North Wind People
by R.G. Miga
There’s a bit of dialogue from the 2017 film Wind River that’s stuck with me for years. It’s a throwaway line at the very end of the movie, after a long slog through a McCarthyian wilderness of brutality, bad men and worse choices. The story is set on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming; one of the Indigenous characters is grieving a loved one, and appears in traditional face paint. When asked how he knew to paint his face in that way, he says, “I don’t. I just made it up. There’s no one left to teach me.”
The scene draws its poignancy from the idea that traditional rituals come from the distant past. They are artifacts, as fragile as pottery, carefully handed down to modern practitioners for safekeeping. If that chain of custody is broken—if there are no teachers left to pass on the “authentic” way of conducting rituals and defining identity—then modern people are left to “make it up,” and what they make up will be false and ineffective. The loss of authenticity is permanent.
If this is true, then things look very bleak; not just for the Indigenous people who have been robbed of their traditional culture, but for all of us.
I’ve written previously about the restorative power of paganism and its unique relevance for the times that we’re living in—how surprised I was to find myself shaken out of my comfortable secular worldview, and how many other people seem to be struggling with the same thing. We’re all confronted with a world full of grief and uncertainty in which the preserving power of ritual is badly needed. And there is no one left to teach us. If we’ve all been left to “make it up” from scratch, where and how do we start?
Americans suffer acutely from this dissonance. We are, famously, a nation of immigrants—aliens in a country that thoroughly obliterated the people living here before us. If we’re not outright cursed (and the evidence for that is mounting), then we’re at least cut off from anything that represents a genuine connection to the land where we live. Even our so-called founding religion was boxed up and shipped over from a Middle Eastern desert, retaining its head-scratching references to entheogenic shamanism and Babylonian astrology, a bewildering spiritual roadmap for the burghers of Plymouth to follow.
This rootlessness led us to destroy the world, and risk destroying ourselves along with it. The same materialism that drove us to comprehensively wreck the biosphere has, ironically, also denied us the spiritual solace that we so desperately need now that the blowback has begun.
All this might not keep me up at night so much if I didn’t have kids.
Maybe we deserve this. Maybe the Ghost Dance worked after all, just not as expediently as its followers had hoped. Maybe the right thing to do is accept this judgment. Learn to live with this spiritual exsanguination. Go quietly into that burning night.
But I’ve got kids.
If it was just me on my own, facing down the End Times, I could go around in sackcloth and ashes to atone for my sins. Or I could ride out my remaining years with whatever diversions can still be eked out of this flickering fantasia—push all my chips in and hope that the wheel keeps spinning for another half-century, that they’ll still have decent nursing homes, or at least affordable euthanasia, when the time comes for me to cash out.
Except I’ve got kids.
I still have to help them find meaning in their lives, even if I struggle to find it in my own. They’re still blessedly young enough to not be grappling with it yet. But when they’re older, I need something to offer them besides, well, yeah, it’s a horrorshow out there, but we’ve got Netflix and DoorDash, so just keep away from the windows and pull up a chair, I guess.
I need something better than that, and I have to start somewhere.
One promising place to start is the new appraisal of animism as a worldview: a process of re-indigenizing people to the land that sustains them.
Readers of this publication are probably familiar with Robin Wall Kimmere, Tyson Yunkaporta, Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, and others who have made heroic efforts in modeling how this might work. “The land” in this formulation is not just inert scenery, or “natural resources,” or some beatific, all-forgiving Earth Mother. Rather, “the Land” stands in for a metaphysical superorganism—a pantheon of non-human entities with their own agency, and the power to destroy us if we trifle with them too much.
People have been promoting these ways of understanding for decades if not centuries. Nevertheless, the biggest barrier to widespread adoption of these worldviews—even among sincere progressive activists—is the academic distancing that modernized people largely take for granted.
Two of the most obstructive forms of academic distancing are, first, that animist ontologies are proprietary belief systems, and second, that they originated at some point in the distant past, to be handed down as historical artifacts.
Even among well-meaning allies, there is an assumption that indigenous animism is what “they” “believe.” Modernized people know how reality works. Indigenous people must be revered for their deep wisdom and cultural longevity. Their traditions and lifeways should be regarded as valuable sources of inspiration, once they’ve been appropriately filtered through scientific rationalism. But at the end of the day—let’s be honest—they’re just a bunch of quaint, colorful superstitions, because land spirits aren’t really real, right? We know better. That’s just what “they” “believe.”
Once we overcome that barrier, there’s still the notion that these spiritual traditions are relics of a bygone era, and can’t be tampered with. The whole idea of tradition—traditional lifeways, traditional beliefs, traditional practices—is that the formula is set and replicated with as much fidelity as possible. According to mainstream understandings of “tradition,” Indigenous people are just docents in a figurative museum of their own history, and not active participants in an evolving spiritual ecosystem.
A byproduct of these dual obstacles is that animist beliefs are closed off to modernized people, either for the sake of scientific integrity or to avoid corrupting a pure tradition. Animism is what “they” “believe”; even if non-natives want to believe it too, we’d be doing violence to an established tradition by letting settler-colonialists trample through the museum and handle the relics.
This is not to say that cultural appropriation isn’t a problem. Capitalism appropriates whatever it can commodify, including indigenous artifacts and aesthetics. That’s one facet of the problem. But—ironically—the same academic distancing that is deployed to protect traditional cultures also perpetuates appropriation. This is where contemporary religious reproductions and “New Age” aesthetics run aground. While modern seekers crave a way to connect with the spiritual world, they’ve also internalized the academic distancing that surrounds it: the relationships that informed traditional rituals are unavailable, in the past, fenced off, inaccessible to non-natives. The only thing left for latecomers is to import those same ritual signifiers wholesale, along with their symbol sets and costumes and language, in an attempt to hotwire a new practice.
This needn’t be the case. If animism is a reality and not just a belief system, it’s the Land that creates the rituals for people, and not the other way around. New rituals are not reduced to “making up” something, or trying to counterfeit an identity from an existing culture. It’s a matter of listening to the Land. And you better listen carefully, because if you impose too much human hubris on the ritual you’re trying to create (pay attention, social media influencers) the Land, wherever you are, will offer you no shelter.
There’s no one left to teach us, then, except the Land. And if we can just for the sake of everything shut the fuck up and listen, maybe there’s some hope left.
So, then.
My people are North Wind people.
Like many Americans, I have no coherent land-based culture that was passed down to me. My grandparents came from a smattering of European countries; whatever traditional customs they once had were already whittled away by centuries of imperialism and nationalism, even before they were plunged into the corrosive solvent of American industrialism. All that was handed down to my generation was a murky slurry of all-purpose Christianity and a handful of tarnished souvenirs from places that no longer exist.
But they were all North Wind people, and so am I, so that’s where I begin.
My people are North Wind people because we live where it’s cold for most of the year. Our calendar is drawn around winter and darkness: the cold is always just around the corner, either just leaving or just returning. We soak the sun into our bones while we can, and put away stores for the months of darkness soon to come. Even those of us who are sheltered in cities know the feel of killing cold—of ghosted breath snatched from our lips by wind sharp enough to cut. Our history is dotted with the frozen stumps of people who thought they knew what winter was and found out they were wrong.
And yet we stay.
Not everyone lives here by choice. Those who choose it stay for crystalline nights of icy starlight, and mornings of brilliant sunrise refracted across hills of glowing snow. We stay because the North Wind keeps the bugs away, paints the leaves in autumn, gives the first flowers of spring a delirious joy. We stay because the North Wind makes us strong and keeps us safe, so long as we live under its rule. I know I’m a North Wind person above all else, because if things get bad, I’m following the winter—going further into caribou country, chasing frozen lakes and snow-capped evergreens. I know how to survive there.
Crucially, this identity transcends political boundaries: you can draw a line around the world at this latitude and find people who have made the same bargain, built their culture around it. Sure, winter’s a bastard, we say in dozens of languages. But can you imagine life without it?
It’s hard to discriminate against outsiders when you identify with a power that’s thoroughly indifferent to human affairs. Individuals can be skilled or unskilled at dealing with the North Wind; groups can strive to stay in right relation with it, or take their chances. But if we live in its domain, we’re all subject to its rules. North Wind people can get together and boast about how tough we are: the coldest winter we’ve been through; how hardy our gear is; how narrowly we’ve escaped whiteouts, black ice, frostbite, hypothermia. We can quietly (and sometimes enviously) look down our noses at those southern softies with their endless warm weather, panicking at the first sight of a snowflake. Regardless, we will all be equally humbled if we get too prideful. The North Wind has no patience for arrogance or idealism. No one controls it, and no one speaks for it.
Taking this web of relationality as a starting point leads to a whole field of useful conclusions. I can’t take grid-powered heat for granted, because the electrical grid is a flimsy thing, and if it goes down in the dark of February, the North Wind is coming for my family. Natural fuel is the most sustainable option because it grows out of the ground around my house. This means I need to protect the forests; not just because they’re beautiful (they are) or because individual trees are precious (they’re not) but because my family depends on healthy forests for survival—to heat our home, to shield us from the winter wind, to shelter the plants and animals that feed us.
The same calculation applies to food. Living in North Wind country means that the ground freezes for about half the year. Nothing grows outside in winter. Wild game is hard to find. We can ignore these realities as long as the global supply chain runs smoothly (ha!) but the North Wind will still be waiting for us when the grocery shelves are empty. If we want to outlive the delicate filigree of logistical connections that bring us oranges in January, we need to take an interest in the food systems that grow where we are—North Wind plants and animals.
Americans can afford to gamble on brittle supply systems, because not all Americans are North Wind people. “Americans” have a relationship with a remote political abstraction that ostensibly protects them, in defiance of the many different climates they inhabit. North Wind people should know better. We know that the cold is predictably and relentlessly trying to kill us, year after year, and that demands vigilance. We can enjoy the Twinkies while they last. But we should cultivate some reverence for walnuts and apples and rabbits and deer, because they will feed us when the rest breaks down. Unless we neglect our obligations to them; then they will leave us to the North Wind.
A whole culture springs up around these practical considerations. I can ritualize my gratitude to the powers that make life possible here—to the North Wind, to the lakes, to the plants and animals—to ensure that I don’t forget my place. I can make these things sacred, create taboos around their use and misuse, because my life depends on them. I can encode these relationships in myth so they’re not forgotten. I can (and do) tell my children bedtime stories about Fox and Bear and Coyote and Otter, not out of some historical obligation or cultural fealty, but because they’re our neighbors—they’re North Wind people too. I can teach my kids to read the stars in our sky, to build a fire in the snow, to hunt and fish and trap with tools made from the plants that grow in our forests, because that’s how you live in the North Wind’s kingdom. The United States—the byzantine machinery of secret handshakes, patronage, and violence that governs our lives—could throw a rod and blink out of existence tomorrow. And the North Wind will still be here.
Living like this starts to look a lot like indigenous practices, and could get me in trouble for cultural appropriation. But that only applies if I cleave off the aesthetic forms from the relationships that shape them, and try to pass it off as authentic. If these rituals and practices look like something from the past that’s been cordoned off as “traditional culture,” it’s only because these things exist independently of the cultures that recognize them. The powers that inform these relationships reside here; they have been here since the time before time, and will continue until the world is remade. Getting myself back into right relation with them—recognizing the sovereignty of forces like the North Wind—is a bigger project than historical reenactment or preservation. Without the academic distancing, it’s not just what “they” “believe,” not something I’m stealing from a museum. It’s something I learned from the Land.
Even if the rest is beyond saving, this is still a way to live through whatever comes next—for me, and hopefully for my kids, and the ones who will keep on living after we’re gone.
It’s not much. But it’s a start.
R.G. Miga
R .G. Miga is a writer living in the Finger Lakes region of central New York State, exploring the genres of magical realism and solarpunk in addition to nonfiction essays