Politics: A Survivor’s Guide: How to Stay Engaged without Getting Enraged

Product Information

The Sun is sinking lower in the sky and there's a long drive home. Tomorrow will bring another day out on the land, stewarding the territory as her ancestors once did, and as generations to come will too. Since the late 1990s, the vast majority of protected areas established in Canada have been led or co-led by indigenous peoples, says Courtois, and their ambitions far exceed those of governments and global targets.

Serving as the "eyes and ears" on traditional territories, guardians are trained experts responsible for helping indigenous nations steward their lands and waters. Guardians manage protected areas and restore wildlife and plants. They are central to creating land-use and marine-use plans. And they test water quality and monitor resource development.Theresa May’s post-Brexit speech in which she declared that anyone who was not a citizen of Britain was a “citizen of nowhere” chimes eerily with Stalin’s “rootless cosmopolitan”, a euphemism for Jews. Didn’t she realise that? No, reports Behr. He asked her aides and they said as much. Guardians programmes are also vital in connecting youth with elders, facilitating the transmission of indigenous languages, culture and traditional knowledge – helping indigenous nations to recover and reclaim what has been diminished by colonisation. In Canada, where there are feelings among many that colonialism is a historical problem but one still rooted in the present, centring conservation with the country's original stewards is allowing indigenous people to reconnect to their land and culture. It is also reshaping relations between indigenous nations and non-indigenous Canada, presenting an opportunity for genuine reconciliation. We can go to them and say: 'You're not doing your job properly, you're destroying creeks when you're logging, you're not following your own rules,'" says Meness.

People are actually listening now," she says. "Being a guardian means to me that [indigenous] people will never go away. We'll always be here. Stop trying to go against us and start working with us." We live in an age of fury and confusion. A new crisis erupts before the last one has finished: financial crisis, Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, inflation, strikes. Prime Ministers come and go but politics stays divided and toxic.

Meness senses a shift in society, observing that indigenous and non-indigenous people alike are trying to work together. In that shift, hope has taken root. A wonderful meditation on populism, nationalism, politics and truth - rich with imaginative aphorisms, alert to the most unusual connections across time and space - weaving the personal and the global - a great work of political analysis. - Rory Stewart, The Rest Is Politics podcast's Non-Fiction Book of the Year Witnessing their ancestor's knowledge in action was, she recalls, a profound moment that deepened her interest in medicinal plant knowledge. "We [once] used all these plants. That's what they were made for, to help us," she says.