Vibrant modalities: Indigenous modes of being and survival in the sixth extinction

It seems every summer, one cannot escape the daily news reports from across the globe detailing the devastation from fatal floods, fatal heat waves, extended droughts, killer red tides, and inextinguishable wildfires as well as the human intransigence in the face of these existential threats. The reports that reverberate across media platforms and across continents are tangible evidence of an anxious semiotics of doom. In these tumultuous years of upheavals attributed to climate change, excessive resource extraction, rapacious development, and a continuously resurgent pandemic there are also signs of life beyond species extinction. The immersive and immediate conditions of these existential threats blind many to the recursive nature of life and death in the sixth extinction; an endless cycle of new species and biomes replacing antecedent ones. Once in a while, a story offers relief from fear and uncertainty and provides a glimpse of what survival in an apocalypse might look like.

On August 2, 2021, an article on the USA Today website featured a story titled “‘Homecoming’: 100 Years after Forceful Removal, Native American Tribe Celebrate Reclaimed Land in Oregon.”¹ The article describes the process by which the Niimiipuu (Nez Perce) bought back land that was taken from them over a century ago. Vice Chairman Shannon Wheeler evocatively said, “Our people know we sprang from this land and we're tied to the land in that manner and the land is tied to us in the same way” (Lugo, 2021). The article featured photographs and a video of Niimiipuu returning to their ancestral land on horseback. These media illustrate “vibrant modalities” of survival in alienated landscapes (Zimmerman et al., 2023). Zimmerman et al. define vibrant modalities as “the kin-based social interpretation of meaning-making as an emergent property at the intersection of human modes of communication in relation to the vibrant environment” (2023, 224). These modalities offer insights into how we might approach negotiating the sixth extinction with “vision” (Leakey & Lewin, 1996, 224).

The last five centuries constitute the opening act of the sixth extinction. The Indigenous worlds of the Western Hemisphere were dramatically altered (Cronon, 1983), some beyond recognition, others were obliterated (de las Casas, 1992; Pagden, 1982). Not only were invasive species introduced to the hemisphere but so were pathogens, biomes, and most devastatingly, invasive concepts (Baldwin et al., 2018). Today, we are all witnessing the opening scene of the second act of the sixth extinction. The slow violence (Nixon, 2011) of colonialism and its attendant concepts are the systemic conditions creating the largely “invisible” ontological vulnerability (Lear, 2006) that threaten many lifeforms and their respective environments. Humans can no longer separate themselves from the world through gated communities, technology-protected enclosures, or other manicured fortifications, as they may be erased soon enough from these fantasies of defense. Efforts to decenter humans and introduce object-oriented ontologies to cast a larger conceptual field of “hyperobjects” (Morton, 2013) or to imagine a world of “vibrant matter” (Bennett, 2010) are laudable but limited.

Morton argues global warming is a hyperobject that exists beyond human capacity to comprehend its totality due to global warming being “massively distributed in space and time” (Morton, 2013, 1−3). Morton's “realism” seeks to transcend the limits of human cognitive capacity for grasping the scale of the object while also granting global warming an object ontology independent of anthropocentric thought. Bennett's vibrant matter political ecology project seeks to afford nonhuman objects with vitalities that allow these bodies to “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett, 2010, viii). Bennett asserts her “dogged resistance to anthropocentrism” (xvi). These decentering strategies, while provocative, still emanate from human actors/agents. As Bennett nicely puts it, “I court the charge of performative self-contradiction: is it not a human subject who, after all, is articulating this theory of vibrant matter?” (ix). Or, Morton's hyperobjects?

These human efforts to decenter human-centricity are masking a self-deception concealing human ventriloquism as the voice and actions of the nonhuman. We must see through these masks. As the climate crisis devastates communities of all species and extinctions are increasing at alarming rates, we will all be seeking survival strategies (Baldwin et al., 2018) for impending upheavals (such as the COVID-19 induced global disruption). Perhaps, we can learn from Indigenous modes of being as survival strategies for the looming crises; that is, if it's not too late.

The global pandemic threatens everyone's sense of stability and security while amplifying an impatience for “things to return to normal.”² The impulse to wish for a return to the good old days before the pandemic is understandable; be it returning to classrooms, a return to efficient global supply chains, and/or a return to politics “as normal.” “Things returning to normal” is a conceptual luxury no one can afford. What was “normal” is what got us to this existential moment. Why would we want to return to that “normal?” The upheavals and disruptions to social, political, economic, and environmental systems presented an opportunity for collective reflection on what went wrong and how we can avoid future convulsions of the sixth extinction. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin provocatively wrote in 1996, “I will state boldly right now that I believe we face a crisis—one of our own making—and if we fail to negotiate it with vision, we will lay a curse of unimaginable magnitude on future generations” (Leakey & Lewin, 1996, 224). Over two decades later, the global community is still failing to negotiate the crisis with any vision beyond “things returning to normal.” The conceits embedded in such a vision blind the purveyors of the “normal” to the self-inflicted wound that not only harms them but everyone else on this planet. To imagine a way forward not anchored to a trajectory of doom we must look elsewhere for surviving the self-inflicted wounds of climate change and the sixth extinction (Perley, 2020).

A growing number of Indigenous and allied scholars interrogate the contemporary shibboleths “Anthropocene” and “apocalypse” when describing our current existential precarity (Davis & Todd, 2017; Morton, 2013; Nixon, 2011; Perley, 2020; Whyte, 2017). Whyte argues the apocalypse is not something in our near future, rather, for Indigenous peoples they have been living through it for centuries. In a coauthored paper, Davis and Todd reflect upon the pronouncement by the Working Group on the Anthropocene that “the Anthropocene is here” (Davis & Todd, 2017, 762). The authors suggest the start date of the Anthropocene should be 1610: the era of colonization in the Western Hemisphere. The importance of this suggested date is to shift the conceit of science away from geological data and to focus on the relations between the Anthropocene and colonial processes. Their proposed date offers an important consideration for myriad processes beyond geological datasets, but their start point is too late. Baldwin et al. argue that the mass extinctions witnessed by the First Peoples in the Americas started in 1492 (2018). Baldwin et al. argue for a focus on “invasive concepts” as precepts that promote the continued erasure of Indigenous experience and knowledge systems that are encoded in Indigenous languages. The authors write, “The first convulsion of the sixth extinction obliterated entire tribes, languages, cultures, ecosystems, species, and landscapes. The extent of population loss, species loss, and habitat loss will never be known, but we do know that some American Indian communities endured and survived more than five hundred years of drastic transformations in the opening act of human extinction” (Baldwin et al., 2018, 222−23).

The horrors of today's cataclysms (wildfires, floods, droughts, pandemics, and population displacements) are only the second act of the “unimaginable horror” (Leakey & Lewin, 1996) that future generations will have to endure. Despite the horror, discourses about planetary health start to proliferate. Are we on the cusp of a vision for a survivable and sustainable future? Or, is “planetary health” one of the conceits that led us to this precipice of extinction? Can planetary health be considered “health” if humans become extinct due to their own actions? Is the planet healthy only if the conditions promote human health?

During the walk through the wetlands the Anishinaabemowin language teacher leaned forward and looked down at a plant. He extended his arm and pointed to the plant. Still pointing, he turned to the students behind/beside him and gave the name of the plant in Anishinaabemowin, explaining the significance of the name and the plant to Anishinaabe. The students nodded in understanding.

Our working definition of “vibrant modalities” is “the kin-based social interpretation of meaning-making as an emergent property at the intersection of human modes of communication in relation to the vibrant environment” (Zimmerman et al., 2023, 224). This is significant in asserting the multimodal and embodied perspective that will avoid the Eurocentric (or even generalized) conceit of planetary health as perceived from the interest of human survival. The landscape pedagogy exercise was multimodal, multisensory, and interactive across semiotic and ontological domains. The experiential dynamic of learning in the landscape animated multimodal communication to create the conditions for a vibrant modality where life and mutual responsibility became intertwined.

Four years after the global pandemic outbreak, the fear of the COVID virus has subsided into minimal risk and acceptable losses. Things seem to be “returning to normal.” Yet, another summer of climate related disasters is unfolding, and fires, floods, and heat domes have displaced both Indigenous and nonindigenous populations from their homes and put millions of lives at risk. From the human perspective, the earth's vibrant modalities seem like violent modalities. Unless we renew our kinship with the land, we might continue to suffer self-inflicted alienation. The Nez Perce may offer a lesson in homecoming.

The Nez Perce waited until COVID dangers subsided enough for the community to come together and properly celebrate the return of a portion of their ancestral land. Vice Chairman Shannon Wheeler said before the ceremony, “we would hope that our ancestors would feel the tears of joy and their tears will turn to joy because they see our people coming back to the land we belong to” (Lugo, 2021). Despite alienation from their traditional land for over a century, the Niimiipuu embodied vibrant modalities by invoking their ancestors in their homecoming through dances, songs, and ceremonies. The land was alive and echoed the voices of the ancestors in new celebrations of their homecoming across semiotic and ontological domains. This planet Earth is our only home. Is Earth healthy? Planetary health is an emergent complex of vibrant modalities and it does not need humans. But we humans need to negotiate the planet's vibrant modalities with vision if we are to survive the coming decades of upheaval. If we fail, there will be no homecoming for us.