FOUR

REPLANTING A TREE OF PEACE

Naturalizing Relations in an Age of Extinction

TIMOTHY B. LEDUC

Today the Sun dissipated all these clouds to reveal that beautiful Tree of Peace which was already planted on the highest mountain of the earth.

—Wendat Chief Kondiaronk, 1701.¹

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, I have stood many times with my back against a tall strong onerahtase’ko:wa (white pine), letting my urban mind sink into the land. Groves of these tall, straight evergreens stretch across Turtle Island (North America), from the Kaniatarowanenneh (St. Lawrence River) east of Montreal, where I was born, across Lake Ontario, whose shores I currently live on, into the other Great Lakes and southeastern Manitoba. Their green boughs can reach skyward a couple hundred feet, while the branchless space between their straight trunks opens my eyes to lower vistas. Each breath inspires a distinct peace-filled calm, especially in the summer months, when the sandy soil and decomposing pine needles fill the air with a pungent aroma that I wait all year to smell again. When I slow into relation with this presence, stories arise that would not cross my mind without being here.

On this day, I am haunted by the words of Wendat Chief Kondiaronk when he asked those who had gathered on the isle of Montreal in August 1701 to help him lift a tall onerahtase’ko:wa, “that beautiful Tree of Peace which was already planted on the highest mountain of the earth.”² Under these shady boughs, thirty-nine Indigenous nations helped lift up this tree and then listened as French Governor Louis Hector de Callière supported the vision: “I today ratify the peace we have made. I attach my words to the wampum belts I give to each of your nations so that the elders may have them carried out by their young people.”³ After walking through “the darkness of war” for the first century of colonial contact, Kondiaronk wanted to work with others in soothing the pain of loss with a vision that would renew an old story.

The eldest onerahtase’ko:wa can reach five hundred years, an age that gives it a long view on the Tree of Peace that preceded colonial relations and Kondiaronk. Picking up a cluster of pine needles, I am drawn by their number of five to Haudenosaunee stories that tell of five nations who gathered under just such a Tree of Peace. Long before the arrival of colonists, these nations who became the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had been at war and killing each other until the Peacemaker arrived from the north shores of Lake Ontario. This legendary Peacemaker was a Wendat who came to the Haudenosaunee with a vision to bury the weapons of division under a great white pine and to do so in a way that would affirm the unique gifts of each nation. In the words of the late Cayuga Chief Jacob Thomas: “Five bound arrows symbolized the complete union . . . they had bound themselves together in one mind, one body, one head, and one heart to settle all matters.”⁴ A diversity of nations coming into peaceful union would be the source of strength for this Tree of Peace, this onerahtase’ko:wa.

Following the protocols of the land, the negotiations in Montreal were suffused in the teachings of wampum (whelk shell) belts like the Haudenosaunee Gayensra’go:wa (Great Law or Tree of Peace) and the Sewatokwa’tshera’t (Dish with One Spoon), with its white background and purple center. This “big dish” represented all the lands that would be shared through, in Callière’s words, “a misouaine [large spoon] to eat the meat and drink the broth all together.”⁵ In contrast to sharp knives, the misouaine signified the intention to be careful in how the gifts of lands that were held in common and could never be owned were shared.⁶ For Kondiaronk’s Wendat descendent Georges Sioui, this event in Montreal “still serves today as a most significant illustration of one of the most positive expressions of the meeting of the Europeans and Amerindian.”⁷

Figure 4.1. Uprooted white pine. Photo by the author.

Unfortunately, the reality is that from the beginning, the misouaine was not held with care by the French and subsequent generations of Canadians. Over time, I have become haunted by the ancestors of a Montreal peace who are connected to the relations I am trying to reconcile within myself. My mother is French Canadien with connections to Catholic missionaries while my French Canadien father carries ancestral relations to Haudenosaunee and Wendat mission communities along the Kaniatarowanenneh.⁸ My situation highlights one dimension of the truths I am trying to reconcile by reflecting on this colonial story in relation to our present moment of turbulent changes.

A cold north wind swirls me out of this remembrance from an earlier time, when I could still stand under this onerahtase’ko:wa and imagine what might have been with a lifted Montreal Tree of Peace. Now there is only a chill as I stand near a crusty layer of snow and ice that covers the tree’s fallen trunk and a root mound reaching twenty feet in the air. I was guided to continue my relation with this uprooted tree by Haudenosaunee (Cayuga) elder and teacher Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs, who was aware of my history with it; thus, when the tree fell in May 2018 due to an extreme windstorm, she advised me to go there, offer thanks, and listen for what it can still teach. In her culture, the Ganọhọnyọhk (Thanksgiving Address) is a way of expressing gratitude for all the relations that make our lives possible, from the people, to Mother Earth, to the plant medicines, animals, and forests, and all the way up to the celestial bodies and Creator. Giving thanks is the first order in any activity, whether it be treaty negotiations in Montreal or knowledge creation in the midst of a pine.⁹

Standing in the icy hole that remains, I am awed by the extent to which, in four centuries, we have moved from what the Jesuits, who were the translators in Montreal, saw as an uncultivated wilderness into our era of the Anthropocene, a time when nothing is untouched by modern progress and its impacts. The windstorm that toppled this tree also caused four hundred million dollars of damage to surrounding urban areas. Though extreme storms have long been part of these forests, their frequency is increasing. Along the Kaniatarowanenneh, the river’s flow has been altered while many beings are challenged by “habitat fragmentation, pollution and . . . habitat loss.”¹⁰ The average annual temperature has increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius, resulting in ice-cover decreases, precipitation increases, and more extreme storms, with projections of another rise of between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius by 2050.¹¹ All of this will deeply impact many habitats and species. These local changes are a reflection of global climate processes that have led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to state that we must phase out fossil fuels by 2030 to limit catastrophic changes.¹²

We have moved into a time when the effects of modern ways, from intensifying extreme climate events to the expanding losses of habitat and species extinction, can be seen everywhere on the planet. From a Western conservation science perspective, extinction is a term descriptive of an irreversible situation whereby every member of a particular species has died. According to geological studies of the Earth, there have been various periods of time when a mass extinction of biological beings (plants, insects, and animals) has occurred due to various natural phenomena, and today we are undergoing what scientists describe as our planet’s “sixth mass extinction event,” due this time to industrial, modern, and colonial expansions.¹³ This uprooting of so many relations who are honored in the Thanksgiving Address is the central concern of this book, and for me, the stories of the Montreal Tree of Peace offer one way of seeing the colonial depths of these losses.

The ghosts that gather around me at this fallen tree offer a different view on the roots of extinction and on the spirit needed to sustain a response to so much loss. The words of Gae Ho Hwako reverberate: “When we see everything as a resource, we lose that sense of what is sacred in our everyday lives. We forget the importance of Thanksgiving, and thus uncertainty and confusion grows for future generations.”¹⁴ Extinction and climate change arise, in her perspective, from broken cultural protocols that were meant to guide human ways of relating with the world that sustains us. She is not alone in this view, as a recent special volume on Indigenous peoples and extinction highlights: “From many Indigenous perspectives, addressing existential threats to lifeforms means remaking protocols and repairing relations through direct engagements with more-than-human communities in the specific places where these bonds are made and broken.”¹⁵

In the wake of giving thanks to this uprooted tree, I cannot help but notice the array of trees that lie across the ravines around me. These are not simply the result of the increase in extreme windstorms in the area but also of an urban forest canopy that is more open to the sky due to growing human pressures. With each new opening, the forest and its community of relations becomes more vulnerable to the intensifying storms. Sitting with these changes, I cannot help but think about what Deborah Bird Rose learned with her Indigenous teachers from Australia about extinction today. With more species departing than coming into creation and more habitats becoming vulnerable, she says we are becoming intimate with a new kind of “double death” that is “unravelling the work of generation upon generation of living beings.”¹⁶ Those modern and colonial processes that have been bringing about the death and extinction of species are now far outstripping the capacity of habitats, like this urban forest, and the Earth itself to renew in the face of unrelenting, ever-growing modern pressures.

The “Anthropocene,” Rose writes, “is bringing us into a new era of solitude, one marked less by our fragmented vision of ourselves than by the actual loss of co-evolved life.”¹⁷ But there is another dimension to this issue that I sense in these roots. The gratitude that I have learned to offer at this onerahtase’ko:wa is also being unraveled, and with such lost relations, our capacity to envision a way out may be constricted. As I note in these pages, the relational nature of our double death moment means that the current dwindling of capacities to renew in the face of accruing losses can also be seen to have internal dimensions for us—individually, culturally, and spiritually. There is a tension I am concerned with here between the legacy of religion as a colonizing force that is related to extinction dynamics and the potential of “religious” ceremonies like the Thanksgiving Address in fostering viable ways of living relationally. The story of what was offered in the Montreal Tree of Peace and its subsequent rejection have slowly unraveled for me teachings about the intertwining of extinction and religion and how we are ancestrally entangled in our double death times.

Figure 4.2. Red-tailed hawk feather. Photo by the author.

A coarse call followed by squeals of fledglings draws my eyes up to the flash of a red-tailed hawk’s feathers gliding into the nest atop a neighboring onerahtase’ko:wa about twenty meters to the south. Looking up at this soaring presence, I recall Jacob Thomas’s teaching about how an eagle sits atop the Tree of Peace, serving as a guardian who can see “far into the distance.”¹⁸ Eagles are at home in a variety of forest habitats, where they nest in tall trees, often near the hunting grounds of a large lake or river like the Kaniatarowanenneh flowing around Montreal. With the gift of high flight and keen vision, the eagle—shöndahkwa’ in Kondiaronk’s Wendat language—is responsible for warning people when danger approaches that may threaten the peace.

Kondiaronk could see the importance of renewing such a broad vision, especially after having witnessed many of his Wendat communities “die out through war and epidemics.”¹⁹ Born in 1625, he was a child when the Jesuits came to live among the Wendat in the 1620s and created their first mission, Sainte-Marie-Aux-Pays-Des-Hurons (Wendat), in 1632. In the words of Jesuit Father Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, “The missionaries were convinced that by fixing the Centre of their Missions in a Country (Wendake) which was at once the Centre of Canada, it would be easy for them to carry the Light of the Gospel to every part of this vast Continent.”²⁰ Across the river from Montreal, the Jesuit mission to the Haudenosaunee (Mohawk) of Caughnawaga (Kahnawá:ke) experienced similar dynamics as converts were separated from their communities so as to uproot cultural ways that were seen as sinful. But without the suffering and confusion brought by the epidemics, the Jesuits would have had limited success. As Indigenous peoples had no previous contact with smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, millions died, with some nations experiencing a 75 percent loss.²¹ While some colonials used smallpox-infected blankets as weapons to further political interests, the Jesuits simply saw the unfortunate upheaval as divine confirmation of their mission.

The winds still carry the hope-filled words offered by Kondiaronk as he asked those gathered to help “dissipate all these clouds” while moving through the loss of his own life. As Kondiaronk was “mortally sick from an epidemic disease which . . . was raging in the Montreal region,” his words “moved many people to tears, even his lifetime enemies, the Iroquois, the very ones who, the next day, carried his coffin and performed the traditional Hodenosaunee Condolence ceremony for their departed brother, Kondiaronk.”²² Callière ordered a state funeral that began with a silent procession along the streets with thirteen hundred Indigenous delegates and most of the village’s two thousand habitants watching as they entered Notre Dame de Montreal. The multifaith ceremony had been initiated by Kondiaronk, who had requested that Haudenosaunee Condolence and French Catholic funeral rites be observed out of an intention “to create unity between all traditions present.”²³

In using his own death as a means to heal disrupted relations by weaving together elements of both Indigenous and French ceremonies, Kondiaronk was drawing from a central teaching of the original Tree of Peace. The Haudenosaunee story told by Gae Ho Hwako tells of a Peacemaker who traveled south from his Wendat homelands to bring a message of peace to five nations who were killing each other.²⁴ While on this journey, he came across a man, Ayenwatha, at the forest edge of a village and could hear him grieving the loss of his daughters. The Peacemaker approached and repeated with care the words he heard Ayenwatha speak, then wiped his tears, gave water to clear his throat, and used an eagle feather to clean his ears. As Ayenwatha began to feel better, the Peacemaker asked him to help bring peace to others who were also lost in this violence. Approaching the forest edge of other communities, they offered this Condolence ceremony to those who needed to be heard and renewed, and thus the Haudenosaunee Confederacy “buried their weapons beneath a Great Tree of Peace.”²⁵

What seems to my modern mind to simply be a political negotiation in Montreal was wrapped up in a ceremony that had a more spirited intention. I can almost see Miskouensa of the Fox nation approach the French donning a white powdered wig and a red-painted face along with others who wore hats and embraced other European styles. Miskouensa had, in the words of the Jesuits, “made himself an ornament of it to follow the French manner . . . and, wanting to show that he knew how to act, he saluted the Chevalier de Callière with it.”²⁶ The Indigenous intention, Gilles Havard explains, was “to appropriate otherness in order to eradicate it”; to enact ways of “adopting them [colonials] as their own.”²⁷ On the surface, the French reciprocated, as Callière attached his words to wampum belts he gifted to the nations to convey respect for the protocols of these lands.

Despite the intention to share that was indicated by the Sewatokwa’tshera’t, it would not take long for some to sense the semiconcealed sharp words of disrespect carried by French officials like the Jesuit missionaries who translated in Montreal. As Charlevoix reported in the Jesuit Relations following the Tree of Peace agreement: “This ceremony, as serious as it was for the Savages, was for the French a kind of comedy, which they enjoyed very much.”²⁸ Speaking directly to the adoptive actions of Miskouensa, Charlevoix wrote, “We could not help but burst out laughing . . . [at] his horrible and ridiculous appearance.”²⁹ An air of European superiority is what many Jesuits carried with them as they learned the Indigenous languages and established missions. In contrast to the Indigenous intention to share the land, this dismissive attitude was connected to a view of those same lands as a “menacing wilderness” that was home to sauvages who were “like the uncultivated landscape.”³⁰

Noticing a few white-rust plumes that had fallen from the nest above, I recall that in Kondiaronk’s Wendat culture, the high-soaring guardian clan is represented by the hawk, yändehsonhk. But as Sioui clarifies, this being is broader than modern taxonomies. The clan’s origin story “does not describe the bird ruler as a hawk, but as ‘the Ruler or Mighty Chief of all the Eagles, Hawks, Owls, and other birds of prey’”; it is this “Big Bird” who came into relation with the human spirit to cocreate the beings we relate with as hawks, eagles, and others.³¹ While onerahtase’ko:wa and yändehsonhk are viewed in modern times as primarily natural phenomena or mental symbols that hold some abstract meaning and potential use value,³² they carry something else in many Indigenous traditions. As Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. explains, “there are no symbols in the Western sense” being held up in an Indigenous ceremony like the multifaith Condolence that suffused Montreal.³³ Rather, in this context, a Tree of Peace with soaring yändehsonhk “represents” the ceremonial opening of space for “spirit(s)” to attend “in the same way that people represent an interest group.”³⁴

In trying to approach the spirit of Montreal, it is helpful to consider how critical anthropologist Nurit Bird-David shifts earlier dismissive perspectives on animism toward a “relational epistemology.” The classic anthropological definition of animism as a mistaken personification of nature was limited by Western assumptions like those of an objective observer rationally distanced from phenomena—assumptions knotted with the European sense of cultural and racial superiority that distances them from Indigenous relations. In contrast, Bird-David shows that people “do not first personify other entities and then socialize with them but personify them as, when, and because [they] socialize with them.”³⁵ A clan animal or sacred tree is much more than a symbolic association but rather reflects how Indigenous peoples “engage in and maintain relationships with other beings” and, through these acts, “make them ‘relatives’ by sharing with them.”³⁶ A relational epistemology, a ceremony like the Thanksgiving Address guides us to talk with trees and animals rather than objectively dissecting them, and this quality of behavior is how we come to know and live with each other peacefully

On a now faded yellow parchment, the Jesuit translators documented the French understanding of the Montreal Tree of Peace. It begins with a preamble by Callière that concludes with the words: “I invite you all to smoke this calumet [pipe] . . . and to eat the meat and broth that I have had prepared for you.”³⁷ The oral speeches of the Indigenous representatives were affirmed in pictograph signatures that represent their name, nation, or clan association. The clan animals many signed with attach them to “a way of life in terms of character and respect” and thus can help people “learn how to comfort and support one another during times of need.”³⁸ A crane was drawn by the Ojibwa delegate to reflect the fact that it was “the most prestigious clan and thus the one overseeing relations with the Europeans.”³⁹ Others drew thunderbirds, sturgeon, a wading bird, a turtle, and a host of other animals, all of which have connections to images on older rock carvings and birch-bark scrolls.

In the wake of death, Kondiaronk signed the agreement with an image that represented the meaning of his name and was also evoked in the epitaph for his burial at Notre Dame: “Cy git Le Rat, chef des Hurons” (Here lies the Muskrat, chief of the Hurons).⁴⁰ His name calls to mind the shared Wendat and Haudenosaunee origin stories about Sky Woman’s fall from the spirit world and the pivotal role Muskrat played in helping life flourish.⁴¹ It is said that as she fell from above, a host of marsh birds carried her softly from the heights onto the back of Turtle. Meanwhile, a council of marsh animals realized the survival of spirit here depended on retrieving mud from the depths. In many versions, the great lodge builder Beaver and swift Otter made the first attempts with no success, and then Muskrat, the weakest and most modest of the deep divers, asked to try. After a long absence, his dead body floated to the surface, his paws holding the sacred mud that life needed to be planted. Now on the edge of death, Le Rat also carried forth teachings about death, humility, and how the “weakest are sometimes the most capable.”⁴²

Back in the present, the signature call of a red-tailed hawk—kee-eeeee-arr—reminds me to let myself be drawn into the spiritual ecology of this onerahtase’ko:wa treaty, an agreement more mysterious than the political, economic, and symbolic assumptions of land treaties in the colonial and modern mind. The Montreal Tree of Peace does not signify some kind of transfer of land ownership or war alliance as is often assumed but rather clarifies the responsibilities I need to uphold if I am to help foster peace across human, ecological, and cosmological communities. To violate this agreement is to undermine the relational spirit of a Sewatokwa’tshera’t; this is exactly what the colonial missions began doing, thereby contributing to our era of mass extinction. To follow the keen sight of yändehsonhk on the roots of our present moment, I need to look more closely at what my French Canadien ancestors and Catholic religion brought across the ocean to Montreal and Turtle Island.

Figure 4.3. Montreal Tree of Peace treaty, signed August 4, 1701. Archives nationales de France, Fonds de colonies, CIIA, vol. 19, folios 41–44. Courtesy of National Archives of Canada.

We are in a world where, as Sioui writes, “life triumphs without eliminating death,” a place that “is supremely beautiful and good, but also harsh, mysterious, and dangerous.”⁴³ His words reverberate as I look back on the mound and recall first noticing an oak sapling of about twenty feet intertwined in the roots of the fallen onerahtase’ko:wa. It lies parallel about five feet away from the trunk I stand upon. For the first couple years, the oak’s leaves remained green over the summer and into the autumn, its roots still intact. But as the mound’s soil dried and stressful times took their toll, this life also departed. Something in these entangled roots haunts me with older stories from before Kondiaronk’s vision and birth—religious stories about origins and the role of death in how we have come to live amid so much loss.

“Every living being on this continent might have shuddered with foreboding when that first tiny sail appeared over the Atlantic horizon.”⁴⁴ This is how Catholic ecotheologian Thomas Berry describes the fateful meeting that brought a storm of change to Turtle Island. Contemplating the origin of this situation, he concludes that those on the European ships brought with them a desire to transcend natural relations and thus turn away from creation. It is a tendency that Berry observes both in his Catholic tradition and in the materialistic consumerism that is prevalent today. While there are sustainable alternatives viable in Christianity for Berry and others in this book, there is also a clear pattern of uprooting tendencies that I want to reflect on more fully before returning to what this all means for living in an era of extinction.

Kondiaronk was a child in 1636 when the now-canonized saint Jean de Brébeuf was guiding the mission of Sainte-Marie while translating and transcribing the Wendat creation story of Sky Woman’s fall. Sioui describes this rendition as an accurate telling of life’s sacred origin, including the fall from the Sky World to Turtle’s back, but notes that it is told with that tone of superiority Charlevoix displayed in Montreal.⁴⁵ This can be seen as Brébeuf tells of Sky Woman having a daughter and eventually two grandsons who help to cocreate all life, including our human ancestors. His difficulty was that there was no male present for conception to occur. “If you ask them how this could happen, you will make them very uncomfortable,” Brébeuf wrote, adding that if pressed, they will say “she was pregnant” before the fall.⁴⁶ Blocking the path to a meeting of minds around this mysterious (virgin) origin were various beliefs, including the male-centered and universalizing Christian view of such an event as exclusive to the Christian savior.

Contrasting the progressive evolutionary view of our modern era, the Jesuits inherited a Wild Man myth common to Europe that suggested Indigenous peoples in the Old Testament past had separated from their origins in the Judeo-Christian tradition.⁴⁷ This extended separation fostered their wild descent away from Biblical teachings. For the Jesuits, the belief in this common origin was discernable in various cross-cultural similarities. For example, the fall and virgin birth in the Christian tradition had a certain resonance with Sky Woman’s fall and virgin birthing of creation. Brébeuf also noted a similarity in the appreciation both traditions have for the heavens and the sun as representations of divinity, but he critically clarified his view: “There are some indications . . . that in the past they had some knowledge of the true God that was more than merely natural.”⁴⁸ In other words, a descent away from “the true” faith had occurred, and in this context, these similarities were then utilized with the arrival of colonial epidemics like those that killed Chief Kondiaronk as a means to reverse this descent through conversion. Bringing this colonial tendency forward in time, Bird-David highlights how subsequent generations of anthropologists also disregarded the relational cosmologies of Indigenous peoples, but this time it was because they were seen as representing earlier developmental forms of cultures that were on the way to becoming modern.⁴⁹

Despite the change from regressive to progressive views, what remains unquestioned is the fundamental belief in the European conception of civilization as being culturally superior—a view that lacks the humility of Le Rat (Kondiaronk). Wanting to understand the origin of these tendencies, Berry goes back to the Black Death that plagued fourteenth-century Europe with a one-third loss of the population.⁵⁰ Over a couple of centuries, the spread of disease interacted with the climate changes of a Little Ice Age that brought cool wet weather that impacted harvests. These interactive changes increased the death toll to the point that whole communities disappeared.⁵¹ The response of European power structures to the uncertainty was, in Berry’s words, to increase “control of the physical world to escape its pain and to increase its utility to human society.”⁵² Supporting this view is David Herlihy’s study of the Black Death that identified a cluster of trends, including “more intensive use of capital, a more powerful technology, and a higher standard of living” for survivors.⁵³ These dynamics informed innovations like the construction of ocean-crossing ships that would foster ways of transcending natural relations—ways that would fuel colonial violence.

To engineer the oceangoing vessels, larger oaks were grown in open spaces so as to expand hulls that could carry back to Europe more resources and wealth that would temporarily buffer a fear of death and loss of control.⁵⁴ It is from these colonial ships that the English term bottom came into common use to describe broad deep hulls; in time, it was also connected to shallow individuals “having no bottom.”⁵⁵ The straight trunks of the onerahtase’ko:wa from Turtle Island were also harvested as tall masts for the oak-hulled ships. Their strength, straight height of up to two hundred feet, and sparse lower branches made them ideal for the European navies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,⁵⁶ and as such, the oldest were harvested. A carrier of peace was converted into a resource for colonial nation-building that would relentlessly violate the values of the Montreal Tree of Peace.

Cupping my hand around the oak’s slender trunk, I can see the young roots were not given time to reach any depth. This shallowness speaks not only to the desire to appropriate wealth but also to a fear of strangers that intensified with the uncertainty and loss of the Black Death. Scapegoating those who were different grew to be more common as Europe became embroiled in the Inquisition, which saw many women tortured and killed, particularly if they still practiced land-based traditions of Indigenous Europe in a Christian context.⁵⁷ This was soon followed by “the violent wrenching of African people away from their homes to become slaves in the New World” and the colonial conversion of Turtle Island.⁵⁸ It is in this context that the Jesuit missions first emerged among the Wendat, when Kondiaronk was a child.

The conversion of Indigenous peoples intensified into the modern era as Jesuit missions mutated into a Canadian residential school system run by various Christian orders and denominations. Their intent is hauntingly epitomized in the 1920 words of then Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs and national poet Duncan Campbell Scott: “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.”⁵⁹ As with the preceding missions, the focus was on swooping up the land’s wealth by uprooting children from mothers, family, culture, and land. Speaking of the residential school system, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission states: “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”⁶⁰

From fish and fur to forests, minerals, and energy (hydro and oil), resource extraction has been connected to Canadian identity since colonial times. The nation’s political and economic expansion followed an east-west line that began with the canoe passages of the Kaniatarowanenneh, Great Lakes, and waterways westward; these were in time industrialized and modernized. Subsequent initiatives were often financed by colonial governments, as epitomized in the building of canal systems and then railways that instituted the “transfer of large areas tributary to the fur trade to the new industrialism.”⁶¹ According to Harold Innis’s classic analysis, Canada’s historic focus on staples reflected “an economically weak country” whose wealth and character depended on providing resources to a more industrialized Europe and later the United States.⁶² These origins have continued to paralyze Canada, which oscillates between taking a leadership role in the 2016 Paris Climate Treaty and fighting Indigenous/environmental protests of oil pipelines.

There is so much more to Kondiaronk’s Montreal vision of a Sewatokwa’tshera’t than the unending cornucopia of resources desired by colonial and then modern nations. Without Turtle offering a back, Muskrat (Le Rat) deep diving for mud, and the gifts of many others, Sky Woman would not have found a place to plant the life she carried from above. As Potawatomi environmental scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, Sky Woman did “not come empty-handed,” as “grasses, flowers, trees, and medicines spread everywhere.”⁶³ These cocreative acts are consistent with a relational epistemology that Bird-David tells us assumes “as human agents appropriate their shares they secure further sharing.”⁶⁴ This is the vital source of the Sewatokwa’tshera’t, and this is what was being renewed with the planting of a Montreal Tree of Peace by Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Fox, French, and many others, including Kimmerer’s ancestor, Potawatomi Chief Onanguicé, who offered support from “all the nations of Lake Huron.”⁶⁵

Looking at the bottomless ship’s ever-expansive desire to consume and uproot relations, Kimmerer offers an Indigenous diagnosis of the same estrangement observed by Berry: we have become windigo. This shadowy presence is described in Anishinaabe tradition as having an insatiable hunger for human flesh and is linguistically rooted in “‘fat excess’ or ‘thinking only of oneself.’”⁶⁶ Drawing on ecological science, Kimmerer tells us that windigo embodies a positive feedback loop wherein its hunger fosters more eating; it is never satisfied, and the greed grows into “an eventual frenzy of uncontrolled consumption.”⁶⁷ While the stabilizing nature of negative feedback loops tends toward decreasing hunger by promoting a dynamic balance, the fear-based windigo disease grows relentlessly almost in lockstep response to the way it destabilizes relations. The relational epistemology described by Bird-David and practiced in Indigenous ceremonies like the Thanksgiving Address is in this sense meant to align our ways of living with creation and thus inoculates people from the fear and isolation of becoming windigo.

In the midst of these knotted roots, it is clear various events fostered the spreading estrangement that has progressed into the extinction crisis of our time. While Berry highlights the Black Death, others delineate different key moments. Paul Shepard connects it with the dawn of agriculture,⁶⁸ and Haudenosaunee scholar John Mohawk roots it in a succession of Western philosophies that emphasize abstracted human ideals over natural relations.⁶⁹ Complementing these views are ecofeminists like Val Plumwood and Vandana Shiva, who outline a system of intersecting dualities in Western culture (e.g., male/female, civilized/Indigenous, society/nature, spirit/creation) that have fostered hierarchical violence against the most marginalized.⁷⁰ This is today epitomized in the experience of Indigenous women who are the traditional center of their matrilineal cultures and have thus suffered the brunt of colonial impacts,⁷¹ as documented by Canada’s 2019 National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.⁷² Intersecting with this gendered and racial violence is the Indigenous connection to land and the related losses that are still escalating in today’s environmental changes.

Circling the mound once more, I notice the oak’s presence is almost impossible to detect amid the numerous tendrils of the elder onerahtase’ko:wa. Colonial missions and extinction are knotted in these tangled roots. One cluster tells of the first Jesuit missions and their transformation into Canadian residential schools and a contemporary child welfare system that continues to sever Indigenous children from culture and land. Then, in the blink of an eye, I am drawn to an interconnected tangle that tells of animal and plant species that are being displaced by our ever-growing desire to consume. What makes this all so troubling for Kimmerer is the way this windigo disease seeps into our lives through these disruptions, thus making us “all complicit.”⁷³ We are being suffocated by assumptions and systems that choke out the capacity to imagine different ways of relating in this world.

Drawing my eyes up from these intertwined roots once more is the flashing red tail of a yändehsonhk. A century of urbanization around the Kaniatarowanenneh and Great Lakes impacted the bald eagle that for a long time watched over these lands and the Tree of Peace. By the 1980s, a combination of habitat loss due to shoreline development, deforestation, bioaccumulation of pollutants like DDT, and hunting had led to their local extinction in Ontario and reduction to six nesting pairs in Quebec.⁷⁴ To be clear, bioscientists usually employ the term extinction in reference to the total loss of a species from the planet, but from a relational epistemology perspective, the complete localized loss of a relation and its gifts is an extinction of relational potentiality for ecology and culture. It is in this sense that the colonial violence against Indigenous peoples has coincided with the extinction of many local relations that are vital to cultural and ecological integrity.

While environmental cleanup and reintroduction programs eventually changed the local Endangered status of the bald eagle to that of a species of Special Concern in Canada as they began returning to these lands, their sensitivity to ecological changes have led conservationists to describe them “as a bio-sentinel species” whose health reliably indicates “the health of aquatic ecosystems.”⁷⁵ Even the absence of the bald eagle flying overhead is like the haunting whisper of a guardian yändehsonhk warning that peace for all is endangered—that if the double death diagnosed by Rose comes to outstrip the vitality of life’s renewal, we are all in trouble. From this perspective, we can think about global “extinction” as a continuum of relational losses that range from localized dimensions that can be temporary (as has been the case with the bald eagle), to the complete and permanent global extinction of a species, to mass extinction, to the more extreme double death.

As I rub the dried ground from one curved root of the onerahtase’ko:wa, I am called back to Kondiaronk’s multifaith Condolence ceremony as a reflection on what is needed to carry up the much-needed grief-soaked mud from the depths. At the core of this ceremony is a recognition that “a person in grief is not in their right mind . . . [they cannot] treat others with the kindness and respect necessary for peace.”⁷⁶ Those who sailed across the ocean were searching for the safety of resources and wealth, and thus, such a relational peace would be difficult to plant without cultural healing. In the words of Berry, his and my Catholic ancestors “might have learned from the peoples here how to establish a viable relationship with the forests” but instead could only see a land that needed “to be conquered and brought under human and Christian discipline.”⁷⁷ Being out of “their right mind,” those at the helm of the colonial ship chose missionizing behaviors that have fueled a still-intensifying windigo storm of loss relations, extinctions, and double death rather than being adopted to the Sewatokwa’tshera’t that holds this now fallen tree.

Figure 4.4. Sewatokwa’tshera’t (Dish with One Spoon) wampum belt. Photo by the author.

Each winter’s erratic oscillation through heavy snow, -30 degrees Celsius weather, and quick melts takes its toll on the onerahtase’ko:wa; its remaining green needles first brown and then simply fall before decomposing. As for the oak, spring continued renewing its first buds for a couple years, but the fact that it was rooted in an eroding mound of soil meant this was borrowed time. In the presence of these dying roots, it is difficult to sense what could have been if the gift of being adopted to these lands, as modeled by Kondiaronk and Miskouensa, had been received with Muskrat humility. While French officials followed these land protocols by imitating the gestures of Indigenous representatives, Havard concludes that “they were imitating the Other only for the purpose of manipulation.”⁷⁸ Affirming this recognition does not lead to the assessment that Kondiaronk and Miskouensa were naive of colonial intentions. Rather, the living religious cosmologies that they and others etched on the Montreal parchment inclined them toward “adopting” rather than subjugating allies and thus needed to be affirmed even in the face of colonial disregard and violence.

What was offered to my French Canadien ancestors in Montreal was an opportunity to bring their roots into relation with all the beings of the Sewatokwa’tshera’t, and the death of Kondiaronk modeled the existential spirit of this giving act. I can hear this intention reverberating through time as Sioui advises Indigenous people “to get busy with the task of . . . Indigenizing the non-Indian society, and thereby avoid what is coming our way if we keep on with this linear thinking, this path of destruction.”⁷⁹ To sign this agreement was to spiritually commit to an adoptive process that is akin to what Kimmerer describes as becoming “naturalized to place.” As she explains, this means relearning “to live as if this is the land that feeds you. . . . Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.”⁸⁰ There is an inclusive spirit being expressed in the adoptive intention of Montreal that is vitally different from the universalizing approach to colonial conversions.

As I contemplate this sense of adoption, my attention is drawn from the uprooted tree to a new growth of plants, including the broad-leaved common plantain that comes from European shores. While this plant carries antimicrobial medicinal properties useful as a poultice for wounds, this is not the only reason it is today included in Indigenous medicine bundles, according to Kimmerer. The common plantain has found a niche among the land’s original inhabitants. It carries a cultural medicine that models for settlers how to be adopted or “naturalized” into local relations, to “give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.”⁸¹ So while Indigenous people are responding to the colonial storm by decolonizing and creating space for their Indigenous cultural renewal, those of colonial descent are called to take in this plantain medicine to renew their gifts and responsibilities to what was rejected in Montreal.

A sign of what taking the plantain’s medicine looks like can be seen in the apology of the United Church of Canada to Indigenous nations for its role in the residential schools and colonialism: “We tried to make you like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. . . . We ask you to forgive us.”⁸² Considering what such an apology means for a faith that promoted universalizing conversions, Marilyn Legge asks whether Christianity can “attempt to disentangle churches from a concept of mission as ‘civilizing’” and wonders if we can “reframe [the] mission in terms of negotiating our place in ‘the family of things,’ to discover how to live in right relation.”⁸³ This was the hope of Kondiaronk and Miskouensa as they modeled what it means to appropriate otherness by asking the French to bring their gifts into these relations—a transformative process that recognizes death’s role in reconciliation and renewal. In this sense, the missions of capital R Religion that prioritize particular institutions and dogmas as holding “the truth” need to be pruned back into “right relation,” and this may partly entail reviving small r religious practices that can foster Le Rat’s humble sense of our place in relation to the gifts of others under the Tree of Peace envisioned in Montreal.⁸⁴

Beyond the mound with its patches of plantain, I can see spreading into the ravine the nonindigenous garlic mustard that at the height of summer will sprawl over the forest floor. Just as the expansion of modern systems creates less space for biodiversity and leads to the loss of many species, garlic mustard expands its range by poisoning the soil and spreading roots that crowd out native plants. For Kimmerer, this invasive presence carries teachings about the difficulty of pruning windigo ways, for the act of trying to pull out its roots actually fosters garlic mustard’s proliferation. I can sense these choking knots in the expanding colonial missions; in the growth of my Canadian social work profession through residential schools and a child welfare system that is composed of more than 50 percent Indigenous children,⁸⁵ in the economization of conservation responses to our climate of extinction,⁸⁶ in the way increasing natural disasters foster what some refer to as “disaster capitalism,”⁸⁷ and, as Lisa Sideris’s chapter in this book explains, in the wonder of a de-extinction technology that upholds modern assumptions of unending technological prowess over relational responsibilities.

I recall that it is through lifelong relations with the bald eagle or yändehsonhk that Indigenous stories teach of their roles as a peace-guardian whose broad vision is needed to hold in check appropriative behaviors. In a similar spirit, some Western mystics describe the eagle as being kin to those messengers known as angels, who, in the earliest texts, had elemental associations with wind, heat, and all-seeing eyes.⁸⁸ For the fifth-century elder of Christian mysticism Dionysius the Areopagite, the eagle is a “representative” of the “swift in flight, and quickness, and wariness, and agility, and cleverness in search of the nourishment which makes strong; and the unimpeded, straight, and unflinching gaze towards the bounteous and brilliant splendor of the divine rays of the sun.”⁸⁹ A line of Christian mystics, such as St. Teresa of Avila, subsequently experienced the broad vision of this guardian: “This powerful Eagle rising and bearing you up on its wings . . . carries [us] away you know not where.”⁹⁰

Opening to such heights humbles our limited knowledge so we can walk in the world with an unknowing spirit, a via negativa that, with some decolonizing, can perhaps foster a naturalizing capacity. For Dionysius, the spiritual heights inspired by the eagle would bring one to an unknowing of our knowledge and of the relations from which that knowledge arises. In his words, since the Creator is “the Cause of all beings, we should posit and ascribe to it all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and, more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being.”⁹¹ Meanwhile, the Indigenous approach of yändehsonhk similarly offers a broader vision for unknowing many beliefs that can impact our relations, but the engagement of spirit occurs in the context of our created relations and not outside them. We need a guardian vision for unknowing that which can limit us and the broader peace, but this is to be done as a means for deepening our relations with the medicines of the animals represented in clans or plants like the plantain.

Rather than as a via negativa, perhaps we can conceive this unknowing approach through our relations as a kind of via naturaliza. I can sense this potential in the “briny watery depths” that Kate Rigby descends into in her chapter. The oceans are suffering from pollution, a loss of life, and the extinction of species, and Rigby draws out some ancestral roots of these impacts in Christianity’s “dread and loathing of the watery deep,” which came into prominence in the second century CE with “the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo” and its belief in divine omnipotence and the “hierarchical (and highly gendered) spirit-matter dualism.” But simply critiquing these limitations is not her primary concern. Looking for an alternative to creatio ex nihilo, Rigby follows Catherine Keller and related feminist, liberation, and via negativa theologies in describing a vision of creatio continuo ex profundis—“a theology of continuous cocreation . . . [that calls] those made in the divine image to act creatively, compassionately, and justly to help sustain the potential for continued cobecoming.”⁹² Swimming into those dark briny depths like Kondiaronk and bringing up some mud ultimately requires leaving behind much, though not all, of what we hold dear.

In the presence of the fallen tree, the via naturaliza teachings I sense around me do not ask us to leave the body of this world for some transcendent spiritual ideal. Rather, we are called to unknow many assumptions, beliefs and practices of our modern lives so as to foster a continuous cobecoming or cocreation. A ceremonial spirit is needed to energize this work, and it is in this way that I attend the yändehsonhk guardian above me. Powerful ceremonies are meant to broaden our vision so we can see all that we need to die to if we are to live a more peaceful life on these lands. Much in modern society needs to be made smaller, composted to the language of where we live. So much of what the modern mind thought was certain increasingly seems incompatible with the sharing of the Sewatokwa’tshera’t. This is apparent in the localized losses of many relations that were once directly or indirectly represented on the yellowing parchment of the Montreal Tree of Peace, but added to these losses is the global extinction of species and habitats. Beyond this is what Rose describes as double death, an emotion-filled time of escalating losses that is marked by the way death is seemingly eclipsing the capacity of life to renew. We need a vision not only for seeing all this but also for staying with the grief-soaked pain that will arise when we do so—a via naturaliza.

The adoption enacted in Montreal attempted to “appropriate the otherness” of colonists in an effort to encourage them to bring their cultural ways into relation with the Tree of Peace, which needs everyone to lift it up. It is a violation to convert others and to appropriate the culture and religious practices of another. Rather than taking up specific Indigenous ceremonies, as a French Canadien, I can learn from “Indigenous worldviews” about the values they model.⁹³ While I have long appreciated hearing stories of the Haudenosaunee Tree of Peace and Condolence ceremony, I am more rooted when learning about a Montreal Tree of Peace that I was never formally educated about and yet grounds all my ancestors. By renewing these roots, I can listen carefully to the earlier stories of a Tree of Peace and focus on the values they contain and what they teach about approaching a via naturaliza of my cultural responsibilities in this cocreation.

By coming to this onerahtase’ko:wa in a spirit of thanksgiving, I learn that our vision of what we rationally know becomes broadened by a heart warmed with gratitude for our relations. I am reminded of Gae Ho Hwako’s Haudenosaunee approach to imagination as “a homing device for finding a way into the sacred unity of time, mind, spirit, and place.”⁹⁴ In contrast to the dominant modern view of nature as a resource, many Indigenous people approach “this mysterious energy differently, by recognizing it first in personalities, then in the motions of the natural world.”⁹⁵ A personal relation with this sacred energy is fostered as we embody Muskrat’s humility, the broad vision of the yändehsonhk, the medicine of the plantain, or the sharing of the Sewatokwa’tshera’t. The acts enshrined in the Montreal Tree of Peace are relational, not symbolic. To emphasize this point, Deloria notes the tendency for Western symbols to lose their “potency primarily when we become over-familiar” and wear them out, whereas Indigenous traditions foster ways of relating wherein “spirit can intervene to remove the power from the ceremony or withhold the representatives of that power.”⁹⁶ Many modern symbols have stopped being renewed through a lively ritual relation with their source in a mysterious cocreation. From this perspective, I cannot help but agree with James Hatley that the term extinction “proves itself to be antiseptic and distant,” a word symbolic of “policies and lists, when one determines dates and definitions.”⁹⁷

If I recall the many representatives on that faded Montreal parchment, I begin to sense the relational depth and profound mystery that goes so far beyond what an antiseptic term like extinction can evoke. Each time I watch a muskrat swim by in the pond not far from this tree, I remember the need to humbly bring up the mud of life with our own death. The glimpse of red tails above reminds me of the bald eagle I have yet to see return to these lands and the importance of coming to a broader vision of my place and responsibility in all this. There is a generative spirit that comes with living with familiar yet autonomous relations and that is not expected of modern nation-states and corporations focused on controlling creation so as to accrue wealth and political power. Rather than encouraging a world built on the shaky foundation of unending economic growth and fixed national borders, the Sewatokwa’tshera’t affirms that multiple nations and species can learn to share lands in ways that are culturally and ecologically unique yet mutually beneficial. The only control I have in this quality of creation is the discipline of returning to this fallen tree to offer thanks, opening internal space by evoking a via naturaliza, and then following the relational imaginings.

Our unfolding knowledge depends on a cosmos that is responsive to how we embody values like sharing, respect, humility, and peace in our acts. The physical benefits of affirming such a relational cosmology can be seen today in research on the positive health effects of being intimate with a diversity of natural realities, from green spaces, to water, to mud.⁹⁸ What becomes clear as I spend time with this fallen tree is that these natural capacities are extended through the practices of Indigenous ceremonies like Condolence or Thanksgiving. Such acts are meant to nurture our flowing connection to the vital energy of life as we become “active participants in this wholeness.”⁹⁹ They renew our knowledge, inform treaties, and heal individual suffering or great traumas like that of Canada’s colonial legacy.

Just as I feel choked up with pessimism, I imagine Kondiaronk once again carrying from the depths mud that affirms that even in our death, we live in a give-and-take world. In receiving Condolence from his enemies the Haudenosaunee and French Catholic rites from those who missionized his confederacy, Kondiaronk models the difficult task before us: letting go of so much in the hopes of renewal for future generations. There are other dark dimensions to the task of carrying this gift from the depths that Rose helps to clarify: “As living beings come into life collaboratively and mutually, their fates are intermeshed; we live and die together, and no one, ultimately, is isolated from calamity.”¹⁰⁰ We are interconnected in our origins, and now our entangled deaths are revealing that codependence in the more haunting methods of mass extinction and double death.

Long recognizing our modern trajectory, Sioui summarizes the counsel of his Wendat elders: “This way that the Strangers are living and . . . treating life cannot last for a very long time. One day, soon, the Strangers will be frightened by the consequences of their actions.”¹⁰¹ And yet the relentless pull we feel toward so much estranging loss may still remind us of something forgotten but held in all our cultures, families, and lives: the renewal ancestral ceremonies in the spirit of Condolence, Thanksgiving, or a via negativa may still have vital power for naturalizing our place in this cocreation. We need to recover such ways of reconciling ourselves to a life that is sustained by our deaths but yet mysteriously not limited by them.

After three days of speeches and sharing, on August 4, 1701, the Montreal Tree of Peace was signed by the gathered representatives. This agreement is a spiritual contract between human nations, the beings of creation, and the land’s spirit and thus goes beyond so many modern assumptions. In affirming these relations, we agree to embody life-affirming ways that stretch back to Sky Woman’s reciprocal acts with beings like Muskrat and Turtle. It was through such give-and-take relations that, Kimmerer writes, “the original immigrant became indigenous,” learning in relation with so many others “to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”¹⁰² The same care-filled intention must be fostered as we “naturalize” modern ways, especially after so much death.

Figure 4.5. Standing white pine. Photo by the author.

What was agreed to in Montreal was meant to blow like a soothing summer wind across the generations for those who live on the Sewatokwa’tshera’t lands. The agreement did provide a half-century of peace until the resumption of French and British hostilities saw the end of Nouvelle France, thus setting the stage for the American Revolution and subsequent founding of two colonial nations, the United States (1776) and Canada (1867). While the Sewatokwa’tshera’t was later reaffirmed in the 1764 Treaty of Niagara that came to inform Canada’s constitution, the reality is that the intervening centuries have been marked by intensifying treaty violations, missions to convert, cultural misunderstandings, successive waves of land appropriation, systemic extinction of so much life, and a relentless march into our era of double death. As Sioui writes, the unfortunate reality is that “an authentic meeting between the heirs of the two worlds whose destinies were united long ago on American soil still has not occurred.”¹⁰³

Sitting with these severed roots, I wonder whether a Tree of Peace can be replanted in today’s climate of uncertainty and whether any of the atrophied tendrils have enough life to take root. This is what Kondiaronk’s Condolence evokes in chorus with other Indigenous ceremonies, like those half a world away in Australia, where Rose learned from her elder, “Old Tim,” that ceremonies of death and grief are ultimately “about coming into being.”¹⁰⁴ Through patient attention, we foster a “turning toward life that connects species and generations and brings death into dialogue.”¹⁰⁵ We ritually engage our ancestral guides to learn ways of participating in this death with the life-giving spirit of reciprocity, and such acts are especially needed when we are faced with injustices that intensify the experience of life’s existential challenges.

Back at the mound, I see one of four Mother roots is severed in the hole’s southern edge. Putting my hand to this pliable strong root that for a time flexibly anchored this tree in storms, it becomes clear that I want to be responsible to the guidance of ancestors like Kondiaronk. Though I cannot fully know his intentions, everything about his accord with the humility of Muskrat, vision of yändehsonhk, and peace of the onerahtase’ko:wa asks me to help him by naturalizing cultural ways of relating that I have inherited. As an ancestor who I have adopted by trying to live the Montreal Tree of Peace, Kondiaronk reminds me that if we are to sink into the muddy depths, we need the life-giving energy of ceremonies like Condolence, Thanksgiving, or a via naturaliza.

With the choking windigo knots intensifying in our time of double death, we each need to summon a vital living energy for facing a deep internal denial that keeps us distant from these dying relations and what they teach about renewal. The twofold nature of this denial is first related to how I often look away from my participation in the loss of so many relations, an act that increases the externalization of the suffering of and injustices faced by others. From this emerges my denial of a growing double death that is surpassing the generative power of life and the sustainability of modern societies. There is a physical rawness to the task of responding to this denial that I find highlighted in Hatley’s chapter as he guides us with the salmon migrations into spawning grounds that are filled with their own death. He writes: “even as the next generation is called into existence, the present one is being actively consumed. Eagles descend on the river, as do bears and ravens. . . . In the end, the entire river stinks for days of rotting meat” (see chap. 7, this volume).

Religious ceremonies have long helped peoples from around the world to look at such death rather than deny, and we will need to renew that energy if we are to find our way back into a relational cocreation. When we forget the life-giving gifts of Le Rat, the vision of yändehsonhk, and the other ancestral roots held in the Montreal Tree of Peace, the spirit of these relations also depart and forget us in a kind of creation-based via negativa of us, modern society, our cultures, and even humanity. This is the deep source of the double death that I hear whispers of around this fallen tree.

We are being called to embody relational values that can guide us toward sharing what we hold in common, even amid a numinous double death. In the silence of this great onerahtase’ko:wa, I listen to the land and give thanks for the relational medicines it offers in the wake of our windigo storm. I will follow Kondiaronk and wade into the mud of double death with the hopes of replanting “that beautiful Tree of Peace which was already planted on the highest mountain of the earth.” With that, I follow the ways of Gae Ho Hwako Jacobs in concluding by saying merci—thanks—to all who gather around these roots and their diverse teachings for affirming life in the face of death.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I give thanks to a few Elders and traditional teachers whose teachings guided this chapter, including Norma Jacobs, William Woodworth, and through them, Jacob Thomas, as well as Banakonda Kennedy-Kish (Bell) and her teacher Jim Dumont Onaubinisay. I also acknowledge that I published a short piece of prose in the book Rising Tides that began my writing relation with Kondiaronk.¹⁰⁶

TIMOTHY LEDUC is Associate Professor in land-based social work at Wilfrid Laurier University, not far from his home in Toronto, Canada, which he shares with his partner and two children. He is author of three books, including Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North (short-listed for 2012 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences) and A Canadian Climate of Mind: Passages from Fur to Energy and Beyond. Most of his writing arises from the time he spends walking in the forests and along the lakes, rivers, and ponds that are the root of his life in southeastern Ontario.

NOTES

1. Cited in Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2001), 201.

2. Havard, The Great Peace, 201.

3. Cited in Havard, The Great Peace, 136.

4. Jacob Thomas, Teachings from the Longhouse (Toronto: Stoddart, 1994), 17.

5. Cited in Havard, The Great Peace, 147.

6. See Havard, The Great Peace; Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017), 43.

7. Georges Sioui, Histories of Kanatha: Seen and Told (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2008), 284.

8. See Timothy B. Leduc, “Falling with Heron: Kaswen:ta Teachings on Our Roughening Waters,” Social and Cultural Geography 21, no. 7 (2020): 925–939; Leduc, A Canadian Climate of Mind: Passages from Fur to Energy and Beyond (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2016).

9. Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs, Q da gaho de:s: Reflecting on Our Journeys, ed. Timothy B. Leduc (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2022). Also see Noah Theriault et al., “Living Protocols: Remaking Worlds in the Face of Extinction,” Social & Cultural Geography 21, no. 7 (2020): 893–908.

10. “Watershed Report: The St. Lawrence River,” WWF-Canada (2015), accessed May 24, 2022, http://watershedreports.wwf.ca/#sws-020/by/threat-overall/threat.

11. “State of Climate Change Science in the Great Lakes Basin,” Ontario Climate Consortium (2014), accessed May 24, 2022, https://climateconnections.ca/app/uploads/2014/07/OCC_GreatLakes_Report_Full_Final.pdf.

12. “Summary for Policymakers,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, October 8, 2018, accessed May 24, 2022, https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/.

13. Theriault et al., “Living Protocols.” Also see Anthony D. Barnosky et al., “Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere,” Nature 486 (2012): 52–58; Rodolfo Dirzo et al., “Defaunation in the Anthropocene,” Science 345, no. 6195 (July 2014): 401–406.

14. Jacobs with Leduc, Q da gaho de:s, 38–39.

15. Theriault et al., “Living Protocols,” 899.

16. Deborah Bird Rose, “Double Death,” accessed March 1, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190402000224/https://deborahbirdrose.com/144-2/.

17. Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 10.

18. Thomas, Teachings from the Longhouse, 17.

19. Sioui, Histories of Kanatha, 284.

20. Cited in Sioui, Histories of Kanatha, 119.

21. See Hill, The Clay We Are Made of, 86–90; Sioui, Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999).

22. Sioui, Histories of Kanatha, 284.

23. Havard, The Great Peace, 4.

24. Jacobs with Leduc, Q da gaho de:s. Also see Thomas, Teachings from the Longhouse; Brian Rice, The Rotinonshonni: A Traditional Iroquoian History through the Eyes of Teharonhia:wako and Sawiskera (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2013).

25. Jacobs with Leduc, Q da gaho de:s, 9.

26. Cited in Havard, The Great Peace, 138–139.

27. Havard, The Great Peace, 139.

28. Cited in Havard, The Great Peace, 137.

29. Havard, The Great Peace, 139.

30. Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 199; Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2000), 42.

31. Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 42–43.

32. Some possible points of connection can be made with the work of Ian McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, new ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

33. Vine Deloria Jr., C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature, and the Primitive (New Orleans: Spring Journal, 2016), 192.

34. Deloria, C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, 192.

35. Nurit Bird-David, “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40 (1999): 78.

36. Bird-David, “Animism Revisited,” 73. Also see Tim Ingold, “On the Social Relations of the Hunter-Gatherer Band,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, eds. R. B. Lee and R. Daly, 399–410 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

37. Cited in Havard, The Great Peace, 211.

38. Thomas, Teachings from the Longhouse, 146. Also see Sioui, Huron-Wendat; Edward Benton-Benai, The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

39. Havard, The Great Peace, 188.

40. Havard, The Great Peace, 3.

41. For examples, see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013); Leduc, A Canadian Climate of Mind.

42. Rice, The Rotinonshonni, 42.

43. Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 19.

44. Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 40.

45. Sioui, Huron-Wendat.

46. Cited in Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2000), 43.

47. Blackburn, Harvest of Souls; Olive P. Dickason, The Myth of the Savage: And the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984).

48. Brébeuf (1636), cited in Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations, 41.

49. Bird-David, “Animism Revisited.”

50. Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988), 125.

51. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Change Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2001); David Herlihy, The Black Death, and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (Garden City, NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1988).

52. Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 125.

53. Herlihy, The Black Death, 51.

54. William Bryant Logan, Oak: The Frame of Civilization (New York: Norton, 2005).

55. Logan, Oak, 197.

56. S. A. Rogers, “The Tree that Sparked the Revolutionary War: Eastern White Pine’s Colonial History,” 2013, accessed May 24, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220123004815/https://easternwhitepine.org/the-tree-that-sparked-the-revolutionary-war-eastern-white-pines-colonial-history/.

57. For more on this, see Celeste Ray, The Origins of Ireland’s Holy Wells (Oxford, UK: Archaeopress, 2014); Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973).

58. Banakonda Kennedy-Kish (Bell) et al., Case Critical: Social Services and Social Justice in Canada, 7th ed., 52–53 (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2017).

59. Cited in “Executive Summary Report,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), 2, accessed May 24, 2022, http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Exec_Summary_2015_06_25_web_o.pdf.

60. “Executive Summary Report,” 1–2.

61. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 400–401.

62. Innis, The Fur Trade, 401.

63. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 4–5.

64. Bird-David, “Beyond the Original Affluent Society: A Culturalist Reformulation,” Current Anthropology 33, no. 1 (1992): 32.

65. Cited in Havard, The Great Peace, 205.

66. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 306.

67. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 305.

68. Paul Shepard, The Only World We’ve Got: A Paul Shepard Reader (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996).

69. John Mohawk, Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light, 1999).

70. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993); Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (London: Zed, 1993).

71. Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 3–31.

72. “Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report,” National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019), accessed May 24, 2022, https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1a-1.pdf.

73. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 307.

74. “Watershed Report”; R. J. Galbraith, “Quebec’s Bald Eagles Return from Verge of Extinction,” Montreal Gazette, August 8, 2014, accessed May 24, 2022, https://montrealgazette.com/news/blue-skies-ahead-for-quebecs-bald-eagles.

75. “Bald Eagle Populations in the Great Lakes Region: Back from the Brink,” Environment Canada (2001), accessed May 24, 2022, http://publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection/En40-222-13-2001E.pdf.

76. Hill, The Clay We Are Made of, 39; Rice, The Rotinonshonni; Thomas, Teachings from the Longhouse.

77. Berry, The Great Work, 41.

78. Havard, The Great Peace, 139.

79. Sioui, Histories of Kanatha, 97.

80. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 214–215.

81. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 214–215.

82. Cited in Marilyn Legge, “Negotiating Mission: A Canadian Stance,” International Review of Mission 93, no. 368 (2004): 124.

83. Legge, “Negotiating Mission,” 130.

84. The approach to religion that I discuss here is largely informed through learning with Indigenous teachers, like those I mention in this chapter, who talk about spirit and ways of life as opposed to directly mentioning religion as a separate category. During his keynote at the 2018 World Parliament of Religions in Toronto, Anishinaabe Elder Jim Dumont Onaubinisay talked about the importance of letting go of the concept of religion in the wake of colonialism; this supports the approach I am taking. See Jim Dumont, “Onaubinisay at the 2018 World Parliament of Religions,” YouTube video, posted November 26, 2018, accessed April 1, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB-Fi31klTs. In relation to scholarly publications on these issues, from an Indigenous Studies perspective, I find the thought of Deloria Jr. on Western religions suggestive of these issues. See Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994); and Deloria Jr., C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions. From a Religious Studies perspective, these ideas are consistent with Brent Nongbri’s research on the evolution of religion in Western traditions as an isolated institution or object of study that supplanted earlier senses of religio as simply “worship practice” or “rite” that did not “delineate “religious” from “non-religious.” See Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 30, 45.

85. See Kennedy-Kish (Bell) et al., Case Critical; Cindy Blackstock, “The Occasional Evil of Angels: Learning from the Experiences of Aboriginal Peoples and Social Work,” International Indigenous Journal of Entrepreneurship, Advancement, Strategy, and Education 1, no. 1 (2009): 1–24.

86. See Theriault et al., “Living Protocols.”

87. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2007).

88. See Michel Serres and Philippa Hurd, Angels, a Modern Myth, (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).

89. C. Luibhéid and P. Rorem, eds., Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality, vol. 54 (New York: Paulist, 1987), 188–189.

90. Teresa of Avila, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, trans. and ed. E. A. Peers (1565; repr., New York: Image Books, 1960), 189–200.

91. “Pseudo-Dionysius,” in Luibhéid and Rorem, eds., Pseudo-Dionysius, 136.

92. Rigby, chapter 6, this volume.

93. Cindy Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings: The Value of Indigenous Knowledges in the Helping Professions (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2011), 10–11.

94. Joseph Sheridan and Daniel Longboat, “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred,” Space and Culture 9, no. 4 (2003): 375.

95. Deloria Jr., C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, 187.

96. Deloria Jr., C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, 193.

97. James Hatley, “Walking with Ōkami, the Large-Mouthed Pure God,” in Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, eds. Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 26.

98. See Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 236; Florence Williams, “This Is Your Brain on Nature,” National Geographic Magazine, January 2016, http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/call-to-wild; C. A. Capaldi et al., “Flourishing in Nature: A Review of the Benefits of Connecting with Nature and its Application as a Wellbeing Intervention,” International Journal of Wellbeing 5, no. 4 (2015): 1–16.

99. Deloria Jr., C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, 155.

100. Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, 11.

101. Sioui, Histories of Kanatha, 105.

102. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 9.

103. Sioui, Histories of Kanatha, 29.

104. Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, 133.

105. Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, 133.

106. Catriona Sandilands, ed., Rising Tide: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (Halfway Moon Bay, BC: Caitlin, 2019).