Content uploaded by James Rowe
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by James Rowe on Aug 20, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
THE ARROW
A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics
HEALING SOCIAL &
ECOLOGICAL RIFTS
PART 1
VOLUME 8 | ISSUE 1 | VOLUME 8 | ISSUE 1 | SUMMER 2021SUMMER 2021
The Arrow
A JournAl of WAkeful Society, culture & PoliticS
the ArroW JournAl explores the relationship among
contemplative practice, politics, and activism. Inspired
in its founding by the teaching and social vision of
meditation master Chögyam Trungpa, the ArroW
welcomes the insights of multiple contemplative lineages
for achieving a kinder, healthier, and more compassionate
world. We encourage dialogue on wisdom and knowledge
arising from methods of contemplative inquiry, ways of
embodied knowing, and intellectual disciplines. In doing
so, the ArroW provides a critical and much needed space
for investigating the meeting point of contemplative
wisdom and pressing social, political, and environmental
challenges.
The Arrow
STA FF
Chief Editor
Gabriel Dayley
Managing Editor
shah noor hussein
Copy Editors
Tyler Lehrer
Vickie Masseus
Francie Reed
Creative Director
Alicia Brown
Artists
Rae Minji Lee
Chetna Mehta
Ocers
Kai Beavers, Secretary
Nick Marsellas, Treasurer
LEADERSHIP
Board of Directors
Laurie Amodeo
Martina Bouey
Gabriel Dayley
Sharon Owyang
Sheryl Petty
Rosalyn Stagg
Advisory Board
Rachel DeMotts
Gaylon Ferguson
Michaele Ferguson
Holly Gayley
Michael Gayner
David Kahane
Sara Lewis
Adam Lobel
Judith Simmer-Brown
Shanté Paradigm Smalls
Aarti Tejuja
ISSN 2768-055X (Online)
ISSN 2768-0568 (Print)
Visit our website
www.arrow-journal.org
© 2021 e Arrow Journal
Illustration by
Chetna Mehta
The Arrow
A JournAl of WAkeful Society, culture & PoliticS
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021 13
Death Denial, Human Supremacy, and
Ecological Crisis: Indigenous and Euro-
American Perspectives
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
Our mother grows angry
Retribution will be swift
We squander her soil and suck out her sweet black blood to burn it
We turn money into God and salivate over opportunities to crumple and
crinkle our souls for that paper, that gold
Money has spent us
Left us in small boxes, dark rooms, bright screens, empty tombs
Left investing our time in hollow philosophies
To placate the fear of our bodies returning back into our mother
Tanya Tagaq, Inuk throat singer, “Retribution”
FROM GOVERNMENTS DECLARING climate emergencies to new
pandemics fueled by deforestation, we live in a period of heightened eco-
logical crises, and scholars have long pointed to narratives of human supremacy
as central drivers of ecological destruction. One of the more prominent think-
ers to make this argument—Lynn White Jr., in his famous essay “e Roots
of Our Ecologic Crisis”—argued that narratives of human supremacy were so
deeply held, so embodied for most Euro-Americans, that cognitive argumen-
tation alone could not overturn them. White argued that “we must rethink
and refeel our nature and destiny.”1 Following thinkers such as White, scholars
in environmental studies are now attuned to the role of aect in shaping en-
vironmental behavior and commitments.2 We move further in this direction
by exploring an overlooked but powerful explanation for stubborn attachment
to the idea of human supremacy in the Euro-Americas: the political force of
death denial. In the face of nitude, human feelings of fear and belittlement
have fueled Euro-Americans’ attachment to narratives of supremacy. Or, as
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
14 The Arrow JournAl
Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq sings in her song “Retribution,” we invest “our
time in hollow philosophies to placate the fear of our bodies returning back
into our mother.”
In making this connection between death denial and narratives of human
supremacy, we draw from three main sources. Firstly, we engage anthropologist
Ernest Becker who is the Euro-American thinker who has done the most to
clarify the linkages between death denial and illusions of human supremacy.
While a small number of scholars have drawn on Becker’s work to explain
ecological destruction, very little has been done to link his insights on death
denial to environmental destruction in general and longstanding Euro-Ameri-
can attachments to human supremacy in particular.3
Secondly, we turn to Indigenous studies scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr.
and Michael Yellowbird to engage the more open and accepting orientation
towards mortality among many Indigenous nations, and the role this dier-
ent orientation plays in facilitating non-supremacist relations with the more-
than-human world. While environmental studies scholarship has long looked
to Indigenous worldviews and land-caring practices for models of reciprocal
relations with the more-than-human world, scholars have yet to explore the
connection between non-supremacist worldviews and dierent orientations to
mortality.
irdly, we develop a case study of Coast Salish approaches to mortality,
arguing that the non-supremacist worldviews and ecological successes of Salish
peoples—upon whose territories we both live—are deeply connected to their
dierent orientation toward death, especially when compared to Euro-Amer-
ican death denial. Our case study shows that environmental education and
advocacy must begin by addressing the death fear that underpins Euro-Amer-
ican culture. Until the Euro-Americas honestly and collectively reckon with
the reality of death, stubborn and often unconscious attachments to human
supremacy will not only remain, but will make the necessity of ecological re-
dress nearly impossible to achieve.
We undertake this analysis from an anticolonial perspective because we are
committed not only to learning from Indigenous knowledge systems but also
to supporting Indigenous sovereignty.4 Our previous research, along with that
of our collaborators, explored Indigenous Peoples’ impressive record of culti-
vating ecological health and species abundance on the Northwest Coast over
thousands of years.5 Darcy Mathews spent twenty years working with Coast
Salish funerary experts to manage ancestral human burial sites. We acknowl-
edge the expertise and guidance of these experts as we seek—as settlers—to
understand the relationship between approaches to mortality, ecological sus-
tainability, historical connections to the land, and the primacy of a place-based
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
15
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
kincentric ecology, a concept developed by Enrique Salmón that we explore
more fully in our case study.6
Although we emphasize the importance of learning from Indigenous cos-
mologies, we recognize that this learning should be in the service of not only
bettering relations with the more-than-human world but also accelerating pro-
cesses of decolonization in settler-colonial contexts such as the United States,
Canada, and Australia. Although we focus on human supremacy, we also think
that research on death denial holds considerable promise for combating other
destructive illusions like white supremacy, which stand in the way of genuine
decolonization and learning eectively from Indigenous Peoples.7 Overcoming
Euro-American death denial will help undo compensatory narratives of su-
premacy and the premature death they cause for humans and our nonhuman
kin.
Ernest Becker and Terror Management eory
Ernest Becker died at the age of forty-nine, months before his book, e Denial
of Death, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. His innovative ideas on how
death denial shapes behavior, culture, and institutions inspired a subeld of
social psychology known as terror management theory (TMT), which received
considerable media attention in the COVID-19 era.8 But Becker’s work in
general was slow to inform debates in the humanities and social sciences, even
though his death-denial thesis bears on foundational questions of power and
injustice. More specically, Becker oers a powerful explanation for aective
attachments to narratives of supremacy—from human supremacy to white su-
premacy. In other words, his work speaks directly to the provocation at the
core of this special issue, mainly that “ecological crisis and societal polarization
emerge from a shared foundation: a dualistic logic of domination and exploita-
tion.” For Becker, death denial fuels this domination.
According to Becker and other TMT researchers, the intense existential
fear caused by the reality of death compels humans to psychologically buer
themselves with cultural constructions of supremacy that compensate for the
overwhelming helplessness they feel in the face of nitude.9 e human ani-
mal, like other animals, possesses a will to live. What distinguishes us from our
fellow critters, however, is an evolutionary inheritance—the cognitive ability
to imagine and anticipate our own end.10 According to Becker, a will to life
combined with the cognitive capacity to imagine death led humans to a level
of existential anxiety seemingly unique in the animal kingdom.11 While this
article will address the limits to Becker’s universalizing argument, we will rst
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
16 The Arrow JournAl
trace how it remains constructive for making sense of Euro-American attach-
ments to human supremacy.
Because the prospect of death can be overwhelming, humans develop
mechanisms for relating to death; some humans develop mechanisms that spe-
cically deny their eshy mortality. Death denial, for Becker, plays a formative
role in all cultures. e primary mechanism for denying death is cultural and
involves creating the conditions for symbolic immortality, for heroism. Soci-
ety is, for Becker, “a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles,
customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly hero-
ism.”12 Each culture has a unique hero system that provides multiple pathways
to heroism.
People pursue heroics to earn a feeling of “cosmic specialness”—a sense
that their life is signicant beyond the dust they will one day become.13 For
Becker, “the real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells [humans] that
they are small trembling animals who will decay and die. Illusion changes all
this, makes [humans] seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some
way.”14 Narratives of human supremacy are one such illusion: they allow be-
lievers to feel heroic, to feel cosmically special. We are the chosen species. As
Becker states: “e frail human creature tries to change his position from one
of insignicance in the face of nature to one of central importance; from one
of inability to cope with the overwhelming world to one of absolute control
and mastery of nature.”15
In the forty-ve years since Becker’s death, TMT scholars have tested his
theory multiple times. e experiments that relate most to our topic at hand
entail priming a test group on their mortality—either with explicit or sub-
liminal reminders of death—and then tracking how participants respond to
dierent situations or written statements. When reminded of their mortality,
test subjects tend to do two things: (1) they increase their commitment to
worldviews, and (2) they pursue self-esteem according to the standards of their
preferred worldview.16 Although a canonical TMT experiment did fail a rep-
lication eort in 2019, to date over ve hundred experiments in twenty-ve
countries have supported Becker’s account of how fear of death shapes human
behavior.17
Numerous tests have linked fear of death to the idea of human supremacy.
For example, a 2007 study found that test subjects primed on their mortali-
ty were more likely to report negative views of animals.18 A follow-up study
examined whether the ndings were similar for pet owners, who presumably
have more positive attitudes toward animals than the general population.19 e
researchers found that even “pet owners evaluate animals, and activities that el-
evate the status of those animals, less favorably when they are reminded of their
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
17
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
own creaturely and mortal nature.”20 Likewise, another study found that death
reminders increased participant support for the killing of animals.21 According
to the researchers: “e idea that humans are dierent from and superior to
other animals is a fundamental part of most worldviews, and this is certainly
true of the mainstream American view.”22
In an interesting twist, a study published in 2018 revealed that challenging
the illusion of human supremacy brings forth the thoughts of death that the
illusion serves to repress.23 Researchers had the test group read an article argu-
ing that dolphins are more intelligent than humans and found that the article
brought forth high levels of death-related thoughts in the test group when
compared to participants who read an article about dolphin intelligence that
did not connect dolphins to humans.24
e ndings from these studies reveal the link between fear of death and
a belief in human supremacy in the Euro-American worldview. According to
Becker’s theoretical framework, all doctrines of supremacy (whether of race,
nation, class, gender, or species) are eorts to achieve cosmic specialness for the
elect, eorts to fend o the pain of existential insignicance. “All power,” writes
Becker, “is in essence power to deny mortality.”25 He continues: “Either that
or it is not real power at all, not ultimate power, not the power that [human]
kind is really obsessed with. Power means power to increase oneself, to change
one’s natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, nitude, to one of
bigness, control, durability, importance.”26
Becker was interested not only in articulating the Euro-American world-
view but also in exploring what Euro-Americans could learn from dierent ap-
proaches, particularly Indigenous worldviews.27 Becker theorized that all worl-
dviews—no matter how diverse—are hero systems designed to protect against
existential anxiety. He noted, however, that some worldviews are less destruc-
tive than others. He commended Indigenous societies for giving their members
“less invidious and competitive forms of self-expansion.”28 Euro-Americans, he
argued, should look to them for inspiration and seek to craft “nondestructive
yet victorious” social systems that satisfy the need for heroism without precipi-
tating the wreckage that comes from doctrines of supremacy.29
Despite this insight, Becker failed to explain why some societies (e.g.,
Christian) embrace doctrines of human supremacy when others (e.g., Indige-
nous) can meet their existential needs in less destructive ways. Having answers
to this question would support contemporary eorts to promote more egali-
tarian worldviews. For instance, perhaps anxiety about death is not as univer-
sal as Becker claimed. Maybe some cultures have learned to overcome their
existential anxiety to the point where the need for compensatory heroism or
signicance is not so great, thereby quelling the will for supremacy.
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
18 The Arrow JournAl
Indigenous Approaches to Death
In the same year that Becker published e Denial of Death, Dakota schol-
ar Vine Deloria Jr., a key gure in the disciplinary formation of Indigenous
studies, released God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, which challenged one
of Becker’s key premises. Recall that death-denying illusions, for Becker, are
integral to all cultures and that some illusions are more destructive than oth-
ers. Although he was not referring to Becker’s theories specically, Deloria Jr.
challenged Becker’s universalism when he observed that “rather than fearing
death tribal religions see it as an armation of life’s reality.”30 He continued:
“e Indian ability to deal with death was a result of the much larger context in
which Indians understood life. Human beings were an integral part of the nat-
ural world and in death they contributed their bodies to become the dust that
nourished the plants and animals that had fed people during their lifetime.”31
For Deloria Jr., Indigenous approaches to mortality are linked to nonsuprem-
acist worldviews that position humans as fundamentally integrated with the
natural world; upon their physical death, humans feed other life forms, much
as animals nourish humans when they are hunted and eaten.
How did some Indigenous nations achieve relative equanimity in the face
of death? It is dicult to disagree with Becker’s claim that death is fundamen-
tally troubling for the human animal. But, clearly, fear of death is more mallea-
ble than he allowed for. For example, Arikara scholar Michael Yellow Bird has
written about the rituals his community used to “rehearse for death.”32 In one
ritual, for instance, a tribal member was chosen to represent death (i.e., to dress
up and don body paint). e chosen one then left the village and prepared in
isolation to return as death. According to Yellow Bird, the arrival triggered
“deep emotional responses.”33 As the ritual closed, death left the village, disap-
pearing into the hills. Elders then talked with fellow community members to
hear how the encounter had impacted them. Sergei Kan’s work with the Tlingit
has likewise demonstrated how their mortuary Potlatches transformed death
into a “largely-life-arming event.”34
For Yellow Bird, Indigenous rituals share commonalities with Buddhist-in-
spired mindfulness practices, which are increasingly the subject of scientic
study.35 “Indigenous Peoples,” he writes, “have been engaged in practices that
incorporated mind body meditation and mindfulness principles for thousands
of years.”36 And, according to a TMT study published in 2019, mindfulness
practices can reduce defensive responses to death fears, rearming that one
can overcome existential anxiety and reduce compensatory illusions of su-
premacy.37 e study involved Buddhist and non-Buddhist participants in
both South Korea and the United States. e authors, Young Chin Park and
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
19
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
Tom Pyszczynski found that non-Buddhists in both countries who were put
through a twenty-minute meditation protocol did not become more defensive
of their worldviews after being primed on their mortality (but the control sub-
jects did, as is predicted by TMT). ey also found that experienced Buddhist
practitioners did not react defensively when reminded of their own mortality,
even when they did not meditate before the experiment (a nding that suggests
the enduring eect of mindfulness practice).
e authors go even further in pinpointing the mechanism that reduc-
es defensiveness. According to previous TMT studies, defensive responses to
death arise because of thought suppression. Instead of directly facing their
anxiety about death, people repress the fear, which is then sublimated into a
compensatory worldview defense. But Park and Pyszczynski found that medi-
tation halted thought suppression, allowing death fears to be experienced con-
sciously. is consciousness—like in the death-rehearsal ritual described by
Yellow Bird—facilitates a non-defensive response to mortality priming. Park
and Pyszczynski conclude that “responding defensively to thoughts of death,
by initially suppressing such thoughts and then defending one’s worldview
when they rebound, is not an inevitable response to this existential problem.”38
As Deloria Jr. points out: “Indians know that people die. ey accept death
as a fact of life. Rather than build a series of logical syllogisms that reason
away grief, Indian people have a ceremony of mourning by which grief can
be properly expressed… When [death] is suppressed—as it is in the Christian
religion—death becomes an entity in itself and is something to be feared.”39 In
eect, ritual and ceremony are mindfulness practices that help reduce existen-
tial defensiveness.
While more research on mind/body practices and death denial is need-
ed, Park and Pyszczynski’s study suggests that existential defensiveness can de-
termine whether a worldview is human supremacist or more egalitarian. We
suspect that some Indigenous nations use story and mindfulness techniques
such as ceremony and ritual to transform fear and denial of death into an
armation of earthly life. is reduction of existential fear, in turn, supports
non-supremacist worldviews and produces better ecological outcomes. “From
our traditional trickster stories that long preceded European and American co-
lonialism,” writes Michael Yellow Bird, “many of us realize that we humans can
be a fairly egotistical and negative species.”40 He continues: “e importance of
understanding the risks of negativity and an overinated ego are undoubtedly
one of the many reasons that our ancestors urged us to practice deep introspec-
tion and humility in our daily lives.”41 In other words, cultures that recognize
the fear and defensiveness that we humans can easily feel in the face of nitude
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
20 The Arrow JournAl
and that in turn have developed resources for facing and transforming that fear
are more likely to produce non-supremacist and egalitarian worldviews.
Coast Salish Ways of Death and Life
Although the reality of death remains painful for Salish peoples, ritual practices
help transform death from a “scary other” into a fundamental part of a trust-
worthy and regenerative cosmos. We argue that rather than denying death,
the ritualized acknowledgment of death among Coast Salish peoples supports
non-supremacist relations with the more-than-human world. ese relations
are, in turn, integral to practices and a worldview that has, as a core value,
the promotion of networks of relationships and responsibilities between all
beings—living humans, ancestral humans, salmon, trees, and all others. Fur-
thermore, we assert that this ethos of responsibility and relationality promotes
ecological health.
e Coast Salish are an ethnolinguistic group of Indigenous peoples of the
Pacic Northwest Coast, living in British Columbia, Washington, and Or-
egon. ey are a geographically diverse grouping of many peoples with nu-
merous distinct cultures and languages. e authors live and work within the
traditional territories of the Lekwungen and W
̱SÁNEĆ Coast Salish peoples in
the metropolitan area of Victoria, and the information presented here derives
largely from ethnographies, published sources, and from personal teaching
from knowledge holders. When we present knowledge from these experts, we
acknowledge them by name in the text and thank them for their guidance and
expertise. In particular, we acknowledge elder Sellemah/Joan Morris (Songhees
First Nation), and Harold Joe (Cowichan Tribes).
e Coast Salish, like many Indigenous Peoples around the world, adhere
to an epistemological framework that weaves all beings together into a web of
shared ancestry, origins, and well-being. Rarámurischolar and anthropologist
Enrique Salmón refers to this framework as kincentric ecology. is view is
some distance from the human supremacy alive in the Christian Genesis story,
especially God’s injunction to his human creations: “Be fruitful and multiply
and ll the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the sh of the sea
and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the
earth.”42 Contrary to the dominion promoted in the Book of Genesis,kincen-
tric ecology as a concept promotes the understanding that people are part of
an extended, interdependent ecological family with all life around them.43 e
reciprocal and nonsupremacist relations in this family are supported by more
armative relationships to mortality.
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
21
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
Consider traditional Coast Salish understandings of funerals. In the short
term, funerals helped the deceased reunite with relatives in the land of the
dead and provided necessities for the trip. ey allowed people to acknowl-
edge other dead ancestors who may be visiting and present at the time of the
funeral while helping to ensure the psychological and spiritual well-being of
the survivors. In the long term, funerals were rituals for mediating the physical
dissolution of the social person, ensuring the reconstitution of the dead as an
ancestor, and creating a venue for commemoration and remembering—much
like the Tlingit mortuary Potlatch mentioned above. ey were history in the
making as the burial of the dead anchored memories, stories, knowledge, and
rights to places associated with specic families and lineages.
e process, however, came with risks because the ancestral dead are inher-
ently powerful. As Elder Helen Joe states: “at energy is so strong… we have
to understand that the spiritual strength and the spiritual part of our people is
so much greater than the human being and we have to be careful.” e dead are
not malicious; they are simply more powerful than the living, and precautions
had to be taken before entering into any interaction with them.44
In contemporary Coast Salish communities, spirits of the recently deceased
are still viewed as inherently powerful and potentially dangerous if protocols of
respect for the dead are not followed.45 For example, close relatives are warned
to be careful in the year following a death because their loved one may still be
lingering and tempted to “take” a family member along on the journey to the
land of the dead. Protocols and prohibitions enable grieving families to cope in
appropriate ways during this volatile period. Some practices extend to all com-
munity members. For example, Harold Joe, a Cowichan Tribes cultural worker
and “gravedigger,” warned that you should not eat outside at dusk because a
lingering spirit might see you, become jealous of your ability to eat physical
food, and strike out.46 e awareness of the dead that pervades everyday life for
many Coast Salish people is, in eect, the opposite of death denial. Uncanny
encounters with the ancestral dead are a part of real life. ese encounters may
be odd, or even frightening, but few dispute that spirits exist and have the
power to inuence the living.47
Songhees elder Joan Morris/Sellemah tells us that she receives visitations
and signs from her “old ones” at important junctures when she needs clarity,
when she has important decisions to make, or when they have something they
need to tell her—“but even though they have important things to say to you,
you still have to stay strong and not take their hand. ey can take your səlí
[soul], because they know when you’re suering and they want to help you, to
take you home.”48
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
22 The Arrow JournAl
e Coast Salish view life and death as cyclical, which underlies the sense
of connection between ancestors and descendants and is at the root of the
ethic of mutual respect and responsibility between the living and the dead. In
this sense, death is not an end but rather a continuum along which personal
relationships are extended. e spirits of the dead came to visit and they were
honored, fed, and spoken to; they retained their agency and continued to exist
as real beings.49 People were reminded to maintain the connections between
the living and the dead because the dead were not a resource to be wielded or
“bossed around.”50 e ancestral dead were the supernatural foundation for
social order.51 ey were supernatural actors who interacted with, assisted, and
inuenced the aairs of the living, especially kin. Kin therefore had a custodial
responsibility toward the dead. ey needed to honor their ancestors to en-
sure the continued well-being and positive disposition of the dead toward the
living. Honoring the dead cultivated kinship values, promoted the continui-
ty of the family lineage through genealogies, and maintained connections to
ancestral places and histories.52 In other words, a certain amount of ritualized
interaction between the living and the dead was seen as necessary to “keep the
world right.”53
We suspect that these ritualized interactions quelled human-supremacist
impulses, contributing to a relational worldview that supports ecological health
as part of making the world right. Many Indigenous nations have been partic-
ularly successful at promoting ecological abundance, particularly when it came
to the species that sustained them.54 For instance, a study of Indigenous Peo-
ples in the Pacic Northwest published in 2016 explored how they enhanced
forest productivity.55 Although the study focused on specic land-management
practices that improved soil conditions for Western redcedar, this ecological
success also stemmed from a nonsupremacist worldview (including the rituals
for enacting it). is worldview was expressed, for example, by the late Kwak-
waka’wakw Clan Chief Kwaxsistalla/Adam Dick, who shared the Kwak’wala
word q’waq’wala7owkw—which means the responsibility of “keeping it liv-
ing.”56 is concept reects accountability in plant cultivation, including prac-
tices such as tilling, transplanting, weeding, selective harvesting, and controlled
burning. In eect, “keeping it living” encompasses a broad and complex system
of knowledge, teaching, laws, protocols, ritual, technology, and language as the
basis for a deep history of ecosystem use and management practices in which
humans are accountable to the plants and animals they harvest.
Within this system, creating productive root and berry gardens or sustain-
ing shing grounds to provide for one’s kin means establishing and following
the appropriate codes to ensure the continued well-being and productivity of
habitats and their life forms. For example, the sustainable SXOLE or reef-net
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
23
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
shery of the W
̱SÁNEĆ Coast Salish depends on a selective shing method
in which two canoes, anchored to the ocean oor, are situated along known
sockeye salmon seasonal migration routes. During a ooding tide, the salmon
navigate their way along complexes of reefs and paths cut by the shermen
through kelp forests; they swim toward the strategically situated and stationary
canoes and the large billowing net stretched between them.57 While this shery
is both ingenious and technically sophisticated, the shermen see its success as
being grounded in honoring the proper social relations between humans and
salmon. Adam Olsen, a member of the Tsartlip Nation, describes the respectful
relationship each sherman must have with salmon:
e wealth of a Straits Salish reef netter was not counted by the
number of sockeye he could catch, preserve, and trade alone… It was
also calculated by the long-term quality and abundance of the shing
grounds he owned, cared for and passed down to his descendants…
is relationship was central to the way of life of a reef netter. Rather
than viewing the sockeye as a resource to be exploited in full, reef
netters believe the sh, like every other living being, was once a hu-
man… [and that] all living things were an integral part of the circle
of life. e sockeye that passed by our nets were honoured as sacred
lineages, no dierent than the lineage of reef netters… both were part
of the same cycle.58
Integral to the success of the reefnet shery is the First Salmon ceremony.
Each year when the sockeye salmon begin to run, there is a prohibition against
shing until the rst catch had been ritually welcomed.59 After sx̣ʷaʼyəqʼʷ (the
rst sockeye salmon) is caught, children—freshly bathed, painted with red
ocher, and with white bird down sprinkled in their hair—are assembled on
the beach under the guidance of ritual experts to receive the sh from the sh-
ermen. Each child carries a dead salmon on outstretched arms from the shore
to the re pit.60 ere, the sh is laid on a bed of ferns and daubed with tə
́məɬ
(red ocher). Women butcher it, carefully removing the esh in one piece from
the spinal column, which is to be preserved intact. e esh is then fastened
to skewers and roasted over coals.61 Often, qʼəx̣min (seeds of Lomatium nu-
dicaule, dried and burned as incense) are sprinkled on the re while the sh is
cooked. When people nish eating, they are puried, and the bones are “fed”
with burning qʼəx̣min or təməɬ—both of which are ritually associated with
protection or purication.62
We suggest that the First Salmon ceremony is a homology to the ritualized
death, burial, and resurrection of humans.63 On both occasions, events are
governed by ritual experts, and qʼəx̣min and təməɬ are used as agents of puri-
cation and spiritual protection. While a funeral works toward transforming
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
24 The Arrow JournAl
the dead from a corpse into an ancestor and repairing the social fabric torn by
the death of the individual, it is also central to transforming mourners into
inheritors. Family-owned names, access to owned resource sites, and other as-
sets of the deceased are returned to the family group so they can be resurrected
again and passed to future generations. e First Salmon ceremony concerns
honoring the salmon who were “just like a person.”64 is ritual works toward
creating an accord with salmon so they will continue to appear each year. e
First Salmon ceremony and funerals for the human dead are highly ritualized,
cyclical movements between death, burial, and resurrection.
is regenerative cycle is also referenced in “e Story of the Sockeye,”
which Secwépemc Elder Dr. Mary omas shared with ethnobotanist Nancy
Turner.65 According to Dr. omas, the story was used to teach youth about
growing up and giving back to the community and the more-than-human
world. e story ends with the salmon reaching their spawning beds, with
them “fanning the beds with their tails and putting all their energy into ensur-
ing the survival of the babies. ey died giving life to the next generation, and
they also gave life to humans and to all the other living things along the river.”66
Death is presented in this story as a natural part of a generous and regenerative
cycle that we share with our nonhuman kin.
Eurocentric death denial has been forcefully enacted upon—and vigorous-
ly resisted by—Indigenous Peoples. As Pamela Amoss observes: “the western
rationalistic tradition has never been fully accepted by most Coast Salish peo-
ple but has only impinged on their own world view and canons of evidence.”67
Colonial acts of attempted assimilation, aimed at imposing a capitalist settler
culture on Indigenous Peoples included the coast-wide Potlatch ban, were en-
acted under an 1884 amendment to the Indian Act by the Canadian gov-
ernment.68 Depending on the culture, Potlatches were days-long gift-giving
feasts, rituals, and ceremonies held to commemorate the death of a Chief or the
head of a house; to facilitate the passing of names, titles, and responsibilities
to inheritors; to distribute tangible and intangible wealth; and to serve other
vital functions necessary for the continuance of the community’s culture and
economy.69
e ban—which came into eect in 1885 and was enforced by govern-
ment Indian agents, missionaries, and police—made it a criminal oense to
participate in a Potlatch.70 But many Potlatches continued to be held in secret.
For the Tlingit, for example, the Potlatch was the culmination of a series of
funerary rituals; following the wake and cremation, it served to strengthen the
alliance between the clan of the deceased and the moiety opposites. e living
spouse’s lineage was responsible for preparing the body and nal cremation.
While the Potlatch honored the deceased, it also provided the living with an
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
25
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
opportunity to repay the moiety opposites for their part in the funeral ser-
vice, thus strengthening the social fabric caused by the death of an important
member of Tlingit society. In eect, the Tlingit mortuary Potlatch transformed
death from a threat to their social order into an opportunity for strengthening
and enhancing it.71
e Potlatch ban was a colonial attempt at cultural assimilation, but it
was also an attempt to interrupt the process by which Indigenous Peoples re-
armed their familial histories and connections to important places. As a par-
ticipant in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal peoples testied in 1992:
“is provision of the Indian Act was in place for close to 75 years and what
it did was it prevented the passing down of our oral history. It prevented the
passing down of our values. It meant an interruption of the respected forms
of government we used to have.”72 e ban attempted to disrupt the Potlatch
as a resilient institution of social order and Indigenous law in tandem with
missionization and conversion to Christianity. In contrast to death, which is
unplanned and tragic, the Potlatch was a process of transforming death “from
an unpredictable rupture in the ow of social life into a planned, seasonal, and
largely life-arming event punctuating social time.”73
Although colonization and missionization brought economic, sociopoliti-
cal, and ideological change and introduced Christian approaches to death, fun-
damental elements of the Potlatch survive among all Indigenous communities
on the Northwest Coast. Among the Tlingit, for instance, contemporary prac-
tice of the funerary Potlatch ensures the survival of ancestral heritage.74 George
Davis (1899-1980), a respected orator and storyteller, spoke these words at
a Potlatch in 1980: “If we did not perform the potlatch, we would have lost
our Tlingit culture (way of life) (Lingít kusteeyí) long time ago. is is what is
holding up our Tlingit culture… Our past is sacred and there is no price tag on
it… is is what is keeping our Tlingit culture alive.” Potlatching is now also
a process of resisting those aspects of colonialism that threaten language, law
and the values associated with the ancestral caretaking and protection of family
histories and ancestral places. Funerary ritual and kincentric ecology are core
traditional values that have survived colonization and assimilation but are also
sites of Indigenous resistance to colonial hegemony.
• • •
e Coast Salish case is one example among many of non-Euro-American so-
cieties who have developed practices to face the nitude of death and avoid the
compensatory and destructive illusions of human supremacy—illusions that
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
26 The Arrow JournAl
result in ecological destruction and other harms. Indigenous scholars such as
Robin Kimmerer and Glen Coulthard encourage settlers to learn respectfully
from Indigenous lifeways.75 We argue that one of the key learnings settlers can
receive from Indigenous Peoples’ is their orientation toward death.
Ernest Becker’s death-denial theory helps to explain stubborn aective
attachments to human supremacy among Euro-Americans. Narratives of su-
premacy buer against existential fears by making subjects feel empowered
despite the dismembering force of nitude. Indigenous thinkers such as Vine
Deloria Jr. and Michael Yellow Bird add nuance to Becker’s argument by chal-
lenging his universalism and oering insight into how some peoples hold non-
supremacist worldviews while facing the same predicament of impermanence
as do all humans. As the Coast Salish case shows, death need not be so terri-
fying that it requires denialism and compensatory illusions. Instead, stories,
mind-body practices, and rituals can help cultures face and metabolize their
fears. And recent TMT research on mindfulness reveals that aective strategies
can undo death denial and the supremacy narratives it often generates.76
ese are important lessons for environmental educators and advocates
who work in a eld where educational materials often trigger fears of death
and images of destruction riding on the backs of climate change or some other
ecological calamity.77 Our hope is that awareness of death denial and the devel-
opment of aective strategies to overcome it will become a focus of future en-
vironmental research, education, and action. But we should take care to learn
from Indigenous ontologies and ceremonies without stealing knowledge in the
same way that land was violently stolen in settler-colonial contexts such as the
United States, Canada, and Australia. Although Lynn White Jr. and Ernest
Becker were respectful of Indigenous lifeways, they did not explicitly advocate
for the resurgence of Indigenous cultures and the repatriation of Indigenous
land. Yet joining Indigenous nations and following their lead as they seek to
reclaim their lands is one of the best ways for ethical learning to happen in our
current moment when unjust power imbalances continue to shape relations
between Indigenous nations and settler peoples and between humans and the
land we all inhabit.78
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the guidance, teaching, and advice of Joan Morris (Songhees
Nation) and Harold Joe (Cowichan Tribes).
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
27
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
JAMES ROWE is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the
University of Victoria. He is currently writing a book called Radical
Mindfulness: Death Denial and the Will to Supremacy, discussing the
transformative potential of mind/body practices within the context of
social movements. His research aims to improve the internal function
of social movements so that they can better overcome dominations such
as the concentrated economic power of elites, white supremacy, settler
colonialism, human supremacy and heterosexism.
DARCY MATHEWS is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental
Studies at the University of Victoria. He is an archaeologist and
Ethnoecologist working collaboratively with Indigenous communities to
understand the deep history of social and ecological relationships between
peoples and their environments. In partnership with community knowledge
holders, as well as with youth, they work to co-discover how people and
their ecosystems interacted through time. Currently, with the Songhees
First Nation, they are researching the human and ecological history of the
Tl’ches archipelago in southwestern British Columbia, with its legacy of
sustainable Indigenous inhabitation and management over millennia.
Notes
1. Lynn White Jr., “e Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science no. 155 (1967):
1207.
2. See Alex Lockwood, “Graphs of Grief and Other Green Feelings: e Uses of Aect
in the Study of Environmental Communication,” Environmental Communications 10
(2016): 734-7.
3. See Janis L. Dickinson, “e people paradox: Self-esteem striving, immortality ideolo-
gies, and human response to climate change,” Ecology and Society 14, (2009): 34; Sarah
E. Wolfe and Amit Tubi, “Terror Management eory and Mortality Awareness: A
Missing Link in Climate Response Studies?,” WIREs Climate Change 10 (2018): 1-13.
4. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: In-
digeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40; and Elizabeth Carlson, “Anti-co-
lonial Methodologies and Practices for Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies
7, no. 4 (2016): 496–517.
5. Andrew J. Trant, Wiebe Nijland, Kira M. Homan, Darcy L. Mathews, Duncan
McLaren, Trisalyn A. Nelson, and Brian M. Starzomski, “Intertidal Resource Use over
Millennia Enhances Forest Productivity,” Nature Communications 7, no. 1 (2016): 1–8;
and James Rowe and Mike Simpson, “Lessons from the Frontlines of Anti-colonial
Pipeline Resistance,” Waging Nonviolence, October 9, 2017, https://wagingnonviolence.
org/2017/10/lessons-front-lines-anti-colonial-unistoten-pipeline-resistance/.
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
28 The Arrow JournAl
6. Rowe is of mixed-European ancestry (primarily Scottish and Irish). Mathews is ofmixed
Cree-European ancestry. His father is Cree from Maskwacis and was separatedfrom his
mother Cecelia Goodeye during the “60’s Scoop.” His mother was of mixed German
Mennonite and English ancestry. Mathews did not grow up inMaskwacis and only in
the past three years has been reunited with his father’s family. Five years ago, he was
adopted into the family of Sellemah/Joan Morris, an elder of the Songhees Nation, who
we acknowledge in this paper for her guidance.
7. According to James Baldwin, who is regularly cited by researchers who focus on terror
management theory, white supremacy is not produced by “hatred but by terror”: see
“Martin Luther King,” in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of
America, 1998), 651. For Baldwin, illusions of supremacy are rooted in white America’s
desire to avoid the reality of death. In a powerful passage from the Fire Next Time (New
York: Vintage, 1991), Baldwin observes that “Americans cannot face reality, the fact that
life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises
and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps
the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrice all the beauty
of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrices, steeples,
mosques, races, armies, ags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the
only fact we have” (91). A particularly striking example of Baldwin’s argument is the
“white extinction anxiety” currently being communicated by avowed white supremacists
in the United States. “e existential question,” wrote conservative political commenta-
tor Pat Buchanan in a recent blog post, is “how does the West, America included, stop
the ood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character
of our nations and our civilization?” (see Charles Blow, “White Extinction Anxiety” New
York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/opinion/america-white-extinction.
html). Donald Trump has shared tweets from proponents of white extinction theory on-
line, demonstrating that this existential anxiety over racial ‘replacement’ is not marginal
on the political right.
8. See Dan Cable and Francesca Gino, “Coping with ‘Death Awareness’ in the COVID-19
Era,” Scientic American, May 13, 2020, https://www.scienticamerican.com/article/
coping-with-death-awareness-in-the-covid-19-era/.
9. Ernest Becker, e Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973).
10. Sheldon Solomon, Je Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, e Worm at the Core: On the
Role of Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015).
11. Becker, e Denial of Death, 26.
12. Ibid., 4.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Ibid., 33.
15. Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil (New York: Free Press, 1975), 49.
16. Young Chin Park and Tom Pyszczynski, “Reducing Defensive Responses to oughts
of Death: Meditation, Mindfulness, and Buddhism,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 116, no. 1 (2019): 102.
17. See, for example, Richard Klein, Kate A. Ratli, and Christine Vitiello, “Failure to
Replicate Mortality Salience Eect with and without Original Author Involvement,”
Center for Open Science, December 10, 2019, https://cos.io/blog/many-labs-4-fail-
ure-replicate-mortality-salience-eect-and-without-original-author-involvement; and
Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, e Worm at the Core. More study is needed, but
the replication may have failed because of the political context. e study that research-
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
29
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
ers sought to replicate had focused on increased attachments to pro-US sentiment after
subjects were primed on their mortality: see Je Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon
Solomon, Linda Simon, and Michael Breus, “Role of Consciousness and Accessibility of
Death-Related oughts in Mortality Salience Eects,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 67, no. 4 (1994): 627–37. But the replication was undertaken in 2016 and
2017, years when there was growing concern about Trumpism and rising right-wing
nationalism, a heightened political context that may have run interference on the typical
worldview defenses predicted by TMT. More replication eorts are needed.
18. Ruth M. Beatson and Michael J. Halloran, “Humans Rule! e Eects of Creatureliness
Reminders, Mortality Salience and Self-Esteem on Attitudes towards Animals,” British
Journal of Social Psychology 46, no. 3 (2007): 619–32. It is important to note that not
all participants in this study showed a defensive response to mortality salience, even if
that was the predominant nding. In TMT experiments, like in larger societies, there is
a diversity of responses to death. Why some individuals might respond less defensively
than others to mortality primes is an open question. TMT experiments have focused
primarily on general ndings across test participants since those are more likely to point
towards general responses in the larger society.
19. Stephen Loughnan, Michael Halloran, and Ruth Beatson, “Attitudes toward Animals:
e Eect of Priming oughts of Human-Animal Similarities and Mortality Salience
on the Evaluation of Companion Animals,” Society and Animals 17, no. 1 (2009):
72–89.
20. Ibid., 86.
21. Uri Lifshin, Je Greenberg, Colin A. Zestcott, and Daniel Sullivan, “e Evil Animal:
A Terror Management eory Perspective on the Human Tendency to Kill Animals,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43, no. 6 (2017): 743–57.
22. Ibid., 745.
23. Melissa F. Soenke, Florette Cohen, Je Greenberg, and Uri Lifshin, “Are You Smarter
an a Cetacean? Death Reminders and Concerns about Human Intelligence,” Society
and Animals 26, no. 5 (2018): 469–89.
24. TMT researchers measure death-thought accessibility (DTA) by asking participants to
complete ll-in-the-blank tests such as Co__. Participants with greater DTA are more
likely to write “con,” while control subjects are more likely to write “coee.”
25. Becker, Escape from Evil, 81.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Ibid., 126.
30. Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press,
2003), 174.
31. Ibid., 171.
32. Michael Yellow Bird, “Rehearsing for Death,” Arikara Consciousness, 5 January 2013,
http://arikaraconsciousness.blogspot.ca/2012_12_30_archive.html.
33. Ibid.
34. Sergei Kan, Symbolic Immortality: e Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century (Wash-
ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 295.
35. Michael Yellow Bird, “Neurodecolonization: Using Mindfulness Practices to Delete
the Neural Networks of Colonialism,” in For Indigenous Minds Only: A Decolonization
Handbook, eds. Angela Waziyatawin Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird (Santa Fe, NM:
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
30 The Arrow JournAl
SAR Press, 2012), 57–83. For more on resonances between Indigenous and Buddhist
cosmologies see Natalie Avalos, “Land-Based Ethics and Settler Solidarity In a Time of
Corona and Revolution,” e Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture and Politics, 9
July 2020, https://arrow-journal.org/land-based-ethics-and-settler-solidarity-in-a-time-
of-corona-and-revolution/.
36. Ibid., 70.
37. Park and Pyszczynski, “Reducing Defensive Responses,” 101.
38. Ibid., 115.
39. Vine Deloria Jr, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1969), 120.
40. Yellow Bird, “Neurodecolonization,” 59.
41. Ibid.
42. Elspeth Whitney, “Lynn White Jr,’s ‘e historical roots of our ecologic crisis’ after 50
years,” History Compass 13 (2015): 396-410.
43. Enrique Salmón, “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature
Relationship,” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5 (2000): 1327–32.
44. Kathryn McKay, “Disturbing the Dead: Diversity and Commonality among the Stó:lō,”
University of the Fraser Valley Research Review 2, no. 2 (2009): 129.
45. Colleen Boyd, “‘You See Your Culture Coming Out of the Ground Like a Power’:
Uncanny Narratives in Time and Space on the Northwest Coast,” Ethnohistory 56, no. 4
(2009): 699–731.
46. Harold Joe, in discussion with Darcy Mathews, May 9, 2020.
47. Boyd, “You See Your Culture,” 717.
48. Personal communication to Darcy Mathews, April 15, 2021
49. Susan Joseph, “Coast Salish Perceptions of Death and Dying: An Ethnographic Study”
(master’s thesis, University of Victoria, 1994).
50. Pamela Amoss, Coast Salish Spirit Dancing: e Survival of an Ancestral Religion (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1978).
51. Joyce Wike, “e Role of the Dead in Northwest Coast Culture,” inIndian Tribes of
Aboriginal America, ed. Sol Tax (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1967).
52. Ibid., 98; and Boyd, “You See Your Culture,” 702.
53. McKay, “Disturbing the Dead,” 124.
54. See, for instance, Richard E. Atleo (Chief Umeek), Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worl-
dview (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass:
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientic Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis:
Milkweed Editions, 2013); Leanne B. Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous
Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017);
Ronald L. Trosper, Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2009); Nancy J. Turner, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany
and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America (Montreal/
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); and Kyle P. Whyte, “Food Sover-
eignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective
Continuance,” in e Oxford Handbook for Food Ethics, eds. Anne Barnhill, Tyler Dog-
gett, and Mark Budolfson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 345–66. Some
scholars have questioned these ecological successes, suggesting that Indigenous Peoples
did not practice conservation as it is understood today. See, for example, Shepard Krech,
e Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Michael E.
Harkin, “Swallowing Wealth: Northwest Coast Beliefs and Ecological Practices: Native
DEATH DENIAL, HUMAN SUPREMACY, AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
31
Vol. 8(1) | Summer 2021
Americans and the Environment,” in Perspectives on the Ecological Indian, eds. Michael
Eugene Harkins and David Rich Lewis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007),
211–32. A problem with these accounts is that they treat Euro-American understand-
ings of conservation as the yardstick and fail to engage with Indigenous land-manage-
ment techniques on their own terms and within the broader context in which they were
practiced. See, for example, Paul Nadasdy, “Transcending the Debate of the Ecologically
Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism,” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2
(2005): 291–331.
55. Trant et al., “Intertidal Resource Use.”
56. Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner, “Introduction: Reconstructing Indigenous Resource
Management, Reconstructing the History of an Idea,” in Keeping It Living: Traditions of
Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America, eds. Douglas Deur
and Nancy J. Turner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 3–34.
57. Nicholas Claxton/’XEMŦOLTW, “To Fish as Formerly: A Resurgent Journey Back to
the Saanich Reef Net Fisher” (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 2015).
58. Adam Olsen, “Speech to the Association of Professional Biology,” April 26, 2014, Victo-
ria, British Columbia.
59. Pamela Amoss, “‘e Fish God Gave Us’: e First Salmon Ceremony Revived,” Arctic
Anthropology 24 (1987): 57; June M. Collins, “John Fornsby: e Personal Document
of a Coast Salish Indian,” in Indians of the Urban Northwest, ed. Mariam Wesley Smith
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 287–341; Diamond Jenness, “e
Saanich Indians of Vancouver Island,” n.d., typescript of unnished manuscript, copy in
Special Collections, University of Victoria; Marian Wesley Smith, e Puyallup-Nisqually
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1940); and Wayne P. Suttles, Economic Life of the
Coast Salish of Haro and Rosario Straits (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974).
60. Suttles, Economic Life of the Coast Salish, 173.
61. Collins, “John Fornsby,” 296.
62. Wilson Du, “Unpublished Wilson Du Notebook 11, Straits Salish,” 1951, British
Columbia Provincial Archives, le B6004 50 STR-W-001; Jenness, “e Saanich Indi-
ans of Vancouver Island”; and Suttles, Economic Life of the Coast Salish, 173–75.
63. Darcy Mathews, “Funerary Ritual, Ancestral Presence, and the Rocky Point Ways of
Death” (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 2014).
64. Erna Gunther, “Klallam Ethnography,” University of Washington Publications in Anthro-
pology 1, no. 5 (1927): 203.
65. Nancy J. Turner, e Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living ( Van-
couver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005).
66. Ibid.
67. Pamela Amoss, Coast Salish Spirit Dancing: e Survival of an Ancestral Religion (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1978), 167.
68. Tina Loo, “Dan Cranmer’s Potlatch: Law as Coercion, Symbol, and Rhetoric in British
Columbia, 1884–1951,” Canadian Historical Review 73, no. 2 (1992): 125–65.
69. Aldona Jonaitis, Chiey Feasts: e Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1991).
70. Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin, An Iron Hand upon the People: e Law against the Pot-
latch on the Northwest Coast (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1990).
71. Kan, Symbolic Immortality.
72. Alfred Scow, presentation to Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), Ottawa,
26 November, 1992, transcriptions of public hearings and round table discussions, Uni-
JAMES ROWE & DARCY MATHEWS
32 The Arrow JournAl
versity of Saskatchewan Archives, Native Law Centre fonds, Reference Library, RCAP,
vol. 78, box 12, http://scaa.sk.ca/ourlegacy/permalink/30466.
73. Kan, Symbolic Immortality, 295.
74. Sergei Kan, “Russian Orthodox Brotherhoods among the Tlingit: Missionary Goals and
Native Response,” Ethnohistory 32 (1985): 196–223.
75. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; and Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the
Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
76. Park and Pyszczynski, “Reducing Defensive Responses,” 101.
77. James Rowe, “Toilet Paper as Terror Management,” e Arrow: Journal of Wakeful Society,
Culture, and Politics, April 9, 2020, https://arrow-journal.org/toilet-paper-as-terror-man-
agement/.
78. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 1–40; and James Rowe and
Mike Simpson, “Lessons from the Frontlines of Anti-colonial Pipeline Resistance,”
Waging Nonviolence, October 9, 2017, https://wagingnonviolence.org/2017/10/les-
sons-front-lines-anti-colonial-unistoten-pipeline-resistance/. Rowe teaches a 4th year
class on “Mindfulness, Sustainability and Social Change” that engages the role of death
denial in ongoing environmental destruction. In that class, we engage Buddhist aec-
tive and narrative strategies for mitigating death fear and the will to supremacy it can
condition (particularly ich Nhat Hanh’s book Love Letter to the Earth). Buddhist
praxis is easier to share without committing cultural appropriation given Buddhism’s
missionary history (although the danger of appropriation is very much alive in the sec-
ular mindfulness movement and we engage that danger explicitly in the class). As noted
above, Arikara scholar Michael Yellow Bird sees deep resonances between Indigenous
ritual and Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices that are increasingly available in the
Euro-Americas. We encourage fellow settlers to become active in anti-colonial eorts as
particularly grounded ways to learn Indigenous knowledge. Buddhist modernism also
oers numerous resonant practices, including meditation itself, for transforming death
denial. We oer these few applications of our analysis as gestures towards wider possibil-
ity, but ultimately we wrote this article as an invitation for more environmental research
on death denial and practical strategies for transforming it since we think more people
need to be collectively working on these vital matters.
