#cosmologies

[Grace Dillon:] Nowadays, I think in terms of Indigenous sciences rather than science. I feel that’s the way we should think about all sciences, as plural, whether we label them Westernized, Indigenous, or whatever form they may take. Let me quote from Gregory A. Cajete, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo Nation who has worked in the field of Native science or sciences. He asks, “What is Indigenous science?” According to him, “It is knowing how to live in a place sustainably.” [...] What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean. There’s this scene close to the end of the book, after the characters have suffered all of this environmental and extractivist injustice, where the grandmother is passing on her traditional ways of knowledge to her grandson but, since he goes to school, they’re actually teaching each other. “Intergenerational” doesn’t imply a hierarchical, top-down elders’ passing of knowledge only. It’s more of an exchange of ideas. This is what I see going on between generations in our Indigenous communities right now. In the science fiction field, my goal is to quietly change the mission for the top-notch journals in the field that are still simply clinging to stories about advanced technology and this linear way of thinking about knowledge as mere accumulation. [...]

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[PNM]: In Brazil, the word that the postwar fascist regime used for clearing certain areas of the country to allow for so-called development was “pacification,” which was applied to both Native peoples and the landscape. Instead of saying that they would cut down a forested region or displace and “educate” its local Native communities, they’d call the whole process “pacification.” So that’s become an extremely loaded word in the Portuguese language. Beyond the term’s historical associations with the military fascist regime, it reinforces the colonial notion that equates Native peoples with “nature” and a violent wildness, like the threatening woods that you just mentioned. Going back to your ideas, it’s been almost a decade since your anthology Walking in the Clouds was published. And what a decade it was! We saw an intense transformation in the field of science fiction, with a wave of Indigenous, black, Asian, and many other nonwhite authors, [...] being published and offering some of the decade’s most challenging stories. [...] Do you find that multispecies entanglements and the inclusion of nonhuman beings has also grown in visibility, within and outside these stories? I’m asking this because, for instance, in Brazil, debates about the rights of nonhuman or other-than-human beings have been key to Indigenous [...] discussions for at least the past two decades. There, the debate mostly centers around plant or animal persons, and moreover the [...] question of “what is human,” from an Indigenous point of view. That is, the knowledge that terms like “animal,” “plant,” “human,” and “spirit” may mean something much broader than how modern sciences define them. 

[GD:] Back in 2012, I was talking about animal persons, rock persons, phenomenological persons, plant persons, and so on, and you could sense a quiet skepticism among some people. They would see it as a form of animism, when in fact I was talking about sciences. For example, plants literally converse among each other; plants that live in toxic areas warn other plants to stay away. There are many examples of nonhuman persons in fiction about sciences. Take Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), a story about a First Nation scientist who is developing chemicals for a bioengineering company that is truly extractivist and toxic, until he sees how that’s impacting the land, together with its animal and plant persons, and he is thrown into a crisis. Does he want to be a scientist? Or at least a scientist in that kind of context?

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[PNM:] How do you see the relation between science fictions and Native myths and mythology? While the modern mind may eventually recognize the cultural value of Indigenous myths, it refuses to see them as scientific evidence. I wouldn’t want to project a meaning onto these stories, so I say this very carefully, but although in Brazil you may not find a great presence of Indigenous science fiction, Native traditions and myths almost seem to perform science-fictionally, in how they both rupture modern categories and expectations and allow for imagination beyond colonial frameworks.

[GD:] I have a lot to say about this. The first thing I’d like to do is to eradicate the term “myth” or “mythology,” because that implies that these stories are false or that they are fictions that should be questioned. Instead, what I do -- and this is what I grew up with -- is to call them “stories.” Everything is storytelling. Indigenous sciences are embedded in stories; this is how we share our Indigenous sciences. I grew up in an [...] anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science. Our word aadizookaanan means “ceremonial stories” or “sacred stories.” Most First Nations don’t share those sacred stories with outsiders. However, in 2012 many of the nations I belong to -- and you should know that we Nish peoples are often called the pacifist-anarchists among other Indigenous nations -- got together and decided to share not only our gikendaasowin, meaning herbal knowledge and science and how they interact with ceremonies and songs, but also our aadizookaanan. We decided that some of our sacred stories needed to be shared globally, because they were necessary right now for dealing with Mizzu-Kummik-Quae, Mother Earth. So the reason I’m interested in science fiction is that when I was little and we had firesides, sweats, and other ceremonies, we were telling stories about star peoples that came to earth in, basically, space canoes. For me, the concept of a spaceship was not unusual. And, of course, we are all star people. We are made of stardust, which is scientifically accurate. Everything is made of stardust.

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Naoj in Kaqchikel refers, in a general sense, to “knowledge-wisdom-understanding”; X’ajaan in Tz’utujiil connotes sacred feelings and respect; and K’uh in Q’eqchi refers to something that is imbued with “a sacred state of thinking-feeling.” [...]

Following from the translation of art as K’uh, and its allusions to the “sacred,” this text is a modest record of encounters between Western and non-Western apparatuses of knowledge as places of untranslatability and instigation. [...] The senses of culture and politics may be so different between different cosmologies that they cannot ever be fully translated. For Glissant, for example, translation is a tool for re-negotiating places of utterance that could “barbarize” or “creolize” European intellectual production. [...] In the 2000s, concepts such as Bonaventura de Sousa Santos’s “ecologies of knowledges” began to signal a shift in approach. [...] Scholars such as Metis Zoe Todd [...] have written on how non-Western epistemologies have been misappropriated or abstracted. [...] Indigenous art and artists are continually subordinated in the Western art circuit, even or especially when the work is included and attempted to be translated for Western audiences. [...]

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Is it possible for an institution such as a university to accept or acknowledge precisely what science has dismissed and disavowed? How could this be made possible if this exclusion is not merely incidental but part of the very constitution of the sciences themselves?

What frictions emerge from the coexistence of different epistemological frameworks in the context of the university, the temple of Western universalism? For one example, Kwakwaka’wakw geographer Sara Hunt describes how knowledge in the West is inherently connected to fixing and specifically contradicts worldviews based on becoming. Unlike Western rationality, worldviews based on becoming posit a constant process of interlocution and inter-relation that cannot be apprehended [...].

The idea of the “sacred” or “transcendental” in art in Western culture has most clearly manifested itself in the expropriation of objects from non-Western communities. This occurred most explicitly during the colonial era, when “foreign” objects were plundered and then placed in museum collections as demonstrations of national power -- a practice that became especially commonplace in the nineteenth century. [...] this process of designating something other than Western art as “sacred” in order to exercise power continues today in various other forms. For example [...] theorist Ariella Azoulay remarks that turning an ethnographic artifact into a (transcendental) piece of art necessarily involves a process of salvaging, classifying, preserving, authenticating, evaluating, and handling it. She notes that there is an implicit expertise and claim of scientific “neutrality” when non-Western artifacts are turned into transcendental, elevated, and universal artworks in the Western sense. This process of conversion also legitimizes the historic theft of these objects and their isolation from the communities and cultural contexts in which they were produced. [...]

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In response to this drive toward knowledge as possession, Glissant posed the right to opacity, arguing that only by insisting on the importance of opacity can we vindicate that which we cannot understand grasp (comprendre). One of the questions that arises is how to communicate with that which should remain unknown.

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