Sometimes, a story is set in a place that isn't just a location. It's a character. How do places come alive? We discuss hauntings, homelands, and what it means to write a landscape that is more than backdrop. Joining us is Jesscia Johns, author of Bad Cree, to talk about how place figures into her novel about a monster who stalks Treaty 8 territory in Alberta, Canada.
Jessica Johns website
Bad Cree, by Jessica Johns
A mind-bending, gripping novel about Native life, motherhood and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences On the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be: She’s just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve is nothing but supportive; and they’ve recently moved into a new home in a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. But Alice could not feel like more of an imposter. She isn’t connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her own mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from their white, watchful neighbors. Even when she does have a minute to herself, her perpetual self-doubt hinders the one vestige of her old life she has left: her goal of writing a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story. At first, Alice is convinced her discomfort is of her own making. She has gotten everything she always dreamed of, after all. But then strange things start happening. She finds herself losing bits of time, hearing voices she can’t explain, and speaking with things that should not be talking back to her, all while her neighbors’ passive-aggressive behavior begins to morph into something far more threatening. Though Steve assures her this is all in her head, Alice cannot fight the feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that in her creation story lies the key to her and Dawn’s survival. . . . She just has to finish it before it’s too late. Told in Alice’s raw and darkly funny voice, And Then She Fell is an urgent and unflinching look at inherited trauma, womanhood, denial, and false allyship, which speeds to an unpredictable—and surreal—climax.
The Christian Groups Fighting Against the Indian Child Welfare Act https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/the-christian-groups-fighting-against-the-indian-child-welfare-act/
From TV and film to novels and video games, the artistic movement of Indigenous Futurisms has been gaining momentum and breaking cultural barriers. I talk with professor and author Grace Dillon, filmmaker Danis Goulet, fiction wrtier Stephen Graham Jones, and visual artist Virgil Ortiz about what defines a work of indigenous futurism and why telling stories about werewolves, spirits, A.I., and time travelers can be an act of resistance.
The poet Ray Young Bear writes in both English and Meskwaki, his first language. He says that the task of passing on Indigenous languages feels especially urgent now as linguistic scholars predict the loss of languages.
The Meskwaki language is rich with bird names, like Tti Tti Ka Kwa Ha, the name for the robin, which emulates the bird’s song, he says. After decades of creating poems, novels, and songs, Ray Young Bear has dedicated himself to preserving and teaching his language and culture.
Horror featuring indigenous actors or full cast
Despite the outsize role that Indigenous peoples play in protecting nature, their contributions often go overlooked. The modern conservation movement was built on the false idea that nature starts out “pristine” and untouched by humans, as the environmental journalist Michelle Nijhuis has written. That put many of the movement’s early efforts, including protected areas, at odds with Indigenous land management — the very activities that created many landscapes that countries are now racing to protect.
The stakes couldn’t be higher today. More than 50 countries, including the US and the other wealthy nations that make up the G7, have committed to conserving at least 30 percent of their lands and waters by 2030. Some Indigenous activists fear that reaching that goal, known as 30 by 30, could come at the expense of Indigenous land rights.
But they also see an opportunity to change the paradigm of conservation to one in which the enormous contributions of Indigenous peoples are recognized and supported. The consortium’s report could help propel that shift. It finds that if you consider areas conserved by Indigenous and local communities, in addition to formally protected and conserved areas, more than 30 percent of the world’s land is already conserved.
Raccoons inhabit a world between. They have features that are very human: their little paws, their behaviour. But their eyes are the eyes of an animal, and they’re inscrutable. They sit up and look human with these animal faces. Their behaviour — they don’t run away in the same ways that other animals do from us. They’re drawn to novelty, rather than repelled by it. So in all of these different ways, they sit between categories of comfort for us. That’s what fascinates me, but I think that’s partly what puts in some danger with a lot of humans.
Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is Professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia. His published work is largely in the areas of Indigenous literary studies, Indigenous Studies, and animal cultural history, including the recent Why Indigenous Literatures Matter and Raccoon, and, with co-editor Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), the forthcoming Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege.
To round off their Animal cluster, Suzanne and Chris talk with Daniel about raccoons, badgers, and other animals, both in the real world and in literature.
By George Nicholas, Simon Fraser University February 15, 2018
Some types of Indigenous knowledge simply fall outside the realm of prior Western understanding. In contrast to Western knowledge, which tends to be text based, reductionist, hierarchical and dependent on categorization (putting things into categories), Indigenous science does not strive for a universal set of explanations but is particularistic in orientation and often contextual.
On the topic of Native oral history not being deemed reliable, but like this is so common for Western Academia to trest Indigenous knowledge this way. And its really weird bc most of our cultures already place such importance on accurate information that when we'd tell stories, sometimes we'd track it down from who told you to who told them all the way back to the original teller. Our cultures valued accurate word for word info so much that often times it was a whole respected job and prestigious title and life's work of people to be historians, knowledge keepers, and storytellers. But academia still treats us as if we're lying or spreading misinfo. Its just really weird for White academia to see Native cultures that put such importance on Oral history, not believe us about our own history, and then still make the shocked pikachu face when Western science or archaeology or history proves what we'd been saying was actually true
This reminds me of one of my fave political cartoons/illustrations:
It's referring to Delgamuukw V. British Columbia, a landmark case in Aboriginal Title brought forward by the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en Nations regarding jurisdiction over their territory. In the appeal of the case (it was initially dismissed) the judge ruled that oral tradition/oral evidence should be given the same weight as written, that is, that it should be “placed on an equal footing with the types of historical evidence that the courts are familiar with, which largely consists of historical documents.”.
People who think there's no weight to Indigenous oral history just suffer from being legally, culturally, and epistemically illiterate.
For many Indigenous people, land relates to all aspects of existence—culture, spirituality, language, law, family, and identity. Las Vegas writer Soni Brown interviews indigenous writers and artists about the history, impact, and challenges of land acknowledgements.
Indigenous writers, on the other hand, acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes you, weaving the reality of Indigenous life with fiction to scare audiences. In Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow, for example, the apocalyptic event that ends life as we know it — taking out power, internet, phones, satellites, etc. — isn't even really noticed as an apocalyptic event at first; it's just another day on a northern rez, where power can go out at any time and internet and phone signals aren't always available. As Nick, a young Anishinaabe man, points out, "We thought it was kinda funny...The blackout was only two days, but it seemed like some people were already freaking out a little bit. I was just like, 'Come to the rez, this shit happens all the time!'" Once it becomes apparent that things have changed forever, the protagonist Evan observes that "the milestones he [now] used to mark time were the deaths in the community…as people perished through sickness, mishap, violence or by their own hands." He notes that northern reserves like his are "familiar with tragedy," the result of generations of intergenerational trauma and genocide — only now this tragedy is magnified.
Perhaps there will come a time when white Canada will meaningfully grapple with this question, when I won't have to look to horror to find a world where the monsters eventually stop. Until then, Tuck and Ree have put it best: "Haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide...I don't want to haunt you, but I will."
Laroque, Lar-Son and Ball say with increased Indigenous representation in publishing, writing and storytelling, priorities in the publishing world might shift and practical changes could be made, including increased scholarships, mentorship and consultation, and addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls To Action.
And that all begins with more Indigenous people in the industry, they said.
“There’s so few of us out there that it’s hard. Even if somebody gets in through the cracks, even if they’re the most resilient person ever, if they don’t have a support group or a mentor, their chances of surviving and actually doing a good job are minimal,” said Ball. “With more people you can support each other.”
When Princess Leia enters Jabba the Hutt’s lair in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, she greets him with “Yá’át’ééh, yá’át’ééh,” a Navajo greeting, and her iconic double-bun hairstyle imitates a traditional Hopi style for young girls. In the “Spirits” episode of Stargate SG-1, a science-fiction series that ran between 1997 and 2007, the team lands on a planet inhabited by the Salish, a Native American tribe with ancestors on Earth, and the episode is peppered with animal totems and mysterious spirits. Even Jordan Peele’s 2019 movie Us features Native imagery: At the beginning of the film, a young Adelaide (Madison Curry) enters a fun house on the Santa Cruz boardwalk called “Shaman Vision Quest Forest,” sees a mechanical owl (an animal some tribes consider a foreshadowing of death), and whistles at night (an act some tribes believe beckons bad spirits).
In many mainstream science-fiction narratives, Native Americans—as people, not lifted cultural elements that make a scene more exotic—are virtually nonexistent. Yet many of our most iconic science-fiction tales offer perspectives about colonialism. Aliens or apes invade or attack planet Earth, aiming to replace us (the “us” usually being white people), and cataclysmic wars bring about the end of the world. This connection isn’t coincidental: In his 2008 book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa English professor John Rieder notes that Western science fiction rose to prominence in the late 19th century during a period of massive European colonial expansion. “Evolutionary theory and anthropology, both profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology and history, are especially important to early science fiction from the mid-19th century on,” he writes. “The complex mixture of ideas about competition, adaptation, race, and destiny that was in part generated by evolutionary theory…forms a major part of the thematic material of early science fiction.”
As European nations were developing new ideas on racial hierarchy—including Social Darwinism, the belief that “inferior” people would “naturally” die off—writers of science fiction were exploring futuristic wars, invasions, and discoveries of new species. Their works often imitated violence occurring in the real world: H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, one of the first massively popular science-fiction books, imagined a world in which martians invade England—and was inspired by the British colonization of Tasmania. More than 100 years later, James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, which was also a story about invasion and colonialism, became one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Colonization and marginalization are commonly used as plot points, but for Native Americans these are not fantastical, imagined scenarios. We live them.
As Portland State University Indigenous Nations Studies professor Grace L. Dillon wrote in the introduction to 2012’s Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, “It is almost commonplace to think that the Native Apocalypse, if contemplated seriously, has already taken place.” Indigenous authors are thus in a unique position to reclaim sci-fi narratives as a form of resistance against settler colonialism. Indigenous science fiction or speculative fiction—which Dillion encapsulates with the term “Indigenous futurisms,” inspired by the Afrofuturism movement—offers a space for Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists to explore possible futures. From cowboy films to government-assimilation policies, Native American communities and cultures are often portrayed as a “vanishing race” with no place in the present, let alone the future. Indigenous futurism is a contemplation of what our futures look like as Indigenous people, one that recognizes the significance and strength of Indigenous knowledge systems.
