The Climate of Indigenous Literature: Thomas King’s Anthropocene Realism

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that the Cherokee-Greek author Thomas King writes a realism for the Anthropocene avant la lettre, aiming to illuminate how his fiction – including Green Grass, Running Water (1993) and Truth and Bright Water (1999) – becomes even more significant when we perceive how his approach, from the situations he explores to his narrative modes, acknowledges states of dislocation, historical entanglement, and socio-material interconnection as the condition of reality in our catastrophic present, thereby educating the reader into a systems thinking that recognizes the indivisibility of the projects of decolonization and environmental justice. In contextualizing the realities of a present in which the interests of capital and empire and their discursive and institutional handmaidens have been forcibly made paramount within Indigenous frameworks and experiences – bleeding into Indigenous cosmologies, storytelling practices, lifeways, and histories, as well as means of resistance and survivance – King achieves in his fiction a mode of realism with the capacity to teach his readers how to scale their imaginations to climates of crisis, illuminating what Indigenous literatures can and should mean as we strive to inhabit such climates in ways conducive to communal survival.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This essay was composed on lands ancestral to the Menominee (Omāēqnomenēwak) and Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk), in a city named after Oshkosh, a Chief of the Menominee from 1827–1858 whose leadership spanned the years that saw the formalization of the State’s Removal policy and the establishment of Wisconsin’s statehood.

2. On the “Orbis Spike” of 1610, see Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene.”

3. For the AWG’s decision on the mid-twentieth century’s stratigraphic signals as the base for the Anthropocene, see the website of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy at http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/.

4. In the introduction to the chapter he contributed to his edited collection titled Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, Vizenor defines “Native survivance” as “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent… . Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry” (1). I invoke the concept briefly to recognize the correspondences between my essay’s argument and Vizenor’s conceptualization of a dynamic condition of survival mingled with creative transformation. “Survivance” names the intersections of historical and cultural survival with modes of resistance – to narratives of victimhood or tragedy or to conditions of erasure – that together transcend endurance or perseverance and manifest sovereignty. The conception of “presence” that inheres in Vizenor’s wider theorization of “survivance” is also at stake in this essay’s exploration of art’s capacity (whether King’s or his characters’) to manifest conditions of engagement, recovery, and resurgence as decolonizing forces.

5. Having proposed “tribal, interfusional, polemical, and associational” as alternatives to “postcolonial,” King closes his essay with a brief paraphrase of his overall argument about such descriptors: “And it may be that these terms will not do in the end at all. Yet I cannot let post-colonial stand – particularly as a term – for, at its heart, it is an act of imagination and an act of imperialism that demands that I imagine myself as something I did not choose to be, as something I would not choose to become” (190).

6. In his interview with Jennifer Andrews, King goes some way to explaining the characters who serve in the novel as living traces of Removal: “The figure of Rebecca Neugin, that ghost-like figure is really a character right off the Trail of Tears, the march in the 1830s to Oklahoma. These Cherokees are represented by George Guess, who of course was Séquoia, and John Ross, who was principal chief of Cherokees at the time of removal, and Rebecca Neugin, who is a real historical character who was a young girl of eight when the Trail of Tears took place and she was ripped out of her house so quickly by the soldiers that the only thing she could take with her was a duck, and on the first couple of days on the trip she was holding onto the duck so tightly she killed it. And when they interviewed her in Oklahoma, when she was in her eighties or nineties, the thing she remembered most vividly was that duck and that march. It still haunted her. That story of Rebecca Neugin haunted me for a long time until I was able to use it in the book.” (“Border Trickery” 180)

7. King’s 2014 novel The Back of the Turtle – his first in 15 years after Truth and Bright Water – undertakes a similar engagement with the catastrophic, elaborating a narrative in which intergenerational trauma, unbridled scientific curiosity, and corporate greed combine to create a chemical defoliant capable of laying waste on a planetary scale while also suggesting that a reeducation in Indigenous origin stories and attendant philosophies of relation and responsibility can provoke recovery.

8. In a trans-Indigenous reading of the novel in which she contextualizes its narrative in relation to “land-centered knowledge and stories from Siksikaitsitapi, Hodinohso:ni, Anishinabe, and Nêhiyawak nations,” Debicki argues that apparent symbols of division in Truth and Bright Water like the Shield River or the U.S.-Canada border also “speak to the possibility of unification based on a shared ecosystem,” forming part of what she describes as the novel’s meditation on the importance of “land-centered relationships” enabling “shared citizenship with the land” (110, 108, 112).

9. By the 1970s the coherent aesthetic of Lyellian gradualism (inherited by Charles Darwin and widely disseminated by evolutionary theory) is disrupted by a new geo-ecological narrative that embraces the more chaotic concept of “punctuated equilibrium,” which recognizes the pressures exerted by random (and sometimes cataclysmic) disturbances – from extinction events caused by climatic revolutions (as with the Cretaceous extinctions sixty-five million years ago) to sudden changes in morphology – in provoking change and transformation at both evolutionary and geophysical scales. See Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age,” Nature, no. 366, 1993, pp. 223–27.

10. One of Estes’ key examples of an Indigenous political practice that counters such narratives of loss is the Ghost Dance, which is indelibly linked in the settler historical imagination to the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), of which it is cast as merely the preface by such popular narratives. Countering this tendency, Estes claims: “The Ghost Dance, in the revolutionary sense, was about life, not death; it was about imagining and enacting an anticolonial Indigenous future free from the death world brought on by settler invasion” (16). Situating the #NoDAPL movement as part of a long history of Indigenous resistance, of which the Ghost Dance is just one signal example, Estes’s text performs the radical Indigenous history he calls for, “aim[ing] to change the colonial present, and to imagine a decolonial future by reconnecting to Indigenous places and histories” – an aim that aligns with the revisionary impetus I identify in King’s work (18).

11. King achieves the same effect in a more conventionally realist mode in his most recent novel Indians on Vacation (2020), where the semi-retired journalist Bird, of Cherokee-Greek descent like the author, reflects on his unfinished “three-part story on social services” dealing with “The Adopt Indians and Métis Program” (263). Though the narrative does not explicitly explain that “The Adopt Indians and Métis Program” constitutes one of many similar U.S. and Canadian state-sponsored programs of family separation through which the Canadian and Saskatchewan governments collaborated from 1967 to promote the adoption of Indigenous children by white families, the novel’s brief inclusion of Elsie Tolmar’s story (she is one of six siblings removed by a government program from her mother’s care) enables the reader to perceive how government institutions have functioned as instruments of settler colonialism, promoting cultural deracination through paternalistic logic. It is up to the reader to build on this, for instance by seeking out knowledge of the reasons for and consequences of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, installed as part of an effort to acknowledge and address an epidemic of unethical and predatory adoption of Indigenous children. Indians on Vacation is situated in the wake of such emergencies as they live on in the present, and King’s refusal to gloss such histories both asserts that they constitute our shared reality and insists that readers learn to orient themselves to the shape of the present in which they reside, in all its myriad historicity.

12. The Dawes Act was designed to disrupt communal reservation landholding by breaking up reservation lands into allotment parcels mirroring the dimensions identified in the 1862 Homestead Act, thus at once seeking to eliminate traditional practices, cultures, and communities by imposing Western norms of private property and erasing the unique government-to-government relationship that reservation-forming treaties had enfranchised.

13. As scholars of Thomas King’s work including Cheryl Lousley and James H. Cox recognize, in a settlement campaign “empty” land is a constructed prerequisite to identifying territories as “available for possession and exploitation” (Cox 226). And as William Kerrigan shows in “Apples on the Border: Orchards and the Contest for the Great Lakes,” when colonial misrecognitions could not erase the reality of intentional cultivation in accordance with Euro-American ideals of land management – as with the apple and peach plantations along the Great Lakes that evidenced orchard cultivation by the Wyandot, Lenni-Lenape, Seneca, Cayuga, and Oneida – such evidence might be violently eradicated in the interest both of sequestering the cultivated orchard as a sign of specifically European ideals of labor, settlement, land tenure, bounded ownership, etc., and of preserving a racist conception of the seasonal and periodic mobility practiced by some Indigenous peoples as rootless nomadism anathema to European modes of subsistence and ideas of property.

14. While not taking up my ecological language of “keystone species,” Cox also highlights the sacred importance of the cottonwood trees, noting of the novel’s ending that “the once-restrained waters that carry Eli from the landscape also return nourishment to the cottonwoods the Blackfoots use for their annual Sun Dance” (238).

15. Another apt example of the novel’s satire of Christianity’s anti-ecological drive to dominance (and one very often cited by scholars) is Ahdamn’s ludicrous misnaming of the animals (e.g., “You are a microwave oven, Ahdamn tells the Elk”) (41).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pascale M. Manning

Pascale M. Manning is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her research and teaching center on nineteenth-century British literature and science, Indigenous studies, and ecocriticism. Her work appears in Journal of Narrative Theory, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, Literature Compass, and Studies in American Indian Literatures.