Introduction: Indigeneity, Survival, and
the Colonial Anthropocene
MARTIN PREMOLI
The
past decade has given rise to a vast literature that explores the dynamics
between climate justice and activism, environmental knowledges, and Indigenous
storytelling in the colonial Anthropocene. A recent issue in the PMLA, for
example, discusses how the "dialectic of Indigeneity" offers "an abiding
refusal to surrender to either the limits or the logics of this ruined world"
and "provides a map of untraveled routes rather than fallow destinations" (Benson
Taylor 14). Moreover, in their 2017 essay, "Environmental Ethics through
Changing Landscapes: Indigenous Activism and Literary Arts," Warren Cariou and
Isabelle St-Amand "explore themes of environmental ethics and activism in a
contemporary context in which resource extraction and industrialization are
increasingly being countered by indigenized forms of thought and action" (9).
And, to cite a final example, the collection Ecocriticism and Indigenous
Studies "takes the pulse of current Indigenous artistic diversity and
political expression" to examine how these forms "render ecological
connections" visible for diverse audiences (Adamson and Monani 5). These various
texts speak to a growing conversation amongst Indigenous scholars and allies about
our increasingly urgent environmental crisis—and the capacities of
artwork and cultural production for engaging with this dire issue.
Part I of this special issue pursued and
expanded on several of the insights highlighted above. Our contributors
examined the disruptive and empowering potential of Indigenous storytelling in
the movement toward—and realization of—global climate justice. In
this special issue's second installment, we continue this line of exploration. To
introduce this special issue's most pressing concerns, I'd like once more to
turn to the poetry of Chamorro poet, scholar, and activist, Craig Santos Perez.
As before, I will be focusing on one of his poems from his collection Habitat
Threshold, which introduces questions of catastrophe, entanglement,
kinship, survival, and healing—questions that are attended to by the
essays that populate this second issue.
This poem, reproduced below, depicts the
increasing frequency of species extinction in the colonial Anthropocene. This extinction
event, known as the Holocene extinction, figures as the most recent mass
extinction event of our earth's history. Scientists and scholars have suggested
that mass extinction events share three common characteristics. Firstly, they
are necessarily global in scope, and thus not determined or constrained by
regional parameters or borders. Secondly, they occur when extinction rates rise
significantly above background levels of extinction; or, in other words, they
occur when the loss of species rapidly outpaces the rate of speciation. And
finally, within a geological temporal framework, they occur across a
geologically "short" period of time (the "event" might last for thousands of
years, appearing to be quite slow from a human perspective). What's unique about the Holocene
extinction, however, is that our
present crisis is the first to have a human origin point. "Right now,"
Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her study on the topic, "we are deciding, without
quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will
forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will,
unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy" (88).[1]
Perez visually represents and complicates this "legacy"
through several creative innovations. The graph's title offers us a useful
starting point. Rather than use a more conventionally "scientific" word for his
poemodel (such as "Species," for instance), Perez opts for a more intimate and
familiar choice: "F m ly" (family). By referring to these non-human animals as
family, Perez emphasizes the kin relations that generate and sustain life:
"These are relationships of co-evolution and ecological dependency. [...] These
relationships produce the possibility of both life and any given way of life" (van
Dooren 4). In other words, his poemodel recalls the importance of recognizing
our co-dependence and profound intimacy with our non-human kin. In recognizing
our rich entwinement with the web of life, Perez's graph also battles the
perception that non-human animals are isolated "objects" for scientific
analysis; and he destabilizes the tendency to understand species loss from a
narrow, detached, statistical framework. The viewpoint presented by Perez's
graph thus resonates with Sophie Chao and Dion Enari's observation that climate
imaginaries from Indigenous communities in the Pacific "have always recognised
the interdependencies of human and other-than-human beings" and it pushes us
toward the "recognition that other beings, too, have rich and meaningful lifeworlds"
(35, 38). This is a crucial recognition for surviving
the Anthropocene, a time when the biocultural webs of life are being damaged
and undone on a scale that has never been witnessed.
By
dropping letters from the title, Perez's poem also gestures toward the broader
losses in knowledge and understanding that accompany species extinction.[2]
As Ursula Heise explains, animal extinction often functions as a "proxy" for
the profound, surprising, and often intangible disappearances that accompany
the loss of a species (23). This is due, in part, to the fact that species
occupy crucial positions in our cultural and imaginative structures—when
they disappear, the vital imaginative structures built around them are
unraveled and eroded. Think, for instance, of the ways in which the death of
coral reefs triggers anxieties over the disappearance of nature's beauty, of
possible medical discoveries, and of crucial habitats for a stunning range of
marine life.[3]
Recognizing this allows us to more fully register the unexpected effects of
species loss, and in turn, develop appropriate strategies for species
preservation. Moreover, by dropping letters from these important reference
points, we are pushed to more deeply and carefully engage with the information
that is being presented to us—our gaze must linger on the graph in order
to decipher and interpret its meaning.[4]
Through this slowed down, dialectical interaction,
fresh insights and understandings about the climate crisis can surface. Graphs
like this one, Heather Houser explains, thus illustrate how new ways of
thinking become possible when art
speaks back to forms of epistemological mastery" (1-2). And without new ways of
thinking, new relations may not be possible.
Perez's poemodel thus calls to mind Sophie
Chao and Dion Enari's description of climate imaginaries, which are "spaces of
possibility" and "ontological, epistemological and methodological openings for
(re)imagining and (re)connecting with increasingly vulnerable places, species,
and relations" (34). Climate imaginaries issue necessary calls for collective
action that are driven by ethical, material, and political prerogatives, while
simultaneously offering profound visions for inhabiting the world otherwise. In
doing so, they demand a decolonial approach to the Anthropocene and emphasize
the absolute importance of recognizing Indigenous cosmologies, philosophies,
and environmental knowledges.
The
essays that follow offer inspiring engagements with Indigenous climate imaginaries.
We begin with Conrad Scott's "'Changing Landscapes': Ecocritical Dystopianism
in Contemporary Indigenous SF Literature." In this essay, Scott develops
the term "ecocritical dystopia." In Scott's formulation, ecocritical dystopias
diverge from more traditional dystopian fiction through their unique engagement
with setting. Rather than imagine a future (even a near future) crisis to come,
ecocritical dystopias are anchored in the real world, bringing us closer
to crises that are already unfolding. As Scott puts it, "we are, after all,
connected to stories through our relationships (however tenuous) with the
real-world landscapes altered within the narratives." Scott develops this
sub-genre of dystopian fiction through an analysis of Harold Johnson's Corvus
(2015) and Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God (2017), arguing
that these texts depict societies extrapolated directly from the present,
reminding us of the threat of environmental collapse.
Svetlana Seibel's "'Fleshy Stories': Towards Restorative Narrative
Practices in Salmon Literature" introduces an archive of fiction from the
Pacific Northwest focused on salmon—one
of the most significant cultural symbols of the region. These "salmon stories"
are organized around the "cultural and ecological significance of the fish
for Indigenous nations," and they highlight the pervasive reach of the
Anthropocene, which has materialized in numerous consequences for human-salmon
interdependencies and kinship. Inspired by Todd and Davis's observation that
"fleshy philosophies and fleshy bodies are precisely the stakes of the
Anthropocene," Seibel examines how salmon stories create textualities
of care aimed not only at criticizing the colonial economies, but at
narratively restoring the threatened lifeworlds of both the people and the
fish." Seibel reaches this conclusion through a powerful reading of Diane
Jacobson's My Life with the Salmon and Theresa May's Salmon is
Everything.
"Healing
the Impaired Land: Water, Traditional Knowledge, and the Anthropocene in the
Poetry of Gwen Westerman" by Joanna Ziarkowska reads the work of Sisseton
Wahpeton Oyate poet Gwen Westerman from the perspective of environmental
humanities and disability studies. The essay draws on Sunaura Taylor's understanding that the
use of "impaired" as a modifier demonstrates the extent to which Western
preoccupation with and privileging of ableism—able bodies which are
productive under capitalism—has saturated thinking about damaged
environments. Through Westerman's poetry, Ziarkowska locates Indigenous
survival in the preservation of traditions and attention to/care for the
land that is polluted, altered, and in pain. She argues that, in Westerman's
work, "'impairment' is an invitation to care and a construction (or rather the
preservation) of a relationship with the land and its human, non-human and
inanimate beings."
Emma Barnes situates her essay, "Women, Water and Wisdom: Mana Wahine in Mary Kawena Pukui's Hawaiian
Mo'olelo" within recent conversations surrounding how the Anthropocene
inaccurately unifies humans in their environmentally destructive behaviors and
in their experiences of climate change, and overlooks the fact that the unequal
effects of climate change disproportionately alter the lives of Indigenous
peoples. Barnes provides a literary analysis of two short stories
published consecutively by native Hawaiian writer Mary Kawena Pukui in her
collection Hawai'i Island Legends: Pīkoi, Pele and Others. Barnes
situates two narratives—"The
Pounded Water of Kekela" and "Woman-of-the-Fire and Woman-of-the-Water"—as climate change fiction, and argues that they depict
how drought and famine disproportionately affect Native women due to their
cultural and social roles. Through her analysis, Barnes highlights "the
resilience of native Hawaiian women in responding to a changing environment,
and to demonstrate the sacrifices Indigenous women make in their role as
cultural bearers."
"The Crisis in Metaphors: Climate Vocabularies in Adivasi
Literatures" by Ananya Mishra examines the role of Adivasi voices in climate
change discourse and literary studies. While Adivasis are the perpetual
subaltern in postcolonial studies, their voices offer a necessary critique of
the global industrial complex, one that echoes calls for sovereignty issued by
other Indigenous communities globally. Mishra unpacks this claim through an
examination of Adivasi songs emerging from the particular geography of southern
Odisha. In particular, she focuses on the usage of metaphors within early
climate change discourse: "Indigenous literatures hold early warnings of the
climate crisis in metaphors we do not yet center in climate discourse." These
metaphors, Mishra suggests, serve as archives of interpretations of the climate
crisis as already confronted by Indigenous communities within India.
Our final article, "Educating for Indigenous
Futurities: Applying Collective Continuance Theory in Teacher Preparation
Education" by Stephany RunningHawk Johnson and Michelle Jacob positions
climate change conversations within the classroom. Drawing on their experiences
as Indigenous university teachers, and from the experiences of their students
who are training to become elementary and secondary classroom educators, RunningHawk
Johnson and Jacob demonstrate how K-12 classrooms are vital sites for
anti-colonial and Indigenous critiques of the settler-nation, neoliberalism,
and globalization, all of which undermine Indigenous futurities while
simultaneously fueling climate change. Their goal, they explain, is to "frame
education as part of the larger project in which we can better understand our
ancestral Indigenous teachings for the purpose of deepening our Indigenous
identities and knowledges." This entails calling upon Indigenous peoples to
work as teachers and leaders within educational contexts, and urging
non-Indigenous allies to educate themselves on how they might best ensure
Indigenous resurgence, futurity, and "collective continuance."
Together, the contributions featured in this special issue remind
us that "stories frame our beliefs, understandings, and relationships with each
other and the world around us [...] our lives are interwoven stories [...] we live
in an ocean of stories" (Kabutaulaka 47). And through their engagement with
Indigenous storytelling, these essays posit new, vital directions for imagining
Indigenous climate justice in the Anthropocene. Rather than foreground
narratives of declension or demise in the context of anthropogenic climate
change, these essays underscore the importance of telling stories that center
self-determination, struggle, and solidarity. They emphasize, in other words,
the importance of maintaining that better worlds are not only necessary, but
possible. And in doing so, they open space for thinking and feeling our way
through—and potentially beyond—the colonial Anthropocene.