By Dahr Jamail

Interviewed by Carmen Rumbaut
Excerpted and edited by Carolyn Treadway

Introduction:

In this Gaian Gathering presentation, Network Weaver Carmen Rumbaut interviewed award winning journalist and author Dahr Jamail about his work that has focused on how the dominant culture is destroying life on Earth. Dahr also shared his personal journey of truly learning to honor his pain, which led him to seeing with new eyes and then to ever deepening action.

Dahr began the interview by sharing the powerful story of being challenged by Duane French, a high-level quadriplegic, three days after Dahr had started working as his personal assistant. [Do watch the presentation video to see Dahr tell this very compelling story.] It taught Dahr to listen, show up, pay attention, and see the world through the other person’s eyes. It also started Dahr’s understanding of what’s going on politically, and how that affects everyone. Difficulties for his friend Duane opened Dahr’s heart. Dahr then told of his involvement with Iraq and with Joanna:

The buildup to the Iraq war began early in 2003. I read so much about what was happening to the Iraqi people during the sanctions and first Gulf War, and what US policy had already done to that country and its people. They already suffered mightily from US policy, and were about to be attacked. Once that war was launched and the suffering and death toll increased, I just knew I needed to go there. 

I think it was because my heart broke, because I really let myself see very clearly what was happening. 

I did this crazy thing of figuring out how to get into Iraq. I went there simply with a goal of writing about these human beings, and how they were being affected. I just wanted to see that with my own eyes and tell that truth, because that was what was being grossly overlooked in the media, just like Gaza right now. I wanted to report in hopes that it would help people see and know what was going on. I ended up turning into a journalist and reporting on Iraq for years. And that is what led me to meeting Joanna. 

I returned from Iraq with severe PTSD. I was really angry and traumatized from what I had seen. Anita Barrows  took one look at me and said she wanted to introduce me to her good friend, Joanna Macy.  Joanna invited me for tea.  I went to her home and sat down with her. She took a look deep into my eyes, teared up, and simply said “You’ve seen so much” and I cried. It was the first time I cried for anything that I had seen in Iraq. 

That’s when I knew this woman knows what she’s doing and is seeing things in a very deep way. Joanna said that the horrible news of war crimes and atrocities is hard to hear and take in, thus my reporting was like oxygen, because in this country, we’re just not being told the truth. It was like oxygen while we were being strangled by lies. And that was really my introduction to her in the Work and the importance of bearing witness and letting my heart be broken.

Joanna invited me to an Intensive at Land of Medicine Buddha in August 2006. I was still incredibly traumatized and didn’t know it. The first couple days I was sitting with my fists clenched. I felt like a bomb, only able to feel rage  or numbness. When we began the Work in earnest, with the Truth Mandala and other exercises, the dam broke. I just started crying and I didn’t stop much the remaining  time we were there. It was so great! I wept and wept, which was what I really needed to do for everything that I had seen. Joanna was giving me medicine that I didn’t even know I needed. That Intensive started my awareness that my work needed to come from my heart, not from my anger. I went to Iraq because my heart broke and I stayed with that work for a long time because of honoring our pain, which meant honoring other people’s pain as well as my own.

Carmen asked Dahr to speak about moral injury—the injury from witnessing what is happening and feeling hopelessness and shame or somehow being part of what caused it.

Dahr told of the moral wounding from believing in a country that claimed it was doing wartime actions for the right cause and then seeing military leaders committing war crimes and atrocities, which breaks our hearts in a very special kind of way. It is its own kind of trauma. And now we are all living with moral trauma every day because of all the horrible things being done to the earth, and so on. [Please see the presentation video for more on this topic.]

In the last part of the interview, Carmen asked Dahr to speak about what he has learned from his work with Indigenous people, how they view what this dominant culture is doing, and with some idea of how we need to shift and change. Dahr replied:

I learned much from a close friendship with my Indigenous friend and mentor, Stan Rushworth, whom I met in 2018. He essentially gave me a whole new perspective. I would call him in the early days of the Trump administration. Day after day, it was just more assaults and horrible racist power-over policies of that regime. So egregious, even more so than today. I would call Stan very, very upset, like “my God, look at what Trump’s doing now,” and Stan would just listen quietly. When I finished ranting, he’d say “Welcome to Indian country.”  I soon learned not to rant. Stan would say: “This has been life for us since 1492. Until the people of this country, not just the government, openly acknowledge and deal with the fact that this country was built on the genocide of Indigenous people and slavery of African Americans, we are nowhere.” 

Again, I think back to honoring our pain, and seeing clearly with new eyes. And until we do that, we’re trying to build a structure on top of sand, which won’t work. To this day the Indigenous population in this country is not getting its fair due and is largely continuing to suffer from erasure. What has been done and continues to be done is not acknowledged. 

I have interviewed many Indigenous people for the book I co-edited with Stan Rushworth, We Are The Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island On The Changing Earth  and for a recent podcast series titled Holding The Fire: Indigenous Voices on the Great Unraveling  (available through the Post-Carbon Institute at https://www.resilience.org/holding-the-fire-podcast/episodes/.) I’ve learned from them the importance of listening. These are people who have been going through the great unraveling for hundreds and hundreds of years, ever since first contact. These are the leaders we need to be listening to, now that we are so deeply in polycrises. These are the people we need to listen to, instead of being all caught up in ‘everything is coming apart.’ Welcome to Indian country. 

Not only can Indigenous leaders teach us about how to get through this, but more importantly, how to comport ourselves while all of these assaults are happening to all of us, and how we treat ourselves. How we treat ourselves is how we treat the earth. Part of the brilliance of The Work That Reconnects is how so many important Indigenous themes are deeply woven into it. We can’t face reality until we look into ourselves, the lies that we tell each other, and the ways we’ve tried to pretend these horrible things didn’t happen in our history. Until we do that, we can’t face the current reality.

I think it comes down to just being a good human being, having my heart open and having compassion for other people, it doesn’t matter what color they are, their religion, or where they live. Anytime I see something egregious happening to another human being, am I willing to have my heart broken, have compassion, and put myself in their shoes? If I am, then that’s going to lead me into ‘what do I need to do?’ Compassion pulled me to Iraq, to try to help.

For the same reasons, I’ve been working with Indigenous people now, both in the United States and more recently around the world. It’s just simple. I look atwhat’s happening to these people and what I can do about it, then follow that thread. That’s how it has informed and carried through my work leading to where I am now and will continue to be in the future. I’m coming from compassion, not from anger which I did for a long time. But I can’t really come from compassion unless my heart is broken. It takes a lot of strength to allow my heart to break. Breaking seems like weakness, but it’s not, it is allowing the truth to come in.    …

It is my honor to be part of anything that pays tribute to Joanna Macy and all the work she’s done for the earth over all the decades that she’s been on the planet. Her work has impacted and changed my life in ways that I would literally not be who I am today, had I not met her and had the opportunity to do the Work with her. Anything I can do to honor that and pay tribute to her is really my honor and pleasure. Thank you for this opportunity.

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This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the Gaian Gathering of the Work That Reconnects Network in November 2023.  A video of the full talk is available on the WTR Network website here.

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Dahr Jamail is an award winning journalist whose work has focused on how the dominant culture is destroying life on Earth. His writing and podcasts provide us with a clear understanding that enables us to see and feel this deeply, thus allowing us to begin going through the spiral in a positive way. . 

Dahr’s books include: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq; The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption; and We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (co-edited with Stan Rushworth).