Book Review: One Drum

Wagamese, Richard. One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet. Douglas and McIntyre, 2019.

Posthumously published, One Drum is one of those “great books” that Wagamese tells us contains medicine, something that can “return us to balance, to wellness, to our proper size and, in the end, to innocence, to the humility that is the root of all believing.” Using the framework of the Ojibwe Seven Grandfather Teachings (Humility, Courage, Respect, Love, Honesty, Truth, and Wisdom), Wagamese presents a vision of unity and harmony for all life on Earth, a vision that every human being has the ability to attain through a commitment to ceremony and the spiritual gifts it brings. 

Although the book was intended to address all Seven Grandfather Teachings and provide illustrative stories and ceremonial practices to help the reader understand and honour those Teachings, Wagamese’s unfinished manuscript only covers Humility, Courage, and Respect. Humility is about recognizing our non-hierarchical place within Creation, learning from the animal teachers who have lived here longer than us, and walking gently upon the Earth. Courage comes from recognizing our place in Creation, knowing that we are nurtured by the Earth and have everything we need to thrive, thus giving us the fortitude to face our common foe: fear, especially fear of separation and lack. Respect is about honouring everything that Creation gives us; it is itself a gift that we can bestow, often through some sort of sacrifice. These are brief and incomplete summaries of the deep knowledge that lies at the heart of the Grandfather Teachings and which Wagamese so beautifully lays out for the reader.

The suggested ceremonies range from the profoundly simple (breathing exercises that remind us that we are all linked by the Sacred Breath of Creation) to the physically daunting (fasting alone on the land over night). But these are not the only ceremonial practices that are available to us. Wagamese has an expansive view of ceremony as any carefully considered ritual that gets us out of our heads and back into our hearts where we can remember what human beings are so good at forgetting: that we are all part of Creation, all sharing the same Sacred Breath, all inseparable from one another and from the great drum/heartbeat of life.

Book Review: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. Henry Holt and Co., 2020.

Khalidi weaves together rigorous historical research with familial and personal experience to bring us this detailed analysis of Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine. The introduction situates Israel within a global context of other modern settler colonial nations (new national powers built atop stolen Indigenous land) which include the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

From the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to the Nakba of 1948, to the 1982 war in Lebanon, and into the 21st century, Khalidi demonstrates how the funding and political support of first Britain and then the United States has been critical to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. More than indicting Israel and its allies for their attacks on Palestine, the book also takes an unflinching look at the shortcomings in Palestinian leadership and insufficient solidarity from neighbouring Arab nations that made Palestine particularly vulnerable to imperial powers. Khalidi describes the different Palestinian organizations and their disparate responses to occupation, including diplomatic negotiations with Israel and its allies, attempts to influence public opinion in the West, and armed resistance.

Although the reader may not agree with all of the author’s judgements and proposed solutions, they will no doubt find his insights invaluable. For anyone who wants to understand the historical context of Israel’s war on Palestine and the Palestinian people’s ongoing fight for freedom and self-determination, Khalidi’s book, with its extensive bibliographic notes, is an excellent place to start learning.

Book Review: We Are the Middle of Forever

Jamail, Dahr and Stan Rushworth (editors). We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth. The New Press, 2022.

Editors and interviewers Jamail and Rushworth have constructed this book so that each chapter feels like an intimate visit with the interviewee, as if seated in a physical room with them. The structure of the book thus demonstrates what poet Natalie Diaz describes as the physical power of language in her chapter.

Another chapter that highlights the collection’s core questions and themes is the interview with Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte on the subject of kinship and the morality of conceptualizing time. In response to the ‘clock time’ of colonial capitalism that urges us to panic about the ‘unprecedented’ upheaval we are currently experiencing, Whyte suggests shifting to Indigenous conceptions of deep time, kinship time, or seasonal time, all of which encourage us to see ourselves as relatives connected in a web that stretches endlessly into the past and future. This viewpoint is echoed in other interviews, in the editors’ introduction, and in the book’s titular quotation from John Trudell.

No doubt each reader will connect with different chapters, as the book is designed to prompt reader participation and self-reflection. The collection of interviews concludes with a series of discussion questions crafted by the editors, further soliciting the reader’s response to the crucial concepts discussed throughout the book. For anyone seeking spiritual grounding and practical guidance for navigating our changing climate in life-affirming ways, We Are the Middle of Forever will be a welcome companion.

Book Review: Beaverland

Philip, Leila. Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. Grand Central Publishing, 2022.

In Beaverland, Philip’s engaging prose leads the reader through an in-depth history of the North American beaver. Writing as a settler, Philip makes an effort to research and reify the stories and knowledge of Indigenous peoples; however, certain sections are more successful at this than others, and some descriptions of the fur trade lapse into Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, the book as a whole is a compelling overview of beavers as an ecological keystone species within geologic time, transcending the catastrophic yet comparatively recent environmental effects of settler colonialism.

Philip invites the reader to reimagine watersheds from the perspective of a beaver — not as rushing rivers carved into the land, but as millions of feather-like arteries dispersing throughout the land, the slow moving water hiding just beneath the soil in meadows and invisible creeks. As the “beaver believer” scientists are making clear through their research, beavers will be critical for mitigating the effects of droughts and floods in our rapidly changing climate. The sooner a majority of humans can remember how to live in good relation to beavers, the better off we all will be.

Meticulously researched through years of immersive journalism, Beaverland is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of North America and the people, both human and non-human, who have shaped that history.

Book Review: The Strangers

Vermette, Katherena. The Strangers. Penguin, 2021.

A sequel to the stunning novel The Break (House of Anansi, 2016), The Strangers continues Vermette’s thematic interest in justice both within and beyond settler colonial institutions. With her dynamic storytelling skills, Vermette forces the reader to confront the humanity of even the most dangerous and unlikeable characters. Without excusing the violence or attempting to hide its devastating impact, the novel refuses to allow the reader to easily dismiss perpetrators of violence as simply evil or irredeemable monsters; instead, we are shown how these deeply troubled individuals are still members of communities, still capable of love, still humans with a fundamental human right to healing.

As with The Break, The Strangers accomplishes this holistic presentation of the human through its polyphonic style, slipping between the viewpoints of multiple generations of Metis women and girls living in Winnipeg’s North End and grappling with the ongoing effects of colonization. The novel’s ending teases the reader with expectations of the following book, The Circle (Penguin, 2023), which will delve even deeper into what justice looks like situated within Indigenous community values.