As a global epoch and as a critical-theoretical center of gravity, the Anthropocene is big, amorphous, and daunting, not only because of its scale but also because of its trajectory. Its scale is massive, comprehending the entire human history of intervening in and imposing on geologic and ecological processes. Somewhat like the inception of the witchery in the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, the Anthropocene's origins are hard to date with specificity, but the more urgent concern with both the witchery and the Anthropocene is not when they began but how and whether they will ever end. Certainly, one of the most challenging characteristics of the Anthropocene is that it has come to seem unstoppable as its present course arcs, with plausible inevitability, toward doom.
Writing in the contexts of a global pandemic, endemic systemic racism, toxic masculinity, queerphobia, global warming, a deeply entrenched settler colonialism that shows no sign of letting up, and various other social and political challenges, I'm struck by the ways in which the term Anthropocene falls short of naming who is doing what to whom. As many have noted, defining the Anthropocene by way of the human writ large risks erasing its intersectionality. Jeremy Davies, for one, writes that “hostile critics have accused [the Anthropocene] of a domineering universalism . . . suggesting that it is human beings in general who are responsible for ecological degradation” (41). As Rob Nixon demonstrates, though, “attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space are marked above all by displacements” (7), forms of Anthropocenic slow violence visited by the powerful on their “principal casualties,” the poor (4). Other forms of violence, both slow and sudden, both cloaked and visible, both visceral and spectral, also course through and inform the Anthropocene. Davies concludes that “any worthwhile version of the Anthropocene has to be underpinned by a historically nuanced account of how power relations operate” (56).
Thinking about Indigenous literatures and the Anthropocene in each other's contexts invites exactly the kinds of historically nuanced discussions Davies has in mind—guided by the principle that Anthropocenic time, whether longue durée or a briefer, more specifically demarcated period, never operates in isolation from Indigeneity. As Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) observes, “Indigenous peoples have always communicated ideas, stories, dreams, visions, and concepts with one another and with the other-than-human world” (21). Indigenous texts also support David Farrier's theorizing about an Anthropocene poetics in which “distant pasts and futures flow through the present in all manner of sometimes surprising ways” (2). Farrier goes on to suggest that “one of the most striking and unsettling aspects of the Anthropocene is the newly poignant sense that our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and deep futures. Fundamentally, the Anthropocene describes how humanity has radically intruded in deep time, the vast time scales that shape the Earth system and all the life-forms that it supports” (6). But, as I'll suggest, listening to conversations between Indigenous literatures and Anthropocenic discourse makes clear that there are important differences between radical colonial intrusions in deep time and what various Indigenous texts argue for and demonstrate: radical, expansive alliances between deep time and decolonization.
Granted, the epochal vastness of the Anthropocene, the questions it forces us to ask about failing responses to climate catastrophe, and the lateness of the hour lead Farrier to say that, rather like its colonial, extractive desires, its “temporality . . . is deeply menacing. Its breadth is bewildering” (2). Deep time is difficult, perhaps impossible to grasp, as is the end of the world. But as Kyle P. Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) points out, Indigenous peoples “challenge linear narratives of dreadful futures of climate destabilization with their own accounts of history that highlight the reality of constant change and emphasize colonialism's role in environmental change” (“Indigenous Science (Fiction)” 225). Indeed, “Climate injustice, for Indigenous peoples, is less about the spectre of a new future and more like the experience of déjà vu” (Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu?” 88). Indigenously imagined futurities complicate the idea that the Anthropocene unspools forward through chronologically ordered time, quietly and even imperceptibly gaining momentum as it inches inexorably toward an ecosocial catastrophe that is also widely seen as a novelty. A host of Indigenous texts, both recent and not-so-recent, support the idea that “Anthropogenic landscapes are . . . haunted by imagined futures” (Gan et al. G2), and their ghosts and the futures are imaginable precisely because they are not new. In short, Indigenous writers decolonize the Anthropocene—considered as an idea, as an epoch, as evidence of radical colonial intrusions, and as a narrative structure—by way of their concerned, engaged, future-minded undead, but even more by way of critiques and counternarratives that travel through and across the deep presents, futures, and pasts of what Melanie Benson Taylor and I have elsewhere described as “the rootless, haunting, unplaceable architecture of . . . the Indigenocene” (Anderson and Taylor 76).
Full Metal
The Oji-Cree Two-Spirit writer Joshua Whitehead's poetry collection Full-Metal Indigiqueer focuses “on a hybridized Indigiqueer trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. A Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer invention, Zoa infects, invades, and infests as a virus inside canonical and popular works in order to re-centre the lives of Two-Spirit individuals” (Whitehead, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, back cover). Going viral, Zoa time travels to and from the present, the past, and the future and “indigiqueers” literally everything. These infiltrations make not just the presence but the extensive scale and range of queer Indigeneity enormously visible. Decolonizing the past by, for example, talking back to a John Donne poem redefines the present and reanticipates futures; decolonizing the present futurizes the past by, for example, name-checking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and inserting “the rectum is a grave” into Donne's canonical poem “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” which transforms it into a very different poem titled “to my mister going to bed” (76). Indigenized temporalities course through the volume, as in the final poem, “full-metal oji-cree”:
Unlike “to my mister going to bed” and other poems that contagiously decolonize literary and historical pasts, some of them quite distant in time, space, and the relative amount of attention they pay to Indigeneity, this passage invokes the contemporary speculative fiction writer William Gibson, particularly his 1984 novel Neuromancer. But by understanding the premodern as a, not the, “foundation for the postmodern” and by, among other moves, having the “indo-robo-women” take out the cowboys, Zoa and Whitehead meet the extensiveness of the Anthropocene with the extensiveness of Indigeneity, as in the following excerpt from “thegarbageeater”:
The lines are concise, even terse, but their scope and scale—cascading from “prehistoric” to “twenty-first century” and possibly beyond—channel deep time and deep geologic space, the “roots, ore, stones / prehistoric carcass” and the “mouth of the earth,” as well as the invasive processes and effects of extractive colonial-capitalist industry, very much including the violation of “ndn bones.”
Working from the knowledge that the scale of Indigeneity is in fact this big, Zoa deterritorializes and reterritorializes powerful non-Native literary and cultural productions not only by talking back to them—“john . . . soover[DONNE]” (“to my mister” 76)—but also by inhabiting them and “summoning community.” Zoa's viral invasions of the Western canon begin early in the volume and thus serve as a prelude to poems such as “mihkokwaniy,” in which Whitehead honors his murdered grandma Rose Whitehead. This poem, one of the last in the book, closes with a dedication “to all missing & murdered Indigenous women, girls & two-spirit peoples; for their families, friends, loved ones & kin. we are a collective trauma that demands to be examined, reconciled, resolved & healed. today we survive; tomorrow we resist” (104). In literary texts, the dedication typically precedes the work proper and presents it as a kind of gift in honor of the dedicatee; placing the dedication at the end of a poem that appears near the end of the book is a way of looking outward, from the work into the world, and honoring unknown but anticipated futures. Immediately following “mihkokwaniy,” “the exorcism of colonialism” also makes clear the scale of the collective trauma as it speaks the names of a staggering number of missing and murdered Indigenous people, almost all of them women. But, like “thegarbageeater” and many other poems in the volume, “the exorcism of colonialism” summons community and opens passage for “returning . . . toourhome” and inhabiting “decolonial worlds” (108). Throughout, Zoa goes viral “to create coalition among Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and history” (Full-Metal Indigiqueer, back cover). Unghosting thus marks the vast scale of the Anthropocene in the very act of reaffirming the equally vast scale of the Indigenocene.
With a range of reference that stretches as far back in Western culture as Perseus and the Nemean lion—here “a robonemean lion” (“the perseids”), where even the shift from definite to indefinite article does solid decolonial work—and with no indication of ever having been stymied from accessing any Western text or historical or cultural event whatsoever, Zoa writes with free rein, changes texts and stories as needed or desired, reconceives the Renaissance, hacks a Dickens story, says “bah humbug” back to “settler Scrooge” (“slay bells” 48), and invokes Full-Metal Indigiqueer's powerfully decolonial refrain, “here i am”: “hereiamscroogescrewingyou . . . feel my ghosts digging in your bone” (47). As Zoa affirms in “slay bells reign in suburbia,” the poem that talks back to Scrooge and Dickens,
Zoa not only records and absorbs but also envisions and sets in motion expansive, large-scale change that places Indigenous deep time and the deep time of the Anthropocene in conversation. Doing so disrupts Anthropocene narratives that unspool relentlessly forward in time and mute Indigenous agency. For example, Full-Metal Indigiqueer includes a twenty-first-century queer Indigenous response to The Faerie Queene populated by Spenserian characters and also by people, places, and events Zoa knows but Edmund Spenser doesn't. Zoa identifies as “the red crosse knight” and announces that
Deep time is haunted by both its colonial and its anticolonial pasts, presents, and futures, but, more specifically, undead zombie imperialists are met with “here i haunte you feend, here does / colonialism dayly spoyle” (46). The Indigenous undead render zombie settlers more haunted than haunting; “here does / colonialism dayly spoyle” might sound ambiguous at first, but the poem makes clear that colonialism is being spoiled, is going off. Moreover, the repetition of “here” drives home the idea that colonialism is spoiling and being haunted on figurative ground as well as in time, in temporality and on territory it once claimed as its own. Sometimes, though, with characteristic pointed mimicries and disavowals of Western conventions of punctuation, Zoa combines this exhausting decolonizing work with lines that center on the Indigeneity of deep time: “here im just a fractal of the indigenous curve” (“what i learned” 41). Or, as Zoa asks a lover in “to my mister going to bed,” “what does it feel like / to sweep buds against the cutting edge of history [questionmark] / . . . does this satisfy your futurity [questionmark]” (76).
Satisfying Indigenous Futurities
One of the premises of this essay is that foregrounding the vast scale of Indigenous literatures makes possible suggestive juxtapositions to the scale of the Anthropocene, which is, among other things, both a process and a product of settler colonialism. Full-Metal Indigiqueer reimagines both Indigenous and non-Indigenous literary and cultural history, mapping the Indigenocene's deep pasts and restless, painful, yet also hopeful present. But Indigenous writers also frequently imagine deep futures that are intimately bound up in the present and the past, as Zoa does when, for example, they coin new words like “hypercyberreservesphere” and “hypercyberrezsphere” (Whitehead, “to my mister” 77, “the hive” 110), for the familiar legal concept of the reservation, and when they cry out that
“Emerging from the residue” of the Anthropocene, Zoa travels through and across time like a “residential terminator,” merging cybernetic and cosmological, supersonic and thunderbird, body and thing. Looking at the world from this “graveyard scrapyard cyborg” point of view, Zoa reveals that the prevailing extinction narratives of the Anthropocene have less purchase than they might seem to have. This poem ends not with verbs like “mourn” or “vanish” but with the lines “rewrite, reroute, rewire / economic mnemonic warfare,” transforming the sites of “thegarbageeater” and other poems into decolonial memory palaces (35).
Indigenous writers don't deny the climate science or offer false hope in the face of impending catastrophe, and they have written a wide range of stellar, gritty speculative fiction, including the Cherokee writer Blake D. Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears (2011), a satiric metafiction about a Cherokee-invented virtual Trail of Tears theme park; postapocalyptic work such as the Métis writer Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) and the Cherokee writer Daniel Wilson's Robot War novels Robopocalypse (2011) and Robogenesis (2014); and the works featured in the foundational anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), edited by Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe). One of the writers whose work appears in that anthology, the phenomenally prolific Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), has imagined a wide range of different, often spooky, speculative alternate realities and futures, as in his early counterhistorical Badlands novel The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto (2003); his zombie novels It Came from Del Rio (2010), Zombie Bake-Off (2012), and The Gospel of Z (2014); Mongrels (2016), about werewolves; Mapping the Interior (2017), about Indigenous ghosts; The Only Good Indian (2020), featuring a reincarnated Elk Woman; and Night of the Mannequins (2020). Jones does not write specifically about the Anthropocene, but in imagining a vast and various array of monstrous possibilities, his work can be read as pushing back against an Anthropocenic insistence that that variety is narrowing as futures, and especially future catastrophes, draw nearer. He is very probably one of the best exemplars of a big and speculative Indigeneity.
But the history of Indigenous literatures is replete with writers who also wage “mnemonic warfare” not only to preserve the past but also to anticipate Indigenous futures that they do not present as speculative fictions. Indeed, Indigenous texts are more likely to begin with an apocalypse than to end with one. This of course neither immunizes them from further apocalypses nor guarantees that the postapocalyptic Indigenous futurities they envision are easily gained. But some Indigenous texts come to a close by evoking what their multidirectional, spiraling time travel has enabled them to imagine and anticipate throughout: a future that is at least somewhat open. Put another way, Indigenous narratives rarely conclude with a version of the devastating if murkily imagined catastrophe that lies in wait at or near the end of many Anthropocenic narratives. In Fools Crow, by James Welch (Blackfeet, Gros Ventre), the penultimate chapter details the horrific consequences of a large-scale catastrophe, a brutal massacre committed by United States soldiers against the Pikunis. This chapter closes with Fools Crow telling a small group of survivors that “we must think of our children” and then realizing that “they had no children” (386). But in the final chapter of the novel, Fools Crow's band, the Lone Eaters, does have children, including his and Red Paint's child Butterfly. The novel closes with a ceremonial procession that reaffirms Pikuni cultural knowledge and Pikuni futurity simultaneously. Though “burdened with the knowledge of his people,” knowledge gained in part by traveling into the deep-time mythic world inhabited by Feather Woman, Fools Crow “knew they would survive,” and “they knew that soon the meat pots would be full and the hides would be drying in the sun” (390). In the final sentence of the novel, the narrator affirms that “the blackhorns had returned and, all around, it was as it should be” (391). The ending of Fools Crow does not make any explicit promises about the future, but this return to what remains “the country of the Pikunis” (388)—linked to the return of spring, the reappearance of “the rivers of great animals” (390–91), and the proximity of Feather Woman—suggests that “it was as it should be” describes temporal continuity folded in spiraling time. Much as the return at the end of Fools Crow differs from Zoa's time traveling in Full-Metal Indigiqueer, both in their own ways demonstrate and anticipate alliances among deep time, decolonization, and survival. Both set forth conditions that satisfy Indigenous futurities.
Indigenous literatures offer numerous and wide-ranging examples of endings that provide such satisfactions. The final sentence of Silko's massive, century-spanning, hemispheric novel of apocalypse and resistance, Almanac of the Dead, is “The snake was looking south, in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come” (763). As Jessica Hurley argues:
Juxtaposing a secular vision of an earth apocalyptically destroyed through the activities of a Euro-American culture devoted to exploiting resources in every possible way with an equally apocalyptic, sacred vision of the age of the coming of the fifth world in which the culture of destruction will pass away, Silko depicts a world in which apocalypse saturates the everyday, undoing the realism of the nuclear complex by positioning it in a different timeline that has a different past, a different future, and a different present to anything that the nuclear state might think to contain in even its most totalizing attempts to model the world. (773)
Though they are indeed different, Indigenous temporalities are as vast as, if not vaster than, the colonial time lines they resist. Moreover, as one of the statements tellingly placed on the map printed on the inside front cover of the novel says, “the Almanac of the Dead foretells the future of all the Americas. The future is encoded in arcane symbols and old narratives.” Acknowledging and anticipating stories and worlds to come, Indigenous temporalities provide materials for building, rebuilding, mapping, and sustaining Indigenous realities—very much including land claims—beyond the vast scope of the text.
In a very different Indigenous text, the poetry collection Blood Run, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Cherokee, Huron, Creek) writes about the deep time of the generations of earthwork and mound builders who have inhabited the earth for more than eight thousand years. The final poem in this volume, “When the Animals Leave This Place,” implores all who listen to
The poem tells of such a recurrence. Set in recent times, it describes the animals of present-day Blood Run listening to, heralding, and dancing toward rain. The poem's final stanza, quoted in full, is “Air swells with dampness / It has begun” (92). Deep time spirals; seeming endings welcome new yet already-known beginnings that are also futures that, like the river, “will return.”
How are we to think about Indigenous literatures alongside the end of the world as brought to us by the Anthropocene? For me, the most obvious, basic thing one could say about the Anthropocene is that it is big; but, as I have argued, Indigenous literatures and temporalities are big too. Accentuating the bigness of Indigenous literatures helps prevent them from being subsumed by the Anthropocene and helps center critical practices on the impressive extensiveness and fluidity of Indigenous temporalities and the stories they recursively tell. Of course, as Justice points out, Indigenous literatures “don't hide the traumas or the shadows, don't make everything neat and tidy, or presume that the horrors of colonialism will be easily put to rest—like zombies, vampires, and ungentled ghosts, settler colonialism is nothing if not persistent” (210). But, as Justice's work makes abundantly clear, Indigenocene narratives are persistent too; they travel through and across time to assist in the work of survivance and of visualizing Indigenous futurities. “We are always,” says Whyte with telling ambiguity, “in dialogue with our ancestors as dystopianists and fantasizers” (“Indigenous Science (Fiction)” 238).
As Frances Tran points out in a recent discussion of “time traveling with care,” “time travel invites us, as scholars and teachers, to engage the fullness of time and space” (207). It helps make big Indigeneity more visible, and it helps prompt new ways of seeing and hearing the vast and often contentious entanglements of Indigenous literatures and the Anthropocene. Or, as Whitehead writes near the end of Full-Metal Indigiqueer, Zoa has
allowed me to break barriers & defy expectations, to re-augment myself through language & find myself in the most unexpected of places—crafted me into a resistant reader, a resurgent writer [period] what does it mean to be an indigiqueer [questionmark] queer, digital, futuristic, punk, cyber, bio, antiessentialist, scientific, traditional, reactionary, revolutionary, theorizing chaos, materializing worlds—my ndnness exists as the nexus of these machinations: a time traveller, a wormhole [period] to make worlds out of words is what i've learned from these stories, we need to see ourselves in order to know ourselves; beautifully, sexually, sexily, powerfully, viciously, vivaciously all the way down to the cellular [period] my gift, for now, is a series of breakages in which you may find your own form of resurgence [period] (Acknowledgments 115)
