For Arnold Krupat

The idea of the Anthropocene depends on the classic European dichotomy of nature and culture, whereby culture has increasingly placed its imprint on nature in destructive ways, as witnessed by the collapsing climate. But in Indigenous languages, and thus in Indigenous epistemologies, there is no distinction between nature and culture; Indigenous thinking, as Arnold Krupat has argued, proceeds not by oppositions but by complementarities (13). Likewise, Greg Cajete notes that there is no word in Native languages for “animal” because there is no absolute species distinction between the animal and the human (152). Similarly, the Navajo refer to sheep as “mother” (Benally 71), as they do the earth (Witherspoon 20–21), and they mean it literally, not metaphorically. Thus, there is no nature-culture divide in foundational Indigenous theory and practice but only a network extending throughout the universe of kinship relations that results in a practice focused on social balance, a practice disrupted but not ended by the massive European invasion of Indigenous lands that began in 1492. By foundational, I mean a dynamic way of thinking that holds to specific values through historical changes, even when, as in the case of Indigenous peoples, it encounters the violence of settler-colonial theory and practice, and its oppositional and proprietary nature-culture relation.Footnote ¹ William Bevis expresses the Indigenous understanding this way: “Native American Nature is urban. The connotation to us of ‘urban,’ suggesting a dense complex of human variety, is closer to Native American ‘nature’ than is our word ‘natural.’ The woods, birds, animals, and humans are all ‘downtown,’ meaning at the center of action and power, in complex and unpredictable and various relationships. . . . Nature is part of tribe,” not, as in European thinking, separate from it (601–02).

If we accept this foundational difference between European and Indigenous modes of theory and practice, located in two radically different relations to the environment, there can be no Anthropocene in Indigenous thought.

So an essay like this one, on Native American literature and the Anthropocene, is possible only within the historical context of Native resistance to settler theory and practice. When Linda Hogan writes, “There is a separation that has taken place between us and nature,” she recognizes both a point when there was no separation and a point when settler-colonial violence brought about the formulation “us and nature,” allowing “us” (settlers) to think the Anthropocene, which represents “a spiritual fragmentation that has accompanied our ecological destruction” (52). From an Indigenous perspective, the Anthropocene started in 1492, when Europe began its invasion of Indigenous space-time.

Native literature is a form of resistance to what Hogan, quoting C. A. Meier, calls the “physical and mental breaking point” represented by the Anthropocene (52), a form of resistance to the “story of endings” mounted through the search for “new stories, new terms and conditions that are relevant to the love of land, a new narrative that would imagine another way” (94). The successful conclusion of this search would be the realization of the theory and practice of foundational Indigenous epistemologies—that is, the end of the nature-culture divide through the realization of a social world of extended kinship. This is the resistance and the search that constitute Hogan's book of environmental essays, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Hogan's book is a ceremony, a meditation on human interaction, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous (primarily Euro-American), with other beings such as eagles, bats, wolves, chimpanzees, corn, water, snakes, and other human beings in precolonial Indigenous and settler-colonial contexts. Ceremonies are of course central to foundational Indigenous life, and one of their principal functions is healing. A ceremony, Hogan writes, reminds us “that all things are connected”:

The key word here is “balance,” which in its various forms is the central philosophical principle in Indigenous epistemologies. In the Diné (Navajo) language, for example, the word is hozhǫ. Gary Witherspoon elaborates:

The Anthropocene represents a world, radically out of balance, that global capitalism, the apotheosis of settler colonialism, has realized. In The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States, I argue that capitalism (“the master's tools”) cannot restore the world to balance because of what I term “the limits of capitalism's imagination,” which I posit is represented by four key, interactive words: property, profit, production, and progress. The first three describe the destructive exploitation of land and labor resulting in class and species hierarchies (indeed, the very idea of species is a Western, not Indigenous, idea). Property and profit are the basis of production, which entails the rampant creation of pollutants, from the methane of factory farming to the toxic by-products of plastics manufacturing, whereas progress as a manifestation of the first three terms has placed humanity on a linear time line that has brought us to the Anthropocene (10–16).

Hogan's ceremonial text is opposed to capitalism's imagination. Writing of the sacking of sixteenth-century Mayan civilization by Spanish colonizers, Hogan remarks, “Unlike the cyclic nature of time for the Maya, the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end” (93). Hogan is “thinking from a different place,” an Indigenous place of “survivance,” as defined by the Anishinaabe writer and critic Gerald Vizenor: “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy” (vii). Survivance is resistance to capitalism's imagination—to the idea of the Anthropocene as apocalypse, which is a form of both tragedy and victimry. For Hogan the act of writing from this Indigenous place is an act of kinship, in which she meticulously observes herself and others in relation to the world in which she is immersed. This kind of observation and the reading of it places one in circular time, where one can “keep all these relations in mind.” This, Hogan tells us, is to “have health.” Hogan's writing is a ceremony that helps us think from a different place, one “less primitive than the rational present” (19).

In the preface to Dwellings, Hogan introduces herself as “an Indian woman [who] question[s] our responsibilities to the caretaking of the future and to the other species who share our journeys.” The word species instantly conjures up the settler-colonial moment distinguishing “us” (human beings) from “them” (animals) categorically. “It has been my lifelong work,” Hogan continues, “to seek an understanding of the two views of the world, one as seen by native people and the other as seen by those who are new and young on this continent”—that is, settlers. But in both cases, Hogan notes, “[i]t is clear that we have strayed from the treaties we once had with the land and with the animals. It is also clear, and heartening, that in our time there are many—Indian and non-Indian alike—who want to restore and honor those broken agreements” (11). The “we” marks the moment when the Native and the non-Native, though clearly different, are inseparable, linked by a history of settler violence leading to the present climate crisis. For Hogan this crisis is marked by the breaking of “the treaties we once had with the land and with the animals.”

Hogan's use of the word treaties here invokes two conflicting but intertwined histories, one written and one oral. The settler-colonial history of violence in the United States is the written one, recorded in the treaties that mark the moment of genocidal land theft, legalized in formal documents, forced on Native peoples and then broken at the will of the settlers as they further commodify the land, converting it into property for profit in the name of progress. By contrast, the Native accords are recorded orally, in narratives like trickster tales,Footnote ² in which human beings, animals, and the land speak to one another as equals negotiating, not without conflict, a set of sustainable relationships. The written-treaty history, then, which enforces the nature-culture divide, treating land and its yield as commodities, fractures, but does not end, the oral one, ushering in the age of linear time, the age of apocalypse.

Typically, the Anthropocene, as a Western narrative, is framed by the concept of the apocalypse. In his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, whose title says it all (we do not learn to live within the Anthropocene), Roy Scranton notes, “Climate scientist James Hansen . . . has argued that we face an ‘apocalyptic’ future—a bleak view that is accorded by researchers worldwide” (15). April Anson, who has written cogently on the ideology of the apocalypse used in narratives of the Anthropocene, remarks, “The uses and abuses of apocalyptic rhetoric are, by now, regularly acknowledged. Narratives of apocalypse too often overwhelm, immobilize, and instill a sense of futility.” This sense of futility clearly favors those in power, preempting resistance to the settler-colonial state. As Anson notes, “apocalyptic stories of single disastrous events shelter the settler state of emergency, protecting the logic of settler colonial capitalism's continuous creation of and dependence upon the emergency event.” In the worst-case scenario, the emergency event triggers the “state of exception,” which allows the sovereign to suspend civil liberties. The suspension of these liberties strengthens what Louis Althusser refers to as the Repressive State Apparatus (the army and police), which depends on the Ideological State Apparatuses (cultural institutions) for its perceived legitimacy (18–19). In the United States and around the world, marginalized peoples (the poor, the homeless, minoritized communities) have been living this scenario historically, and thus it is a part of all our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not.

In The Disinformation Age, I argue that ideology, a narrative that in Althusserian terms bears a certain relation to reality,Footnote ³ has been replaced by Disinformation, the absolute break of rhetoric from reality. Following Anson, we might think of apocalyptic narratives of immobilization as a form of Disinformation, because in reality resistance to the apocalypse is ongoing. Indigenous literatures are one form of this resistance, as are Indigenous environmental movements such as Idle No More, in Canada, and the 2016 resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, joined by thousands of people, Natives and others, from around the world, before it was dispersed by the Repressive State Apparatus of corporate-government collaboration.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, within this resistance to apocalypse, every day, there are apocalypses as the climate collapses. These apocalypses are distributed unequally on a social, political, and economic basis, as illustrated, for instance, by Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the lives of the poor black residents of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and by the fact that “[c]limate change may have contributed to the suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers and farm workers over the past three decades, according to new research that examines the toll rising temperatures are already taking on vulnerable societies” (Safi).

As noted, climate collapse is inseparable from the onset of settler colonialism, and settler colonialism is inseparable from genocide.Footnote ⁵ Writing of the poet Gertrud Kolmar, who died in Auschwitz, Hogan remarks, “But the holocaust began before her time. It began on this continent, with the genocide of tribal people, and with the ongoing war against the natural world. Here is a lesson: what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing” (89). Genocide was and is ecocide. To take an obvious example, Jair Bolsonaro's attack on the Amazon in the name of capitalist development is simultaneously an attack on the Indigenous people who live there and an attack on all of us, given that the Amazon rain forest is the largest carbon sink in the world. In Dwellings, Hogan reminds us that in destroying the Amazon rain forest we are literally suffocating ourselves: “these forests are the place our air is born. . . . In their verdant density, they produce over a fourth of earth's oxygen” (107).

The increasing spread of viruses like COVID-19 is also the result of climate collapse, as Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, noted on 16 April 2020 on the television program Democracy Now. Daszak remarks that one of the two key factors in the spread of viruses

Daszak's nod to “development” suggests that, in spite of his cogent account of the relation between viruses and climate collapse, he is still thinking within the limits of capitalism's imagination. He suggests that people on the political right, “who aren't interested in conservation or climate change,” might in fact be concerned about their “own health” if they understood the connection between climate collapse and pandemics. Yet this notion seems contradicted by the right's reaction to the shutting down of the economy in the United States during COVID-19; for those on the right, keeping the market alive has trumped fears of rising deaths from the virus. But in his conclusion—“You know, we are making ourselves sick by making the planet sick”—Daszak concurs with Hogan, though she is thinking from a different place, one of sustainability (survivance) not development (progress). When he posits that development can be done “in a smarter way, a more sustainable way,” Daszak clearly does not understand sustainable development to be a contradiction in terms. But I am arguing that within the limits of capitalism's imagination sustainable development is an oxymoron because I am not sure what “development” (progress, growth) would mean outside those limits.

Certainly, there is no place for the capitalist concept in Hogan's imagination. If, following Hogan, we were to think counterintuitively about capitalist (settler) logic, we might think of development, ironically or paradoxically, in terms of de-growth—that is, in terms of sustainability on a planet where capitalist logic is rapidly exhausting the environment. The ultimate goal in this case would be the dismantling of the nation-state, the primary engine of inequality, or imbalance, of which climate collapse is a product. Along these lines there are specific Indigenous, anticolonial models to consider in Native literature, by which I mean all Native writing, such as the Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, ratified in 2009 under the Indigenous regime of Evo Morales, and The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, which models the autonomous Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) communities in Chiapas, Mexico.Footnote ⁶ The Bolivian constitution, in what may be an impossibility, attempts to decenter the nation-state. But at the same time, it presents us with a possible stage in the development of social formations like the Zapatista autonomous communities, which are based in sustainable economies governed by an Indigenous model of democracy-through-consensus rule by obeying the people (“mandar obedeciendo” [El Kilombo Intergalactico 11]): “This method of autonomous government was not simply invented by the EZLN, but rather comes from centuries of indigenous resistance and from the zapatistas’ own experience” (67).

In article 289 of the Bolivian constitution, we can read a version of the Indigenous model: “The indigenous originary farmer autonomy consists in self-government as an exercise of free determination of the indigenous originary farmer nations and people, of which population share territory, culture, history, languages, and their own juridical, political, social and economic organization and institutions” (Constitution 85). In practice, before the instigators of the right-wing coup in 2019 deposed Morales and made war on the Indigenous people of Bolivia, now overturned with the return of MAS (Morales's party) to power in the October 2020 elections, there were conflicts between the state and the regions, in which state power predictably prevailed over regional desires when it came to the development of extractive industries and other capitalist enterprises on which Bolivia depends for its survival in the world market (e.g., Picq). Thus, to a certain extent, the constitution's capitalist necessities contradict its anticolonial aspirations to social, political, economic, and environmental equality (one of its stated principles is “balance”). It is a disjunction between theory and practice, though not entirely, as witnessed by the significant reduction in poverty due to the socialization of extractive industries under the Morales government. Further, Miguel Centellas notes, “There can be no denying that the 2009 Constitution [recognizing thirty-five Indigenous languages (art. 5, par. 1)] is a significant advancement for multiculturalism in Bolivia—and for the rights of indigenous peoples in particular” (100). Thus, the Bolivian constitution itself is worth considering as a means of rethinking the nation-state in a time of climate collapse and rising inequality in all spheres.

For surely, as I write this, in a time of pandemic, the nation-state, resting on the foundation of settler-colonial capitalism, is collapsing under the weight of its increasing social, political, economic, and environmental imbalances. I do not make this statement apocalyptically but with survivance in mind. Hogan puts it this way:

While referring to all “humans,” Hogan is describing Indigenous knowledge, pushed into the past by settler colonialism as part of its project to “eliminate the Native” on a linear time line leading to apocalypse. But this knowledge lives and is accessible in Indigenous time, where past, present, and future are always interacting. Native literatures teach us: we need to start living on that time line.