Claiming Anishinaabe

December 18, 2017
This essay collection from Gehl (The Truth that Wampum Tells), an Anishinaabe activist, environmental scientist, and scholar, is an inviting, though often repetitive and uneven, reflection on the need to embrace traditional teachings to offset humankind’s self-destructive impulses. Gehl is a gifted and thoughtful storyteller, and though some chapters read like unedited blog posts, patient readers will benefit from her perspectives, delivered like informal discussions around a kitchen table or campfire. In tackling duplicitous colonial governments, Eurocentric notions of science and nature, and a decades-long struggle with the Canadian legal system to recognize her long-denied Indigenous status, Gehl provides a theoretical framework for reimagining how people can view and relate to the natural world. Gehl’s reminder that every species can survive in the absence of human beings is a humbling one, delivered with grace and wit. Some sections may be impenetrable for general readers, and she concedes that her exploration of laboratory science may prove a “cognitive wrestle.” But readers willing to skip to less obscure chapters will still glean Gehl’s core truths, especially in penetrating meditations on feasting, the power of song, and body memory. She reminds readers that humans ignore a disconnect from nature at their peril.