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Killing the Wittigo: recommended reading on Indigenous healing
Suzanne Methot is a Nehiyaw writer, editor, educator, and public speaker. Her publications include Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing and Killing the Wittigo: Indigenous Culture-Based Approaches to Waking Up, Taking Action, and Doing the Work of Healing. Here, she shares some must-read titles on healing, decolonization, and social justice.
Healing from the intergenerational trauma caused by colonization is both an individual and a collective experience. In order to heal, individuals must find safety and reconnection – and that can be difficult if the systems and institutions of society do not offer choice and control. For Indigenous peoples, the work of healing is tied to decolonization, which starts with unlearning all the wrong things we were told about ourselves and relearning who we are as people and communities. For non-Indigenous people, decolonization means undoing the oppression and subjugation of Indigenous peoples in what we now call Canada, paying reparations, and returning land.
Because colonization is intertwined with capitalism – proven by the fact that Canada is the only country in the world created by a department store (a joke I’m pretty sure I stole from Oneida comedian Charlie Hill) – then the process of decolonization and healing will require us to rethink how dominant economic systems create and sustain inequality.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen’s classic Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is an eye-opening re-examination of everything you think you know. As you read, think about all the things you were told about Canadian history. Welcome the unsettled feelings that should result – those feelings are forcing you out of your comfort zone and creating space for change.
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When Corporations Rule the World
YES! Magazine founder David C. Korten was once a prominent academic and economist who did international development work – until he figured out that global inequities are actually the result of economic models and government policies created in the U.S. to support corporate rule. He’s now a promoter of economies that support what he calls “ecological civilization.” Korten’s 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World was updated and reissued in both 2001 and 2015, and remains a must-read if you want to know why wealth is concentrated in the 1% and why institutions (and politicians) refuse to change.
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Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Some of the writing in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal first appeared in Rolling Stone, which tells you how well-researched and readable this book is. Author Eric Schlosser is that guy: the writer who can take the epidemic of obesity, deaths caused by food-borne infections, low wages in the service industry, agribusiness, undocumented workers, globalization, Hollywood, and the American dream and turn it into a readable story that makes you wonder about the future of humanity.
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Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System
Schlosser’s big American book goes well with Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System, a global take on the problem with North American supermarkets, why genetically modified crops are connected to farmer suicides in South Asia, and the real reason why there are famines (it’s not because there isn’t enough food). Consumer complicity leads to corporate profit, so this book presents grassroots alternatives to the assumed “norm.”
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Almanac of the Dead
If you want to understand the meanness of colonialism, then you really need to read Leslie Marmon Silko’s classic novel Almanac of the Dead. Silko uses Indigenous non-linear time to tell a story of colonial borders, drug trafficking, and the ecological devastation of uranium mining, turning it into a prophecy about how reconnecting with culture and land offers a solution to current political and environmental crises.
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Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World
The toxic stress of poverty deprives people of choice, which prevents them from realizing their true potential. The “pull up your bootstraps” idea is a colonial one, rooted in the idea that people don’t deserve something unless they work for it, which ignores the fact that living in poverty is the hardest work of all.
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Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine
Settler-colonial states have imposed their systems and institutions on Indigenous communities, which has led to the removal/loss of pre-colonial governance systems and matriarchal leadership. Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine focuses on how women’s work was once key to maintaining the health and well-being of Indigenous communities. Author Kim Anderson also explains how this pre-colonial knowledge can be used to rebuild healthy communities today.
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White Oleander
White Oleander by Janet Fitch, shows the transformative power of art. When the main character, Astrid, creates artwork about her foster homes and the mother figures she has known, she’s restorying her experiences, creating an identity, and figuring out who she might become. Nathan McCall goes through the same reflective process in Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America. This classic memoir describes the author’s journey from prison to writing for The Washington Post, and McCall is honest about how his anger and bitterness held him back just as much as racism and discrimination did. Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way provides the same sort of insight. After being abandoned by his parents as a child, Thistle ended up self-medicating with drugs and alcohol and committing petty crime to survive. If systemic change is key to decolonization, then so is taking a good, long look at yourself, especially when you cross the line from victim to perpetrator.
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Meditation As Medicine: Activate the Power of Your Natural Healing Force
Indigenous and other cultures around the world speak about the nature and behaviour of matter and energy as part of health and well-being. Western allopathic medicine likes to sneer at such talk, but research shows that these ancient practices work. Meditation as Medicine: Activate the Power of Your Natural Healing Force by Dharma Singh Khalsa and Cameron Stauth, guides readers through meditations that have specific physiological effects (I know because I’ve tried them). Use the exercises in this book, and you’ll be on your way to transformative change.
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, shows us how plants and animals can be our teachers. A Potawatomi botanist, Kimmerer challenges the myth that Indigenous peoples don’t have “real” science (as defined by European Enlightenment thought), and presents a clear argument for why spirituality can and should be part of every person’s approach to gaining awareness, understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. Imagine what would happen if every person, every leader, and every system and institution saw everything in life through the lens of reciprocity. Hope is part of healing.
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Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing
I wrote my last book, Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing, in a spiral shape. Colonization, intergenerational trauma, systems and institutions, families, and communities are all interconnected – so I didn’t want neat little chapters that were disconnected from each other. Instead, I used the principles of the medicine wheel to revisit central themes between chapters, building understanding through a non-linear process that offers readers both an emotional and an intellectual journey. Non-linear emotional narratives are typical of Indigenous oral traditions, and reading books like The Almanac of the Dead provided early lessons in how I might employ (and validate) Indigenous storytelling techniques in my own work. Indigenous oral traditions also often require the storyteller to locate themselves within the telling, so even though Legacy isn’t a memoir, there are stories from my life inside the book. The work of colleagues such as Kim Anderson showed me how to combine Indigenous culture-based teachings with stories from my own and other people’s lives to create a non-fiction book that crosses genres.
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Killing the Wittigo: Indigenous Culture-Based Approaches to Waking Up, Taking Action, and Doing the Work of Healing
In my new book, Killing the Wittigo: Indigenous Culture-Based Approaches to Waking up, Taking Action, and Doing the Work of Healing, I used another approach. It’s a YA book, so I knew I had to keep it short to reach Gen Z. Instead of a spiral approach that builds a narrative from beginning to end, I used plain language and organized the ideas into chunks that allow readers to enter the book anywhere they want. If they want to start at section 2 (Identity and Control) and then read section 9 (Culture and Spirit), they can do that. If they start reading section 5 (Families and Relationships) and start feeling weird, they can move to the Flashback Protocol at the beginning of the book to ground themselves. Offering readers safety, choice, and control was key to making this book trauma informed – which, in turn, echoes Indigenous ways of being and doing such as respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and relationships. Killing the Wittigo discusses the importance of decolonization, Indigenization, and social justice as a way to heal people and communities. In that way, I remain in conversation with books like Give People Money, Fast Food Nation, and Stuffed and Starved – but I’m presenting the information for a younger crowd.
View eBookIn the Inuit homeland, the suicide rate among children and youth is 33 times higher than for the rest of Canada and is one of the leading causes of death among children and youth. Indigenous oral history and the written accounts of explorers and missionaries show that Indigenous children and youth were not taking their lives prior to colonization. They are taking their lives now because of colonialism and intergenerational trauma. However, there are few culturally relevant resources focusing on intergenerational trauma, its effects, and how survivors can create change in their own lives and the lives of their communities. Young Indigenous people are being failed by the systems and institutions that purport to serve them, including schools, child welfare agencies, hospitals, and youth detention centres. Most systems and institutions are not trauma- or healing-informed, and they overwhelmingly function on a punitive level, where young people are punished for engaging in trauma-related behaviours. What kind of future do we want that to be? If we want it to be a good future, then we have to support young Indigenous people in creating change in their own lives and in the lives of their communities. ◼︎
Photo by Ben den Engelsen on Unsplash
