This image is from a youtube talk by Indigenous Ecologist Robin Kimmerer. A powerful and loving presentation to youth on how to become resilient to survive and thrive in climate change. She shares potentially very fear-inducing information but does it without instilling fear. Instead she is teaching how to deal with what is real. She encourages us to trace our roots, and draw from our ancestors and First Peoples in order to assist love and wisdom to flow more fluidly between settlers and Indigenous peoples, the past and the present, and hopefully, into the future, for all generations to draw from in cultivating sustainable skills and knowledge and ways of being that will best adapt to the changing earth. Joining and sharing the best of the wisdom traditions of both Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). The link is below to watch her teach in a non-fear-based way.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGEIT8B4VhQ
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It has long been my research and mission to find "fearless leadership" as I had called it back in 2003 when I finished my dissertation in Education. What would/should such a leadership look and sound like? Well, it wouldn't be fear-based that's for sure. But still that is not enough to only have such a theory, we also require exemplars, and I think Robin Kimmer's very feminine, feminist, Indigenous, womanist perspective and attitude is well on the way to such a fearless leadership. It is so different than 99.99% of the 'teachers' I listen to and study out there in 'media world,' where fear, despair, anger and the rationalization to make people afraid so they will change attitude.
I just received the publication notice of my colleague Four Arrows and his campaign to wake people up to the importance of Indigenizing all our media and institutions around the world in this time of crisis. He open's his article in The Nation (May 20, 2019) "If we want to halt the extinction crisis, we need to embrace Indigenous worldviews." Here is his first paragraph of the article "The Media Have Missed a Crucial Message of the UN's Biodiversity Re...--
"Earlier this month, the United Nations released a report warning of the imminent extinction of as many as 1 million species, the result of climate change, pollution, exploitation of land and sea, and other human-created assaults on the environment. The report has tragic significance, but offers hope if “transformative change” occurs immediately. The problem is that the source of that transformative change has been largely ignored by most media; one must read the report’s summary—all that has been released so far—to realize that such transformative change is largely about indigenizing our systems and institutions. It is about a worldview that connects us to nature. It is no mere coincidence that the 5 percent of the global population that are Indigenous are responsible for 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity."