mary Deleary, 2015 Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission report
Our first session looks at cultural ways of activating our knowledge and practices of care through the natural relations around us. After a short rendition of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address by Norma Jacobs, Tim Leduc will reflect on connections between her teachings, her culture’s Tree of Peace and the European Tree of Life, the oak in German culture. Most poignant for this talk will be Goethe’s approach to “active seeing” of plant relations and the plant spirit that he termed Urpflanze:
“To recognise living forms as such, to see in context their visible and tangible parts, to perceive them as manifestations of something within… to a certain extent, in wholeness through a concrete vision.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Session 2: Climate
march 22, 2022
Looking at all the fallen white pines and oaks that crisscross Toronto’s ravines, it is clear that we live in a time of more extreme weather events; expanding losses in biological life that is the planet’s sixth mass extinction event; quickening uncertainty for Indigenous peoples in a melting north and flooding Island States; and conflicts over energy extraction and consumption highlighted by pipeline protests across Turtle Island (North America).
In session 2, we consider the cultural responses to our climate of change, not only in the way in which today’s global climate changes challenge some significant roots of modern culture, but also bridging the relational source of cultural knowledge engaged in session 1 and to be further explored in session 3 on care.
Session 3: Care
April 5, 2022
The sense of medicine(s) is innate in every being when they are connected to their source, and people can draw upon healing medicines like those found in plants through fostering good relations with nature. There is medicine in the German oak, Haudenosaunee onerahtase'ko:wa (white pine) and other trees/plants.
We can learn much from the trees and nature around us, as Anishinaabe healer Herb Nabigon explains in his book The Hollow Tree: “
My culture embraces universal values [e.g., Peace, Kindness, Sharing, Respect] that are treasured by all … major cultures and religions. However, the traditional Native culture expresses these values in a unique way. All of our values are expressed through Nature, and then Nature teaches us how to behave.” Research is showing the positive health effects of being close to forest, water and land, and Indigenous land ceremonies highlight the potential of nurturing this healing energy by actively participating in wholeness. The significant challenge today is to renew our diverse cultural medicines in the midst of a turbulent climate, and we will reflect on the value of re-learning to root our ways of living and caring in our land.
The Participants
Timothy Leduc has for over two decades been re-learning with Indigenous knowledge holders about his responsibilities as a settler whose mother is French Canadien and father carries French Canadien relations to Haudenosaunee and Wendat mission communities along the St. Lawrence River. He is an associate professor in land-based social work at Wilfrid Laurier University, not far from his home in Toronto (Tarontho, “meeting place”), Canada (Kanatha, “village”). He is the editor of the forthcoming book by Cayuga Elder Norma Jacobs Gaehowako entitled Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s: Reflecting on our Journeys (2022), and author of three books including A Canadian Climate of Mind: Passages from Fur to Energy and Beyond and Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North.
Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs is of the Wolf clan in the Cayuga Nation of the Great Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a Longhouse Faith-keeper, advisor to the National Inquiry on MMIWG and Elder who has taught in universities, colleges and other institutions. She will share a Thanksgiving Address teaching in the first session to open this series.
Dr. Kerstin Ensinger is an environmental psychologist and the head of the recreation and tourism department at the Black Forest National Park, where she offers tours and research on mindfulness and nature experiences. She has previously worked at the Forest Research Institute Baden-Württemberg and will be the respondent for the third session.
Please note, this event will be video recorded and photographed for non-commercial purposes.
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