By Claude Schryer

I admire the work and commitment of Artists & Climate Change and have been waiting for the right content and moment to make a contribution.

I proposed recently that they republish my September 19, 2020, converted blog, which explores the idea of “preaching to the converted,” and includes reflections on deficit preaching and issues of impact. But I reconsidered and proposed instead that I write this critique, About converted, as my thinking evolves…

Let’s put paddle to water…

First, some background. I am a composer by training, a student of Zen, and I love the outdoors. On September 15, 2020, I retired from the Canada Council for the Arts, where I was a senior strategic advisor and contributor to corporate environmental policies and partnerships, such as the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre Climate Change Cycle. I’ve had privileged access to networks and knowledge and now am an independent cultural worker.

I launched the conscient: art & environment blog and podcast in January 2020 as a personal learning journey to explore “how the arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.” You can read about my motivation in my first conscient blog, terrified.

My intention is to help inform the arts community, and the general public, about some of the outstanding work being done in the field of art and climate change by leading activists and cultural workers.

It’s been interesting but I recently came to the conclusion that my conscient work was a form of “deficit preaching,” which CBC Radio’s What On Earth: How the arts might help us grapple with climate change (do listen to this episode!) defines as “the idea that people will change their behavior related to a problem if only they had more information about it.”

This made me think about my audience for conscient: art & environment and question some of my assumptions and privileges.

In converted, I wrote that “most people, including most artists, do not respond to ‘wake up calls’ about climate change and other existential issues, no matter how passionate or compelling the arguments might be.”

I asked, “what then is an earnest art and environment podcast producer to do?”

I stood my ground and stated that “I think you have to follow your gut instinct and buckle down on where you think you can make a real difference and not look back.”

Of course!

What choice do we have?

But the truth is that most of the time, I’m discouraged and deeply depressed about the state of the world. I’ve come to absorb some of the pain of the earth’s degradation in my body and carry this maelstrom within me, quite literally, in my gut.

At times, it feels utterly hopeless, doesn’t it?

In converted, I quote one of my favorite writers (and regular contributor to this forum), Joan Sullivan, from her brilliant Solastalgia essay about this sensation of despair: “a form of emotional, psychic, and/or existential distress caused by the lived experience of unwanted transformation or degradation of one’s home environment or territory.”

My questions, fellow art and climate change workers, include:

• How do you manage solastalgia: plunge forward or strategically retreat?
• What keeps you going?
• How do you recover from the stress and strain?
• How can we better support each other?
• On what issues and themes would you like to see more research?

Please let me and each other know.

Here is my plan.

First, I will undergo a reset before jumping back into the fray. I’m not sure, however, where I will focus my energies once I re-emerge: it might or might not be through blogs and podcasts.

Thankfully, I have a shelf full of articles and books by scholars and activists with compelling theories and strategies. I will read and reread these and consider next steps.

For example, one of my sources of inspiration is the Crisis: Principles for Just and Creative Responses document that I helped shape while at the Creative Climate Leadership USAcourse in Arizona, which took place from March 8-14, 2020. A cohort of artists, arts administrators, cultural workers, and scientists from across the U.S. and Canada gathered at Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona to explore creative methodologies and collaboration to address climate and environmental challenges. It was a very intense course that focused on developing creative responses for a new climate future, as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic escalated in the United States and around the world. See the conscient: art & environment podcasts 8 to 17 for a series of 10 interviews with Creative Climate Leadership USA participants and faculty.

Thankfully, I also have access to specialized blogs and podcasts for support, such as Jennifer Atkinson’s Facing It, a podcast about love, loss, and the natural world that suggests that we need to work our way through this pain and reconnect with hope, and Green Dreamer, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths to ecological regeneration, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. Artists & Climate Change postings are also an anchor in a sea of turmoil.

I suspect that given the magnitude of the issues we collectively face, many of us reading this posting share, consciously or not, this dreary state of mind.

Part of me remains hopeful and thinks that it is not too late, while another part of me feelslike it is impossible to save the world as we know it.

What then is the role of art?

How do we move forward?

I concluded converted with this quote from “What should we expect from art in the next few years/decades? And what is art, anyway?” a lucid piece of writing I recommend by curator Carmen Salas:

Imagine art which is capable of rekindling values of care, kindness, compassion, action-taking, social justice and cooperation. I’d like art to take a larger social dimension. Art isn’t about stagnation, conformism, fear. Art is about risk taking, resistance, empowerment and transformation. If we are going to have to re-engineer society after coronavirus, we need art that is less about individualism and the “artistic genius” and more about artists and institutions that focus on systematic solutions and collective/collaborative practices that foster community care and participation, collective consciousness and action-taking.

Art has the capacity to cut through clutter and help us feel, as opposed to only think, our way through emotions like eco-grief. It can also help us feel inspiration in strategies like regeneration and reconciliation.  

I’ve had the privilege to see some of the artworks, meet with artists, and experience the immense and unlimited power of art.

It works.

What is tough is keeping our heads above water, especially when water levels are rising so quickly, and sometime invisibly.

Hang in.

I welcome your feedback or critique, such as this comment by independent artist, writer and cultural worker Richard Holden that I received about converted:

… It is far more effective to be satisfied planting seeds, if not of doubt, then at least curiosity. … Seed planting may take longer, but I’ve found that given patience, it can be far more effective.

Claude Schryer’s final conscient: art & environment blogs for season one are guilt and pause.

(Top image: Scenery from a recent bike ride. Photo by Claude Schryer.)

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Claude Schryer is a composer and arts administrator from Ottawa. During the 1990s, his work focused on acoustic ecology and soundscape composition. From 1999 through 2020, he held management positions at the Canada Council for the Arts, leading the Inter-Arts Office and serving as Senior Strategic Advisor in Arts Granting. From 2016 to 2019, he produced 175 three-minute audio and video episodes of simplesoundscapes, which explores mindful listening. In January 2020, he launched the conscient: art & environment blog and podcast, exploring how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. You can find Claude’s coordinates on the conscient website.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mary Woodbury 

For this post, the Wild Authors series travels back to North America as I talk with Andrew Krivak, author of The Bear. Andrew tells me that though the entire setting is fictional, the landscape of the novel was inspired by the mountains and woods around Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. Thanks so very much to Andrew for talking with me about his newest novel, which I was thrilled to read.

ABOUT THE BOOK

According to its publisher, The Bear (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020) is a cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, and a stunning tribute to the beauty of Nature’s dominion. It’s a story of a girl and her father surviving on the side of a mountain. In story, Adam and Eve might have been the first two characters on the planet, but in The Bear are the last two. The prose is simple but complex, delicate but strong. If you like to read stories set in Nature – where humans connect strongly to their natural habitat – this book might be for you. Stunning descriptions of landscape and wildlife, survival wisdom, love, sadness, and joy splash page after page. It’s a lyrical fable for humankind, with elements of magical realism.

CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

How did you come up with the idea for this novel?

The Bear came together for me over time in two parts. The first was inspired by Randall Jarrell’s children’s story The Animal Family, which my editor Erika Goldman at Bellevue Literary Press sent to my three kids when they were much younger and which I read to them out loud. She thought they would like it because I had told her once that I had made up a story to get them to sleep about a bear who helped my father and me find our lost dog, Troy, in the woods of rural Pennsylvania where I grew up. What those two stories got me thinking about was how to understand not just animals but Nature as protagonist. But, I have to say, my kids really loved that story about the bear – made up on the fly just to get them to sleep! They would ask for it even after they were old enough to know that bears couldn’t talk. 

Then, about six years ago, we bought a house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in the shadow of Mount Monadnock. The place has really taken me back to the kind of nature I knew as a kid myself, and which I’ve tried to share with my own children. So, after I published my second novel, The Signal Flame, I had a really strong desire to write something in which Nature was treated as though it were a character itself, and a first iteration of The Bear was a version of that children’s story. But I wasn’t happy with it. It was too simple. Too thin. I wanted something that challenged me as a writer, as well as pushed the envelope of literary fiction. Then one day, when I was out fishing, I was looking around at the shores of the lake, trying to imagine how the landscape might have looked to the first people who saw it, and – almost automatically – I wondered out loud in my boat, What is it going to look like for the last? Then it hit me. I rowed back to the dock, walked up to the house, and went right to my writing desk, where I wrote the first line of the novel: “The last two were a girl and her father who lived along the old eastern range on the side of a mountain they called the mountain that stands alone.”

When reading this story I was struck by your knowledge of plants and animals and how to survive in the wild. Have you had experience doing this yourself? What kind of research did you do when writing?

I’m no survivalist, I’ll admit to that. But growing up in Pennsylvania in the 70s my younger brother and I were outside in the woods all the time, hiking, fishing, sleeping out in the summers, making snow caves in the winter. It was the kind of childhood in which we seemed to spend more time outdoors than in school (thankfully). In fact, he and I were just reminiscing on the phone about how we used to get up at four o’clock in the morning in the summer, walk over to our uncle’s pond with a friend of ours, and fish until we got tired, then walk home, and our mother would say, without any anger in her voice, “Where’ve you been?” We’d tell her we were at Uncle George’s pond fishing since sunrise, and she’d say, “That’s nice. Did you bring me anything?” On those days we’d have fresh bass for dinner, along with what was growing in my father’s garden. Zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, radishes, all depending on the season. 

To answer your question, though, being accustomed to the outdoors and being able to survive in Nature are two different things. Still, I think that when you’re comfortable in Nature, there’s a shorter learning curve when it comes to understanding the things necessary to live and survive there. So yes, I did a lot a research on plants to eat and where to find them (some of them I already knew and used to eat as a kid), how to make a selfbow and arrows, how to make snowshoes. And then I would come to a place in the story where all I had to do was remember what it was like to build a fire in the winter, how it burned, what it felt like in the cold, and what it smelled like. The thing about research is that you can get caught up in doing more than what you need to move your story.

The Bear is not a handbook for survival. It’s a story about a girl’s coming of age in a unique time. Nevertheless, the purpose of research is to achieve authenticity, especially in the genre of realist literary fiction, which is the genre in which I would place my novel. So, you see the balance necessary. There is one thing I experienced in the writing of The Bear, though, that is curiously relevant to your question and which I’ve never talked about. In the summer of 2018, when I was deep into the final draft of the novel, I found myself trying to live a kind of parallel life to my two characters, at least with respect to food. I didn’t drink any alcohol. I drank only herbal tea. I cut sugar, and bread, and dairy from my diet, and did all I could to consume only seasonal lean protein, fruits, nuts, and vegetables. 

I wasn’t starving myself. I was simply paring back the things we take for granted, but are really just excess. And I found myself having really intense dreams about running through the woods, or along mountain passes high above rivers, or some extreme wilderness environment, and I was always moving quickly through it under my own power. The cool thing about these dreams is that I never felt fear in them. I felt exhilaration and strength, aware of the danger, but not being immobilized by it. I called them my elemental dreams, and they got so that I would crave them before I went to bed at night. 

When I finished the novel, though, they stopped and only re-occurred last year briefly when I was training for a triathlon. After a day of a particularly intense workout biking or running along trails in New Hampshire, I would have an elemental dream. But only for one or two nights, and then they were gone. I think what they helped me understand was the man and the girl’s complete focus on their world. It wasn’t that they had to survive in Nature. It was more like this was simply how their lives were going to be lived out, right up to the end. They were a big influence, these dreams, on why I ended the novel the way I did.

I have read a lot of novels that try to imagine our future, and have seen many different approaches, whether dystopian or utopian. But your novel is rather unique in that it offers an alternative viewpoint of a future world wherein everything is different but it’s not exactly a world that is terrible. It reminds me of the movie based off Jean Hegland’s novel Into the Forest. If you had to imagine our future world right now – especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic – could you see your story playing out as a reality?

Sure. One thing I’ve said, and many friends and readers agree with me, is that while I’m worried about humanity’s survival, I think that Nature is going to be just fine. Which is to say, Nature is a lot tougher, bigger, and smarter in the long run than we are. One of my favorite books is John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, and when you consider how old the Earth – Nature – is, and consider the fraction of time hominids have occupied this Earth, the difference is sobering, if not mind-numbing. It rises to the level of unimaginable hubris to believe that we have been and will be, in the end, anything more than a blink of the eye on the face of this Earth. 

We are fascinating creatures, there’s no doubt. The beliefs we’ve put forward, the problems we’ve solved, the stories we’ve written, the things we’ve made in this short stretch of our existence, are nothing short of sublime. Yet, I have to say, we seem sometimes, as the saying goes, like legends in our minds. I believe that right beneath our feet, the natural world has done, is doing, and will continue to do, things far more amazing than our minds could conjure or contemplate. Yet, more often than not we’re blind to everything but what concerns us. That’s the hubris. So, I think the future could absolutely play out this way, more so today than when I was writing The Bear two years ago.

As I answer your questions, I’ve been in my home with my wife and three children for three weeks because of the COVID-19 virus. This certainly won’t be the end of humanity as we know it. Not this one. But how the world has changed for us literally in a matter of days is astounding. And outside? Birds sing and flowers bloom and it’s coming on spring here in the Northeast, just like it always has, and always will. The only thing I do hope is that we don’t experience something that turns our twilight on this Earth, when it comes, into a nightmare, rather than a quieter dream of what once was. I was certainly aware of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as I was writing The Bear, and I harbor in my mind no comparisons whatsoever to that novel, one of my favorites. But I had also been reading Robert Alter’s translations of Hebrew Scripture as I wrote. That’s the reason why I imagined a return in the end to our mythic beginnings. An Eden for the last two, as it was imagined in the beginning for the first two. 

One thing I love to remind readers of is the fact that the word myth did not always mean a story we believe is false or gets truth wrong. Myth just means story. In his Poetics, mythos is the word Aristotle uses when he writes that “action” is the most important element of tragedy. When we’re talking about what makes a story a story, with all its truth and characters and mystery, we’re talking about myth.

How important do you think it is for authors to connect their stories to the environment?

I think that depends on the environment a writer feels committed to. The Great Gatsby is committed to a certain environment in the same way that Blood Meridian, or Beloved, or Marilyn Robinson’s Iowa trilogy, is committed to a particular environment, not just in setting but in how and why characters live and move and have their being. But if you mean environment with respect to the current ecological and climate crises, I would leave that to the author and his or her own commitment to what is elemental about a story. But I think also that in our current climate, a growing awareness of environment as something that can potentially play a more dynamic role in a story will quite organically begin to enter into fiction. 

When a writer goes deep – and deep necessarily defines what is involved in the process that consumes novel-writing – one isn’t simply connecting to a setting, as though it were a place lying around and the writer comes along and populates it. The place of a novel becomes of the Earth, even in the most urban of places, like Don DeLillo’s New York, or Roberto Bolaño’s Mexico City. But your question also raises a point I think we miss often in our need to shoe-horn fiction into market genres. I push back particularly hard against the category of so-called “historical” fiction. All fiction has its setting in some historical moment, no? Just because an author finds an interest in the intersection between characters who actually existed and characters created doesn’t all of a sudden mean that the history is what’s driving the action of the novel. So, I wonder, the same way, about the fate of the novel that treats Nature as a character itself, if not protagonist altogether. Do we just start calling these books “Environmental Fiction?” Or do we begin to read the re-alignment of Nature-as-character, or Environment-as-action in fiction in an altogether new and critical way?

Something I’ve begun to explore as a way of writing about the environment with respect to form as well as content is to limit the interiority of a character. In other words, how often in a story I go into the mind or thought process of a character, how long I stay there, and what I draw from that interiority for the sake of the story. I think most writers are really comfortable writing from inside the head of their characters, finding that place desirable, if not critically necessary, to moving a narrative along. But what if every time a writer was going to make that interior move into a character’s mind, he or she had the character look out and showed us what that character sees of the world, the environment. I mean really sees it. At the granular level. And then had that character act based on and being wholly within the environment around him or her, rather than acting based on what decisions were come to in the thought process of a moment. That would, I think, begin to raise the role of Nature out of a kind of passive setting (or at least a distant second to the setting of the character’s consciousness) and give it a more active role in the narrative, simply by having the writer signal that environment can and does play a part in the moral imprint of a character in a story. And that’s something I’ve tried to do in The Bear.

Great points above regarding genres. It’s something I’m always asking myself and appreciate when genres actually blur and reach out beyond whatever boxes people tend to put them in. I’ve heard the term “rewilding novels,” which I like quite a bit.

Which authors inspired you as you were growing up, and what are your hopes for younger audiences reading The Bear?

Books were everywhere in our house growing up. If I close my eyes and imagine the bookshelf in our living room, I can see Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare’s plays. Those books, though, I didn’t get to until I went to college (I was lucky enough to have parents who let me, and in fact encouraged me, to study liberal arts in college). 

As a kid, I had a pretty eclectic reading list, influenced largely by my older brothers and sisters, who passed down everything I read, from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey, to Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring. But I also read books that came to me via the usual school channel, like A Wrinkle in Time, and a young reader’s version of The Iliad. I’ll tell you, though, for as much as I loved the freedom of living and playing outdoors so much in rural Pennsylvania, I felt trapped too. Creatively, intellectually. So books became a way of traveling for me. A means of escape. Especially in high school, when I read writers as a way of seeing if maybe I could become a writer myself. I think for that reason the authors who inspired me most were authors who wrote books about journeys. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. Just to name a few. 

Now, all these years later, after decades of studying literature, every character from the great books I’ve read and loved live still in my imagination, every place they’ve all traveled is mapped and logged there too. So that when I’m old and alone and slowed down, I won’t be lonely or sedentary, because I’ll have all of those characters to accompany me to all of those places they’ve been over and over, again and again. That’s what I hope a younger audience will take not just from The Bear but from any book read and loved and never forgotten. Companions of the imagination. Because – if I can add this to your question about survival – literature can be a means to survive. Not because of what a paragraph tells you how to make, but because of how a character in a story lives along the arc of his or her own becoming.

Are you working on anything else right now?

In our new (and I hope temporary) indoor lives, I am working everyday (I’m hesitant to say feverishly) on my third Dardan novel, the fictional Pennsylvania town I’ve mined for my first two novels. It’ll be a longer, more sweeping work than the other two (The Sojourn and The Signal Flame), but that’s all I can say about it right now in these early days, except that I’m really enjoying getting back to the work of shaping and chiseling and sometimes just hammering away at the story that lives inside the stone. We’ll see where it goes.

I’m looking forward to hearing more! And I deeply appreciate your time in chatting with me about The Bear, a novel I think is a must-read in this age. Your in-depth conversation is eye-opening and wonderful. Thanks so much.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change(Routledge). Mary lives in Nova Scotia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Daniel A. Kelin, II

During the eighth session of my ten-session residency with a combined 5th and 6th grade class, I asked the students to find new partners. As a small class in a modest-sized, rural charter school in Hawaii, choosing partners generally meant returning to favorites. In this eighth session, however, one boy hesitated, walked across the room and asked a girl standing apart. The teacher froze, looked over at me and whispered, “I can’t believe that just happened. I can’t believe it.”

Paraphrasing a favorite professor of mine, cultivating awareness does not equal creating change. When invited to conduct a drama-integrated residency focused on a global issue, I selected the threat of sea level rise on Kiribati. One of the world’s lowest lying island nations and a nearby neighbor of Hawaii, Kiribati’s ongoing reality would provide an unknown, yet engaging story that could challenge students to debate real questions that are wrangled over even today. As students imaginatively face the daily challenges and realities of other people, they encounter problems with little to no knowledge of real-life outcomes, so must draw on their own ideas to deal with the “unexpected” challenges.

When I design arts integration residencies, I keep my professor’s comment in mind. Through immersive drama-based experiences, students practice life skills, from collaboration to critical thinking to creative problem-solving. In that charter school, the one girl was often ignored, included only when the teacher required it. When that boy, a kind of social influencer, partnered with her, a significant change permeated the class. The teacher later noted, “This was an amazing experience for my students. Several learned to reach out to others formerly ostracized. We watched students evolve from silliness to seriousness as the lessons progressed.”

We started by engaging in foundational drama activities to explore students’ knowledge of king tides, climate challenges, and Kiribati. Once they trusted that I would provide both joy and safety, we took our first creative dive into the Pacific nation. Analyzing photos from Kiribati and reading descriptions of daily life and communal values, the students divided themselves into “families.” Each received several large pieces of cloth to help them define their land. I find that, when students use simple props to define their own space, their investment in the drama increases. As families they doled out daily tasks, from gardening giant taro to caring for their home and animals to maintaining local sea craft and going fishing.

In a following session, I read how the local hospital was unexpectedly inundated by a king tide. What might a small island community need to do? In small groups, the students imagined and dramatized a three-part action sequence: 1) The moments before the tide hits, 2) The moment it hits, and 3) How might the community react? The students created various scenarios of patients flailing, neighbors wading through the waters to save each other, and finding needed medicines and equipment. I then showed images from the real event. Students often respond more personally to such images when they have already imagined themselves there. As the teacher commented, “The pictures of the real situation added validity to the subject.”

As families, we discussed facing future king tides. The families suggested building walls or watch-towers to raising building off the ground to just leaving. As the students began to dramatize their ideas, I introduced another tide. In silence, I gathered up a cloth or two from each family. Several students attempted to stop me from devastating their land. The families then selected a slip of paper from several I offered. “On the paper,” I told them, “is the amount you lost.” Some lost multiple taro plants to saltwater, or their entire home, or the ocean wiped out a great deal of their coconut trees. More pictures showed trees afloat and people wading through chest-high pools of water. Now the families needed to consider, do we stay on our home island or migrate to a place such as New Zealand?

Families conferred, then presented arguments for and against. Having already experienced the challenges on the island we then, as a class, took on the role of climate migrants. Influenced by the story of Ioane Teitiota, a Kiribati man who sought climate refugee status, I guided students to first explore what changes people might face moving from a rural island to an urban setting. Once they invested in a new life, an official letter was delivered; their visas had expired and they needed to return to their island home. The family, now consisting of the entire class, discussed their options and actually decided to request an extension of their visa. I stepped into a government official role and denied their request. Out of role, the students claimed this was unfair. I asked what argument might convince officials? Small groups suggested the dangers of floods, losing food and land, and even their own lives. I then read about Ioane Teitiota, repeatedly turned down by New Zealand courts and taking his appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. “What happened?” students asked. “Let’s imagine,” I said.

One group took on the role of the family’s lawyers. One group became the Supreme Court. As the government lawyer, I argued why the family did not deserve climate refugee status. The family lawyers then had the chance to refute my points. And finally, the Supreme Court were given privacy to discuss their verdict. Although we had a sense of what the outcome would be, the Supreme Court group did take some significant time to discuss their ruling. The other students were visibly nervous. As the teacher wrote later, “The role-playing of local leaders and government officials by the teaching artist added to the drama and encouraged students to engage in their roles with commitment.” The Court finally ruled in favor of the Kiribati people. Real joy followed, students congratulating each other. One Court member did confess to being against refugee status, wondering if there “might be too many others trying to move.” I ended our residency experience with the true-to-life ruling; Ioane Teitiota was sent back to his island home. Although this disappointed the students, I felt it would help them realize the real challenges of fighting for change.

While the students may not yet be in a place to help climate migrants or address sea level rise, they did discover their capacity to overcome challenges as a class, to welcome working together or take a theoretical stand in support of their fellow human beings. In such a drama-integrated experience, students move beyond simply being aware of our world’s issues to realize that they have it within themselves to make change.

(Top image: Daniel A. Kelin, II teaching class 5 students at Children’s Garden School in Chennai, India in 2010.)

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An artist, educator, scholar, and playwright, Dan has been Honolulu Theatre for Youth Director of Education since 1987. He’s served organizations in American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Pohnpei, Guam, and India and is on the Teaching Artist roster of the Kennedy Center and a current Fulbright Specialist. A Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in India in 2009 and 2019, other fellowships include Montalvo Arts Center, TYA/USA, the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America, and the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Dan has five published books and numerous articles about his arts education work.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Clare Fisher

PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES TO TEACHING THE ARTS 
WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

In my last post, I describe the (not quite) theory of teaching the arts with climate change as a monster: one which, in being unafraid to conjoin multiple and even contradictory forms of knowledge, treads new intellectual and creative ground. Here, I’ll focus on the pedagogical practices that make of these monsters an invigorating learning environment for students.

In many cases, it means a focus on experiential learning. At Wofford College in South Carolina, many courses in the Environmental Studies department feature a lab which, as faculty member Professor Kaye Savage explained, students are often surprised to discover is not science-focused but interdisciplinary. Savage, a geologist by training with a background in fine arts, who had a lot of input into the structure of the department, feels very lucky to be able to exercise both her “scientific” and her “artistic” self. She says this is one of the key components of the interdisciplinary learning on offer in the department: “It’s so important to let students get their hands on materials. Whether it’s out in the field or in a lab or even in a classroom, it makes [the learning] come alive in a way it never can in a book or on a screen.”

Not many institutions, however, will have the resources to invest in purpose-built interdisciplinary spaces; nevertheless, many educators are finding innovative ways to break down their metaphorical classroom walls, even if the physical walls remain very much in place. Elizabeth Trobaugh, who teaches Cli Fi: Science and Stories at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts, is one such example. Her previous experience of running an interdisciplinary program with an ecology professor gave her both a passion and a firm understanding of how interdisciplinarity works, and she was able to “grab the science and integrate it into my literature course.” As well as devising a range of active reading, writing, and discussion activities which probe narratives around climate change, she brings in scientific colleagues to do live experiments in class, to demonstrate, for example, the albedo effect: “I’ve seen many students have that ‘aha’ moment and it’s quite wonderful.”

At the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS), a transdisciplinary center at Uppsala University and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Sweden, students take considerable control over the course structure itself. Every year, two students are appointed as coordinators for the course Perspectives on Climate Change: Ecopsychology, Art and Narratives. Working together – and given that they often come from diverse disciplines, this is an interdisciplinary experience in and of itself – they decide on which lecturers, artists, and external partners and stakeholders to invite so as to bring the syllabus to life. This, of course, is an experimental and unusual method, which Malin Östman, educational coordinator of CEMUS at large, argues is precisely its strength: “We should dare to use more experimental methods from the arts. Sometimes it will fail, but the same goes for all pedagogical methods.”

An openness to experimentation is also a key component of Sarah Fahmy’s approach to the Creative Climate Communication course at the University of Colorado, Boulder:

Much of the learning takes place outside, in the field, where it’s easier to see that we don’t live here alone and this planet isn’t only ours… It’s important for them to see that not everything has to be rigorously theorized. An important part of research is doing things that are fun – and laughing! The pedagogy is very participant-driven, which means often our ideas as facilitators end up being challenged or changing, but that’s fine because we’re not precious. We’ve also got used to the idea that not everything we start will go to plan; it’s the process that’s important, and making sure we create a space in which everyone’s voice is heard.

In Fahmy’s eyes, an openness to experimentation goes hand in hand with an openness to failure, and an assumption that students’ views are just as valuable as the educator’s. Rather than clinging rigidly to an initial idea or vision, she is willing to let them go in favor of a better idea that may come about during the learning process.

Evelyn O’Malley, who teaches the Theatre for a Changing Climate course at Exeter University in the UK, also noted that adopting a collaborative approach to pedagogy was empowering for students:

There is a real sense of shared responsibility for the material amongst the students. The collective element of the learning is one of the pleasures of the teaching. I’m always looking for ways that the students can facilitate each other’s learning; I can be part of that, but I try not to be an all-knowing lecturer at the front of the class. The students are always smarter than me and able to ask better questions. I try to set up my classroom as a space where we can think together and go down the rabbit hole together; hopefully, we’ll end the module with better questions than we began with.

In creating classroom structures where students feel supported in taking risks and making mistakes, and where the emphasis is on collaboration and asking questions rather than heroically rushing to find the best individual answers, O’Malley supports students to sit with the “trouble” and the uncertainty of taking responsibility for their own learning.

Yet what is the link between giving students an active role in their own learning and giving them the tools to actively work towards a sustainable future? Ian Garrett, who teaches in the MFA Design for Performance program at York University in Canada, has some ideas in this regard:

Performance is a way of imagining what society might be: at a time where we need a lot of social change for a sustainable future, it becomes a very useful process. The core is being able to communicate ideas about different possible future scenarios and, through the process of play, to come at it from different perspectives. Students work on specific projects around improving sustainability on campus, and this is usually empowering for them: they’re doing it about a place they’re invested in, and are presenting it not just to me for a grade but to a stakeholder who has agency that they have identified. It deepens their relation with a place and their systems thinking.

Systems thinking and project-based work give students a multi-faceted understanding of their artistic discipline as entangled within a complex web of change, yet it also, particularly in tasks where they focus on improving one element of their campus and present their projects not only to professors but to external stakeholders, gives them tangible evidence of their research’s impact beyond the university. As such, it has both ethical and practical ramifications.

It is no wonder, then, that every single academic to whom I spoke stressed how much an open, collaborative approach was as enriching to them as it was for the students. Many, such as Min Hyoung Song, who teaches the Climate Fiction course at Boston College in Massachusetts, also stressed how much it had impacted their own research, and for the better:

I was in the midst of revising a book manuscript on climate change and contemporary literature (both poetry and fiction) in the Spring, so there was a dramatic circular relationship between the manuscript and the course on Climate Fiction I was teaching. The students made what I was writing more personal, and allowed me to see from their perspective the kinds of preoccupations I was having. And just as importantly, together we explored how spending so much time with literature helped us to think differently about the topic.

In Song’s words I sensed a real hunger to connect with students, and an ability not just to say that they value students’ insights as much as their own but to demonstrate this through actively allowing such insights to change their teaching and even their research trajectories. Yet, such trajectories, in their openness to grappling with the complexity, uncertainty, and difficulty that is climate change, are emotionally as well as intellectually challenging: How to tread the line between hope and despair? How to empower students while giving them tools to engage with the – in many ways – grim realities of the situation? These are the questions I’ll be asking in my next and final post in this series.

This article is part of our series on Arts & Climate in Higher Education.

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Clare Fisher is a novelist, short story writer, and researcher based in Leeds, UK. She is the author of All the Good Things (Viking, 2017) and How the Light Gets In (2018). Her work has won a Betty Trask Award and been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Edgehill Short Story Prize. She is studying for a practice-led PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds and teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary University of London. She can be found on Twitter at @claresitafisher.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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By GiGi Buddie

Growing up in a whitewashed world, playwright, actress, and poet Yolanda Bonnell took on the task of searching for her Indigenous identity through the arts. Using the creative possibilities of theatre to navigate her way through uncharted waters, she has now emerged a successful artist that seeks to guide those on their own journey. White Girls in Moccasins is one of her works that does exactly that as it beautifully tackles an Indigenous search for identity. Drawing upon her own experiences, Bonnell finds comfort in art that tells stories that often go untold.

As a Queer Two Spirit Ojibwe and South Asian artist, Bonnell has explored and created many narratives on the stage, as well as been involved in works that call for Indigenous representation. Her acting credits include roles in The Breathing Hole by Colleen Murphy, directed by Reneltta Arluk, who I wrote about in my previous post, and presented at the Stratford Festival, and Two Indians by Falen Johnson, presented at Summerworks 2016, for which she was named one of NOW Magazine’s Theatre Discoveries and most exciting artists to watch. 

Bonnell and myself, like many others, grew up experiencing stereotyped depictions of Indigenous peoples and sadly, this has resulted in a barrier between non-Indigenous people and an accurate knowledge of our people and culture. Artists like Bonnell are breaking down that barrier to communicate and teach Indigenous traditions, culture, and narratives, and to expose those stereotypes for the blatant fiction they are and always have been.

Your show White Girls in Moccasins deals with the search for identity as an Indigenous person in a whitewashed world. How has art helped you navigate finding your identity?

I think that creating and writing truly helped me work through the confusion and the “lost” feeling I had, one that I still sometimes have, about my identity. So much was kept secret or buried or hidden when I was growing up. I mostly learned about the stereotypes regarding my identities. All of the things that make up who I am were ostracized, or attacked, or made to look like something that they weren’t. Once I finally used my art to lean into mining through all of the colonial bullshit, I was able to bring all of myself forward in a positive way. Telling my stories helped me navigate through all the positive reclamation work I was doing to discover myself.

You performed in The Breathing Hole, a story that uses the medium of theatre to talk seriously about climate change, at the Stratford Festival. In your opinion, what is the importance of addressing serious topics through art, especially the topic of our climate crisis?

I think it’s incredibly important. I’ve always said that I believe art is inherently political. We’ve been able to map our true history with our stories, no matter in which medium they’re told. Often those stories carry messages or truths that push back against oppression. Even our prophecies are stories. Many Indigenous prophecies warned about climate change and environmental devastation. 

As artists, we are either given or we build a platform for ourselves to engage and display great vulnerability and truth, which allows our witnesses to deeply feel something. To experience something. To watch and listen and laugh and cry and sing along. It’s an honor and a privilege to have that platform, as much as it is an honor and privilege to be a witness. For me, revolution is a duty, not a choice (I read that on a bathroom stall and have touted it ever since). As artists and storytellers, I believe it is our duty to use our gifts to bring forth truth and be political. It is our duty to remind people of what’s actually happening in this world, remind them what is happening in their “country,”  and in their backyards and neighborhoods. Then, once we show you, it’s your job as a witness to go and continue to do your part in making that change. We can be political and entertaining. There are intersections that have always worked. It’s like hiding the medicine in the pudding.

The West Coast of the United States is experiencing the worst and most devastating wildfires to date. For millennia, Indigenous people used flames to protect the land, but the US government outlawed the process for over a century before recognizing its value. Yet the Indigenous knowledge of the caretakers of the land is unmatched. As the climate crisis progresses, do you think experts will look to Indigenous people for answers on how to care for the land?

I want to say yes. I want to say that they’ll read Indigenous authors or look to our histories to see how we worked in rhythm with the land. I want to say they’ll put Indigenous land defenders, scientists, botanists, knowledge keepers at the head of environmental defense, but I’m not confident in those steps ever being taken.

We’ve seen this time and time again. We are at the precipice of irreversible climate disaster, and we have watched this happen before. From first contact, Indigenous people have been attempting to teach settlers how to live with the land and how to live sustainably. Yet here we are. The systems of government on Turtle Island do not see Indigenous people as people, they see us as a nuisance and they always have. You’re not going to ask the roaches in your house to dinner to negotiate survival tactics. No. I really do hope that the experts will do what is needed, but systemic racism is a deep root and many of those people don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.

In an interview for Muskrat Magazine, you said, “We (Indigenous women) don’t experience enough of seeing ourselves. There is power in representation.” What does Indigenous representation on stage mean to you?

Indigenous representation means that I’m not alone. It means that I matter, my story matters, and that my experiences as a Queer Indigenous woman matter. It means that I am seen, beautiful, and more than just a statistic. It means that I am more than just my trauma and pain. When I see another Indigenous person on stage, especially a Kwe, I am immediately moved. I grew up, as many of us did, surrounded by whiteness. White was the standard and it was considered to be the blueprint of beauty. Life only mattered if you were white. I was a stereotype, assimilated, indoctrinated, so I grabbed on to what I could. The Pocahontas, the Tiger Lily, the Isabel Two (who wasn’t even Indigenous), every noble savage imagery, anything to find myself, I grabbed onto. Even now, I’ve only felt seen and represented on stage three times. So when I do see it, it moves me to a place deep in my core because I understand that the feeling of being seen and not being alone is like nothing else in this world.

In closing, do you have any words of wisdom for our readers?

I urge you to read more Indigenous literature and learn about systems of governance that existed long before the Eurocentric systems we have now. Learn the true histories of this land and the land you come from. Decolonize. Stay informed. Use your privilege for good.

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Here is a list of 10 Books by Indigenous Authors You Should Read, written by Emily Temple for Literary Hub, as well as a Decolonization Reading List to further educate while decolonizing your mind and bookshelf. 

(Top image: Yolanda Bonnell performing in her solo show bug. Photo by Dahlia Katz.)

This article is part of the Indigenous Voices series.

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GiGi Buddie is an American Indian artist and student studying theatre, with an emphasis in acting, at Pomona College. Whether it be through acting or working in tech, GiGi has dedicated much of her life to the theatre. In the summer of 2019, her passion for art and environmental justice took her to the Baram River in Malaysian Borneo where she, alongside Pomona professors, researched the environmental crisis and how it has been affecting the Indigenous groups that live along the river. As a result of her experience researching and traveling, she student-produced the Pomona College event for Climate Change Theatre Action during the fall 2019 semester.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Peterson Toscano

Photographer, writer, and climate advocate Princella Talley tells us about the vital role of art in her life and her work. Her interests in visual art and storytelling started at a young age when observing dolphins in the ocean. After a successful career as a professional writer, Princella worked on a freelance writing assignment that ultimately drew her into the world of climate change and her role as Diversity Outreach Coordinator at Citizens’ Climate Lobby. In our conversation, Princella speaks candidly about the challenges of being a person of color in predominantly white climate spaces. 

Before joining the Citizens’ Climate Education team, Princella spent more than a decade working as a photographer and writer. She covered topics ranging from climate change and ecotourism to artificial intelligence and mobile app development for major news outlets with more than 60 million online visitors, independent publications, and tech startups in Silicon Valley. She has written for CBS Las Vegas, worked as a copy editor for a digital publication with 135,000 weekly readers, and created content for a GRAMMYs campaign. Princella is also the owner of Louisiana Food Fellow, a cohort of change leaders working within local food systems. In central Louisiana, she partners with community leaders to provide environmental education and implement sustainable and eco-friendly programs in economically disadvantaged communities.

Next month, I am talking with Jason Davis. Jason curates ClimateStoriesProject.org. The site hosts videos from people all over the world that reveal the impacts of climate change on their lives, and how they are responding. Jason takes some of these stories and composes music to accompany them. You will hear a moving and powerful testimony from John Sinnok, an Inuit Elder from Alaska. Woven around the story is Jason’s haunting and beautiful composition for the double bass.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Clare Fisher

ON NOT-QUITE THEORIZING INTERDISCIPLINARITY 
IN ARTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

In my last post, I talked about interdisciplinarity as an “and” through which students and researchers of arts and climate change can reach beyond the limitations of their disciplines in search of new and more sustainable ways of thinking, making, and living. In this post, I’m going to focus on the theories that hold such “ands” in place – although whether it is really possible to devote a post entirely to theory when such courses are constantly trying to resist the separation of one form of knowing from another is another matter.

Or perhaps I should put it this way: how do we theorize what does not want to be theorized? The collection of essays Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing – a highly interdisciplinary text that features on many reading lists – provides a useful starting point:

In the indeterminate conditions of environmental damage, nature is suddenly unfamiliar again. How shall we find our way? Perhaps sensibilities from folklore and science fiction – such as monsters and ghosts – will help. While ghosts … help us read life’s enmeshment in landscapes, monsters point us toward life’s symbiotic entanglement across bodies…. Against the conceit of the Individual, monsters highlight symbiosis, the enfolding of bodies within bodies in evolution and in every ecological niche. In dialectical fashion, ghosts and monsters unsettle anthropos, the Greek term for “human,” from its presumed center stage in the Anthropocene by highlighting the webs of histories and bodies from which all life, including human life, emerges. Rather than imagining phantasms outside of natural history, the monsters and ghosts of this book are observable parts of the world. We learn them through multiple practices of knowing, from vernacular to official science, and draw inspiration from both the arts and sciences to work across genres of observation and storytelling. [pp 3-4]

In the West, the Enlightenment tradition predisposes us to categorize all that cannot be categorized as monstrous. Tsing, however, reclaims the monster’s resistance to categorization as a vital tool in both critically engaging with the complexity of the climate crisis and imagining beyond it.

It is exactly this sort of “monster thinking” that underpins the Department of Environmental Studies at Wofford College in South Carolina, where Kaye Savage teaches an Art & Earth course:

We’re rooted in the notion that no environmental problems are single-faceted: it’s everything from who’s in the room to how we understand what the problem even is. How do we place our values in understanding how the problem came about?

Savage paints the tangled complexity of the problem as a source of intellectual and creative excitement, not the failure it might appear to be from a discipline-bound point of view. The courses in the department encourage students to investigate such questions by conducting research not only in the classroom but in the field and a purpose-built “lab,” thus transforming the interdisciplinary aspects of the course from something abstract – having to read different texts or search different sorts of databases, for example – to something they can experience with their whole body. The aim, says Savage, is to provide them with the opportunity to experience different modes of maintaining focused attention on a problem. 

This attention, argues Savage, is of crucial value in itself: “It could be going out in the field and counting trees, another way is to look carefully and sketch; it could be thinking about a problem broadly so as to include the global, social and economic aspects. This is something that is lacking in society in general, I think.” The attention, or noticing, that Savage’s courses foster crosses not merely from one discipline to another but from theory to practice; it is, then, a praxis.

Min Hyoung Song, who teaches Climate Fiction at Boston College in Massachusetts, and is heavily involved in their Environmental Humanities program, placed a similarly strong emphasis on what we do and don’t notice and why:

That conversation is often regulated by a lot of specific social rules. Teaching a course on climate change and the arts helps to shed light on these dynamics, to consider what these rules are, what happens when we break them, and what new rules might enable. The focus on the arts also helps to make a topic that feels far off and abstract more immediate and visceral, so that climate change is something that’s happening now and all around us. 

Noticing the rules that regulate what can and can’t be noticed is the first step towards reaching for new rules. In her oft-cited book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway advocates for “making kin” across species. Here, Song seems to suggest that making kin between abstract and intellectual knowledge on the one hand, and affective, bodily knowledge on the other, is what will foster both critical and creative responses to the contemporary moment’s climate-related blind spots.

Evelyn O’Malley, for whom the texts by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway are touchstones in her Theatre for a Changing Climate course at the University of Exeter, UK, encourages students to notice the difficulty of this sort of noticing: “I’m trying to get students to look at how we can keep on looking at and engaging with the trouble of the present, rather than getting lost in projected futures and either an Edenic or horrific past.” When she first started teaching this course, she thought that students not being able to grasp the scientific information would be a crucial problem. However, she quickly found this was far from the case:

I was confronted with a cohort that already had a decent grasp and was politically engaged. It became less a matter of trying to extract the truth of the data from specific plays or performances and more about learning to see how they function, as discourses, to impede or progress real world effects for people who are on the receiving end of climate change. Yet I also tried to constantly travel back to the science and ask whether it’s true or not. It felt important to have conversations with [scientific] experts about those things that touched at the edges of their roles.

O’Malley’s theory is a monster theory in that it is constantly breaking rules and boundaries and, in doing so, gives students a panoramic view of how change happens and the roles that each discipline, and its constituent theoretical underpinnings, play in such a change. 

For John Wills, who teaches on Inviting Doomsday: US Environmental Problems in the Twentieth Century at the University of Kent, UK, one of the main benefits of interdisciplinarity is that it highlights the fact that the rigid separation of disciplines is a myth. “The environment,” he argues, … “should be taught as part of history as a matter of course, but it’s mostly left out as a factor. I’m trying to decenter humans from the historical stage; we’re not the lead actors on stage. We need to broaden what history is.” 

The real monster is, perhaps, the Enlightenment itself. Willis’s course, like so many others mentioned here, seeks to illuminate some of the damage done by the Western intellectual fantasy of humanity’s exceptional separation from the rest of the planet – of a world that can be neatly ordered, controlled and colonized – which, paradoxically, has created all kinds of environmental destruction that is in itself quite monstrous. 

Interdisciplinarity, in its varied forms, is at once a dismantling and a reaching for something that can’t quite be named. How, then, can it be taught, particularly in institutions which are (perhaps necessarily) rigidly categorized and ordered? How can teachers help students to step into spaces of uncertainty and difference? These are some of the questions I will be asking in my next post, which will focus on pedagogy.

This article is part of our series on Arts & Climate in Higher Education.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Susan Hoffman Fishman

Since June of 2017, artists Jarrod Cluck, Gina R. Furnari, sTo Len, Leslie Sobel and Rachel Wojnar have been on an intense physical, emotional, spiritual, and art-making journey, which culminated with their MFA Thesis Exhibition, Confluence, on view at the Joseloff Gallery of the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford (Connecticut) from September 10-19, 2020. 

They are the third cohort to complete the Nomad Interdisciplinary MFA program. Founded by director Carol Padberg in 2015, the program uses an innovative field-based model and offers a curriculum that includes art, ecology, the study of place, indigenous knowledge systems, and technologies. Encompassing two hands-on residencies per year, the Nomad MFA provides courses in El Salvador; New York City; New Mexico; Mexico; Oakland, California; Miami; and Minneapolis.

Having traveled, lived, and worked together for two plus years, the cohort is a cohesive unit. The work in the exhibition, although specific to the preferred media and individual inquiries of each artist, also suggests an on-going conversation among the artists, a collective voice expressing grief over ecological destruction as well as a genuine respect for the natural cycles of life and all living beings on Earth. The topic of water was a common thematic thread running throughout the work – the pollution of our waterways and oceans, the sense of place that bodies of water create, and the liquid resource that enables life itself.

Despite the pandemic, the decision was made by the university to install a physical exhibition in the gallery, but with access limited to the college community only. Virtual programming and resources, including an opening, a tour of the exhibition, artists’ talks, an exhibition catalogue, and a dedicated website were available to the public. The virtual tour and website continue to be accessible online and provide an accurate sense of the exhibition’s richness and power.  

JARROD CLUCK: DIRT

Jarrod Cluck’s body of work in the exhibition was a visual record of his activities during the year 2019 in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas where he lives – observing the land, collecting native plants and seeds, planting and harvesting traditional crops, building a cob kiln, and firing clay pots. As Cluck describes it, “so much of my work is about the soil and how things come into being,” the process of poiesis, or the creation of something that did not exist before. He went on to add that water, the liquid substance deep beneath the soil and raining down upon us, is a collaborator is this creative process and enables the dirt and living beings to exist at all.  

Cluck’s work includes a video collage called Aletheia that was projected onto a scrim in a ninety second loop and documented his working year; a digital print of eggs photographed while they were candled over a six-day period of time; and a handmade book called The Book of Dirt, whose pages consist of the pigmented imprints of the plants he collected as well as “things made from dirt.” Cluck calls the book an almanac of his observations and experiences. A visceral and beautiful object, it begs the viewer to touch the earthy pages and then go play in the soil.  

GINA R. FURNARI: HABIT DWELLS IN PLACE

Gina Furnari is interested in the meaning and construction of place and in “the edge spaces around and within habitat: where bodies, water, land, sea, sky, and light all come together.” Her ceramic Waveforms are reminiscent of the shells she found along the habitats of southern New Jersey, where she lives. They also represent shelters, the places of rest and solace that proximity to water brings. Emanating from the Waveforms through a digital audio system are environmental sounds, including seagulls over Ocean City, artesian wells, wind through oak trees, and car and boat traffic. The undulating shapes of the Waveforms clearly mimicked the motion of ocean waves as they move towards and away from the shoreline.

In her video, On the Edge, A Kind of Bridge, Furnari recorded a performance in which she lies on the sand at the edge of the sea and then in the water near the shore in order to feel how each of the experiences impacted her body. The video was projected onto a vertical window blind. Normally associated with a protective barrier between the outside and inside of a house, the blind implied a sense of home and security. Both the Waveforms and the video projection successfully addressed our common need for the consolation and comfort that occurs in a home and around water.

STO LEN: FUTURE OF A MATERIAL

sto Len’s carefully conceived and striking installation, entitled FOAM (Future of a Material), reflects upon our polluted waters and the toxic, plastic substances within them that will remain in the environment for generations to come. Using pieces of Styrofoam that he found in bodies of water and a self-invented printing process that he calls “Gomitaku” (trash impressions), he created ink prints on “scrolls” of unstretched canvas, linen, and paper. “Gomitaku” is based on the 19th century Japanese printing method, “Gyotaku,” that was used by fishermen to both record and honor their catches. The printed scrolls in the exhibition were hung vertically from monofilament attached to the ceiling of the gallery and directly on the wall suggesting the downward movement and eventual crashing of waterfalls. Walking among the scrolls, one can feel the enormity of the plastic pollution in our waters.

In addition to being a printing process, Len describes “Gomitaku” as “a pictorial writing system, a new language of repetitive marks describing the poisoning of our environment” and notes that “the monumental scale of the installation emphasizes the monumental legacy of pollution” left by companies like Dow Chemical, the makers of Styrofoam, who have put profit over the health of the planet. 

LESLIE SOBEL: CONNECTING CLIMATE, WATER, AND DATA

Leslie Sobel has confronted the topic of water for decades, most recently focusing on the condition of lakes and river systems near her home in the Midwest. She is deeply concerned about pollution and the flooding and environmental damage that climate change has caused to our continental watersheds. Her series of large-scale, mixed media pieces on paper in the exhibition incorporate images from old survey maps as well as drawing and encaustic. The vibrant colors and visually pleasing compositions immediately draw the viewer into the work. At closer inspection, though, it becomes clear that Sobel is issuing a warning about and expressing her grief over the conditions of our water resources. The title, “Inflection Point,” which she used for one of the mixed media works, is a clue to that warning. As she states, “we are at the cusp;” we are at an inflection point where changes must be made in how we serve as stewards of our environment before it is too late.

As the daughter of two scientists, Sobel is finely attuned to scientific systems and often collaborates with scientists in the field. The more intimate, three-dimensional pieces in the exhibition, Alga Flow and Microcystis Box, reference the toxic blooms on Lake Erie and include cast resin pieces incorporating digital prints of photomicrographs of alga as well as digital photographs of Maumee Bay State Park – both in found boxes. The presentation of the objects in a manner similar to the storage of scientific specimens adds weight to their message of environmental crisis.

RACHEL WOJNAR: TO LIVE, ENTANGLED

Rachel Wojnar embraces impermanence. Her intriguing, biodegradable masks in the exhibition were created to decompose, in direct contrast to the way in which the plastic products and other mass-produced, non-biodegradable, toxic materials in our culture remain in landfills and in the ocean for hundreds of years. The masks are also in direct contrast to the death masks dating back to ancient Egypt, which served as a likeness of a person’s face after death and were an attempt to immortalize the figure. Wojnar noted that she sees death, including ecological death, as the opportunity for renewal.  

Fungi is the medium Wojnar used for the decomposition process of her plaster facial casts. She filled the molds with natural substances, such as mushrooms and wood chips that fungi feed on, and then injected mycelium, the feeding structure of fungi, into the cavity. The symbiosis between the plastic cast of Wojnar’s face, the mycelium, and water, which activates the growth of the fungi and all living matter, created an ever-changing, human/non-human form, which underscored what Wojnar refers to as “our need to move from an anthropomorphic view of the world to one in which we are intrinsically tied to all living beings.

Confluence was a particularly fitting title for the combined work of these five artists. Their exhibition was a true confluence, a coming together of their individual styles, choices of material, and pressing personal and environmental interests, creating a narrative of grief, crisis, the cycles of growth and decline, responsibility, and solace. Flowing throughout was the presence of water, the force that makes life possible. 

(Top image: sTo Len, detail of FOAM (FutureOfAMaterial) installation. Gomitaku print, sumi ink on linen, 64” x 360,” 2020. All photographs are courtesy of the artists.)

This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water and climate disruption a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances, projects and publications that are appearing in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Since 2011, all of her paintings, installations and photographs have addressed water and climate change. She co-created a national, participatory public art project, The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and has inspired thousands of adults and children of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to protect this vital resource. Her most recent body of work calls attention to the growing number of rampikes along our shores – trees that have been exposed to salt water and died as a result of rising tides.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Kristina Watt

Over the past two years, I have had the privilege to invite a group of teenagers in Canada, ages 13-17, to consider theatre as a possible means to fight for climate action. These ten youth, Natasha Knight, Anna Carsley-Jones, Sebastien Cimpaye, Sophie Dean, Quinn Lesaux, Jaya Matiation, Olivia Smith, Ethan Whidden, Kaatje Yates, and Paige Young, are all driven by a concern and love for the planet – and are deeply anxious about a future they feel they have inherited. As Sophie says, “We’re a group of teens with a goal and the passion to achieve it. We’re not all the same; we have different backgrounds and ambitions, but we’re united in our goal for climate action through theatre.” Quinn adds, “I would describe us as a group of teenagers who have a strong opinion on climate change; we’re trying to get our voice out there for older and younger audiences and trying to inform them how they can use their voice to control this problem.”

Together, we created and toured our collective theatre creation, 12 â€“ not just to theatres but to corporations and inside government offices. Olivia describes the project as “…a question. A question in desperate need of an answer. We ask for help, we ask if you knew this, and ask you to think about it. And we hope you’ll take action – that 12 will stay with you.” Jaya adds, “12 doesn’t have a traditional plot or storyline. We use physical movements, words, numbers, and twelve stools to portray the calm and chaos of our world now. Many characters are present only momentarily. They are youth activists from around the world and people from Ottawa. But mostly, they are us: it’s our hope and desire for help and cooperation. We ask adults to confront themselves, to care, to question, and to take action.”

However, when theatres shut down in March 2020, their means of taking action came to a standstill. After deliberation, the youth decided that 12 couldn’t be replicated online; it had to be live. From the isolation of all of our homes, we built a digital theatre creation, While We Wait, as a means to question how to navigate a life-on-hold while still wanting change. “We felt we needed to take action, somehow. We didn’t just want to wait till all this was over. Climate change wasn’t waiting so how could we?” says Natasha. “It’s a new way to share our experience and still ask questions while living during COVID,” Anna adds. In While We Wait, the ten teens tell the audience that the world has now become more motivated to take action and cooperate due to the pandemic crisis, but what is happening with climate crisis action? And why did it take a devastating loss of human life when there has been an ongoing loss of all life?

When I was invited to write this article, I felt that I shouldn’t be the only voice but should include the youth themselves. The goal of my work with young people is to allow theatre to communicate their truth, fears, and hungers to audiences of all ages. Speaking from isolation this summer, these ten “unstoppable youth” share their thoughts with me.

Do you think that theatre can actually change people?

Jaya: Yes, I think theatre can change people. When we started creating 12, we didn’t want to talk down to our audience or have a one-sided conversation. We wanted them to question themselves and the world in which we live. Theatre can do just that: ask questions. Change, however, requires more than questions; change requires action. In12, different characters deal with action in different ways, from being unsure of what to do to taking on big corporations. Change is nothing without action and change starts with asking questions. Theatre should ask questions. That’s how it creates change.

Anna: I don’t believe theatre can “change people,” but I absolutely believe it can provoke thoughts and feelings that lead to change. Maybe theatre can be thought of as emotional information – it all depends on what you do with the information. Some may watch a production, feel something, then go home and never think about it again. But others – I hope 12’s audience – will watch, feel and think, then go home and reflect. Reflection means they look deeper than their initial reaction, and hopefully that leads to responding, and responding means changing behaviors. If theatre can do that, then our job has been successful – though it is never complete. 

Natasha: Theatre can absolutely change people! When theatre brings up complex topics in an emotional way, the audience starts to think about the topics. Eventually, they’ll think about the world in a different way. I’ve changed since working on 12. Before, I was aware of the climate crisis and doing my best to help, but since I became part of the project, my climate anxiety has gone up because I’m facing the facts. Instead of just trying my best to help (reusing grocery bags, etc.), I now want to spread the message and share the facts far and wide. I think audiences we’ve had so far also felt the need to spread the message. I hope they’ve actually done so.

Is there anything else you would like to say about your work?

Jaya: Yes. 12 is a conversation about climate anxiety and the lack of action from governments and corporations everywhere.

Sophie: But we don’t want to rant. We want theatre to send a wake-up call to all of us, including us actors. Yes, we’re doing what we can, but is it enough? And if it isn’t, what else should we do?

Kaatje: We created 12 out of our fears regarding climate change and the role that it plays in our futures. You know, I always wondered how theatre groups could tour plays for years and never get bored of them or the roles they played. After performing 12 for as long as I have [8 months], I see that it’s constantly changing, improving, and updating with current events. It’s never the same thing. It’s taken so much effort from all of us to become what it is today. I am very proud of it.

Olivia: Our planet is dying, and it’s terrifying to me. It’s easy to get swept up in the panic, but it’s also easy to ignore the problem. We need an answer to our question, a solution to our problem. We want to act, do you?

In March, you were told that you couldn’t perform live anymore due to the global pandemic. What did that mean to you?

Sebastien: The pandemic came at a time when we were productive. We had a lot of shows on our schedule and were rehearsing every weekend. After CID shut us down, we stopped. Then we had the idea to continue spreading our message through a screen. But we didn’t feel the internet was the right medium for 12. In the live show, we use a lot of movement; we have human pyramids and we make formations with our bodies. This is necessary, it adds something to the story. Would the audience react the same watching us on a screen? Probably not.

Paige: We knew an online version of 12 wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t have the same impact. Stuck inside little Zoom boxes, unable to move around or even see the people watching us? We lost the connection with each other and the audience. We needed to look them in the eye and ask why they leave the burden of climate change to us. On top of that, even though we actors were together online, it felt like we weren’t together in the same space. Theatre on a screen can be great, but not for 12.

Anna: Theatre is about sharing art live. And 12 is about sharing our perspectives about the climate crisis through theatre. We weren’t sure what to do. How can we share when we can’t be within two meters of each other or have an audience in front of us? It was disappointing and still is. But I’m definitely grateful that we brainstormed and created the digital project While We Wait.  It’s a new way to share our experience and still ask questions while living during COVID. But it’s absolutely not as thrilling as being in the same room with an audience.

Natasha: Digital theatre is very different… We recorded some scenes together on Zoom and others by ourselves around our house. It was odd reacting to others’ boxes after repeating a line instead of just looking directly at the actor or audience!

Sebastien: COVID is a weird thing. I think it might be interesting to address performing 12 with a post-COVID audience. We didn’t know this was coming so we haven’t had time to write about it yet. I think that’s what we should do next.

What’s your biggest climate change concern these days?

Quinn: I’m scared that humans are going to cause more animal species to go extinct – maybe even some that haven’t been discovered yet. Also, humans are going to completely eradicate forests and jungles and those are very, very important for life. What we’re doing right now is exactly what we’re not supposed to do!

Anna: One of my biggest concerns is the animal agriculture industry (e.g., factory farming). Animal agriculture causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation added together… yet diet is something that many people (capable of eating sustainably/plant based) aren’t willing to change. 

Ethan: I’m worried about the next generation of humans. If we don’t fix what we’re doing now, me or you might not feel all the effects, but the next generation will have to go through the horrors of climate change. They will go through seeing entire cities go underwater, entire species of animals go extinct. They won’t see what life could have been. They will see the downfall of humanity, and that it’s our fault.

Quinn: So many are clueless about what’s going on in the world! Climate change is a real thing, it’s not something to make jokes about.

Anna: I’m concerned about rising temperatures and lack of water. Many people in the Global South face increased temperatures and therefore a lack of resources (e.g., water and food). Since water dries up in the heat, and lakes and rivers shrink, there’s less water to drink or to grow any food, causing susceptibility to diseases, malnutrition, and death. And the most affected countries are the ones with more poverty and more BIPOC people, and not as much attention and aid is given to them from countries with more resources. So they are more deeply affected by climate change. The climate crisis involves racism, classism, and elitism. Why won’t many acknowledge this?

If you could ask one question to other youth around the world, what would it be? And how would you answer?

Quinn: I would ask them, “How are the challenges you face different from the challenges I face?” Different people face different issues in different parts of the world. If someone asked me this, I’d say some of my challenges are missing the bus, getting to school late, or not knowing what clothes to wear. My challenges are minimal. But kids around the world like in Mexico City or Iran? I’ve heard that they’re scared to go outside, scared to go to school by themselves. That makes me think of how privileged I am compared to them. So what do you struggle with?

If you could ask your parents’ generation one question, what would it be? And, if you were them, how might you answer?

Sebastien: I would ask them, “Was the information we now have on climate change out there at the time? Were others trying to tell you about it?” And if I were one of their generation, I think I’d say that the information was out there but I wasn’t looking into it.

The last line of 12, written by you all, is: “It’s as if I’m a spectator, but it’s real.” What keeps you going?

Olivia: Hope is a tricky thing. The majority of the time, I’m putting all my energy into just getting out of bed. What really gives me hope is 12 and our group. It makes me feel like I’m really doing something. I’m making my voice heard and people are changing as a result.

Kaatje: I often lose hope. I hate to say it but I do. I think it’s hard to stay optimistic when those in charge seem to have “more important” things to do. And as much as people talk about climate change, there’s rarely any real action… at least not where it counts. For example, our government keeps giving the oil industry economic advantages rather than putting money into sustainable energy options. Our prime minister says he plans to ban single use plastics by 2021, but how can I be sure a bill like that will pass?

Sophie: Our powerful generation keeps me going: our refusal to stay silent, and our ability to use the internet for activism. Fear also motivates us – fear of what will happen if we don’t act. The idea that our future is in danger drives us in powerful ways.

Kaatje: It’s easy to blame others. I’m often just as guilty. I contribute to fast fashion… I try not too… I use plastic straws even though I know they end up in the oceans. Let’s just say I don’t have a clean record when it comes to being green. I feel guilty and somewhat hopeless, especially when doom seems to be around the corner. But I know being negative won’t help me. As hard as it is to be positive, I have to have hope. I have to do better. Otherwise, how can I expect others to do the same?

Paige: What gives me hope is the knowledge that, despite it all, there are people out there who are fighting to make a difference. If they can still see a better future for this world, then so can I. 

Courage, all, and thank you.

* * *

I would like to note that there were eleven youth in the ensemble until June 2020 when Saava Boguslavskiy left the group, saying, “I don’t really have hope for the whole situation. From my point of view, it’s all too late. I feel my contribution to the play is only going to deteriorate and I don’t want to have a negative impact.” Saava, age 16, continues to contribute in his own way; he composed the music for While We Wait and for the live version of 12.

(All photos except screenshot by Brigitte Pellerin.)

______________________________

Kristina Watt is an award-winning actor and theatre creator with an unshakeable passion for collaborating with youth on projects that question our relationship with the planet and with each other. She is driven to question where science intersects with the arts, and to create theatre that sits within that fusion. She is the Artistic Director of 100 Watt Productions and since relocating to Ottawa from New York City where she worked in theatre and TV and taught youth in inner city schools, she has performed at theatres including the National Arts Centre, Great Canadian Theatre Company, New Theatre of Ottawa, Third Wall, and St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By GiGi Buddie

Like many Americans, growing up I was taught that Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer, discovered America. Our nation’s history celebrated his explorations by erecting statues, writing textbooks, dedicating an entire day for his memory to be celebrated, and much more. It wasn’t until I was much older and was given new perspectives on the history of my people and this nation that I learned: one, a place cannot be “discovered” if people already inhabited the land; and two, Christopher Columbus never even set foot on the North American continent. His travels led him to the Carribean Islands (now the Bahamas) and to parts of Central and South America. So why is it that the United States commemorates his memory and explorations so deeply? 

Every place where Columbus anchored had an entire ecosystem of thriving Indigenous tribes with established governments, traditions, art, and culture. These were Indigenous communities that worked in rhythm with the Earth and its inhabitants, never taking too much and always giving back. In short, Columbus didn’t “discover” America. He, and Europe, were simply made aware of the fact that this land, and these people, existed and thrived in a place they had not yet touched. As the editors of History wrote in their article “Why Columbus Day Courts Controversy,” Columbus, like many other European “explorers” of the New World, pioneered and contributed to the “use of violence and slavery, the forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity and the introduction of a host of new diseases that would have dramatic long-term effects on native people in the Americas.”

It was not until 1989 that South Dakota became the first state to switch Columbus Day to Native Americans’ Day. Then in 1992, Berkley, California became the first city to symbolically rename Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This reflected an acknowledgment of the need to protest the historical conquest of North America by Europeans, and to stand in solidarity with and recognize the extensive losses suffered by Indigenous People through diseases, warfare, massacres, and forced assimilation. Each year, beginning in 2014, hundreds of American cities, as well as entire states have officially renamed the day, and recently it has been celebrated in spectacle in major cities across the U.S.

For this special installment in my Indigenous Voices series, I have decided to pair the history of Indigenous People’s Day with the earliest form of theatre: storytelling. All of the stories you will read come from various tribes in the United States, and each tells its own history in powerful and intricate ways. They highlight the culture of the tribe and lend new perspectives to the creation of the world, war, love, and the relationship mankind has with the Earth. Some of these stories I grew up with, and others found their way to me through literature and conversation. I hope that they bring you as much joy as they have brought me, and I hope that they open your mind to both new and old ways to live with the Earth. Today, we celebrate the people who cared for the land that we now live on, and the cultures that have survived through the worst feats imaginable. But let us not forget that today is also for the people, cultures, and traditions that have been lost through colonization, assimilation, and genocide. These stories are their legacy. 

WHERE THE GIRL SAVED HER BROTHER

CHEYENNE

In the summer of 1876, the two most memorable battles between soldiers and Indians were fought on the plains of Montana. The first fight was called the Battle of the Rosebud. The second, fought about a week later, was called the Battle of Little Bighorn, and is where Colonel Custer was defeated and killed. The Cheyennes called the Battle of the Rosebud the Fight Where the Girl Saved her Brother. 

Three columns of cavalry entered the last stretch of land left to the American Indians, led by Generals Crook, Terry, and Colonel Custer. Crook had about 2,000 men with him, and had artillery and Indian Scouts to guide him. At the Rosebud, he fought the united Siouxand Cheyenne Warriors. On the other side, many proud tribes were there besides the Cheyenne – the Hunkpapa, the Minniconjou, the Oglala, and the Burnt Thighs. Leading the Sioux were the great Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull â€“ what a sight it was to see! As the fight began, Crazy Horse of the Oglala shouted his famous war cry: “A good day to die, and a good day to fight! Cowards to the rear, brave hearts – follow me!”

The fight started. Many brave deeds were done as the battle swayed to and fro. More than anybody else’s, this was the Cheyenne’s fight. Among them was a brave young girl, Buffalo Calf Road Woman, who rode proudly beside her husband, Black Coyote. Her brother, Chief Comes in Sight, fought in the battle too. Searching the chaos, she found him surrounded with his horse killed from under him. Soldiers were aiming their rifles at him while their Crow scouts circled him and waited for an opportunity to strike. But he fought them off with great courage and skill. 

Buffalo Calf Road Woman uttered a piercing, high pitched war cry and raced her horse into the midst of the enemy. Her brother jumped up on her horse behind her as she laughed with joy and the excitement of battle. The soldiers were firing at her, but she moved too fast for her or her brother to be hit. The Indians and soldiers saw what she was doing, and stopped fighting to watch the brave girl saving her brother’s life. The battle was still young and not many men had been killed on either side. But the white general was thinking: If their women fight like this, what will their warriors be like? Even if I win, I will lose half my men. And so General Crook retreated his regiment a hundred miles from the battle. He was to have joined up with Custer, but when Custer had to fight the same Cheyenne and Sioux a week later, Crook was too far away to aid him and Custer’s regiment was wiped out. So, in a way, Buffalo Calf Road Woman contributed to the victory of that battle too. Many who saw what she had done thought that she had achieved the biggest coup of all: not taking a life, but giving it. The memory of her bravery will last as long as there are Indians.

COYOTE PLACES THE STARS

WASCO

There were once five wolves, all brothers, who traveled together. Whatever meat they hunted they would share with Coyote. One evening, Coyote saw the wolves looking up at the sky. 

“What are you looking at up there, my brothers?” asked Coyote.

The youngest wolf turned to the other wolves and said, “Let’s tell Coyote what we see up there. I’m sure he won’t do anything.” 

So they told him: “We see two animals up there. Way up there into the sky, where we cannot reach them.”

“Let’s go up and see them,” said Coyote as he gathered a great number of arrows and began shooting them into the sky. The first arrow stuck in the sky and the second arrow stuck in the first arrow. Each arrow stuck in the end of the one before until there was a great ladder reaching down to the earth. The oldest wolf took his dog with him and they started the climb. For many days and nights they climbed until at last they reached the sky. They stood in the sky and looked over at the two animals… They were two grizzly bears. The younger wolves started towards the bears in curiosity. Only the oldest wolf and his dog held back. When the wolves got near the bears, nothing happened. The wolves sat down and looked at the bears while the bears sat and looked at the wolves. Once the oldest wolf realized it was safe, he too went over with his dog and sat down with them. 

Coyote examined the scene, but he would not go over. That makes a nice picture, thought Coyote. I think I’ll leave it that way for everyone to see. Then when people look at them in the sky they will say, â€œThere’s a story about that picture,” and they will tell a story about me.

So Coyote left, climbed down the ladder, and once down on Earth he admired the arrangement he had left up in the sky. Today, the animals still look the same. They call those stars the Big Dipper now. If you look up there at the sky, you will see the three wolves that make up the handle and the oldest wolf, the one in the middle, still has his dog with him. The two youngest wolves make up part of the bowl under the handle, and the two grizzlies make up the other side, the one that points toward the North Star. 

When Coyote saw how they looked, he wanted to fill the sky with stars. He arranged stars all over the sky in great pictures and then made the Big Road across the sky with the stars he had left. “When I am gone, everyone will look up into the sky and see the stars arranged this way. Tell them I was the one who did that.”

HOW BEAVER STOLE FIRE FROM THE PINES

NEZ PERCE

Before there were any people in the world, the different animals and trees lived and talked together just like human beings. The pine trees had the secret of fire and guarded it carefully, so that no matter how cold it was, they could always warm themselves. During a fiercely cold winter, plan after plan was hatched to discover the pines’ secret, but they were all in vain until Beaver thought up a plan. At a certain place on the Grande Ronde River in Idaho, the pines were about to hold a great council. They had built a large fire to keep warm, with sentinels posted to stop intruders from trying to steal the fire secret. But Beaver had hidden under the bank near the fire, and when a live coal rolled down the bank he seized it and ran as fast as he could.

The pines immediately started after him. Whenever they were close behind, Beaver would dart from side to side to dodge his pursuers. The Grande Ronde River preserves the direction Beaver ran, and this is why it is tortuous and twisted in some parts and straight in others. After running for a long time, the pines grew tired. Most of them halted together on the river banks, where they remain in great numbers to this day. A few pines kept chasing Beaver, but they gave out one after another, and so they remain scattered at intervals along the banks of the river in the places they stopped. 

There was, however, one cedar who ran at the forefront of the pines. He said to the few trees who were still in the chase, “He’s too quick. We can’t catch him, but I’ll go to the top of the hill and see how far ahead he is.” So he ran to the top of the hill, but could not find Beaver. Beaver had crossed the Big Snake River and given fire to some willows, birches, and several other kinds of trees. Since then, all who have wanted fire have gotten it from these particular trees, because they have fire within them and give it up when their wood is rubbed in the ancient way. 

If you look to the top of the hill, near the junction of Grande Ronde and Big Snake rivers, you can still see Cedar standing alone. He is very old, so old that his top is dead but he still stands as a testament to this story’s truth. The old people still point him out to the children as they pass by. “Look,” they say, “that is old Cedar standing in the very spot where he stopped chasing Beaver.”

PUSHING UP THE SKY

SNOHOMISH

The Creator and Changer first made the world in the East and as he slowly came westward, he brought many languages and he gave a different one to each group of people he made. When he reached Puget Sound, he liked it so much that he decided to go no further. But he had many languages left, so he scattered them all around Puget Sound and to the north. That’s why there are so many different Indian languages spoken there. 

Although these people could not talk with each other, none of them were pleased with the way the Creator had made the world. The sky was so low that the tall people bumped their heads against it. The wise men of the different tribes had a meeting and agreed that all the people and animals were to lift the sky and push it upwards. So the wise men sent a message to all the people and animals and told them the day the sky was to be lifted. Everyone made large poles from giant fir trees. They pushed and pushed together until the sky settled into the place it is now. Since then, no one has bumped their head against it, or been able to climb into the Sky World. 

Now, three hunters had been chasing four elks during the meetings and were not aware of the plan. Just as the people and animals were ready to push the sky up, the three hunters and the four elks came to the place where the Earth nearly meets the sky. The elks jumped into the Sky World, and the hunters ran after them. When the sky was lifted, the elks and hunters were lifted too. In the Sky World they were transformed into stars, and at night, even now, you can see them. The three hunters form the handle of the Big Dipper. The middle hunter has his dog with him – now a tiny star – and the four elks make up the bowl of the Big Dipper. Their story lives on and is forever encapsulated in the constellations we still see above us each night.

THE CELESTIAL BEAR* 

IROQUOIS 

A grizzly bear had been terrorizing a small village so three warriors were sent to track, find, and kill the bear. They tracked the bear all the way into the sky where they became trapped. The hunters wounded the bear, and now are memorialized in the stars above. The warriors and bear sit still in the sky as the constellation known as Ursa Major, and the blood of the wounded bear paints the trees red in the fall as the Big Dipper glides across the horizon.

*Ursa Major, my own song, tells the Iroquois story of the Celestial Bear. If you wish to listen to it, you can do so here.

* * *

I would like to acknowledge the book American Indian Myths and Legends, compiled and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, as the reference for some of these stories, and my own library of stories passed down to me. 

For ideas on how you can celebrate Indigneous People’s Day from quarantine, check out this article from Smithsonian Magazine.

(Top image: Chicano students from the University of Wisconsin at Madison protest Columbus Day on October 12, 1992, the Columbus quincentennial. 500 years of resistance, UW-Madison Library Archives.)

This article is part of the Indigenous Voices series.

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GiGi Buddie is an American Indian artist and student studying theatre, with an emphasis in acting, at Pomona College. Whether it be through acting or working in tech, GiGi has dedicated much of her life to the theatre. In the summer of 2019, her passion for art and environmental justice took her to the Baram River in Malaysian Borneo where she, alongside Pomona professors, researched the environmental crisis and how it has been affecting the Indigenous groups that live along the river. As a result of her experience researching and traveling, she student-produced the Pomona College event for Climate Change Theatre Action during the fall 2019 semester.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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