by Rob Latham;
Once out of the poison ivy the little frog fairly flew over the ground bounding without pause until he came to another grove of plants. Within that grove of jewel weed, the little frog twisted and turned and writhed washing every part of himself. . . . From the conduct of the little frog the Anishnabeg learned the cure for poison ivy. (Ojibway Heritage 42)
Like these orally transmitted ceremonial worlds, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000), the preceding Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), and the later The Salt Roads (2004) and The New Moon’s Arms (2007), blend history and myth in a manner that heightens the natural extrapolative qualities of sf while offering complex plotlines that at first may resemble dystopic soothsaying, but that inevitably unfold junctures of hope. As meditations on indigenous contact with colonial power, the ceremonial worlds created in these novels cast the landscape as the “dreamwork” of imperialism where indigenous or diasporic aboriginal peoples engage colonizers in conflicted (sometimes ambivalent) negotiations that potentially evolve into positive exchanges of commodities and customs. Whereas head-hard, street-wise ’80s cyberpunk engaged neoliberal globalization policies from the low-tech back alleys of first-world corporate city-states, Hopkinson’s postcolonial ceremonial worlds contemplate “third world” and “fourth world” future-worlds that overcome the exported “technoscientism” of ’90s globalization practices. This overcoming occurs by going back, way back, to tradition through the telling of story/ceremony, and by going forward, way forward, by mining the imagination to construct an ameliorated technology informed by indigenous tradition and practice.
A key element of Hopkinson’s ceremonial worlds is what I call “indigenous scientific literacies.” Indigenous scientific literacies are those practices used by indigenous native peoples to manipulate the natural environment in order to improve existence in areas including medicine, agriculture, and sustainability. The term stands in contrast to more invasive (and potentially destructive) western scientific method. And since indigenous scientific literacies are shaped by the diverse natural environments of the indigenous groups that use them, no single set of practices summarizes the possibilities. However, Charles C. Mann offers a useful review of practices for the Americas while establishing the continuity and sophistication of their sustainable approach to resource management:
Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years . . . they modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways. . . . But all of these efforts required close, continual oversight. (353)
M. Kat Anderson underscores the ideological differences between indigenous scientific literacies and western scientific method. Noting that “the first European explorers, American trappers, and Spanish missionaries entering California painted an image of the state as a wild Eden providing plentiful nourishment to native inhabitants without sweat or toil” (1) who played out a “hand-to-mouth existence” (2), Anderson establishes that the paradise discovered by colonial explorers was the outcome of “sophisticated and complex harvesting and management practices” (1). But more importantly, she focuses on the element of spirituality that lies at the root of indigenous resource management. Take, for example, her study of the word “wilderness”:
Interestingly, contemporary Indians often use the word “wilderness” as a negative label for land that has not been taken care of by humans for a long time, for example, where dense understory shrubbery or thickets of young trees block visibility and movement. A common sentiment among California Indians is that a hands-off approach to nature has promoted feral landscapes that are inhospitable to life. “The white man sure ruined this country,” said James Rust, a Southern Sierra Miwok Elder. “It’s turned back to wilderness” (pers. comm. 1989). California Indians believe that when humans are gone from an area long enough, they lose the practical knowledge about correct interaction, and the plants and animals retreat spiritually from the earth or hide from humans. When intimate interaction ceases, the continuity of knowledge, passed down through generations, is broken, and the land becomes “wilderness.” (3–4)
The essence of indigenous scientific literacy, in contrast to western science, resides in this sense of spiritual interconnectedness among humans, plants, and animals. If the historic resource management of the Americas by indigenous peoples was for the most part successful, as Mann and Anderson argue, the reason is not because resources were so abundant that hard work and systematic thinking simply were not required, or that indigenous groups did not inflict environmental damage simply because they did not aspire to grand public projects. Instead, to echo Anderson’s study of indigenous thinking, the concept of indigenous scientific literacy suggests that sustainability is about maintaining the spiritual welfare of natural resources rather than simply planning their exploitation efficiently so that humans do not run out of necessary commodities. Wilderness is not an undiscovered country renewing the possibility of new development; it is the loss of continuity with the land and the decay of generational memory.
By recapturing and sharing indigenous scientific literacies, Hopkinson’s ceremonial worlds offer an alternative to Ulrich Beck’s contemporary “risk society,” whose defining features are public unease and skepticism over “distribution and management of hazards such as global warming that result from techno-economic development itself” (Demeritt 173). Indigenous scientific literacies in Hopkinson’s ceremonial worlds offer indigenous technologies as pathways to sustainable existence.
Indigenous scientific literacies today
What economic and social aspects of western exploitation of indigenous scientific literacies are relevant to our discussion of postcolonial ceremonial worlds? Anthropologists, social scientists, scientists, and international lawyers connected to environmental science and interacting with transnational trade policies are mired in the potential for exploitation of biomedical and botanical indigenous resources. Much like their nineteenth-century counterparts in ethnography, twentieth- and twenty-first-century ethnobiologists engage indigenous cultures and territories to gain traditional knowledge of medicinal plants; natural insecticides and repellants; fertility-regulating drugs; edible plants; animal behavior; climatic and ecological seasonally; soils, forest, and savanna management; and skin and body treatments. Ethnobiologists must grapple not only with intellectual property rights but also with issues of what Frans de Waal’s cognitive altruism, or altruism with the other’s interests explicitly in mind, with “reciprocal altruism,” a kind of system of repayment that de Waal characterizes as “a complex mechanism based on the remembrance of favors given and received,” a system to be distinguished from simpler forms of cooperation (qtd. in Newmyer 77–79).
This reciprocity or gift-giving has been a facet of indigenous environmental ethics in stories re-told throughout time. For example, cross-fertilization of philosophy and anthropology that western social scientists label either “ethnometaphysics” or “cultural studies” is a mainstay in Ojibwa tradition. Original transcriptions, translations of Ojibwa narrative, and interpretive essays explore the intricacies of pimadaziwin—good health and long life—as an aboriginal scientific literacy (Callicott and Nelson 100–135). In literary studies and the social sciences, ecocriticism details ecological imperialisms and moves the social ecological perspective from a preoccupation with the merely pastoral or wilderness to places of hinterland that are no longer pristine: open-pit uranium mines on or near reservations, for example. Ecocritic Greg Garrard invites us “to take a hard look at the contested terrains where increasing numbers of poor and marginalized people are organizing around interrelated social and environmental problems, [where there is] no ‘vanishing Indian’ but ongoing struggles against improbable odds, in which no conclusions can be taken for granted” (123–131).
Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) can be thought of as an intersection between researcher and indigenous knowledge, a collaboration rather than an appropriation. The hybrid nature has taken two paths. The neocolonial path models TEK as taxonomy: that is, as a set of categories and facts used to legitimize western management systems. The decolonial path posits TEK as a negotiated event and process. Because indigenous knowledge is embedded within a cultural context and “expressed through language, ceremony, artifacts, cosmology, and social relationships” (Paci and Krebs 269), it should not be wielded as a rational intellectual methodology aimed at discovering exploitable (and exhaustible) natural resources. Exploring the complex convergence of indigenous local knowledge and the interests of the academic community in their consideration of TEK, James Paci and Lisa Krebs ask: “Can TEK be a force for decolonization, of knowledge and power, or will it be appropriated and then serve only as an engine for neocolonization?” (263).
Notwithstanding these concerns, TEK is moving from the arena of social science to the “harder” sciences in practice and empirical content. Stephen Bocking traces the history of scientists’ evolving perceptions of indigenous knowledge in northern Canada, where knowledge is often transmitted orally through story-form, and is complemented or mixed with the increasing emphasis on taxonomic classifications or behavioral information that can be readily understood in western scientific terms. Science, here, indicates “a complex amalgam of practical skills, technical devices, theory, and social strategies tied to its wider political, social, and institutional contexts” (236). The inspiration for this new academic inclination included a shift in biology towards mandating native input in wildlife management decisions. At the same time, native self-determination and land claims negotiations necessitated increased study of land use and harvesting practices.
Finally, Ruth Mathis and Terry Weik’s Indigenous Archeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice represents a milestone in the developing relationship and counter-hegemonic practices between western science—whether in the garb of ethnographer, ethnobiologist, or anthropologist—and the aboriginal and indigenous subjects of its research. Mathis and Weik offer the “first volume in indigenous archeology that has more Indigenous than non-Indigenous authors” (9). It is dedicated to the indigenous peoples in seventy-two countries world-wide and re-defines archeology theory as “integrating material culture such as historical linguistics, poetry, music, dance, oral histories, and folklores” (10).
Of interest to the present analysis, Mathis and Weik argue for a broadening of African-American diaspora studies to include the social and political relationships between diasporic Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans, particularly within the context of evolving scientific research that redefines itself from the vantage point of indigenous and African diasporic scholars. Sven Ouzman expands the notion of indigenous knowledge (“held and developed by specific autochthonous people, usually long-term residents of a landscape”) to work with an additional form of “embedded knowledge”—one that has been built by “a variety of people who have lived on a landscape; some of whom may not be indigenous” but are almost identical, “akin to a storyteller and her apprentice” (209). Tradition, here, is posed as “those beliefs and practices that are consciously cast in opposition to colonialism, globalization, and the like” (217).
In counterpoising a monolithic indigenous view with a variety of international indigenous elements, Hopkinson takes a similar direction. Her novels, especially the tour de force Midnight Robber, cover transnational geographies from harsh bush and vast hinterlands to urban landscapes of decay, from contaminated Cayaba salt pits to transplanted cashew groves, while at the same time acknowledging the transferences that historically have occurred among African, Caribbean, and Amerindian indigenous and diasporic peoples. She derives material from the Anishinaabe/Ojibwa of First Nations Peoples in the northern United States and Canada, West African Yoruban and Caribbean Yoruban, Australian Aboriginals, the non-vanished Taino/Arawak, and Maroon communities, perhaps especially Jamaican Blue Mountain, John Crow, and Haitian locales. In personal terms, she aligns her own history with the Taino/Arawak, which she traces through her grandmothers’ Maroon ancestry (Mohanraj 2; Rutledge 600). Her family traditions are supported by archeological research in the region. E. Kofi Agorsah comprehensively establishes Maroon-Amerindian fusions and suggests that the first Maroon settlements in the Caribbean were in fact earlier established by Spaniard-enslaved Arawak aborigines who escaped into the less accessible parts of Jamaica, such as the Blue Mountains (165–167). Archeological digs lead Agorsah to conclude that Arawaks were the first people in Nannytown and were gradually absorbed into later Maroon migrations (182). Underscoring obscured lines of ancestral transmission, contemporary indigenous organizations such as Trinidad’s Santa Rosa Carib Community (SRCC) are in strong contact with northerly counterparts, such as Canada’s Assembly of First Nations and Seminole communities, to begin exploring historical connections and to facilitate the cultural revival of the so-called “extinguished” Taino and Arawak and Caribbean Amerindians (see Forte).
Hinte songs, Maroon “break-aways,” and oral traditions: The transmissions of indigenous scientific literacy
In Midnight Robber Hopkinson sets out to imagine “a world rooted in Caribbean culture and folklore, particularly the Trinidad carnival,” in an effort to speculate “what paradigms for technology a society might develop without the all-pervasive influence of American technology” (Hopkinson, “Code Sliding” 1). The story focuses on Tan-Tan, “a little girl living on her home planet who gets yanked hither and yon between her parents as they carry on a hugely troubled relationship” (1). A runaway from this abusive situation, Tan-Tan becomes a folk hero reminiscent of the “midnight robber” of Trinidad Carnival fame. The midnight robber is “a powerful metaphor for exile and longing for home and strongly references the Caribbean history of the African slave trade” (1).
The worlds in Midnight Robber, especially New Half-Way Tree, express the nature of a deep time earthshaper story, reflecting the Algonquin tradition under the ostensible guise of a Maroon-embedded griot tale. For “woodland Indians” used to surviving the harshness of the bush and the fierceness of the hinterland, the animate and inanimate worlds, including humans (such as the Runners and settlers), other creatures (such as the douen), and the land itself, exist in a constantly negotiated set of reciprocal relationships. Managing and manipulating the ecosystem through controlled fires, selective harvesting of desirable species, and horticulture, indigenous communities deploy a flexible resource base and a diverse settlement strategy, one dubbed by Schaghticoke elder Trudie Lamb Richmond and anthropologist Russell Handsman as a “homelands model,” or a site where individual and communal activities take place and where all relationships negotiated between humans and nonhumans within that territory occur over a long span of time (Bruchac 59–61). Algonquian stories and Maroon griot tales are “family stories” marked by the transmission of sophisticated knowledge.
In this landscape of memory, doing battle with superhuman elementals and “molding giant megafauna down to their present size” (Bruchac 61) are the tasks of earthshapers and transformers; fossils of megafauna extinct species, Pokumtuck giant beaver stories, and Great Lakes Anishinaabe transformers such as “Naanabozho” mirror New Half-Way Tree’s huge dinosaur-like mako jumbies and the heroic nonhuman douen who defeat them in battle.
In Hopkinson’s imagined world, the fantastical hinte, packbirds to the colonists but wives and beloved comrades to the male douen (who are deprived of flight unless partnered with hinte) sing nonsense songs and warbles that echo the more obviously scientific literacies of organic computer Granny Nanny, Nansi’s Nanny song (Midnight Robber 173). Their prophetic urgency promotes interactions and negotiations with the colonizing “tallpeople” from the planet Toussaint, a compromise that the indigenous douen and hinte must accept if they expect to survive. On Toussaint, would-be colonists prepare for
their journey to New Half-Way Tree by watching a computer-generated history lesson that projects the simulacra of the douen and other species indigenous to this new world as terrifying creatures that had to become “extinct to make it safe for people coming in on nation ships” (32–33). Simulated Toussaint history therefore prepared colonizers by illustrating the “naturalness” of douen, mako jumbie, and hinte extinction. Toussaint tallpeople think of the indigenous douen and hinte as non–human, categorizing them as species of fauna or flora. In this way the narrative asks its readers to consider the question: What constitutes “personhood” and which beings deserve that status?
