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Healing the Land, Healing Ourselves: Climate Grief and Indigenous Ceremonial Practices

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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

  1. Support Indigenous-Led Healing Events and Ceremonies
  1. 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.
  1. Create Space for Grief in Your Climate Work
  1. 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.
  1. Read Indigenous Voices on Climate and Loss
  1. 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.
  1. Practice Relational Accountability
  1. 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)

 

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Climate Grief: The Emotional Impact of Climate Change

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Climate change triggers emotions. ‘Climate grief’ or ecological grief refers to the emotional response to the loss and anxiety associated with the “overall effects of climate change.” Climate change has an impact on human health—physical and mental. While the physical impacts of climate change have been linked to respiratory ailments, like asthma, because of air pollution and heatstroke, various psychological ailments and mental health concerns are emotional impacts of climate change and are often overlooked.

The uncertainty associated with climate change requires people to deal with changes that have already occurred, and with complex feelings of not knowing what additional changes will emerge in the future; this exacerbates anxiety and grief. Names for climate grief can take on regional terms. For example, “winter grief” is the grief of the loss of traditional winters due to climate change. “Snow anxiety,” and grappling with simultaneous feelings of “winter joy” and “snow relief” are some of the ways that Arctic communities express the spectrum of feelings associated with managing uncertainty in the landscape due to climate change.

Climate grief is prevalent in Arctic communities. The Inuit experience of “solastalgia”—a feeling of home sickness without ever leaving home”—is linked to the psychological impact of seeing the landscape of melting ice due to climate change. The unpredictability of the “shoulder season”—the period between hunting seasons—is a cause for worry among the Inuit. Fluctuations in the amount of snow in the winter and Spring temperatures make it increasingly difficult for Inuit to plan for their lives. With the melting ice limiting access to land and water, Inuit with otherwise strong cultural connections to the landscape are experiencing a form of seasonal affective disorder. The loss of one’s home and the shifting conditions for Arctic survival are feeding a sadness, on top of the impacts of colonialism, regarded by some as a social determinant of health.

Climate change effects also disrupt Indigenous knowledge systems and feed anxiety in the loss of one’s culture. Inuit fear loss of species if there is “no more sea ice” and loss of connection to the land. The cumulative loss of land over years for Inuit communities of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada and the resultant loss of sense of place, are at the root of ecological grief, with the concomitant effect of loss of local knowledge.

The Climate Atlas recognizes how mental health impacts of climate change fall into three main categories: experiences of extreme weather events; experiences of environmental changes; and awareness of climate change experiences. Climate grief and distress affects all age groups. Author of “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety,” Sarah Jaquette Ray notes that the population born “at the tail end of the Millennial generation,” also known as Generation Z or iGen, are “the first to have spent [their] entire lives with the effects of climate change,” and that everyone should mirror their tremendous energy and address climate distress by renewing one’s “commitment to climate advocacy.”

 

By Leela Viswanathan

 

(Image Credit: Jeremy Bishop, Unsplash)

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