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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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Appreciating ‘Place’ in Relation to Climate Change and Indigenous Health

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An appreciation of place is crucial to understanding the impact of climate change on the health of Indigenous peoples. A place-based understanding of climate change can help to recognize how changes in the environment effect physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual facets of both individual and community health and well-being.

The terms ‘place-focused’ and ‘place-based’ are used primarily by non-Indigenous governments, academics, and planning and design professionals. For example, the Government of Victoria, Australia has offered explanations for how they use both place-focused and place-based approaches in their work. Place-focused approaches involve highlighting a particular place to ensure that government-driven or other service-related plans cater to the characteristics and experiences of people living in a specific geographic area. By contrast, place-based approaches engage with people from a particular geographic area to bring meaning from their cultural and environmental contexts, histories, and practices, to develop solutions to problems, using a process of shared-decision making.

While land dispossession and other impacts of colonialism, and climate change effects continue to disrupt the attachment to place for many Indigenous communities, not all place attachments have been lost. Increasingly, Indigenous communities are engaging in their own community planning processes that could be considered by non-Indigenous planners as “place-based.” Examples of Indigenous-led community plans in Canada, that incorporate elements of culture, health, and well-being, include the Six Nations Community Plan and M’Chigeeng First Nation Comprehensive Community Plan, among others. By comparison, Canadian municipal official plans often exclude direct references to cultural and health factors; these become the content of supplementary plans and policy reports. However, place-based approaches to community planning and official plan processes are becoming more popular among local governments for reasons that often include climate change resilience.

The emotional and psychological health effects of climate change among Indigenous peoples around the world are largely understudied, however, the existing literature attributes these effects to “changes in place attachment, disrupted cultural continuity, altered food security and systems,” and other factors. For example, in the community of Nain, located in Northern Labrador, Canada, an “appreciation of place” is crucial to understanding how sea ice, and its uses by the Inuit, have a positive impact on Inuit mental health, even with the increase in physical injuries, and reduced access to their traditional environments, brought upon by climate change.

Focusing on the ongoing impact of the current combined pandemics of climate change and COVID-19, the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change (IHACC) program highlights a connection between the protection of key places for Indigenous foods and medicines in remote Indigenous communities in Uganda, the Peruvian Amazon and the Arctic ecosystem, and the protection of Indigenous knowledge, practices, and rights of Indigenous peoples to access their lands.

Place, climate change, and Indigenous health are connected. Together they reveal how different threats to Indigenous traditional environments negatively impact overall Indigenous health. Subsequently, the contributions made by Indigenous-led community plans to reduce climate health effects on Indigenous communities are also worth further exploration.

By Leela Viswanathan

 

(Photo Credit: Erik McLean, Unsplash)

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Prioritizing the Protection of Indigenous Rights to Achieve a Sustainable Future

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Prioritizing Indigenous rights and supporting innovative Indigenous practices are required to achieve a sustainable future and are crucial to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The race to meet SDG targets by Year 2030 is heavily focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs); however, globally, Indigenous communities are not responsible for these high levels of GHGs. Indigenous communities have been integral in the fight to reduce GHG emissions through innovative practices like traditional fire management. Yet, Indigenous peoples remain among the most affected by climate change and its impacts on a global scale, because of their interconnectedness with Mother Nature, the land, and all that it offers.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 calls for “ensuring the availability of sustainable water management and sanitation for all”; however, in Canada, for decades, many First Nation communities have gone without clean drinking water. Canada’s federal government has promised to ensure clean drinking water to all First Nation reserves by March 2021; however, there are now fears that this deadline will not be met.

Frustrated by government inaction in addressing the clean water crisis in their community, Lytton First Nation, (pop. 1,660 people) located in the Fraser Canyon, British Columbia, connected with RES’EAU-WaterNet, at the University of British Columbia. Together, they built the Lytton-Nickeyeah Creek Water Treatment facility in 2015, bringing clean water to the homes spread out over 56 reserves across 14,161 acres. The RES’EAU also worked in consultation with community members, leaders, and water operators at Lytton First Nation, to find a collaborative, creative, and affordable way to bring clean water to additional homes (some over 100 kms apart) that were too isolated to benefit from the larger treatment facility.

According to Alliance 2030, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the UN SDGs should be considered in concert with each other, if the 17 SDGs are to be met by 2030 and “achieve basic rights like clean water and equality for all.” The International Fund for Agricultural Development in their 2019 policy brief made several recommendations to advance collaborative policy solutions and to recognize Indigenous rights to land and intellectual property, in order to meet the SDGs.

Successful implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is based on the premise of “leave no-one behind”. Canada’s 2018 Voluntary National Review acknowledged that Indigenous peoples and other “historically marginalized groups…still face unacceptable barriers”. Any attempt by countries to involve Indigenous communities as partners in sustainable development may be a step forward to meet the 2030 Agenda; however, when the basic rights to education and clean water are not guaranteed for Indigenous peoples, these calls for collaboration must be questioned. Indigenous peoples at the forefront of sustainable development innovations and climate change adaptation in Canada have declared a climate emergency. Realizing the SDG goals requires non-Indigenous governments to prioritize the protection of Indigenous rights if they also seek the collaboration of Indigenous peoples.

 

By Leela Viswanathan

(Image Credit: Carter Hildebrand, Unsplash)

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