Meditations on Living with Ghosts

The extirpation of Buffalo in North America provides a telling instance of the deep-seated struggle for spiritual and cultural well-being humans are living through in a time of human-caused mass species extinction. In a series of meditations occasioned by his time volunteering at the First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park in Montana, the author probes how complex the question of species extinction turns out to be and how difficult it is to raise it in a manner that is fully attentive to the worlds of the more-than-human living kinds involved, as well as the dangers both they and we humans are undergoing. Mulling over imagery from a dream, as well as the fleeting thoughts inspired in his daily work undoing the bottom strand of a barbed wire fence enclosing the park, the author experiences moments of what the Jewish religious tradition characterizes as hirhurei teshuva, a stirring up of one’s thinking and ultimately of one’s soul that leads to repentance. In acknowledging the earthly aspects of one’s life, even to the point of taking one’s daily defecation seriously as a spiritual practice, the author invites the reader to a renewed sense of living with humility and reciprocity with Buffalo and all other living kinds. While the Buffalo Treaty initiated by First Peoples has set the stage for a resurgence of Buffalo in North America guided by Indigenous values, thought also needs to be given to how the diverse religious traditions of settlement peoples, Judaism among them, might grow beyond the legacy of colonial, ecocidal violence that so insistently frames their ongoing relationship with a more-than-human living world

Geography · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History