Clayton Thomas-Müller helps protect Mother Earth through art, activism and a little bit of magic

Clayton Thomas-Müller is an organizer, public speaker and author focused on fighting for environmental and economic justice. He’s worked for more than two decades in support of grassroots movements and Indigenous peoples. He is a campaigner for 350.org, and has worked with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Bioneers. I had the opportunity to talk to him about his memoir Life in the City of Dirty Water, which you might have heard about as part of this year’s Canada Reads competition, or because it is an absolutely brilliant book. In caring, luminous prose, Clayton writes in the book about his growth into the climate activist and storyteller he’s become. A phrase that comes up a couple of times in the book is this idea of having a “PhD in hustle;” I asked Clayton about that way of phrasing it, and he talked about how the book is partly about showing how he’s seized multiple opportunities to acquire new knowledge, but without thinking of that knowledge as a commodity. Instead, for him, it’s about applying knowledge, not just forming theories. Applying knowledges means actually trying to do the work of building community. The title of his memoir has thrown some people off, he says. People assumed, from the title, that the book is only about what he calls his “day job” as an environmental activist and water protector. So, Thomas-Muller, as a member of the Treaty #6-based Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, located in Northern Manitoba, is really making a “very specific reference” to Winnipeg with that title. The Cree and Ojibwe name for Winnipeg translates as "murky water" or "muddy water.” I asked him about some of the resonances, though, of that title—how it can open up conversations about the murky nature of political and environmental communication in our moment of catastrophic climate change. He emphasizes that the goal of his memoir is really to encourage readers’ own interpretations, to “agitate and create” and to just “make people think.” Because, as he puts it, “there is no one answer” to colonial violence and climate collapse. He says, ultimately, that it will likely take “a hybrid mix of Western science, traditional ecological knowledge and straight-up magic” to pull ourselves out of the dire and desperate mire of capitalist accumulation and fossil fueled modernity. The greed we see naturalized today, he feels, is by no means natural. It is a “sickness,” and the product of “disconnection from nature.” The alienation we feel is a thing that derives directly from this uprooting. It breeds “hyper-individualism” and “hyper-consumerism,” in his account. So he looks to unite people “on the jagged intersections of our movement goals and our social movement sectors, “to break down barriers and build up systems of accountability and transparency as we build the largest social movement in the history of humankind.”