In Inuit culture, an angry person does not raise their voice. They do not throw a tantrum, or throw anything for that matter. Even if they feel a sense of rage, they never resort to violence or aggression. And yet they do not suppress their emotions either.

So what do they do?

They walk.

They take a stick and begin to walk in a straight line across the landscape. They walk until the anger has ceased to burn inside of them… until it melts into tears or turns into laughter or maybe just dissipates like steam. And when they get to that point, they drive the stick into the ground. A marker. The distance between that marker and their village is a measurement “bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage,” writes Lucy R. Lippard in Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory.

And then they walk back to their village, where they are welcomed back into the community.

I am a furnace in the snow.
I have been given my anger-stick
and told to go plant it
where and when my flames
have turned to embers

and so I walk
past my people who know
            to look away. I walk
past the Place of Drying Fish,
past the Place of Catching Fish,
past the Place of the Seals who do not know
            to look away. I walk
beyond the place called The End of Places
until the heat spills from my eyes.
Here I drive the stick into
the yielding snow and
turn to face the cold
walk home.

Inuit Anger Walk (from A History of Walking) by Lydia Kennaway

I didn’t grow up in a culture that helped me handle or even understand my emotions at all, particularly “bad” emotions like anger. In fact, I was often encouraged to shut down, to not cry, to not say anything if it wasn’t “nice,” and when I couldn’t hide my feelings, when those difficult emotions came exploding out of me in ways that I couldn’t control or cope with at all, I was punished. The punishments were even severe at times, and of course did nothing to help me cope with whatever I was experiencing.

I entered adulthood a rather emotionally inept person. Which I was able to get by with for the most part… until I became a mother. We often hear that we, as parents, are the mirrors for our children – they are able to see and understand themselves in our actions and reactions, our connection or disconnection, in our love or in our fear. But the opposite has also been true for me.

From day one, my tiny little humans have been like mirrors reflecting my wounds and traumas, laid dormant for so long, unconsciously informing my life, now brought to the surface, playing out in front of me. Little dramas and overwhelming emotions that I had to come to terms with, or else I would continue passing along the emotional wounds and cycles of trauma. Which didn’t feel like an option for me.

So I have been trying to heal and evolve into a more emotionally intelligent person. To empower my children to work with their emotions too. I’ve realized that this isn’t something I can teach them by instruction, but something I must be, something they must witness and experience.

There is so much to learn from traditional cultures like Inuit culture, for example, which is known to be among the gentlest, most nurturing parenting styles in human history. Consequently, the Inuit culture is characterized by adults who can remain calm and compassionate in the midst of even the most enraging circumstances.

The Gift of Emotion

I want to share this short yet powerful film featuring Craig Makhosi Charnock.

I believe there are many in my generation who can relate to this, as we were born into a culture that feared emotion. Happiness was cool. But guilt, shame, anger, frustration, sadness, anxiety… these were all “bad” and needed to be stamped out as quickly as possible without being evaluated or resolved. The problem with this approach is that our emotions are a huge part of being alive. In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” The inability to confront our feelings means that we never learn from them. Moreover, we’re never able to let them go.

And as Craig shares in The Gift of Emotion above, our feelings are like messengers. And if we’re not listening and learning from their message, they won’t go away despite our best efforts to force them, but rather they will leak out in unhealthy ways, like gasoline waiting to catch flame.

It reminds me of the wildfires in California. Fire is the element related to anger. We westerners see fire as a destructive force to be prevented at all costs and put out as quickly as possible. But the indigenous people of America, particularly in California, had a very different relationship with fire.

“You have to know how to work with fire. When you’re my age, I take my young ones out. Smell the smoke! Smell it! That’s grass fire. Smell the smoke! That’s a house burner. Smell the smoke! That’s tires burning. Smell it! That’s a wood fireplace burning. You should be able be smell every single different kind of smoke. The animals teach their young to do that. But if there’s no fire, they can’t teach them. That’s why we have to burn. That’s why we have to keep the fires going. So that all parts of life understand what fire is.”

Cultural Burning, Tending the Wild

For millennia, the indigenous people of California burned the land in order to perfect the resources that were important to them, whether it be food, medicine, materials for tools, houses, baskets, etc. And as it turns out, these fires helped every part of the ecosystem thrive. Their cultural practices – built on respect and reciprocity –  became a key element of the land’s health, as if the two had evolved together in a marriage of sorts. By burning away the debris, native people enhanced the land for every single life form who called it home. By burning away the debris, native people prevented catastrophic wildfires. By burning away the debris, both land and waters, animals and humans became the highest expressions of themselves.

When colonizers arrived, however – first the Spanish, then white Europeans – they did not understand what the native people were doing. To them, the use of fire seemed reckless, wild. And so they banned the fires and prevented the Californians to carry out their cultural and environmental practices.

The result, as we are seeing today, is massively destructive, uncontrollable wildfires.

Each year, California fears and fights these tragic wildfires. Native people never fought fires – nor did they fear them. Instead, they formed a relationship with fire and used it to their advantage.

A traditional Chumash woman recounts:

How did the old people live with respect, and honoring that sacredness, or life force? We did not overuse resources, nor disregard them, nor did we use them in a frivolous way. Instead of destroying resources, we enhanced those resources … We used controlled burning to keep forest areas clear so that the animals and the plants could live throughout the forest areas. Those cleared areas were like meadows … We did not have these huge uncontrolled fires, like the one three years ago (and still worsening today) in this area. That was like a firestorm that went through here. We didn’t have those because we kept that debris down.

Earth Wisdom: A California Chumash Woman

What does these cultural burnings have to do with emotions, you ask?

To fear and avoid fire leads to wild, destructive, explosive fire. Suppressing fire can actually turn it into toxic energy that does a lot of damage.

Likewise, to fear and avoid emotion leads to wild, destructive, explosive feelings. And suppressing emotion can turn our uncomfortable feelings into toxic energy that can do a lot of damage, unconsciously or not. “People cause suffering when they are suffering,” said Craig in the Gift of Emotion.

When fire is understood and managed properly, it is a gift to the whole of life. It purifies, cultivates, enhances. Likewise, when emotions – yes even anger or anxiety – are understood and managed properly, the are gifts too. Not only to our entire inner landscape, but to everyone and everything that we come in contact with.

Back to Inuit culture for a minute: When Jean Briggs, a Harvard graduate student, went to live with an Inuit family in their village in the Arctic Circle, she went with the notion that she was the civilized one and they were the wild ones. Wild as in uncultivated, untamed, more primitive. What she discovered, however, is that the Inuit people were extremely cool-headed and refined, not only in their cultural practices but in handling their emotions. They had a highly evolved emotional intelligence that she herself lacked. If anyone was wildly uncivilized, it was her!

“Briggs seemed like a wild child, even though she was trying very hard to control her anger. ‘My ways were so much cruder, less considerate and more impulsive,’ she told the CBC. ‘[I was] often impulsive in an antisocial sort of way. I would sulk or I would snap or I would do something that they never did.’ – NPR

Even when the Inuit people got very angry with Briggs, they never snapped at her, never raised their voices. And yet we must conclude that the anger and discomfort they felt were being dealt with, because the emotions ever erupted either. The Inuit people had their ways of navigating it all. I also wonder if they had less “debris” from their childhoods waiting in the background to catch fire.

In Reimagining California’s Relationship to Fire, Sage Gerson describes fire as “its own kind of element infrastructure that connects human culture to the surrounding land and waters.” It is used as a tool – and it is much more intimate than merely setting some fires on the land without reason or relationship. And I love thinking of fire as something that can connect us just as much as land and water, air and ether.

Our emotions, too, connect us to so much – to what we love, what we fear, what we need, what we can be.

The process begins with awareness, I think. Giving ourselves time and space to listen and tune in. To investigate what comes up without judgement. Perhaps to take a stick in hand and begin to walk outside. Walk in a line or in a circle if that’s your style, let the land help us navigate it all.

“The land knows you even when you are lost.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass

Today we might be the one heading out, hot tears stinging our eyes as we pound the frozen ground. And tomorrow we might be the one who stays behind in the village in silent support, waiting to welcome someone else back home.

Or whatever your process might look like.

xx