Rhythm and Reciprocity: Nurturing the Land and Self Through Restoration Ecology
For decades, fellow scientists have told restoration ecologist Jennifer Grenz that she takes her work too personally. But for the young Nlaka’pamux woman, who grew up on her family’s farm in interior British Columbia, eating tomatoes like apples and listening to warbling frogs at night, that never quite rang true.
As she entered a scientific field dominated by a detached approach to caring for the land — its plants, waters, and animals — she also quietly practiced traditional medicine at home, living with one foot in each disparate world. In her new book, Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Towards Personal and Ecological Healing, Grenz takes readers along her ongoing, circular journey to reconcile those aspects of herself with an integrated scientific approach inspired by Indigenous wisdom. From the rhythms of gardening to fighting invasive species with flame torches, she offers a warm, beautifully rendered glimpse into the lengths we must all travel to bring healing and balance to our collective natural environments, inside ourselves and out.
It was more a smattering of fleeting visions and memories than one defining moment. My dad was really into fishing and the outdoors, and I constantly followed him on his adventures.
I also had a lot of exposure, in my early life, to being outside and honouring where food comes from. My grandmother and my great-grandmother were amazing gardeners. In my great-grandma’s garden, she used to have a salt and pepper shaker hanging from the fence so you could pick tomatoes and cucumbers and eat them right away with salt and pepper while you were gardening. But at that time, I didn’t really realize this could be a career path.
As much as my dad was super-outdoorsy, my mom was the opposite. Everyone jokes that they wonder how my mother is actually my mother, because she does not get dirty or like bugs. [In Girl Guides] I found a lot of mentorship, and saw that women could do that kind of stuff. When my daughters got to that age, it was a no-brainer for them to join Brownies and Guides, and for me to become a leader, because I felt I had some knowledge I could share with the girls. When you teach people about medicines, it resonates in a different way. When the girls started to learn that plants were helpers, they saw how there are all these relationships they didn’t know about. And they found something for themselves in it. It was just such a wonderful opportunity to marvel at that, and to have a moment to see in their worldview.
Since my daughters were little, we’ve harvested cottonwood buds every March. And reciprocity is an often-forgotten but critical protocol in taking anything from the woods. Every year, a truck shows up [in the forest], and people harvest branches to make wreaths. They come in, and they take, and just leave, and it feels so wrong. And so I’ve always thought we have to teach reciprocity from a young age, that you have to do something in return, whether it is pulling weeds or invasive plants or moving another tree around.
One year, my girls said, ʻWhat are we going to do this year for the cottonwood tree?ʼ And I was like, ʻI don’t know. What do you guys want to do?ʼ And so they decided that they were going to pull some scotch broom. We talked about this with the Girl Guides too. I think about the power of when I was in school and learning the three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle. I feel like reciprocity is another R we need to add. Kids are so powerful. I remember can-shaming my mom if she threw a can into the garbage. So let’s add that reciprocity, so kids can say to thei parents when they’ve hiked on a trail, ʻOkay, what are we going to do now to thank this place for this beautiful experience we just had?ʼ
In my Western scientific education, studying these things that I love more than anything — plants and land — when I came into it, I had such wonder. But through the course of my education and career, I lost that awe and wonder, because it became so mechanistic. Because we had all the answers through our education. It was just such a simplistic way of looking at land and problems and disturbance, always casting humans as the scapegoat. And yes, weʼve done a lot of terrible things, but there was a degree of ignorance in that, because of colonial history.
When we started to have Indigenous community members observing our work, they were called observers. And at the beginning, Iʼm ashamed to say, it bothered me that they were coming with us, because I had this beautiful routine managing marine parks with my favourite park ranger. We had our routine, and suddenly there were like, almost like these intruders, which is so messed up. It was their land. But what happened is they brought the awe back.
I remember thinking, ʻWow. They know every square inch of this territory, in a way that I don’t, and I’ve been working up here for so long.ʼ I think that was a big piece of that unravelling, in bringing back that awe and that wonder. Why did that leave me when I was getting educated, and why am I returning to it, where we’re trying to solve really complicated problems? There was this realization that staying on this [Western scientific] track was not the right thing, and I just kept going and exploring from there. But boy, the more I unravelled, as hard as it was, the more things started to make sense.
Well, it’s still not easy. In some circles, especially in British Columbia, I feel like we’re in a unique situation, where our colonial history is so much shorter, and there’s a lot of lived memory. There’s more of an openness here to integrating Indigenous knowledge. But elsewhere, I still face a lot of skepticism and eyebrow raises. The hardest part about it is that, even as a woman in a STEM space, you’re in the minority. So you’re trying to prove yourself, and you want to follow the rules. You don’t want to seem disrespectful, and you already feel like you don’t belong in the space.
I think the hardest thing for anyone to do is to speak up. I’ve watched firsthand as people who did speak up get trashed by other professionals in the field. People were completely discredited, cut out of professional organizations, so the risks are high. But I think it just came to a point where I had to be brave. Our Elders teach us that all the time: don’t talk so much, just watch and learn and listen, but at some point you can put up your hand and say, ʻThis is the best way we could be doing things.ʼ
Even my very favourite mentor told me that I was going to undermine myself as a scientist if I tried to integrate Indigenous knowledge. I know a lot of people can’t understand this, but I don’t hold that against him, because he said it out of care. He was worried for me. He knew what the risks were, and he had helped me get where I am. And I think there’s a lesson in that, too, about mentorship with students. We have to be careful that our protection isn’t holding them back from the transformative power they might have.
Words matter, and they have so much power to transform our experience and bring us out of this two-dimensional ʻscience,ʼ where we don’t integrate things like spirit. By changing words, we can help people come into a relational worldview. And it’s not even just about giving [plants] animacy, but also giving them truth. The term ʻnatureʼ bothers me, because it feels like it’s this thing that will exist without us. Maybe it will, in some ways, but it ignores our history. I’m continuing to work on this and encouraging people to use other words, like land healing. But it makes people so uncomfortable, because we’ve been taught to keep ourselves out of everything that we’re doing. Like, ‘don’t show that you care about something or you can’t be objective.’ I think there’s just so much opportunity for everyone to explore how we are describing things, and asking if we are separating ourselves. We talk about this all the time, with my grad students and in courses that I teach: what are the words that aren’t quite meeting the mark, and why?
Oh my gosh. The crazy thing is that frogs are everywhere in my life. A lot of times, even working in intersectional spaces, you hear people describe this work as walking in two worlds.
I have another friend who describes my work as that of an edge-walker. Every different nation, at least in B.C., has different stories about the frog. And it’s always that the frog’s role is in knowledge translation, or in giving knowledge. I realized that the frog is the great connector between those worlds, and that you can live in both those worlds. It’s not like one is better than the other; they’re both necessary. It was just such a beautiful thing that these frogs showed up at this moment of trying to understand this concept of walking into worlds that didn’t feel quite right to me.
The frog needs both worlds to live and thrive and carry forward, and so it’s been this amazing way to remember how to walk in the world. Because I also think it’s easy to get frustrated in this space, when people misunderstand or choose to misunderstand your work. But if you can remind yourself that you’re the connector, and you know that that is your role, it’s a lot less frustrating. They’re just not walking this way.
Later, when I was recording the audiobook, we set up in that cottage. Just as I was about to start reading the frog chapter, the Pacific chorus frogs started singing outside the door. I was being directed virtually, and the frogs were so loud that in the meeting, the director laughed and said, ‘Haha, Jen, I don’t think we can include that,’ thinking that I did it on purpose with a recording. But I was like, ‘No, the frogs are actually singing that loud outside.’
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
