Building Community: Vocabularies and Rituals Used to Define and Process Climate Grief by Politically Active Youth in Mi'kma'ki

There are many terms that exist to describe and define climate grief but the vocabularies that youth use to describe climate grief are not well defined. The purpose of this research was to identify the vocabularies that politically active youth use to describe and define climate grief and the rituals that they use to process it through a poetry workshop, interviews, and arts-based engagement. Twenty youth ages 12-29 living in Mi’kma’ki (Atlantic Canada) engaged in political activism connected to climate change participated in individual interviews to understand their journey to becoming politically active, their personal experiences of climate grief, and how they define and manage their climate grief on a day-to-day basis. Five of those twenty youth participated in a facilitated poetry workshop that guided them through writing poetry expressing their definitions of and experiences with climate grief, followed by a focus group debriefing their experience in the workshop. An additional three of the twenty participants submitted individual visual and written pieces of art on climate grief and participated in short interviews following their submission. The main vocabularies used to define and describe climate grief were found to be in contrast: full of despair and focused on apocalypse; and full of hope and centered on community and building just futures. Additionally, participants identified that community-centered rituals that involved tangible change or meaningful interactions were crucial for helping them manage their grief through rituals.