RoboKin and Technovation in Cherokee Speculative Fiction

Abstract

This essay reflects on how two Cherokee novels, Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears (2011) and Daniel Wilson’s Robopocalypse (2011), interrogate dogmatic beliefs in technology as social progress. Hausman imagines a VR experience where customers virtually re-enact the Trail of Tears, and Wilson details a global robot takeover staged in a dystopic future. This essay argues that the novels’ commentary on artificial intelligence, technology, and grounded knowledge build on a long history of Cherokee technological innovation, what I term Cherokee technovation, meaning Cherokee peoples’ ability to take technological innovations not necessarily created to support Indigenous self-determination and creatively repurpose and adapt them in modes that are grounded in Cherokee ways of being and nurture Cherokee lifeways and worldviews. Hausman and Wilson interrogate twenty-first-century fetishization of the emancipatory power of technology using longstanding Cherokee discourses that demand a more nuanced and careful approach than dominant modes of inquiry. They invite their Cherokee and non-Cherokee readers alike to reflect on the necessity of nurturing ethical relationships to technology that view technology as part of an already-interrelated ecosystem, not as cultural salve, savior, or villain.