Tag: indigenous knowledge

Who owns the Green New Deal?

“A reindeer stands in silent protest in front of a hydro power plant” on Indigenous Sámi land in northern Scandinavia. Image: Tobias Herrmann CC BY-NC 2.0

by Geoff Garver

Green New Deal? People, we have a problem. 

You go into your Wall Street investment bank and ask, “What’s a hot investment these days?”  Your super sharp investment advisor says, “Farmland in Africa! People have to eat, right? And there are more and more people. Put your money in African farmland and you’ll double your money in no time!”  She doesn’t say a word about what makes that land unique and special or about the people and other beings that live, or lived, there.

That’s a big problem. It’s a remote ownership problem. In fact, it’s a whole bunch of justice problems related to the hard-wired legacies of colonialism that come together as a multi-faceted problem about remote ownership of land and resources. In a nutshell, remote owners or rights holders often cause serious harm to far away ecosystems they know and care little about, and grave injustice to the people and other life that know those ecosystems most intimately and depend on them. 

So, what about this Green New Deal (GND)? Is it merely the old wine of capitalist growth-driven development in a new bottle, or is it a recipe for socio-political and socio-ecological transformation that will right past wrongs and reshuffle political power in favor of historically disempowered people? Any Green New Deal (GND) framed as a “just transition” has to address problems of remote ownership and empower place-based governance.

Open questions about the remote ownership problem in AOC’s GND

Some say the GND in H.R. 109 introduced by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and others is merely a shift to green or climate colonialism, by which the greening—via decarbonization and other means—of wealthy, developed countries in a growth-driven, capitalist, and globalized world will worsen injustice in developing countries. This injustice includes not only increased exposure to environmental harms and health risks from extraction of materials needed for green technologies but also ongoing wealth inequality and social and cultural upheaval as the wealth-building potential of extracted resources (jobs, profits, etc.) is mostly exported along with them. 

The GND risks continuation of the crushing of long-standing place-based governance systems.

At the heart of this injustice are international companies and their stockholders and other remote owners—land and resource grabbers—that exert enormous political power from the local to the global scale. The GND risks continuation of the crushing of long-standing place-based governance systems, permanent displacement of people with the most intimate knowledge of local ecosystems and devastation of ecosystems and the life they support, all typical of land and resource grabbing around the world.  A particular concern is that land use reform is essential to success of the GND, yet the GND does not directly confront the hard wiring of the property rights regimes that must be addressed. Another is that the GND was conceived and announced with virtually no inclusion of Indigenous voices and that unless this lack of inclusion and the superficiality of references to Indigenous ideas is overcome, the GND could maintain “broken structures that perpetuate disconnection and individualism.”

Some cautiously, others more enthusiastically, see the GND as an opportunity to end and provide restitution for these injustices.  The openings for transformative change to scale back land and resource grabbing and empower place-based governance systems, including Indigenous ones, are signaled in support for “community-driven projects and strategies” to deal with pollution and climate change; locally-appropriate ecosystem restoration; and free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous communities with respect to matters of concern to them.  For these openings to fulfill their potential, justice activist Syed Hussan argues that the GND must foster “just transition in the broadest sense” and not just deal with displaced workers in fossil fuel industries and other discrete issues that decarbonizing the economy will entail.

Where to look for answers to remote ownership problems

The good news is that worthwhile ideas about how the GND can confront problems of remote ownership and promote locally-tailored place-based governance systems are already out there. Here are some of these sources of inspiration.

The degrowth movement. Degrowth is a forceful challenge to the growth-insistent sustainable development model, and a more hopeful approach to long-term perpetuation of a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. Degrowth combines a commitment to respecting ecologically-based limits with a commitment to developing a comprehensive, practicable approach to building thriving human communities based on conviviality and human solidarity without consumerism or material and energy excess. The reforms associated with degrowth “emphasize redistribution (of work and leisure, natural resources and wealth), social security and gradual decentralization and relocalization of the economy, as a way to reduce throughput and manage a stable adaption to a smaller economy.” Giorgos Kallis’s nine principles of degrowth should be useful in making sure the GND adequately confronts remote ownership problems: 1) End to exploitation; 2) Direct democracy; 3) Localized production; 4) Sharing and the commons; 5) Provision of relational goods, through friendship, love, healthy relationships, kinship, good citizenry; 6) Unproductive expenditures geared to communal activities, such as festivals, games and the arts; 7) Care, and treating humans and other life as ends, not means; 8) Diversity; and 9) Decommodification of land, labor and value.

The G20.  What?!? Well, it’s useful to understand the key ideas of the global political apparatus that must be overcome for the GND to lead to radical social, political and ecological transformation.  At annual meetings, the G20 typically agree on the need to “further collective actions toward achieving strong, sustainable and balanced growth to raise the prosperity of our people.” The means to do so generally involve supporting global trade and investment (much of which is tied to remote ownership) and the role of the World Trade Organization as a means to create jobs and maintain growth, with weak or marginal actions or aspirations to address inequalities, corruption, climate change and environmental harm.  The G20 supports the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, with emphasis on sustainable, inclusive economic growth. A truly progressive GND should look past the SDGs!

The EJ Atlas.  The Environmental Justice Atlas documents real cases of how remote owners have created social and environmental conflict.  These compelling narratives are a rich resource for understanding in detail the problem of remote ownership and the power dynamics that must be confronted and reshuffled in order to overcome them. 

Indigenous ways of thinking and being. In many Indigenous worldviews, attachment to place, founded on respect for all life and for deep appreciation of a reciprocal relationship with the Earth and its life community, is key to a more hopeful vision of the human-Earth relationship. Indigenous activist Eriel Deranger writes, “It is Indigenous communities, locally, nationally and internationally, that continue to push for an actualization of instilling deeper spiritual connections to Mother Earth to help us relearn what systems of colonization, capitalism, and extractivism have severed.” Connecting or reconnecting to the places that nourish our bodies and souls is at the heart of the long-term promise of a GND done well. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “[f]or the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place.” But, inviting settler societies to become indigenous to place—and an invitation from Indigenous holders of knowledge of a place is essential—does not mean letting them “take what little is left.” Attaching to a place by carefully and respectfully seeking to become indigenous to it requires humility above all, and it requires direct experience with wise teachers, not merely book knowledge.

Indigenous peoples and other social groups that have been historically disadvantaged by colonization and land and resource grabbing must play a central role in developing and carrying out the GND.

Six mutually reinforcing proposals on remote ownership and place-based governance for the GND

First, Indigenous peoples and other social groups that have been historically disadvantaged by colonization and land and resource grabbing must play a central role in developing and carrying out the GND. Including Indigenous notions of justice, decolonization and self-determination through meaningful inclusion of Indigenous communities in decisions that affect them, which requires adequate time and resources, is essential.

Second, the GND should empower communities like those included in the EJ Atlas to develop strong place-based governance systems and communities of solidarity and mutual care in order to resist the social and environmental conflicts they face, often because of remote ownership. This means providing them with a determinative role in decisions affecting them directly and indirectly. It also means developing a global/international scope and strategy so remote ownership problems in one place aren’t just displaced elsewhere. Also, we should look for opportunities to scale up and out from local remote ownership problems that are avoided or justly resolved.

Third, the GND should end corporate giveaways that are tied to remote ownership problems and exclude carbon markets, offsets or emissions trading regimes, and geoengineering—all of which typically pose remote ownership problems. Instead, the Climate Justice Alliance is fighting for a GND that shifts “from global systems of production and consumption that are energy intensive and fossil fuel dependent to more localized systems that are sustainable, resilient and regenerative.”

Fourth, stocks and other investment instruments in land and resource grabbing ventures that cause social and environmental conflict and harm in faraway places should be prohibited. This may require profound restructuring, dismantling or abolition of the financial and corporate structures that allow for these kinds of investments. At the least, it would entail deep rethinking of the metaphor of corporate personhood

Fifth, the GND should explicitly reject economic growth as a rationale and driving objective. It should oppose perpetual economic growth and promote communities committed to solidarity, maximal sharing and minimal use of materials and energy.

Sixth, the GND should place limits on wealth, which would help minimize or end the remote ownership problem. The most obvious way to do this is through progressive income taxation or a tax on wealth. For this to be effective, there of course also has to be collaboration between communities worldwide against tax evasion, with the aim of abolishing tax havens. A more radical transformation would be to target the globalized currency system which makes it possible for Wall Street investors to buy African farmland with US dollars in the first place. Or, the international community could finally adopt taxes on financial transactions; already implemented in some countries, this could be expanded to more countries and international transactions.

Some tough questions to test these proposals

If the GND is a step toward post-capitalist societies where remote owners, if they still exist, are no longer able to adversely affect far away ecosystems and people, it nonetheless is starting off in a globalized capitalist economy. As John Bellamy Foster has written, “We have to go against the logic of the system while living within it.” Making the proposals above work will not be easy. It will require people power through mass organizing and consciousness building. And it will mean confronting some tough questions. Here are a few. 

Does the GND inevitably imply ongoing wealth and resource extraction in the global South to benefit the global North? If so, what are the implications for remote ownership and place-based governance? If not, what mechanisms are needed to minimize or end wealth and resource extraction in the global South to benefit the global North?

How can the GND address remote ownership in the form of ownership of financial stocks or other financial investments—keeping in mind how many people are counting on this type of investment for their retirement and long-term care?

What are some good examples that could be duplicated or scaled up of place-based governance systems that maintain fairness among humans and between humans and other life across generations? How should duplication and scaling up account for the unique features of different places and avoid one-size-fits-all approaches?

Can the GND adequately address, as Deranger puts it, the “intertwined roles of capitalism, consumerism, militarism and colonialism as foundations to the current crisis” if it remains “driven by White ENGOs, those with the resources and power, and mainstream political parties”?

Is re-establishing traditional labor protections and increasing unionization a long-term solution, or does it risk locking in an us-them worker-owner power dynamic—where the owners are often also remote owners and land and resource grabbers—that other alternatives could overcome?  What about more locally-committed, place-based employee-owned businesses or cooperatives?

Final thought

Questions like these need to be asked in relation to every single aspect of GND proposals in the advanced capitalist countries. Political organizers and activists should think about how to balance such critical questions with the visionary rhetoric that makes the GND so popular—all the while keeping in mind that the strength of a GND vision should be judged on the basis not only of its policy designs but also its ability to inspire and unite broad movement building for climate justice. Grappling with entrenched problems of remote ownership is one way to take a focused approach to building momentum for this movement.

Dr. Geoff Garver is an adjunct professor at Concordia and McGill Universities in Montreal and coordinates research on law and governance at McGill University for the Leadership for the Ecozoic initiative. He is on the steering committee of the Ecological Law and Governance Association and the board of the Quaker Institute for the Future and is active in the international degrowth movement.

The post-Columbian exchange

When Indigenous and pop cultures meet, as in Civilization VI, subconciously colonial mindsets can cause conflict. Source: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

 

by Travis McKay Roberts

Grandpa’s voice was weak, forced. I’d never heard him like this, not in the first round of chemo, nor in the weeks after he’d decided that enough was enough and he would let the cancer take its course. Years later, after advanced radiation therapies and hormone treatments and inexorable time, he and I were talking together for what would become the last time.

‘I’m working on a story,’ I told him. I had never told him about any of my writing before. ‘It’s sort of a re-telling of Cherokee history but fictionalized. There’s a seed of a story this anthropologist recorded, and I want to dive into it a little bit.’

‘I always thought the story of Louis Riel would make a good movie,’ he told me. That script would be one of the last that my grandpa would work on before he passed away.

Raoul McKay was a documentarian, historian, and a champion of Indigenous education in Canada. He was also Metis, and passionate about sharing our people’s stories with the world. Time was, you could see an exhibit he helped put together at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. I would make the pilgrimage every other month or so, from my home in the northwest of the city. There’s a new exhibit there now. I haven’t been.

What I have been doing is continuing on my grandfather’s work from a different perspective. Over the past few years, I have been blessed enough to pursue passions in both fantasy worldbuilding and Indigenous representation via prose, tabletop game design, and conversations in conferences and forums like this. Through it all has run a single thread: while the culture and history of native North America has been repressed, it cannot be forgotten.

We can imagine the stories of Indigenous peoples burning like bonfires across the Americas. Each one distinct, with its own fuel, smoke, and flame. Many have been dashed to embers when colonists rolled across the continents like a wave. But despite displacement, forced assimilation, and even genocide, there are embers yet alive. They have been handed down from elder to child, again and again – and now, they are being relit.

But from time to time, just as a fire is starting to go, someone powerful comes in, admiring the flame and wanting to make it their own. So, in it goes, into a great heap of other torches, and a unique glow is lost amidst a pyre of a hundred thousand stories.

When Indigenous stories are separated from the communities that made them, they often lose what made them special in the first place.

To the untrained eye, the act of appropriation might look like salvation. A tiny flame is coaxed into something much bigger, even more significant and impactful by western standards. But a closer look betrays the truth: when Indigenous stories are separated from the communities that made them, they often lose what made them special in the first place.

JK Rowling illustrated this for us in 2016, when she published a brief history of magic in the Americas on Pottermore. The most controversial part of the passage had to do with Skinwalkers, or as they are known to the Diné (Navajo), yee naaldlooshii. The Diné have traditionally taught their people about this shape-shifting witch as a stark contrast to what is held as good and proper in Navajo society. In JK Rowling’s retelling, she writes:

The legend of the Native American ‘skin walker’ – an evil witch or wizard that can transform into an animal at will – has its basis in fact. A legend grew up around the Native American Animagi, that they had sacrificed close family members to gain their powers of transformation. In fact, the majority of Animagi assumed animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe. Such derogatory rumours often originated with No-Maj medicine men, who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves, and fearful of exposure.

The outcry was instantaneous. Dr. Adrienne Keene, a Cherokee academic who writes on Indigenous appropriation summed up the general outcry well:

What you do need to know is that the belief of these things has a deep and powerful place in Navajo understandings of the world. It is connected to many other concepts and many other ceremonial understandings and lifeways. It is not just a scary story, or something to tell kids to get them to behave, it’s much deeper than that… What happens when Rowling pulls this in, is we as Native people are now opened up to a barrage of questions about these beliefs and traditions (take a look at my twitter mentions if you don’t believe me)–but these are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders. At all. I’m sorry if that seems “unfair,” but that’s how our cultures survive.

Navajo writer Brian Young responded to the Pottermore piece with anguish, tied to the vital role traditional Navajo culture has played in his survival:

I’m broken hearted. Jk Rowling, my beliefs are not fantasy…. my ancestors didn’t survive colonization so you could use our culture as a convenient prop.

Young responded with more than critique. He also took the moment as an opportunity to self-reflect and live out a best practice, writing:

I’ve decided to seek advice from the diné medicine men association for their opinion on how I depict my culture in my young adult book.

Young demonstrated the antithesis of what Rowling practiced. Rowling’s writing lumped the hundreds of nations, tribes, and bands Indigenous to North America into a single people group, and took a vital piece of their culture out of context without consultation. Young went to the source of the stories. Doing so allowed him to ensure that when he took real cultural practices into a fictional setting, he was doing so with humility and respect.

Of course, JK Rowling hasn’t been the only one to take a stray step in terms of appropriation. Last year, when Firaxis announced the inclusion of the Cree chief Poundmaker in Rise and Fall, the latest expansion to the 4x strategy game Civilization 6, a headman from Poundmaker’s own band responded in force. In an interview with the CBC, Milton Tootoosis lambasted the game, saying that it ‘perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land. That is totally not in concert with our traditional ways and world view’. He also noted that Firaxis hadn’t approached Cree peoples as they developed the character and associated nation, but didn’t seem surprised, saying ‘This is not new. Hollywood has done a job for many decades of portraying indigenous people in a certain way that has been very harmful’.

To understand Tootoosis’s critique, you need to understand a little bit about the Civilization franchise, and the 4x genre. 4x games are strategy games, built on four core mechanics: exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. Civilization plays this out by having players control a nation, exploring a blank map, conquering rogue barbarian tribes, extracting resources, and developing a network of cities that allow the nation to exert cultural, scientific, religious, or military dominance over the world. To many Indigenous observers, these mechanics are rooted in the same colonial mindset that brought European colonizers into ‘the New World’, and lead to the breaking of treaty bonds in pursuit of oil extraction in places like the Athabascan oil sands in Canada’s Treaty 8 land today.

For Tootoosis, placing Poundmaker in this genre was inherently counter to the man’s legacy of striving against colonialism. Although the game’s mechanics encourages a player controlling Poundmaker to develop alliances with other players, those alliances are still created in the context of the 4x genre, and lead to eventual global domination.

However, there were in fact positive aspects to the portrayal, which were done via a process of consultation. Each civilization is given a unique, unfolding, soundtrack that develops over the course of the game and is rooted in a traditional song of the nation. In order to develop the Cree theme, Geoff Knorr worked with the Poundmaker Singers, including one Clyde Tootoosis. The CBC reports that Clyde saw his work with Knorr as ‘an awesome experience’, though he ‘felt sorry that certain people were offended’. In contradiction to Milton, Clyde sees the game as an opportunity to share the name and culture of Poundmaker and his Cree – a clear sign that consultation can go a long way towards making a people feel heard and respected.

The balance between Clyde and Milton’s views has led me to the unique challenge of attempting to tell my own stories inspired by the cultures of the Americas, while still respecting the communities who made them in the first place.

Atohi and Nanye

The story I told my grandfather about has grown into my own story of Atohi and Nanye. In this work, I seek to retell a traditional Cherokee story, but in the fantasy genre (a similar pattern was followed by George RR Martin when he plopped the War of the Roses into Westeros). In it, a woman named Nanye roots out a corrupting force at the heart of the priestly clan’s power, and her beloved Atohi starts a revolution to bring her safely home. I first learned of this bit of history through American anthropologist James Mooney, who in turn learned it from the Cherokee:

The people long brooded in silence over the oppressions and outrages of this high caste, whom they deeply hated but greatly feared. At length a daring young man, a member of an influential family, organized a conspiracy among the people for the massacre of the priesthood. The immediate provocation was the abduction of the wife of the young leader of the conspiracy. His wife was remarkable for her beauty, and was forcibly abducted and violated by one of the Nicotani while he was absent on the chase. On his return he found no difficulty in exciting in others the resentment which he himself experienced. So many had suffered in the same way, so many feared that they might be made to suffer, that nothing was wanted but a leader. A leader appearing in the person of the young brave whom we have named, the people rose under his direction and killed every Nicotani (Ni-go-ta-ni), young and old. Thus perished a hereditary secret society, since which time no hereditary privileges have been tolerated among the Cherokee (Myths of the Cherokee, James Mooney, p. 393).

The events described here are ripe for fiction. There is romance, corruption, and revolution. A chosen one defeats his enemies utterly and brings lasting salvation for his people. A story grows out of such fertile ground quickly. But it has never been my goal to simply tell a good story. I want to tell a good story that illuminates the better story about the people behind it. I want to guide readers towards the living people who have inherited the legacies of my inspirations, and let those people speak for themselves. To do so, I must avoid stereotype and colonialist tropes. As much as possible, I must allow the Indigenous worldview to seep in, breaking apart the frameworks I learned from my favorite fantasy authors. To achieve my goals, it is not enough to tell American stories in the European tradition. I have to go beyond. And to go beyond, I go to the community.

In 2016, I was connected through the Smithsonian with the archivist of the Cherokee Nation, a bright and caring storyteller named Jerry Thompson. As I pitched the idea of my story and goals to Jerry, he was patient in explaining to me the various aspects of Cherokee culture he wished others would focus on, and places where Mooney and others had gotten the story wrong. He introduced me to the Cherokee concept of lying – or storytelling. In Cherokee culture, the word does not necessarily have the same negative connotations that it has for us. Instead, it offers up a unique paradigm on narrative and truth, and admits the two may diverge, and it is up to the listener to determine where they do, and how that affects him or her. It’s also a tool of respect, and a way to safeguard precious knowledge. For example, a young boy may come to his grandpa many times before his persistence is rewarded with the “real story”. Even many of the formulas for ceremonies that Mooney recorded simply aren’t accurate. They are true in form, but the specific medicines are held as property of the families, so as not to be shared with outsiders. They told Mooney the truth about the general form and function of the ceremonies, and “lied” about the details.

Paradigms like this offer us a unique insight into the culture of the Cherokee, and they help me as a content creator. Given this knowledge, I can layer it in with my own ideas. This led to me fleshing out the concept of another race I’ve developed – the Aghazi nomads. The Aghazi travel my world to bear witness to disaster and atrocity and record the stories of those they meet. When they travel to Tsalagi lands (inspired by Mississippian cultures like the Cherokee), they find themselves called – what else? Liars. From that small seed grows a whole bevy of questions that must be answered as Tsalagi and Aghazi collide. Can the Aghazi be trusted? Are their auguries genuine, or just tall tales? How might the priestly class use this appellate to discredit them, and how might that backfire?

As I continued to investigate Cherokee culture, I stumbled across the practice of a young man learning his clan’s skills and role from his mother’s male relatives. Parallel research for a tabletop RPG setting (looking to the Lakota, Pawnee, and Kiowa for reference) brought me to Plains Sign Language. The byproduct of interviews with Thompson and this research brought me one of my favorite characters: Rayoteh Hanging-Jaw, Atohi’s uncle, and a veteran of wars with a neighboring nation. In those wars, he both learned the art of his enemy’s sign language, and found need to use it when his face was mangled by a brutal attack. A brief excerpt with him in focus follows:

 

Rayoteh Hanging Jaw wrapped a scarlet scarf around his old war wound, and set to preparing a fire as the first rays of light came darting in through the cracks in the daub walls. A few coals still glittered in the pit in the middle of his home, and there was still wood enough for the day’s needs.

Rayoteh prayed that his portion would be fair today, and began to work.

In minutes, a fire was lit, and sage leaves tucked in the coals let off opaque white smoke that danced in the motes of the morning’s first sunbeam. The smell of char filled the home, and the old warrior knelt in the earth by the fire. He breathed the scent in, and closed his eyes. The moment Rayoteh’s eyes shut, smoke billowed out the door, and his nephew stormed in.

Dustu sputtered and wiped his eyes as smoke rolled over him. He feigned a salute, and quickly crouched under the smoke. “Uncle, Athoi is- “

Rayoteh swept Dustu’s legs, and he went sprawling. Crouching next to Dustu, he signed: Do not move to sit before your elder bids you welcome.

“Of course, Uncle,” Dustu said.

Now, how can I help you? Rayoteh patted the ground next to him, bidding his nephew to sit under the smoke.

Dustu paused, and took in a deep breath. He coughed, and started again. “Atohi’s gone. He was out on hunt with Nanye this morning, and I think,” he cradled his head in his hands. “I think they took her.”

Rayoteh’s eyes flared, and his hands moved furiously. They? He signed each letter individually now, slowly and methodically. K-A-T-U-N?

Dustu nodded, and Rayoteh groaned, his voice rasping with years of disuse. Standing, he motioned towards the door. We need to be clear-headed, he signed. Atohi will be rallying for warriors. If he strikes now, they will roll off the mounds like a wave breaking on stone.

“Atohi’s a fine warrior, uncle.” Dustu stood opposite Rayoteh, feet planted, arms crossed.

I didn’t say he wasn’t.

The two men stood in silence for a few moments. “We can’t let him stand alone.”

We can’t let him stand at all. Not yet.

“But what about Nanye?”

Rayoteh stopped and slumped. His fingers began moving, once, and once again. His shoulders sagged, his eyes fell. I don’t know, he finally signed.

“That’s not good enough,” said Dustu. “We can’t- “

Rayoteh’s hands snapped up, and his nephew stopped cold. He finished the sentence for Dustu. We can’t do anything.

“I won’t accept that.” Dustu had wheeled around to Rayoteh, standing in the old warrior’s face. Dustu was young, taller than Rayoteh had been at his age. He had the same fire in his eyes, and a reckless edge to his voice. Rayoteh dropped his eyes.

There is nothing for you to accept. There is only what is, and what cannot be.

Rayoteh’s hands were still moving when his nephew turned his back and stomped out from the hut, war club unslung and ready in his hand.

 

Though this is still in rough form, I know Rayoteh will play a vital role in the story to come, in no small part because of research and consultation. Not only did consultation help me avoid a trite adaptation of Cherokee culture, it actually made my world more complete and led me to characters I wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Thompson’s help wasn’t relegated just to culture, but also to historical knowledge that’s almost impossible to find anywhere else. Thompson himself has done a great deal of research into the history of the Ani-Kutani and the similarity to legends found far away from the Cherokee’s homeland in the Appalachian foothills.

Not only did consultation help me avoid a trite adaptation of Cherokee culture, it actually made my world more complete.

Ani-Kutani, according to Thompson, translates to something along the lines of ‘People of the Dragon’. Dragon might be better translated to horned serpent, a crucial figure in Cherokee mythology. As it happens, similar creatures are found in stories throughout North America. Thompson indicated that the oral tradition regarding the migration of the Ani-Kutani maps well to the existence of the stories of horned or flying serpents elsewhere, particularly in regarding the feathered Quetzecoatl of Mayan and Aztec mythos. Similar mythological migration can be found with tropes like Spider Grandmother, shared by Navajo and Aztec cultures (though expressed in different ways), or the figure of the coyote trickster, found in Ojibwe and Yakama cultures. These bonds have inspired similar bonds in my constructed world and have led me down paths to create content inspired not just by the Cherokee, but by the Navajo, the Lakota, the Pawnee, the Olmec, the Aztec, and the Ojibwe.

These cultural exchanges help illustrate that stories from one culture can be told in a different setting. They push against the idea that any one people group truly owns a story. At the same time, they reflect a different paradigm than what’s commonly practiced now. These cultural exchanges were just that – exchanges. People told each other their stories and received stories or shelter in turn. There’s a deep network of respect and relationship that lies behind these common figures, and there’s not a 1:1 representation of that in the modern day. It’s impossible to compare googling about a culture on the internet and slapping traditional beliefs into colonial settings with the ancient patterns of trade and reciprocity that led to stories being shared far and wide. It is possible to mimic those patterns, enter into genuine relationship, and enrichen the narratives authors and designers create. Those same relationships can guide us to aspects of culture that can and should be shared and proclaimed and guide us away from teachings that are sacred and require protection and custodianship by the community. Though it can be difficult to hear that a piece of culture is off-limits, the cost to the content creator is much lower than the risk the community is concerned with.

Because of the relational nature of the process and the potential risk for creative constraints, cultural consultation is often depicted as a painful, expensive, and unnecessary step, foisted on creators by a PC culture run amok. I’ve found that it’s almost entirely the opposite. Consulting with the communities you find yourself inspired by is not only a way to build relationships and mutual respect, it’s a way to improve the product. And when content grows richer, communities feel respected, and stories guide readers to Indigenous peoples on their terms. Everybody wins. Consultation isn’t a burden, it’s a blessing – and one that basic human decency demands.

Travis McKay Roberts is a writer and public health social worker in Washington, D.C. Born in Canada, Travis is a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation. You can find more of Travis’s writing at callingallwayfarers.wordpress.com and at Relevant.com, and can reach him on twitter @TravisWMRoberts.

Avatar revisited

Image: Ross LewAllen ©

by Fani Cettl

James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2009), to which four sequels have been announced, was generally praised for its cutting-edge special effects yet criticized for the simplistic narrative by both film reviewers and scholars. Sukhdev Sandhu, reviewer for The Telegraph, puts it effectively when he writes, “It’s an achievement to make 3D look as good as it does here, but that counts for little if the characters are all in 1D. The film is a triumph of effects over affect” (Dec 2009). It is a rather formulaic take on the histories of western colonialism and environmental destruction. The alien Na’vi on planet Pandora are meant to mimic the pre-industrial Native Americans, who worship the Goddess Eywa and live in harmony with their environment until the mechanized human colonizers arrive to extract “unobtanium” and obliterate everything in their way. The main protagonist Jake Sully joins the Na’vi and forms a romantic bond with the native princess Neytiri, and ultimately discards his paraplegic, ex-Marine, white body to become a non-white, feminine-coded, abled, environmentally attuned Na’vi body. The scenario rehearses two of the most powerful American frontier myths: the Pocahontas and Mohican stories, adapting them to the 21st century where they no longer function only “as an exercise in romantic regret, but to expiate guilt over the genocidal nation building” (Howe 2016, 125). The seeming postcolonialism and ecofeminism of Avatar can be read as a symptom of white guilt: one that reinforces the ultimate stereotype of a heroic white warrior leading through the justified violence the oppressed to freedom, which remains very problematic in terms of race, gender, ability, and the idealized version of nature.

The film remains a worthwhile cultural phenomenon to examine for its particular staging of post/modernity that underlies environmentalist politics.

Considering these controversial assumptions of the narrative, the massive box office success and the widespread fascination with the film’s CGI effects, as well as the announced four sequels in the upcoming years, is it worth revisiting Avatar and with what aim? I wish to suggest yes; the film remains a worthwhile cultural phenomenon to examine for its particular staging of post/modernity that underlies environmentalist politics. This has so far generated an interesting scholarly discussion to which I would like to contribute in this essay. Bruno Latour, well known for his view that the European modernity in the 17th century installed what he calls the Great Divide(s)–between nature and culture, self and other, human and nonhuman–surprisingly reads the film in a rather positive way (Latour 2010), although we could argue that Avatar continues to enact precisely these divides. More recently, ecocritical scholar Timothy Morton has argued that the film gestures towards non-binary postmodernity, but it is unable to actually take us there (Morton 2014). That is, the environmentalist message that celebrates the pure, organic, pre-technological Nature on Pandora is undermined at the level of the film medium, which glaringly speaks to us through the luminescent screen images its reliance on the highly advanced digital technology. In this paper I wish to build further on these scholarly readings of Avatar and, following Morton, argue that the film does not seem to take its own propositions seriously enough. It not only unconsciously undermines its ideology through the level of the medium, but also on the level on the narrative itself. Through a close reading of a dialogue from the film I will show that, if taken seriously from a postcolonial anthropological lens, the dialogue signals a decolonization of the hierarchical divide between western sciences and Indigenous knowledges, which the film overall remains unable to articulate.

For Latour, Avatar “is the first popular description of what happens when modernist humans meet Gaia. And it’s not pretty” (Latour 2010, 471). As he argues, since the 17th century nature has been understood as no longer spirited and actively interfering with human affairs, but in terms of passive objects to be demystified through scientific knowledge. All those living on the wrong side of the epistemological divide were considered irrational because they believed in a world animated by all sorts of entities rather than reducing materiality to the cause and effect relations. A model of mechanism was posited as a paradigmatic model, within which the Christian God was reinterpreted as a clock maker who had created the world and then left it to unfold by itself according to mechanical laws. (Carolyn Merchant in The Death Of Nature (1980) explicated this scientific model in detail, and showed has it was entangled with the histories of patriarchal colonialism and capitalism.) For Latour, this model can no longer be upheld (if it ever was) as it becomes ever more visible in the current age of climate change that nonhuman materiality has agency and that effects exceed their causes. Both humans and nonhumans are actants, and their agencies are much more evenly distributed, which means that we need to consider “the tricky question of animism anew” without the usual scorn that has been poured onto the concept: “Consider Lovelock, for instance, with his ‘absurd idea’ of the Earth as a quasi organism – or the Na’vis with their ‘prescientific’ connections to Eywa” (Latour, 2010, 481). Latour aligns James Lovelock’s Gaia theory of the Earth as a living super-organism, which in the past was criticized for being unscientific by the scientific community, and the animist beliefs of non-western Indigenous peoples as they are staged in Avatar. He suggests that both should be taken much more seriously by us “moderns”. In fact, in recent decades Lovelock’s theory has been revalued considerably in the environmentalist movement, while the indigenous models of sustainability have been increasingly explored in anthropological scholarship. Instead of constantly policing the epistemological border of what proper science and what pseudo or non-science is, it is necessary to look carefully into how well a certain model is assembled, how efficient of a “handle” to stage nature it is (Latour 2010, 483).

The film’s gesturing towards postmodernity crucially entails a gesturing towards decolonizing epistemology.

It seems that Latour casts Avatar in a rather positive light despite its clichéd narrative and very controversial take on colonialism. Bruce Clarke notes that the film resonates for Latour with his agenda of deconstructing the nature-culture divides and redistributing the worldly agencies in a “nonmodernist fashion” (Clarke 2014, 160), yet for Clarke, “At every level, Avatar is self-contradictory and wrapped up in its own paradoxes” (Ibid, 177). This really captures well the film’s modus operandi, which is, I suggest, that of failing to take seriously its own propositions. It is this ambiguity that enables us to interpret certain moments in the film as possibly questioning the Great Divides between western sciences and indigenous knowledges, while understanding the film on the whole as enforcing these divides by privileging the spiritual belief over the scientific-technological outlook.  While the biology and neurology of the Pandoran/Gaian living system are shown to resonate well with the animist forest spirits, yet at the same time, the nature on Pandora is strangely purified from the contamination by capitalist technology. Morton approaches the ambiguity of Avatar by arguing that the narrative of the purification of Nature from modern technology fails at the level of film medium, which heavily relies on the advanced digital technology. For him, “What Avatar gestures toward, then, is a genuine ‘postmodernity,’ a historical moment after modernity,” where no extrication of the organic from the technological is possible, “without ever being able to tell us to go there, or even wanting with all its heart to push us there” (Morton 2014, 222). I wish to push Morton’s idea further and argue that the film’s gesturing towards postmodernity crucially entails a gesturing towards decolonizing epistemology: questioning the hierarchical divide between western sciences and indigenous knowledges, which unfolds at the level of the narrative. An intriguing dialogue along these lines develops between the Na’vi-friendly scientist Grace, played by the sci-fi heroine Sigourney Weaver, and the merciless corporate manager named Parker, played by Giovanni Ribisi:

Grace: Those trees were sacred to the Omaticaya in a way you can’t imagine.

Parker: You know what? You throw a stick in the air around here it falls on some sacred fern, for Christ’s sake!

Grace: I’m not talking about pagan voodoo here – I’m talking about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest.

Parker: Which is what exactly?

Grace: What we think we know is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora.

Parker: That’s a lot, I’m guessing.

Grace: That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network – a global network. And the Na’vi can access it – they can upload and download data – memories – at sites like the one you just destroyed.

What is at stake is not to rebrand non-western knowledges as scientific, but rather to make us think how and what discourses and practices, and not others, get to be authorized and legitimized as scientific in the first place.

The animist Na’vi view that trees are imbued with the spirit of Eywa is presented crucially as compatible with, and not opposed to, the biological and neurological constructions of synapses and neurons in living organisms. One way to understand Eywa is in terms of Gaia, or as Clarke suggests, in the neocybernetic terms of “a self-referential cognitive system producing self-maintaining regulatory dynamics without having to assume the agency or anima of a conscious system” (Clarke 2014, 162). This does not mean, however, that Grace’s aim is to simply translate the spiritual belief into the scientific idiom in order to legitimize it. Importantly, she respects both the animist and neurological worldviews, unlike Parker for whom the translation between the two is needed. Grace’s perspective encourages us to think how both models, each on its own terms, successfully stage materiality, and though for Clarke this “conveys the perennial Western muddle between science and spirituality, physics and metaphysics, energy and anima” (Ibid, 170), I suggest that it also gestures towards a decolonisation of knowledge. In the above quote the borders that police the temporality–primitive vs. modern–as well as seriousness–superstition vs. truth–of the two ways of knowing are put in question. Why would we not think of shamanic practices as scientific, or of the concept of the neuron as animist? What is at stake is not to rebrand non-western knowledges as scientific, but rather to make us think how and what discourses and practices, and not others, get to be authorized and legitimized as scientific in the first place. “Muddling” this border would mean to inhabit epistemologically the space which Gloria Anzaldúa terms “borderlands”, an undetermined and vague state created through the deconstruction of a historically enforced border (Anzaldua 1987, 3).

Recent postcolonial anthropological research in the Amazon region can take us further into decolonial directions. Jeremy Narby publishes in popular rather than academic media, but some of his insights can precisely shed more light on the quote above. (In comparison, Eduardo Kohn’s research of the Amazon in How Forests Think (2013) is more rigoruosly academic, but his conclusion to understand the Amazon forest spirits as semiotic actors resonates strongly with Narby’s view.) Based on his research with both Ashaninca shamans and biologists, he argues for a striking compatibility between the shamans’ and the biologists’ understanding of life. Intriguingly, he suggests that what the Amazonian shamans see in their hallucinogenic visions induced by plant brews, which is the images of giant fluorescent serpents, corresponds to what biologists see as the double helix structure of DNA through their instruments. A he puts it: “My hypothesis suggests that what scientists call DNA corresponds to the animate essences that shamans say communicate with them and animate all life forms” (Narby 1999, 132). As in Avatar, the spirits in the Amazon forest correspond to the scientific model of reality; the hallucinogenic plants are an equally good method to approach nature as the scientific instruments; and the shamans use their vision-induced knowledge to heal people same as the medical doctors use the knowledge of molecular biology. In the film, both the scientific and spiritual forms of knowledge are imagined to not only theorize life, but also construct it successfully on a practical level. While the human scientists use advanced biotechnology to construct avatar bodies, which are then operated through a psionic link with the genetically matching human minds, the Na’vi at the end of the film transport the mind of a human completely into his avatar body by using shamanic techniques. Such staging makes it hard to delineate science from non-science, or indeed faith from science, in the way that Narby argues:  “…it is of utmost importance to respect the faith of others, no matter how strange, whether it is shamans who believe plants communicate or biologists who believe nature is inanimate” (Narby 1999, 145). Whether or not we subscribe to Narby’s conclusion that the visions of serpents and the DNA double helix correspond on the ontological level, what his approach foregrounds is that both shamans’ and biologists’ models of life are equally efficient handles to stage nature, and therefore should be equally respected.

Traditional ecological knowledge is based on collaboration rather than appropriation, spiritual interconnectedness rather than a taxonomic set of categories and facts.

Equal respect towards western and non-western epistemologies would mean to speak of what Grace Dillon terms “indigenous scientific literacies” (Dillon 2007), as the ways in which indigenous sustainable practices constitute indeed a Native science despite the lack of resemblance to taxonomic western knowledges. As she writes, traditional ecological knowledge is based on collaboration rather than appropriation, spiritual interconnectedness rather than a taxonomic set of categories and facts. In the contemporary context of climate change, indigenous scientific literacies seem to be finally “discovered” widely by the mainstream science, and Dillon sees precisely the mode of science fiction as a space in which this already has been, and can be productively engaged and developed further (Dillon 2016). Within this framework, Avatar both speaks and fails to speak of the indigenous scientific literacies. It gestures towards such understanding, yet overall it fails to engage this potential explicitly: it gestures towards postmodernity while not being able to extricate itself from the modernist divides. In Morton’s reading, the celebration of pre-technological Nature is unconsciously undermined at the level of the vibrant, computer-generated screen imagery: “The very attempt to force viewers to accept an ecological view of interconnectedness results in pushing humans to accept the proximity of a more-than-human-world of uncanny strangers” (Morton 2014, 221). Morton’s uncanny strangers are the glowing, weird creatures and the immersive environment on the screen, which cannot but not reveal the technology that made them possible. But if this is so, these luminescent uncanny strangers also unconsciously reveal to us and embody the hallucinatory method that shamans use to communicate with and gain knowledge from their plant teachers. As we, the film’s audience, immerse ourselves in the astonishing living world of the screen, are we not “hallucinating” about ecological knowledge? I suggest that the gesture towards postmodernity that Morton detects in the film crucially entails a gesture towards decolonising epistemologies, yet this move fails to be articulated explicitly. What the announced sequels make of decolonising the epistemological borders is to be seen, but so far the historical understanding of post/modernity in Avatar has generated an important scholarly discussion to which this essay contributes.

Bibliography

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Fani Cettl holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the Central European University in Budapest. Her fields of interest are science fiction, Gothic fiction, science and literature, biopolitical theory and posthumanism.