Indigenous Anthropocenes in Poetry

Transmotion, 2022

In his book, Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, Daniel Wildcat calls for a "cultural climate change" (5). This would entail a change in our thinking and actions regarding climate change and the environment. To Wildcat, the best solution for spurring a cultural climate change is "indigenuity," his term for Indigenous ingenuity (74). Mvskoke (Creek) poet Jennifer Elise Foerster's work begins to answer this call for a cultural climate change by amplifying an Indigenous-specific, and Mvskoke-specific, notion of the Anthropocene in her second collection of poetry, Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018). She blends time, weaving past, present, and future (in no particular order) to convey a catastrophic future mirrored by difficult but resilient Mvskoke pasts and presents. In a 2017 interview with the University of Arizona Press, Foerster discussed the environment in Bright Raft in the Afterweather. Foerster states, "The characters of the poems are suffused by their ecologies and energy systems, including the systems we can't see" (UA Press). Foerster often features recurring characters and voices in and across her collections, and these characters have important connections to the environment and to Mvskoke stories. Foerster also discusses important connections between poetry, the environment, and healing. She states, "Poetry, I believe… can reveal the invisible landscapes, histories, and stories that we've forgotten, that we need to remember in order to continue. When I say 'transform' I'm talking about healing, which naturally involves ecological balance" (UA Press). Bright Raft in the Afterweather highlights the Kasey Jones-Matrona "Indigenous Anthropocenes in Poetry" 28 importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and cultural healing in narrating one version of a Mvskoke Anthropocene. Foerster utilizes this moment of the Anthropocene to story Mvskoke homelands, histories, and futures by recognizing human and nonhuman agency. I read Foerster's poetry as a symbiocene, a balance between human and nonhuman, and a poetics that seeks to heal, not solely express survival. The Mvskoke Anthropocene in Bright Raft in the Afterweather, conveys Mvskoke specific experiences of colonial climate disaster leading to broken contracts with the natural world along with Mvskoke ingenuity in survival and imagining futures. Indigenous Anthropocenes The term Anthropocene is one used popularly in scholarship now, although there are efforts to restructure the study of this epoch to take non-Western perspectives into account. Eugene Stormer began the study of the Anthropocene in the 1980s, and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized this term in the early 2000s (Grusin vii). The Anthropocene is "the proposed name for a geological epoch defined by the overwhelming human influence upon the earth" (Grusin vii). However, scientists cannot agree on exactly how recently this era began. Scientists debate the start of the Anthropocene, ranging from 1610, to the start of the Industrial Revolution, and even as late as 1964 for reasons such as a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the increase of fossil fuel burning, and peaks in radioactivity (Lewis, Maslin 175-177). The date does matter, although it may never be agreed upon, because it affects the perception of human action on the environment (Lewis, Maslin 177). Geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin note that the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492 along with the "subsequent annexing of the Americas led to the largest population replacement in the past 13,000 years," and "the cross-continental movement of food and animals alone contributed to a swift, ongoing radical reorganization of life on Earth without Transmotion Vol 7, No 2 (2021) 29 geological precedent" (174). This summation of the profound impact of colonization on Indigenous populations allows for an argument of a much earlier start date to the Anthropocene. Many Indigenous scholars date the beginning of the Anthropocene based on environmental impact at the beginning of European colonization of the Americas. Recent studies reveal that European settlers killed roughly "56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central, and North America" (Kent). This led to

Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, edited by Gina Comos and Caroline Rosenthal, 2019

As the title proposes, this contribution aims at exploring how indigenous North American literature relates to the concept of the Anthropocene and how it intervenes in the currently dominant Anthropocene discourse that figures humankind as a geophysical agent who has visibly transformed the planet to an unprecedented extent. In order to do so, this chapter looks at two literary case studies: Chantal Bilodeau’s play and contribution to The Arctic Cycle, Sila (2015), and Thomas King’s recent novel The Back of the Turtle (2014).

Art Journal, 2017

[Excerpt] I briefly retrace a path of art and criticism in the decades between American Indian Movement and No Dakota Access Pipeline to consider tensions and resonances between the work of select Indigenous practitioners and broader developments in art and ecology. Some of the groundwork is laid in a previous article I coauthored with Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” for a special issue of Third Text on contemporary art and the politics of ecology, edited by Demos in 2013, as well as my recently published book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Some of the same artists and insights from that research reappear here.This essay differs in its aim to build a genealogy of ecocritical concerns connecting philosophy and activism during AIM in the 1970s, so-called identity art of the 1980s and 1990s, and creative media in the context of Anthropocene discourses after 2000. Putting “Native struggles for land and life” in dialogue with contemporary ecoaesthetics—or more specifically, considering their intersections in a continuum of First Nations texts and artworks—bears on some of the most pressing problems in both fields. A historically informed engagement with the political status of Native American lands can yield a fuller understanding of the interdependencies among colonialism, capitalism, and ecological devastation. More profoundly, the related arts have played a critical role in transmitting alternative means of organizing human-earth relations through a painful history to address our equally fraught present.

Portrayals of the anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives miss the populations of people, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with their descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literatures on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by non-Indigenous persons, such as the holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies’ narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies’ capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. [open access @ http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/enea/0/0]

Literary Geographies, 2018

Narratives of climate change place it alternately as an environmental justice issue, a national and global security issue, an apocalyptic threat to life on earth, an opportunity for social change, and more. In this article, I aim to bring critical geographic work on climate narratives into conversation with contemporary poetry, through close readings of specific poems. I argue that the work of contemporary poets, and in particular the work of Indigenous ecopoetics, is rich in poetic texts that offer imaginative practices for recalibrating climate change narratives. I look particularly to works by Craig Santos Perez, Kathy Jetn̄ il-Kijiner, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan. I approach the poems as both a critical geographer and as a poet, thinking through and with their form and content in relation to climate narratives, and in relation to a description of Indigenous ecopoetics by Perez. I meet these poems as stored energy, as actors themselves in a human and more-than-human collective. A close reading of the craft of creative texts—particularly to the level of the line in poetry—highlights the inextricable connection between form and content in how a poem acts and means in the world. As a non-Indigenous reader of texts by Indigenous poets, my goal is not to perform a 'master' reading or analysis of these texts, but rather to learn from the poems and in doing so attempt to decolonize my own thought, a process that is a constant practice.

Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 2019

It is impossible to think today, without thinking of the Anthropocene. As biospheres are pushed ever-closer towards exhaustion, collapse, and/or radically inhospitable transmutations, there is a simultaneous explosion of work striving to represent and understand this epoch. However, the Anthropocene should not be thought in isolation from other social, political, and ecological processes. In this paper, I investigate the Anthropocene’s intersection with settler colonialism. Of particular interest to this paper are the metaphorical and narrative accounts about wastelanded spaces; that is, how meaning is ascribed to the local manifests of the Anthropocene as they are birthed on colonized territories. I ask what sort of futurities or recuperations are imagined as extant within the Anthropocene; in particular, whether possibilities for anti-colonial futures are imagined as existing within or emerging from wastelanded spaces. I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”.

Anthropocene discourse often describes futures characterized by climate destabilization leading to the extinction of certain species. Often these futures are described using dystopian themes. As a Potawatomi person and scholar-activist, I wondered how might some Indigenous peoples interpret such futures? While similarities are present given Indigenous concern with conserving native species, it is more accurate to claim that indigenous conservationists focus more on sustaining particular plants and animals whose lives are entangled locally, over many generations, in ecological, cultural and economic relationships with human societies. Indigenous peoples learn from, adapt, and put in practice these relationships to address the conservation challenges we face today, especially the environmental destruction of settler colonialism in North America. What is more, the environmental impacts of settler colonialism have made it so that quite a few indigenous peoples in North America are already no longer able to relate locally to many of the plants and animals that are significant to them. In the Anthropocene, then, some indigenous peoples already inhabit what our ancestors would have likely characterized as a dystopian future. So we consider the future from what we believe is already a dystopia. The paper explores these ideas in relation to case examples from Indigenous conservation and restoration.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2021

Electronic Green Journal, 2019

Comparative Literature: East & West , 2022

Dipesh Chakraborty and Kathleen D Morrison engage in provincializing the Anthropocene to decenter the grasp of the idea that Anthropocene is an outcome of European industrial phase that enhanced socio-economic growth worldwide, thereby revealing the other causes for the culmination of the era of Anthropocene, offering a space to other cultural histories and Anthropogenic pursuits by non-European societies responsible for climate change. Local episodes of altered weather patterns and adversities when compared, they assist in conceiving the shift in the climate of Earth because of inclusivity of experiences across boundaries, giving importance to the planet that constitutes life. This paper is a comparative study of two poetry collections, Anthropocene Blues (2017) by John Lane and Anthropocene (2021) by Sudeep Sen to ascertain how these poets, belonging to two different continents represent the Anthropocene and deal with its provincialization through their poems. Through an analogical framework, this paper deliberates that how provincialization of Anthropocene facilitates a link to gain a panoramic view of the planet towards the realization of a planetary climate change.