Everything is one

Everything is one is an ecological teaching that turns interdependence into a way of seeing: a change to a river reaches humans, animals, and the sea, while efforts to dominate other life threaten the possibility of sharing the world. In the novel, Greywolf gives the teaching the name Hishuk ish ts’awalk; Leon Anawak later recalls Ijitsoq Akesuk’s account of spirits and the consequences of destroying life. The expression binds Indigenous knowledge to the story’s material transformations of ocean, seabed, and climate, without reducing those transformations to a single human explanation.

The teaching and its transmission

Greywolf invokes Everything is one while speaking about men, women, and whales. His formulation refuses to treat people and other species as separate moral worlds. The phrase is not offered as an abstract slogan: it names a relationship in which what happens to one part of the living world affects the others.

Frank describes a related teaching as central to many Indigenous cultures, while noting that different communities express it in different words. He explains it through a river: a change there affects people, animals, and the sea. When Leon reduces this to ecology, Frank does not reject the comparison, but suggests that the meaning is carried across songs and stories rather than exhausted by a scientific label. The exchange places the teaching within a living tradition of narration and listening.

That tradition has been damaged by colonial policy. The Indian Act of 1885 disrupted the transmission of oral knowledge, while pressure to leave homelands and send children to residential schools sought to assimilate Indigenous communities. In a separate history, Inuit were forcibly relocated to settlements in the Arctic, away from familiar hunting grounds; the ensuing loss of livelihood, illness, and cultural dislocation forms part of the background to Anawak’s family history. These accounts give the expression’s emphasis on continuity a historical weight: knowledge, land, and community are connected, and breaking one connection has consequences for the others.

Anawak’s recollection and the warning against mastery

During a conversation with Greywolf and Alicia Delaware, the idea returns to Anawak as a memory of what Ijitsoq Akesuk had told him. Akesuk’s account interprets the crisis through spirits inhabiting the Earth’s creatures and the sea, and warns that destroying the beings at issue would also destroy the destroyers. The point is not simply to identify a supernatural cause. It changes the proposed response: the struggle cannot be won by claiming mastery, while recognizing the beings as part of a shared world leaves coexistence imaginable.

The scene makes the expression practical by setting it against the impulse to solve every problem through force or technical control. Delaware’s joking suggestion that they should comb Sedna’s hair leads into Anawak’s recollection of Akesuk’s teaching. The remembered lesson does not provide a technical procedure; it redirects attention from defeating an external enemy toward repairing a relationship with the world on which human life depends.

The ocean as a connected, disorienting world

The novel’s descriptions of the sea give the expression a physical scale. The continental shelf is the underwater continuation of the continental plate, and its edge descends into deeper regions that remain far less familiar than the land. At sea, rain and cloud can erase the horizon; below the surface, familiar cues such as sight and gravity become unreliable, and a depth gauge must substitute for bodily certainty. The ocean is not empty space around human activity but a world whose conditions shape what people can perceive and do.

That interdependence also appears in the account of a continental-slope collapse. As the slope slid downward, it lowered the sea level over a vast area; water displaced by the sinking mass surged outward, initially as a low wave that went unnoticed in the storm. When the wave reached the shallower shelf, its danger changed. The sequence turns connectedness into cause and consequence: a disturbance beneath the sea travels outward and acquires force through its relation to the surrounding depths and coast.

In the Arctic and other polar waters, the sea’s blue becomes an image of another kind of distance. Descending into it, a submersible passes through a world where familiar perception falls away; at sufficient depth, neither inner ear nor vision can establish whether it is rising or sinking. The comparison to travel through outer space reverses the direction of exploration but not its disorienting effect. Human limits of perception are part of the relationship, too: the world is connected, yet never fully available to human senses.

Meaning within the novel

Everything is one links Anawak’s changing understanding of belonging to the novel’s wider challenge to human exceptionalism. The expression makes ecological harm relational rather than remote: the sea, animals, and people are not independent compartments, and an attempt to secure human control can deepen the crisis it is meant to end. It also places scientific description beside inherited knowledge without making them identical. The language of ecology can describe connections; the stories and teachings carried by communities give those connections histories, obligations, and limits.

The phrase therefore works both as an account of how the world is joined and as a restraint on what humans may claim to do within it. Its force lies in refusing the clean separation between observer and environment, victim and aggressor, or human society and the rest of life. To damage one part is to alter the conditions shared by all.