Review: The Story in our Bones
The Story in our Bones : How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis by Osprey Orielle Lake
I am writing this review from the Lands of the Wappo, Coast Miwok, and Pomo peoples where I have lived for over half my life. I came as an immigrant from the Philippines in 1983 and later learned that I should be calling myself a settler. My journey of decolonization and learning how to court my Indigenous Soul has been the dominant theme of my settler life as an academic/scholar- turned-culture-bearer.
I’ve been asked a few times in certain gatherings if I know Osprey Orielle Lake. I always say I don’t because we don’t seem to circulate in the same circles even though she is located in Marin County which is just down south from where I am in Sonoma County. And I don’t know how the book publicity service knew to contact me about writing a review. The reviews that are included in the book are already superlative. I was eager to accept the invitation to finally meet Osprey’s book!
It so happens that I have just finished reading Louise Dunlap’s Inherited Silence about her life-long journey to reckon with the ancestral legacy of white supremacy and how her own family benefited from it and became the “owners” of vast tracts of land in Napa Valley — now the famous wine-growing region in Northern California. I got to know Louise through another friend, Hilary Giovale, who is also in the process of writing a book about settler apology, healing, and reparations. Hilary’s forthcoming book is Becoming a Good Relative. They both write from a very vulnerable and personal reckoning of the ancestral legacy of white supremacy and imperialism in their lives. Hilary and Louise connected me to Oglala Lakota Elder Basil Brave Heart who initiated a call for a “Ceremony of Repentance and Forgiveness” after he was approached by Brad Upton, a descendant of Major General James Forsyth, at the Wounded Knee Massacre site, and offered an apology. A descendant of the manufacturer of the Hotchkiss Mountain Guns, which were used at these genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples, apologized as well.
In 2019 a wider invitation to participate in this ceremony landed in my inbox…and I accepted. I wrote about it here. It is the vulnerability of acknowledgment and apology beginning to arise in the thinking of settler descendants that I was hoping to find in Osprey’s work. There were glimpses of it but I wanted to see more fully how she has processed or journeyed through the shadowy parts of her ancestral story.
Osprey Orielle Lake’s The Story in our Bones is an ambitious book that tries to connect all the dots, or fit the pieces of the puzzle, so to speak. It foregrounds possible scenarios of a viable future informed by the indigenous world view as honed and practiced over millennia by indigenous peoples/communities around the planet. It also reflects the author’s lifetime of activism on many fronts which I assume has been made possible by the privilege of travel, of being well-networked with climate justice-minded folks, and of having access to resources.
I confess that I am trying hard to like this book — The Story in our Bones. What is getting in the way, I ask myself? I have read many authors writing on the same themes about averting the ecological and social crises of these times. Many are deconstructing the modern ideologies — white supremacy, capitalism, heteronormativity — and borrowing/appropriating from traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous paradigms, as well as decolonized and decolonial perspectives. I am familiar with this terrain.
As a reader, I am becoming more and more drawn to personal storytelling that tugs at my heartstring which doesn’t speak English. There were parts in this book that did that for me but it felt off-balanced by the seemingly over-rehearsed rhetoric of climate catastrophe that is about to befall us. And although she tries to point to the myriad indigenous voices that point to solutions, I am left with this voice in my head whispering “wow, she has traveled a lot and met so many people”! And then I castigate this critical voice and silence her.
Indeed The Story in our Bones is a very good resource. It’s only in the relatively few years that the discourse on climate change has become visible thanks to the many indigenous youth and other young people that are mobilizing social media to send the message out. Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies have more recently come under fire in the U.S. because the deconstruction of the Enlightenment beliefs that shaped the pre-21st century has become part of the popular culture and there is a backlash now especially in conservative states like Florida. So for the reader who is now swept up by the predictions of global climate catastrophe can find ways of understanding the interlocking issues: global capitalism+white supremacy+patriarchy+climate change — but often such framing also breeds a lot of fear and a sense of urgency to problem solve before a deeper understanding and wisdom emerges to illuminate.
While reading this book, someone texted me asking for advice on how to avoid “white saviorism” as she prepares to take a group of young people from an elite prep school to visit an indigenous community in the Philippines in the summer. There are so many questions I wanted to ask that begin with Why? Would this book answer the Why of white saviorism? Or would it inspire white saviorism that hides behind do-good gestures and problem-solving that is so ingrained in the dominant culture?
I feel that this is why I struggled to like this book. It had a distancing effect on me. Its call for speed and urgency in these times goes against the grain of the call for slowing down, the call for self-reflection, the call to get to know the Land/Place where we dwell. As Bayo Akomolafe says often: The times are urgent; let us slow down. After all, isn’t this what indigenous world views invite us to do? Get to know your ancestors. Get to know the history of native genocide on Turtle Island. Get to know the more-than-human beings in the Place where you dwell. Get to know the Shadows of history that lurk in the cracks of our awareness. As a Southern Pomo friend sitting among settlers who were regaling each other about traveling the world once told our circle: I have not traveled the world, but I know this Place like the back of my hand. I can name these trees, flowers, birds, herbs, these hills…because I know them as my relatives. Hearing her words pierced my heart and made me want to do the same: to stay, to dwell, to listen, to be quiet. I wonder if Osprey Orielle Lake has ever had such thoughts and whether, if she had, her approach to this book might have been different, more in keeping with actual Indigenous practices.
Still there is much to commend in this book. It supports the global movement for climate justice; it foregrounds indigenous worldviews which are much needed in our world today. It’s also full of resources that I can google for more depth if I need to. The Story in our Bones and its beautiful cover by Metis artist, Christi Belcourt, for me, is that invitation to reflect on the stories that our bones carry. My bones carry the indigenous stories and memories of Austronesian peoples in that part of the world. That these stories have also been mixed with the thinking of colonizers have rendered my time on this earth to be mostly about the work of Healing, Return, and Repair. It is that refrain that I hear in this book as well if only it weren’t somehow overshadowed by a fearful and foreboding sense of urgency.
This sense of urgency reminds me of a story told to me by my Hmong student years ago. He said that whenever he is in a hurry to accomplish something and gets anxious and nervous, his mother tells him: Don’t worry. What you don’t accomplish in this life, you will continue in the next.
It is this Slowness I am reminded of when I was reading this book.
On the other hand, I understand the sense of urgency in this modern/colonial context. I have been unlearning this colonial conditioning lately. And I feel it in the air, too, as I sense and watch the slow death of many things in this culture and the slow re-emergence of an indigenous future. My prayer is for the reader who picks up this book to take seriously the indigenous wisdom presented here and then proceed slowly to the tending of an indigenous future. The keyword is Slow.
