Climate change is not only a physical or scientific crisis but also a spiritual and emotional one. As forests burn, waters rise, and species vanish, people around the world are experiencing a deep, often overwhelming sorrow known as climate grief. For Indigenous Peoples, this grief is profoundly layered. It is grief for the land, for sacred places lost or polluted, for ancestral foods no longer harvested, and for cultural practices threatened by environmental destruction.
Yet in the face of this grief, Indigenous communities are turning to ceremony, not as a retreat from reality, but as a powerful form of response, resistance, and renewal. Ceremony offers a space for collective mourning, connection to ancestors and land, and healing across generations.
What Is Climate Grief in Indigenous Contexts?
Climate grief among Indigenous Peoples often encompasses:
- The disappearance of animal relatives and medicinal plants is integral to cultural identity.
- The loss of seasonal rhythms that guide ceremony, harvesting, and kinship practices.
- The disruption of sacred responsibilities to care for water, land, and future generations.
- The emotional toll of witnessing ongoing ecological injustice tied to colonialism and extractive industry.
This grief is not abstract—it is experienced viscerally and communally, and it is inseparable from histories of land dispossession, forced relocation, and cultural suppression.
But where colonial systems pathologize grief, Indigenous knowledge systems validate and honour it. Grief is a necessary process that can reconnect us to responsibilities, reawaken our relationships with the land, and inspire transformative action.
Ceremony as Climate Healing
Across Turtle Island, Indigenous-led ceremonies are emerging—or re-emerging—as sacred responses to ecological loss and planetary crisis. These ceremonies do not attempt to “fix” grief or offer quick closure. Instead, they create sacred space to sit with the pain, acknowledge intergenerational trauma, and begin the process of relational repair with Mother Earth.
Some powerful examples include:
- Grassroots Indigenous communities across the Great Lakes, Prairies, and West Coast organize land-based grieving circles. These gatherings often involve fire keeping, songs, and shared storytelling, honouring ecological loss and cultural resurgence.
- Fasting ceremonies, long used for spiritual clarity and prayer, are now undertaken by youth and Elders alike in response to climate emergencies, including pipeline resistance, biodiversity loss, and drought. These fasts are often held on the land and accompanied by teachings, songs, and tobacco offerings.
Healing as Collective and Relational
Indigenous ceremonial responses to climate grief are profoundly relational. They are not individual acts of self-care, but collective acts of care for land, ancestors, and future generations. They reassert Indigenous sovereignty by centring traditional governance, gender roles, and spiritual protocols, while inviting emotional honesty and humility into spaces of climate discourse often dominated by technical language.
Recommendations for Readers
- Support Indigenous-Led Healing Events and Ceremonies
- Attend public ceremonies where invited, donate to ceremony organizers, and share their events. Respect protocols and follow the lead of Indigenous organizers—these are sacred spaces, not spectacles.
- Create Space for Grief in Your Climate Work
- Make room for emotional truth in your activism. Whether through storytelling, group reflection, or spiritual practice, recognize grief as a valid and necessary part of climate justice.
- Read Indigenous Voices on Climate and Loss
- Works like All Our Relations by Tanya Talaga explore the intersections of grief, cultural resurgence, and land-based healing. Reading Indigenous authors is one way to understand the emotional dimensions of climate change from lived experience.
- Practice Relational Accountability
- Ask yourself: Whose land am I on? What ceremonies have been practiced here? What responsibilities do I hold to this place and its people? Learning and acting from this position of relationship helps turn grief into grounded action.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
(Image Credit: Patrick Hendry, Unsplash)
