Mitigating the Impacts of Climate Change: A workshop with Diane Obed on “Feeling the Cries of Mother Earth: Climate, Relationality, and the Emotional Body”

Mitigating the Impacts of Climate Change is a series of separate workshops featuring speakers who share their insights on Indigenous environmental leadership, community action, and land-based learning. 

The Indigenous Climate Hub explains that: “Climate change is not only a physical or scientific crisis but also a spiritual and emotional one.” Dominant Western paradigms, often frames climate change through rational lenses, as a stressor on the individual psyche, a source of anxiety, grief, and fear to be managed through self-care, or therapeutic resilience. But according to Vanessa Andreotti and the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures Collective (2021, 2025), this framing assumes separability: that our minds and hearts are disconnected faculties, and that climate anxiety is something happening to us, rather than through us as Earth-feeling beings.

In this workshop, Inuk climate emotion researcher, Diane Obed, invites participants into a space of inquiry that honors Indigenous paradigms of relationality, where emotions are not pathologies to fix, but relational feedback mechanisms from the lands, waters, skies, kinfolk, we are entangled with.

Together, we’ll explore:

• What shifts when we treat climate grief and fear not as dysfunction, but as relational intelligence?
• How Indigenous land-based worldviews metabolize emotion through kinship, ceremony, and responsibility.
• Expect reflection, dialogue, and gentle embodied practices, not as solutions, but as invitations to listen differently to what moves through us when the land speaks.

Audience: Concordia community and external

Speaker

Diane Obed is an Inuk woman mixed with English ancestry, originally from Hopedale, Nunatsiavut, Labrador. She currently lives in Nalikitquniejk– “place of torn branches” in Mi’kma’ki, in the territory of Peace and Friendship Treaties, also known as Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Diane is currently studying in the Inter-University Educational Foundations PhD program at Mount Saint Vincent University. Her doctoral research project explores the intersections between Indigenous land education and contemplative studies to draw on ancient wisdom for modern day psycho-social issues such as cultivating courage to be able to face and engage in dialogue about the current climate crisis.

This event has been generously funded by the Chamandy Foundation.