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ELOHI Peuples indigènes et environnement
3 | 2013 La vie signifiante A vida significante The Signifying Life
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/elohi/576 DOI: 10.4000/elohi.576 ISSN: 2268-5243
Publisher Presses universitaires de Bordeaux
Printed version Date of publication: 1 January 2013 ISBN: 978-2-86781-899-8 ISSN: 2431-8175
Electronic reference ELOHI, 3 | 2013, « La vie signifante » [Online], Online since 01 January 2014, connection on 08 October 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/elohi/576 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/elohi.576
This text was automatically generated on 8 October 2020.
© PUB-CLIMAS 1
L’un des lieux communs les plus répandus à propos des peuples indigènes est qu’ils ne laissent pas de trace sur leur environnement. Cette idée se révèle être un procédé de déshumanisation par déni de signes, alors que le colonisateur, lui, en inonde la nature soi-disant vierge : il s’approprie le monde par le truchement d’un drapeau, d’une croix, d’une carte, et de tout autre représentation, et le recouvre de tant d’images qu’il finit par le dissimuler. L’Indigène est perçu comme dépourvu du pouvoir et du savoir de produire des signes. Il est donc rendu invisible et sa vie littéralement insignifiante. Situation idéale pour tout colonisateur de terres « nouvelles ». Si on les voit « vierges », terra nullius, alors aucun obstacle ne s’oppose à l’avancée de la « civilisation », qui devient une responsabilité pour le colonisateur. Les auteurs qui contribuent à ce troisième numéro d’Elohi s’intéressent tous à des discours indigènes qui replacent le culturel au cœur du naturel, non pour nécessairement vanter les mérites d’un mode de vie indigène qui serait primitif, donc harmonieux, mais pour simplement tenter de comprendre comment s’articule un fait objectif : l’humain habite la nature, celle-ci marque le premier, et le premier imprime sa vie signifiante sur la seconde. Les discours analysés dans ce numéro – le discours légal des Maoris en Nouvelle-Zélande, le discours spirituel aborigène en Australie, celui des Makahs dans l’État de Washington, de N. Scott Momaday, les discours littéraires d’Alexis Wright (Waanyi), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe), David Seals (Huron) – ont donc une puissante portée politique. Lorsqu’ils prennent la parole pour se représenter dans leurs rapports avec l’environnement, les auteurs indigènes déjouent le paradigme imposé et paramétré par les pouvoirs colonisateurs, un paradigme qui n’a réduit le « sauvage » qu’à être « noble » ou « ignoble ». Ils disent alors leur présence dans un environnement qu’ils contribuent à transformer ou à préserver.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
La vie signifiante Laurence Machet, Lionel Larré and Antoine Ventura
Guardians of the Environment Indigeneity and Ecology in New Zealand in Light of the WAI 262 Claim Corinne David-Ives
“This land is me”: Indigenous Australian story-telling and ecological knowledge Susan Barrett
Magical Realism, Spiritual Realism, and Ecological Awareness in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale François Gavillon
« Blizzard de formulaires officiels », ou la trace du mocassin à l’épreuve de la trace d’encre dans Tracks et Four Souls de Louise Erdrich Elisabeth Bouzonviller
“The Truth Hangs over Your Head”: Toward an Indigenous Land Ethic Lee Schweninger
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La vie signifiante
Laurence Machet, Lionel Larré et Antoine Ventura
1 Le discours a de tout temps été au cœur de la colonisation et a contribué à la déshumanisation des peuples indigènes à plusieurs titres.
2 Arrivant sur des terres qui n’avaient pas encore été soumises à l’influence occidentale – si l’on excepte, pour l’Amérique, les Vikings et leurs voyages évoqués dans les sagas islandaises (Gomez 15 et suivantes) –, le colonisateur a tout d’abord cru constater l’absence de discours chez le colonisé. Comme l’a écrit Tzvetan Todorov : La première réaction, spontanée, à l’égard de l’étranger est de l’imaginer inférieur, puisque différent de nous : ce n’est même pas un homme, ou s’il l’est, c’est un barbare inférieur ; s’il ne parle pas notre langue, c’est qu’il en parle aucune, il ne sait pas parler, comme le pensait encore Colon (99).
3 Face à ce qu’il percevait comme une carence, le colonisateur a produit du discours à profusion, notamment afin de définir les peuples à coloniser. C’est ainsi que les colonisateurs déchaînèrent des « tsunamis d’écriture » (Serres 58) pour submerger les colonisés qui se trouvèrent dépeints comme des sauvages, des païens, des enfants, ou des arriérés. Dans tous les cas, ces définitions rendaient inévitable une hiérarchisation des « races » ou des cultures qui à son tour justifiait la domination des colonisateurs, ainsi que l’évangélisation et l’assimilation des colonisés.
4 Tous ces procédés de déresponsabilisation ou, dans le pire des cas, de déshumanisation donnèrent cependant naissance à des représentations qui n’étaient pas nécessairement, de prime abord, négatives. Ainsi, l’invention du « bon sauvage » telle qu’on la perçoit notamment dans les Voyages au Canada de Jacques Cartier, semblait révéler une sorte d’admiration de l’homme « civilisé » envers le « sauvage » dont la vie était simple et vertueuse et le rapport à la nature direct. Il en va de même chez nombre de ces missionnaires espagnols qui peuvent être vus comme des précurseurs de l’anthropologie et de l’ethnographie (José de Acosta, Bernardino de Sahagún), quand ce n’est pas à une véritable plaidoirie en défense des droits des autochtones que se livre quelqu’un comme Bartolomé de Las Casas dans sa Très brève relation de la destruction des Indes (1556).
5 Ce mythe du bon sauvage qu’on peut identifier dès le XVIe siècle rencontra un tel succès qu’il se trouve aujourd’hui réhabilité dans les conceptions que les (anciens)
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colonisateurs se font de la vie harmonieuse des Indigènes dans la nature. L’un des lieux communs les plus répandus est que l’Indigène, par conséquent, ne laisse pas de trace sur son environnement.
6 Le lien entre l’absence de parole perçue par Colomb et l’absence supposée de traces dans l’environnement est clair. Toutes deux se révèlent être des procédés de déshumanisation par déni de signes, alors que le colonisateur, lui, en inonde la nature soi-disant vierge : il s’approprie par le truchement d’un drapeau, d’une croix, d’une carte, et de tout autre représentation, et recouvre le monde de tant d’images qu’il finit par le dissimuler. Montaigne l’écrivait déjà : « Nous avons tant rechargé la beauté et richesse de ses ouvrages par nos inventions, que nous l’avons du tout étouffée » (318-319). L’Indigène est perçu comme dépourvu du pouvoir et du savoir de produire des signes – tout du moins l’est-il pour des raisons économiques et commerciales, de la part des colons qui, dans l’Empire espagnol des Indes, jamais n’appliqueront les « lois nouvelles » (1542) adoptées sous Charles Quint grâce au travail de Bartolomé de Las Casas, lui-même inspiré par la pensée juridique de Francisco de Victoria, des lois tendant à protéger les Indiens des abus dont ils étaient les victimes depuis les débuts de la « Conquête » et, surtout, de la mise en exploitation du Nouveau Monde (Lavallé 81-91). L’Indigène est donc rendu invisible et sa vie littéralement insignifiante. Situation idéale pour tout colonisateur de terres « nouvelles ». Si on les voit « vierges », terra nullius, alors aucun obstacle ne s’oppose à l’avancée de la « civilisation », qui devient une responsabilité pour le colonisateur1. Pour le cas de l’Espagne et de son empire, on connaît le fameux débat romancé par Jean-Claude Carrière, La controverse de Valladolid (1992), entre Bartolomé de las Casa et Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda qui, en se fondant sur Aristote, défendit l’idée qu’il existait des peuples inférieurs qui devaient se soumettre, par nature, à plus fort qu’eux.
7 Aux États-Unis, il est possible de voir la création des parcs nationaux et l’adoption du Wilderness Act de 1964 comme des manifestations politiques ultimes et cruellement ironiques d’une colonisation qui a consisté à rendre l’Indigène invisible. Comme l’écrit William Cronon, le mouvement en faveur de la création des parcs apparaît en même temps que l’on finit de déplacer, parfois depuis des espaces que l’on veut protéger, les dernières tribus rebelles dans des réserves (Cronon 15). Quant au Wilderness Act, il définit la nature sauvage comme un espace « où l’homme est un visiteur qui ne reste pas » (An Act to Establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the permanent good of the whole people, and for other purposes) et où l’empreinte de son travail passe inaperçue. Cette conception est si prééminente que certains auteurs indigènes s’y laissent parfois prendre. L’auteur cherokee et choctaw Louis Owens raconte dans un essai autobiographique intitulé « Burning the Shelter » comment il arriva à la prise de conscience qu’il n’existe rien de tel que la nature sans les hommes. À l’automne 1976, alors qu’il travaillait pour le Service des Forêts états-unien dans la réserve naturelle Glacier Peak Wilderness, État de Washington, il eut pour mission de réduire en cendre la cabane de White Pass. L’une des missions du Service des Forêts était « d’éliminer des aires sauvages tous les objets fabriqués par les hommes », une mission que l’auteur avoue embrasser avec conviction2. Une fois sa mission accomplie, sur le chemin du retour, il rencontra deux vieilles femmes indiennes en pleine ascension. Elles lui expliquèrent qu’elles rejoignaient régulièrement la cabane de White Pass, que leur père avait bâtie des décennies plus tôt : « “A long time ago, this was all our land,” the one called Sarah said. “All Indi’n land everywhere you can see. Our people had houses up in the mountains, for gathering berries every year” » (215). Se morfondant de la bévue
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commise, Owens comprit alors que ce qu’il appelait « wilderness » n’était qu’une invention institutionnelle et qu’il s’agissait en réalité d’un lieu habité, imprégné d’histoire : Gradually, almost painfully, I began to understand that what I called “wilderness” was an absurdity, nothing more than a figment of the European imagination. An “absolute fake.” Before the European invasion, there was no wilderness in North America; there was only the fertile continent where people lived in a hard-learned balance with the natural world. In embracing a philosophy that saw the White Pass shelter—and all traces of humanity—as a shameful stain upon the “pure” wilderness, I had succumbed to a five-hundred-year-old pattern of deadly thinking that separates us from the natural world (216).
8 Les auteurs qui contribuent à ce troisième numéro d’Elohi s’intéressent tous à des discours indigènes qui replacent le culturel au cœur du naturel, non pour nécessairement vanter les mérites d’un mode de vie indigène qui serait primitif, donc harmonieux, mais pour simplement tenter de comprendre comment s’articule un fait objectif : l’humain habite la nature, celle-ci marque le premier, et le premier imprime sa vie signifiante sur la seconde.
9 Selon Edward Said, « everything about human history is rooted in the earth » (5) tandis que William Cronon et Richard White, affirment quant à eux : « all history is a long- standing dialogue between human beings and the earth » (25).
10 En conséquence, considérer que les Indiens n’ont laissé aucune trace sur le territoire qu’ils ont habité est « fondamentalement une vision ahistorique » (Cronon & White 20). Le discours politique se fait parfois le relais de cette vision, en proclamant par exemple que « l’homme africain n’est pas assez entré dans l’histoire »3.
11 Les discours analysés dans ce numéro ont donc une puissante portée politique. Lorsqu’ils prennent la parole pour se représenter dans leurs rapports avec l’environnement, les auteurs indigènes déjouent le paradigme imposé et paramétré par les pouvoirs colonisateurs, un paradigme qui n’a réduit le « sauvage » qu’à être « noble » ou « ignoble ».
12 Depuis une époque récente, la littérature et l’orature indigènes sont parfois et par endroits prises en compte dans les politiques environnementales des nations qui les englobent. Corinne David-Ives et Susan Barrett, en Nouvelle-Zélande et en Australie respectivement, analysent la façon dont le discours indigène s’insinue dans le discours politique environnemental national. David-Ives rend compte des activités du Tribunal Waitangi, qui a l’autorité d’examiner tout grief, contemporain ou historique, revendiqué par les Maoris, et de conseiller l’État sur les éventuels moyens de compensation. Comme l’explique David-Ives, le Tribunal Waitangi devint un forum dans lequel ont pu se déployer le discours politique maori et leur vision des politiques gouvernementales à leur sujet. Quant à Barrett, dans l’introduction de son article sur le « savoir écologique » des Aborigènes d’Australie, elle écrit que de plus en plus nombreux sont les Australiens d’origine européenne qui commencent à comprendre que le savoir indigène en termes de gestion des ressources naturelles, un savoir véhiculé dans les histoires ancestrales du Dreaming – « qui non seulement décrivent la création du monde mais contiennent également des informations sur la nature du paysage et du climat » – peut être utile à l’ensemble du pays.
13 Dans son article sur People of the Whale (2008) de Linda Hogan, François Gavillon analyse le monde inventé par l’auteur chickasaw dans lequel la disruption de « la relation de respect et de réciprocité » qui lie les hommes à l’environnement peut amener la nature
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elle-même à prendre la parole – natura loquens – et à signifier aux hommes, par le truchement de catastrophes naturelles, qu’ils manquent à leurs devoirs culturels. Comme Gavillon l’écrit dans son introduction, dans la fiction de Hogan, « environmental devastation characteristically parallels cultural disempowerment ».
14 Elisabeth Bouzonviller montre également à quel point, dans l’œuvre de l’auteur anishinaabe Louise Erdrich, la terre – et surtout la perte de celle-ci sous l’impact de l’action colonisatrice – est intimement liée aux « tragédies individuelles et collectives ». Erdrich, comme Hogan, prône, dans sa littérature, un ré-enracinement de la culture dans la nature, une reconnaissance de la place de l’humain dans son environnement nécessaire à la survie et la protection des deux.
15 Qu’ils soient légaux, politiques ou littéraires, modernes ou traditionnels, tous les discours analysés par les quatre premières contributions à ce numéro d’Elohi révèlent ce que Lee Schweninger appelle dans la cinquième une « conscience environnementale » indigène, ou une « éthique de la terre » indigène, expression qu’il emprunte à l’auteur kiowa et cherokee N. Scott Momaday. Schweninger théorise cette « éthique de la terre » grâce au lien qu’il opère entre deux « textes » a priori très différents : le premier est le « récit » que racontent deux chasses à la baleine, l’une légale, l’autre interdite, qui furent effectuées par des chasseurs makahs en 1999 et en 2007 respectivement ; le second est le film Powwow Highway (1989), ainsi que le roman dont il est l’adaptation.
16 Il est un point commun fondamental entre de nombreuses croyances indigènes et la culture judéo-chrétienne colonisatrice : « Au commencement était la parole » (Jean 1 : 1). Chez les Publo Laguna, Ts’its’tsi’nako, pense le monde et le fait ainsi advenir :
17 Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, Is sitting in her room And whatever she thinks about Appears. […] Thought-Woman, the spider, Named things and As she named them They appeared. (Silko 1)
18 Pour N. Scott Momaday, la vie d’un homme procède de son nom : « The storyteller Podh-lohk gave me the name Tsoai-talee. He believed that a man’s life proceeds from his name, in the way that a river proceeds from its source » (épigramme). Louis Owens évoque une croyance Cherokee : “we can form and alter the world for good or bad with language, even with thought” (209). Il ajoute : « Traditional Native American stories tell us that words are powerful and sacred, that words bring into being and compel and order the world. Words are powerful creators, and they can be powerful destroyers » (213).
19 Le monde dans lequel nous vivons est essentiellement façonné par les histoires et les discours colonisateurs. Dans leurs propres histoires, les auteurs indigènes tentent de transformer le monde, peut-être pour le bénéfice de tous. Pour Owens, il s’agit de bien choisir les histoires que l’on veut écouter :
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20 The future of that wilderness and, of course, the future of all life depends upon whose stories we listen to : the stories that tell us we are bound in a timeless and inextricable relationship with the earth which gives us life and sustains us, or the stories that tell us the earth is a resource to be exploited until it is used up (210).
21 Ces paroles de Owens trouvent un écho dans des œuvres littéraires de type témoignage où la prise de parole est partiellement assumée par un indigène et où, à l’instar de Rigoberta Menchú associée à l’anthropologue Elisabeth Burgos (Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, 1983), une autre lecture du monde, indigène donc, devient ou redevient signifiante et permet la dénonciation du colonialisme interne dont souffrent les descendants des peuples premiers d’Amérique latine, face non plus aux colons (encomenderos) mais aux propriétaires terriens dont les logiques de lucre restent semblables ; face également aux gouvernements préoccupés de prospection et d’assimilation, y compris par les soins médicaux qui viennent nier les connaissances et les pratiques ancestrales, comme le dénonce Marcos Pellegrini à propos des yanomamis du Brésil (Wadubari, 1991). Le cri de ce dernier s’opère dans une inversion du rapport d’acculturation, puisque son discours emprunte les formes rhétoriques et syntaxiques de l’autre langue, qu’il a apprise comme le firent nombre de missionnaires à l’époque coloniale, moins animés par le profit temporel que par leur démarche spirituelle et de connaissance de cet autre Moi qu’est l’Autre, que je ne puis nier, rendre insignifiant, sans me dissoudre moi-même.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
BURGOS, Elisabeth. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. La Habana : Casa de las Américas, 1983 ; Moi, Rigoberta Menchú . Une vie et une voix, la révolution au Guatemala. Paris : Gallimard, 1983.
CARRIÈRE, Jean-Claude, La Controverse de Valladolid. Paris. Belfond, 1992.
CARTIER Jacques. Voyages au Canada. Québec : Lux Editeur, 2002.
CRONON, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1.1 (janvier 1996): 7-28.
CRONON, William & Richard WHITE. “Indians in the Land.” American Heritage 37.5 (août/septembre 1986): 19-25.
D’OLWER, Luis Nicolás, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590). México : Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1952.
Escritores de Indias. Zaragoza : Clásicos Ebro, 1961.
GOMEZ, Thomas. L’Invention de l’Amérique. Mythes et réalités de la Conquête. Paris : Aubier, 1992.
LAVALLÉ, Bernard. L’Amérique espagnole, de Colomb à Bolivar. Paris : Belin, 1993.
LAS CASAS, Bartolomé. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de Indias. 1552. Madrid : Cátedra, 1989 ; Très brève relation de la destruction des Indes. Paris : Maspero, 1979.
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« Le discours de Dakar de Nicolas Sarkozy ». LeMonde.fr. www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/ 2007/11/09/le-discours-de-dakar_976786_3212.html.
MOMADAY, N. Scott. The Names: A Memoir. Tucson & London: Sun Tracks/University of Arizona Press, 1976.
MOMADAY, N. Scott. “An American Land Ethic.” The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. 42-49.
MONTAIGNE, Michel seigneur de. Les Essais. 1595. Paris : Livre de Poche, 2001.
OWENS, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
PELLEGRINI, Marcos. Wadubari. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1991.
SAID, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage Books, 1993.
SILKO, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1977.
TODOROV, Tzvetan. La Conquête de l’Amérique. La Question de l’Autre. Paris. Seuil, 1982.
United States Cong. An Act to Establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the permanent good of the whole people, and for other purposes. 88th Cong., 2nd sess. Washington, September 3, 1964.
NOTES
1. Cf. Rudyard Kipling, « The White Man’s Burden ». 2. “It was part of a Forest Service plan to remove all human-made objects from wilderness areas, a plan of which I heartily approved” (Owens 214). 3. « Le drame de l’Afrique, c’est que l’homme africain n’est pas assez entré dans l’histoire. Le paysan africain, qui depuis des millénaires, vit avec les saisons, dont l’idéal de vie est d’être en harmonie avec la nature, ne connaît que l’éternel recommencement du temps rythmé par la répétition sans fin des mêmes gestes et des mêmes paroles ». (« Le discours de Dakar de Nicolas Sarkozy », prononcé le 26 juillet 2007, à Dakar, Le Monde.fr, http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/ article/2007/11/09/le-discours-de-dakar_976786_3212.html. (Consulté le 14 juin 2013).
AUTEURS
LAURENCE MACHET Université Bordeaux Montaigne
LIONEL LARRÉ Université Bordeaux Montaigne
ANTOINE VENTURA Université Bordeaux Montaigne
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Guardians of the Environment Indigeneity and Ecology in New Zealand in Light of the WAI 262 Claim
Corinne David-Ives
Introduction
1 In the long struggle for survival that followed colonization, the full and proper enforcement of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between Maori and the British Crown has been a beacon for Maori activism. While the Treaty organized a transfer of sovereignty to the British Crown and marked the official annexation of New Zealand by Britain, it also guaranteed Maori rights, protected Maori property and granted Maori the status of British subjects. The fundamental ambiguities lingering over the interpretation of the Treaty – namely the actual nature of the transfer of sovereignty and the persistence of Maori authority over the land – did not prevent it from being considered by both sides as the founding document of the nation. The Treaty remained a central reference in New Zealand politics even though the first conflicts over its enforcement erupted soon after its signature. In spite of a number of subsequent legal defeats before New Zealand and British Courts to have the Treaty recognized as having legal force1, Maori remained intent on having the terms of the Treaty upheld.
2 In the context of reconciliation politics initiated in the late 1970s by the New Zealand government and given full force from 1985 onwards2, a legal framework was set up to deal with Maori claims relating to alleged violations of the terms of the Treaty, which was given new prominence in national politics. The new Waitangi Tribunal was thus given authority to review both contemporary and historical grievances brought forward by Maori tribes or individuals and to advise the government on remedies or compensation. While the decisions of the Tribunal did not have binding force, they soon acquired moral force in a political and legal environment more sympathetic at last to the plight of the indigenous minority, left almost landless by the end of the 20th century. The Tribunal quickly became a public forum for Maori to express their views on the New Zealand government’s policies towards them, as well as one of the prime vectors for indigenous political action. Meanwhile, the first Maori victories before traditional legal bodies such as the New Zealand Court of Appeal marked the beginning
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of the recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi as a document endowed with a measure of legal or even constitutional force3. The process known as “the process of Waitangi” had been set into motion: it was to keep Maori concerns at the forefront of New Zealand politics. A whole range of Maori claims would be addressed, not only over customary land but also over a number of natural elements.
3 This communication deals with the Fauna and Flora WAI 262 claim, arguably one of the most important claims ever submitted to the Waitangi Tribunal. The claim process has recently come to a close with a final report issued in July 2011, following twenty years of investigations. The claim, focusing on indigenous biodiversity as a whole and on the indigenous system of knowledge relying on this biodiversity, brings together fundamental issues relating both to indigenous rights and to political ecology. To understand its scope and significance, it will first be necessary to present the Maori concept of “guardian of the environment” which stems from the indigenous identity itself, and to review the political use of that concept both on the part of Maori and on the part of the Crown. Then, we will look at the claim itself and at the various challenges it encompasses, notably the contradictions between the western concepts of intellectual property versus an indigenous holistic worldview.
Indigeneity and ecology
4 The concept of indigeneity surfaced as a means to legitimize Maori demands in the context of reconciliation politics. This concept made it possible to present the indigenous worldview as a valuable alternative deserving official recognition, particularly in a post-colonial society willing at the time to become truly bicultural4. We’ll refer to the definition of indigeneity elaborated by Maori sociologist and academic Mason Durie: A long-standing bond with the land and the natural environment is the fundamental feature of indigeneity, and arising from that relationship it is possible to identify five secondary characteristics of indigeneity: time, culture, an indigenous system of knowledge, environmental sustainability, and a native language. (Durie 2005: 2)
5 For Mason Durie, indigeneity is therefore a variation of ethnicity which makes it possible to move beyond dubious connotations of race. Instead, it lays stress on social and cultural interactions. Indigeneity is a concept referring to a global worldview. It conveys a relationship to the land which is of a spiritual nature; it enables the individual to be truly grounded in a place together with the community he is part of – a notion expressed in Maori by turangawaewae, literally a place to stand. An individual has no intrinsic significance outside of a set of interdependent relationships all going back to the land. The notion is essential because it confers meaning and connects past, present and future through a line of ancestors all linked to the land, a key notion expressed in turn by whakapapa or genealogy. In his definition, Mason Durie establishes a correlation with the contemporary discourse of political ecology: the “special bond” to the earth induces respect, which in turn opens on to a genuine concern for the preservation of the natural world, translated here into “environmental sustainability.” The “indigenous system of knowledge” stems from this special relationship. It is implicitly distinguished from western approaches based first on exploitation and profit. “Time” and “culture” refer to the occupation of the land by the indigenous people, either from time immemorial or in any case as first occupants. This confers
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legitimacy to their claim over the land or the natural elements associated to it. A unique “native language” (and culture) is yet another distinctive marker associated today with world heritage. This conceptual grid is an efficient tool for delegitimizing any form of displacement of indigenous peoples.
6 In the New Zealand context, the notion of indigeneity is almost always referred to through the Maori phrase tangata whenua, literally the people of the land, which is used officially and routinely today at government level with regard to Maori. This concession to bicultural politics also works as a constant reminder that most customary land in New Zealand was alienated by the colonization process.
7 The holistic framework within which indigenous cultures and worldviews have traditionally developed is opposed to western worldviews centered on individuals rather than groups (Dumont: 12-23). This fundamental difference is used again as a political weapon to assert the worth of indigenous cultures, in particular in relation to the preservation of the environment, a modern concern that has gained prominence and has been voiced more and more forcefully on the political scenes around the world in the last thirty years. Mason Durie thus also affirms: But despite socio-economic similarities and comparable experiences with colonisation and postcolonial development, the unifying feature of indigenous peoples has a more fundamental quality that depends on a sense of unity with the environment. The individual is a part of all creation and the idea that the world or creation exists for the purpose of human domination and exploitation is absent from indigenous world-views. (Durie 2008: 3 emphasis mine)
8 Today, this appears as a voice of wisdom very much in tune with contemporary concerns about the commodification of the environment at large. It also permits the introduction of a notion of responsibility: “Territory confers authority and obligation” (Durie 2008: 5), a notion which in turn is completely in tune with the Maori concept of guardianship, kaitiakitanga. This concept has been used since the early 1980s to substantiate claims put to the Waitangi Tribunal over customary land or natural elements such as rivers or mountains (Waitangi Tribunal 1983). Kaitiakitanga explicitly places Maori in a holistic relationship to the environment, as part of a totality rather than divorced from it, and it also induces duties. In this sense, it can be paralleled with recent approaches in political ecology which have adopted a systemic view of environmental problems. This systemic view was voiced in New Zealand as early as the 1970s by the Values Party, today the New Zealand Green Party.
9 However, the difference here is that guardianship is intimately connected to Maori identity and is not simply a reasoned political choice. The indigenous voice adds a spiritual dimension which is absent from mainstream political ecology. For Maori, environmental damage is equated with spiritual loss. That spiritual loss in turn affects indigenous wellbeing in a way which is specific and different from the emotional impact and the impact on health that such damage may have on non-indigenous people. This is the hallmark of the indigenous discourse centered on the notion of guardianship. If “all New Zealanders” are frequently included in the fight for the defence of the environment [Sharples 2010: 3], the role of kaitiaki falls only on indigenous people. It is construed as a matter of survival for indigenous people, both for their physical and spiritual integrity, because of their special connection to the land. Margaret Mutu for instance, an academic and Maori leader, states that: “Only mana whenua – that is, those who belong to the land - can be kaitiaki and hence exercise kaitiakitanga.” (Mutu: 16)
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10 For Maori, guardianship has clearly been used as a means of empowerment particularly in relation to government agencies and ministries. From a timid recognition starting in the 1980s thanks in particular to the work of the Waitangi Tribunal, it has been embedded into New Zealand legislation and has become a household phrase.5 But what has the Crown really conceded to Maori on that front?
11 The first official recognition by the Crown of the role of Maori as “guardians” of the environment came in 1991 in the Resource Management Act (RMA) which states that: In achieving the purpose of this Act, all persons exercising functions and powers under it, in relation to managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources, shall have particular regard to— (a) kaitiakitanga (RMA 1991section 7 (a)
12 The act was the brainchild of the Ministry of Environment and also the prelude to a series of official policy statements, issued in response to the setting up of new international environmental frameworks, in particular Agenda 21.6 The idea was to apply the concept of sustainability to New Zealand. All of those policy statements and their subsequent enforcement were reviewed by the Waitangi Tribunal as back up evidence in the WAI 262 claim (McClean and Smith 2001). The claim had been brought forward by a group of Maori claimants in 1991 on the specific issue of the management of the native New Zealand environment by the government.
13 Looking at the Draft Strategy 2000 which was officially adopted in 1995 as Environment 2010 Strategy (Ministry for the Environment 1995), the experts commissioned by the Tribunal noted the requirement that “[...] the natural treasures and taonga of Maori are protected, and the cultural practices of Maori associated with the environment are provided for.”(McClean and Smith 2001: 664).
14 This was an indirect reference to the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi, article Two, in particular the term taonga used in the Maori version of the Treaty and which can be translated in English by “their most prized possessions or treasures”. Here the Crown appeared to admit that it was bound under the Treaty of Waitangi to recognize and foster the special relationship between the indigenous people and the environment as well as the associated notion of kaitiakitanga – guardianship. However, throughout the 1990s, as pointed out by the Tribunal, the New Zealand government continued to advocate the primacy of the market and to apply deregulation to vast sectors previously controlled by public bodies. This was bound to clash with environmental concerns involving Crown land and with Maori tribes asking for consultation processes. The lack of proper consultation was pointed out notably through Maori submissions to the Waitangi Tribunal. Similarly, the will of the government to move from the administration of common resources to a property rights regime applying to natural resources (water, etc.), in contradiction with customary rights, raised concern.
15 The final New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy released by the newly elected Labour government in 2000 appeared to give more emphasis to Maori demands and notably stated that “Iwi and hapu [tribes and sub-tribes] as kaitiaki are active partners in managing biodiversity.” (McClean and Smith 2001: 668). One of its governing principles referred specifically to the Treaty of Waitangi: The special relationship between the Crown and Maori as reflected in the Treaty of Waitangi should be recognised and provided for in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, including kaitiakitanga, customary use, and matauranga Maori [indigenous knowledge system]. (MFE 2000: 16. Quoted by McClean and Smith 2001: 668)
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16 For the Crown, the issue was framed as a cultural issue limited to recognizing kaitiakitanga as an important indigenous concept connected to the exercise of certain customary rights. In other words, the Crown accepted to allow guardianship as a cultural manifestation ultimately subjected to its authority. But for Maori, the issue was, and remains, essentially one of partnership: it is a political issue, deriving from the proper implementation of the principles enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi. It is an issue touching on sovereignty and on the precise definition of the rights and duties of each “Treaty partner”. Consequently, piecemeal consultation on environmental issues on the part of the Crown has been deemed unsatisfactory and bypasses the essential issue of power-sharing. Even though kaitiakitanga is now routinely referred to in political discourse, and has been used as a cultural marker giving New Zealand a distinct character, it has had limited effectiveness in final decision-making. Treaty protection has proven too weak and for Maori, the government has been reluctant to follow its own recommendations over the years.
17 All of these questions find themselves fully addressed in the final report for the WAI 262 claim. The sheer scope of the original Fauna and Flora claim (the whole of New Zealand’s biodiversity plus the indigenous system of knowledge and language), as well as the length of the proceedings – twenty years of inquiries, pre-reports and hearings – make it one of the most important cases ever dealt with by the Tribunal. Although the recommendations issued by the Tribunal do not have binding effect, their impact is important as moral pressure is exercised on the government to implement them as best they can. This is because the work of the Tribunal continues to be part of the general reconciliation process initiated and pursued by the successive New Zealand governments themselves. The release of the final report in July 2011 was therefore clearly a political event.
WAI 262 and the Ko Aotearoa Tenei 2011 report
18 The final Waitangi Tribunal report deals both with environmental questions and the protection of the indigenous system of knowledge, including the Maori language, in relation with Treaty obligations on the part of the Crown. It is the first “whole-of- government” case, which means that the report reviews all of the related Crown’s actions and policies. We will focus here specifically on the environmental issues and leave aside the discussion around Maori works of art and other cultural manifestations (such as the haka).7We should note the contemporary focus of the report: although the Tribunal recognizes “the significant historical content and context” of the claim (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 7), its choice is to deal with the present situation rather than with a historical grievance deriving from the history of colonization in New Zealand and the associated exclusion of Maori from the management of the environment, starting in the early days of British settlement with the modification of the landscape and the clearing of the land, down to the absence of consultation of Maori in particular by local authorities, over projects or economic activities having an impact on the environment. The foreword expresses a sense of urgency and the will to address very practical current questions pertaining to customary law, property rights and conservation: “It is obvious that law and policy must be developed with the express and urgent objective of capturing – not squandering – Māori potential. Our collective future will depend on that objective being achieved.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: xxiv). This
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discourse reflects the major preoccupation of the Tribunal: beyond very technical discussions, the ultimate purpose is to propose a framework within which Maori and Pakeha8 interests will cohabit harmoniously and contribute to national development.
19 At the origin of the claim there were concerns over contemporary issues, in particular over genetic engineering and the commercial use of indigenous biodiversity, notably by multinationals. This question had been referred to in the draft statement of issues published by the Waitangi Tribunal in 2005 as “intellectual property in genetic resources of taonga species – that is, species that the claimants had listed as being of particular significance to them.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 6). The wording was a direct reference to the Maori text of Article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi which guaranteed Maori protection of their taonga or treasures. The final report quotes the draft statement and reaffirms “the core Māori value of kaitiakitanga as central to the claim”. It refers to this early definition of kaitiaki as “those whose special relationship with a taonga gives rise to an obligation and corresponding right to protect, control, use, preserve, or transmit the taonga itself and also the relationship of kaitiaki to the taonga.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 7).
20 But the framework within which the Tribunal would finally place the claim from 2006 had moved from those rather cultural concerns to more political concerns: Our final statement of issues […] included a revised definition of kaitiakitanga that placed kaitiaki obligations in the context of the concept of tino rangatiratanga. Indeed, it identified the two as inseparable – tino rangatiratanga as the right and kaitiakitanga as the corresponding obligation towards taonga. It defined tino rangatiratanga in this context as including the right of kaitiaki to make and enforce laws and customs in relation to their taonga. (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 8. Emphasis mine).
21 Tino rangatiratanga refers to the highest authority or chieftainship that Maori may exercise from the point of view of customary law over their land and other prized possessions or treasures. For Maori, it is a question of mana (the prestige derived from the exercise of authority). Most importantly, it is equated with a form of sovereignty: it is the very expression used in the Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi, Article Two.9 The exercise of tino rangatiratanga involves a degree of power sharing and is a quasi constitutional obligation if the Treaty is to be upheld as the founding document of the nation. This point has remained a hotly contested issue, particularly the extent of the native authority or tino rangatiratanga. However, the Tribunal itself has clearly adopted the position that the Treaty does have constitutional status (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 15) – although we should insist on the fact that this particular status has never been endorsed by Parliament: to this day, it remains a political concession to biculturalism.10 The Waitangi Tribunal expressly declined to discuss “the current constitutional arrangements or the place of the Treaty of Waitangi” in this report (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 12). Nevertheless, by establishing a connection between the concept of tino rangatiratanga (native authority) and kaitiakitanga (guardianship), the Tribunal recognized that on the basis of the Treaty of Waitangi, Maori were guardians of the environment in their own right and were legally entitled to manage the native biodiversity in cooperation with the Crown. As a consequence, from the very beginning, the report clearly announced that it was going to deal with the forms that the partnership should take and with the necessary remedies in case of non observance of the partnership principle. This is further substantiated by the view that the Crown’s right to “enact laws and make policies” was really granted through a Treaty signed
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between equals and that that right was not absolute: it was “qualified by the promises solemnly made to Maori in the Treaty.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 15). Among those promises, was the guarantee to uphold native authority or tino rangatiratanga, and the protection of Maori treasures or taonga.
22 This does not mean that there are no restrictions placed on the exercise of Maori customary authority or tino rangatiratanga. The Tribunal has been careful to recall that this Treaty principle is not absolute either, particularly because of the onslaught of colonization on to Maori land and its negative effect on Maori authority. In other words, in this post-colonial age, the Tribunal suggests it is time to move on and to acknowledge the irreversible changes brought about by colonization. This is a compromise that the Tribunal offers to deliver: “full authority in some areas” and a share of decision-making in others. In any case, partnership remains “an over-arching principle” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 24).
23 From this starting point, the Tribunal has been intent on precisely defining kaitiakitanga in relation to the Maori indigenous system of knowledge. The report therefore provides an overview of the Maori approach to the world, in order to fully clarify the implications of the claim. It focuses on one central element in the claim: the reference to kinship – whanaungatanga - and more precisely to whakapapa, usually translated by genealogy. Here, the report notes: “[…] it is an epistemology – a way of ordering knowledge itself. » (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 37). The purpose is to legitimize the Maori worldview as a perfectly rational and valid alternative to the western views that have become dominant. The part of the claim dealing specifically with bioprospecting and genetic engineering relies on the concept of whakapapa as the basis for its argument. Maori lawyer for the claimants Maui Solomon summed it up in this way: « The act of deliberately taking genes from one species and implanting into another for perceived ‘economic’ or other social benefits is regarded by the claimants as tampering with the sacred matrix of life namely whakapapa. » (Solomon 2005: 224).
24 The report gives an overview of this line of reasoning by referring to the Maori myths of creation which place the earth mother at the origin of every line of ancestors. Again, it is the special relationship of Maori to the environment that is used to speak against contemporary procedures deemed objectionable and dangerous. It is the concept of guardianship and the associated sense of spiritual responsibility which justify the Maori claim against commercial genetic engineering.
25 The claimants consider that Maori guardianship is directly threatened by the latest research developments and new commercial uses derived from bioprospecting. The patenting of life forms, which is typically the ultimate goal of bioprospecting, is also objected to because it by-passes Maori tribes who regularly engage in their daily lives with certain native species that they consider as taonga species protected under the Treaty of Waitangi. Maori consent is rarely sought, the input of Maori traditional knowledge usually not recognized, and there is no protection against what Maori custom would consider improper uses. Maori find themselves at a disadvantage in a system dominated by western concepts of exclusive property. Maui Solomon, lawyer for the Maori claimants, clearly identified the problem: IPR [intellectual property rights] is based on private economic rights which give the holders of those rights a monopoly for a limited period of time to exploit those rights. Whereas, indigenous-based rights and knowledge systems are values based and are integral to the maintenance of the cultural identity of the peoples
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concerned. They are collective and intergenerational in nature. (Solomon 2007: 81)
26 In the same way, the report notes that guardianship or kaitiakitanga is “a community- based concept” as opposed to the individualistic approach of western property rights (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 116). In this context, Maori ask for their special relationship with taonga species to be included in intellectual property law.11 The report precisely records the full range of Maori demands: from the recognition of indigenous property rights in taonga species to a right of veto over bioprospecting and the use of genetic resources, from the protection of the kaitiaki relationship to the protection of indigenous knowledge relating to native species. As for the Crown, its position was clearly to deny any property rights deriving from the exercise of guardianship.
27 In this difficult context, the recommendations of the report are hinged upon the necessity to find a compromise solution for both parties. For the Waitangi Tribunal, it is clearly paramount that the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi should be upheld in the final proposals12. Because those principles give protection to Maori as one of the founding peoples of the nation, what is essential is to define the extent of that protection in relation to the claim. However, the need to take into account the Crown’s position, economical interests together with the interests of non-Maori New Zealanders qualifies this protection.
28 In order to achieve this complicated balancing act, the Tribunal operates a rather stunning reversal of argumentation. We have noted that the Maori version of the Treaty is to be used in court decisions or in recommendations by the Waitangi Tribunal, an approach adopted by the Tribunal itself in the early 1980s. This is due to the fact that Maori is the language which at the time would have been most likely to convey the full implications of the Treaty to the native signatories.13 It is for this reason that the concept of Maori chieftainship or authority (tino rangatiratanga) is constantly referred to, as opposed to the term “possessions” in the English version. But in this case, Maori claimants are asking for native property rights to be vested in taonga species, based on the English version of the Treaty. The Tribunal answer is then very clear: on the basis of all the evidence reviewed, the Treaty does not recognize any property rights to Maori in taonga species. What is protected instead is the exercise of guardianship as a manifestation of tino rangatiratanga, certainly not exclusive property rights based on western concepts of intellectual property: “We conclude that the Treaty does not provide for Māori ownership of taonga species or their genetic and biological material. Rather, it is the kaitiaki relationship with the taonga species that is entitled to a reasonable degree of protection.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 189).
29 In the same way, Maori cannot exercise a right of veto over the exploitation of certain native species, even when that exploitation is derived from the unauthorized use of native knowledge (for instance relating to the medicinal use of plants). The reason is that a lot of this knowledge has been made public since the beginnings of colonization, through various books and publications: We conclude that the Treaty does not provide for Māori ownership of mātauranga Māori [indigenous knowledge] at least where the knowledge is already publicly known, but that kaitiaki have a right to acknowledgement and to have a reasonable degree of control over the use of mātauranga Māori. Where mātauranga Māori is used commercially, the kaitiaki interest must be given better recognition. (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 189).
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30 As a consequence, the Tribunal recommends a case by case approach involving consultation of Maori communities and balancing the interests of research and development and those of local kaitiaki. The general idea is to associate Maori in the management of New Zealand’s biodiversity. The Tribunal holds that specific consultation mechanisms must be set up, but not simply in passing, as has been done in some areas.14 On the contrary, those mechanisms must make sure that the Maori voice is heard and that the exercise of guardianship is protected. The Tribunal is also careful to insist on the fact that the current situation must be reformed because of the preeminence of the western approach: “The legal and policy frameworks are established principally to serve the interests of research and commerce […] as viewed through the lens of te ao Pakeha.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 192). To summarize, the idea is to draw the full implications of the Maori worldview which forms the basis of the Maori claim: In keeping with the Māori preference for holism, it is the relationship as a whole that is entitled to protection, not any property right in genetic and biological resources such as, for example, the potential of its isolated genes. It is the fact that Māori identity is embedded in the species that creates a just claim, not any Western scientific dissection or conception of property. Accordingly, a reasonable degree of Māori control over the use of the genetic and biological resources of taonga species is justified under the principles of the Treaty. (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 194. Emphasis mine).
31 This means that the Maori concept of guardianship is recognized but does not translate into western property rights. The Tribunal considered that the research and development sector represented a valid interest in this matter. However, this does not give complete freedom to either the Crown or private interests: the “reasonable level of Maori control” which is to be exercised is in keeping with the latest international developments on intellectual property rights affecting indigenous peoples (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 197).
32 This mitigated approach also finds its justification in the Tribunal’s desire to strengthen national unity and work for what it perceives as the collective good. The Tribunal therefore insists on the “unifying dimension” of guardianship: These special relationships are not just for the benefit of Māori. They relate to this country’s unique flora and fauna within equally unique land and seascapes. They must now be seen to deserve protection as an element of national identity. For many New Zealanders, indigenous flora and fauna are not merely a resource to be exploited. Indigenous plants and wildlife are symbols of nationhood, and possess intrinsic value that requires protection. (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 197).
33 This is very much in tune with the discourse of national identity that the Tribunal has been delivering from its inception, a unifying discourse seeking to encompass the Maori element. As well as offering a public forum for the expression of Maori grievance over colonization, the Tribunal has been intent on defining New Zealand’s identity on the basis of biculturalism. This report is redundant with references to national identity and the inclusion of Maori: “This emphasis on partnership makes New Zealand unique among the post-colonial nations (such as the United States, Canada, and Australia) with which we are most often compared.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 197). Consequently, Maori involvement in decision-making on the basis of their traditional worldview is presented as beneficial for the nation as a whole: The ability of kaitiaki to protect their relationships with taonga species also serves the interest of all New Zealanders in fostering the preservation of New Zealand’s
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biodiversity. Protecting the kaitiaki interest and conserving indigenous flora and fauna are two sides of the same coin. (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 197).
34 The general compromise that the tribunal is trying to work out should therefore be used as a basis to move beyond grievance and establish a positive relationship not only between Maori and the Crown, but also between Maori and non-Maori New Zealanders. Numerous references to Maori symbols reinforce this view. For instance, the chapter of the report dealing with the issue of conservation and the management of national parks delivers recommendations inspired from the Maori tradition. Instead of simply imposing a strict conservationist approach which would tend to exclude Maori traditional practices – such as ‘customary harvest’ or ‘customary use’ of taonga present in conservation areas – and limit access to those taonga, it insists on combining conservation with the Maori concept of guardianship: The ‘kaitiaki conservation’ approach we recommend requires the weaving together of two approaches to conservation – the preservationist approach and that of kaitiakitanga. This synthesis is reflected in the flight of the tūī, which is often likened to a stitching or weaving action. (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 369).
35 The principle that the Tribunal is systematically putting forward is that of a close association between government bodies, local authorities and Maori tribes (iwi). Only such an association will reflect the spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi and enhance New Zealand’s national identity. For the Tribunal, it is high time to move beyond the settlement of historical grievances and to adopt mechanisms that will ensure effective Maori partnership in the management of the environment and give the tribes “control.” To quote the report, it is time to give guardianship “effective influence and appropriate priority.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: 285-286).
Conclusion
36 Beyond the legal issues, the significance of the claim and its resonance for New Zealand as a nation is highlighted by the new title chosen by the Waitangi Tribunal for the final report Ko Aotearoa Tenei: “This is Aotearoa” or “This is New Zealand”. Clearly, the ambition of the Tribunal here was not only to deal with technical issues pertaining to intellectual property and customary law or indigenous knowledge. The Tribunal has placed the whole claim within the framework of defining a national identity for New Zealand. What is the place of Maori culture in New Zealand? Which framework would both respect the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi and the necessity of economic development for the country? How can Maori be included in this development?
37 Although their fundamental values were upheld, in particular the concept of guardianship and their special relationship to the environment, Maori were not given extra protection in the field of property rights applying to the native biodiversity. Although the inclusion of Maori in the New Zealand economy also appeared as a major concern for the Tribunal, the means to achieve this inclusion are not clearly defined. The tribunal calls for a true partnership to be put in place, but its recommendations are not binding. However, the Ko Aotearoa Tenei report appears as a vibrant plea for a revitalized biculturalism which would enable the nation to move beyond grievance and conflict in order to “unlock Maori potential for the benefit of the country as a whole.” (Waitangi Tribunal 2011: xxv). For the Tribunal, Maori must become more than a peripheral concern for government.
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38 For Maori, the conclusions of the Waitangi Tribunal could come as a disappointment. In an increasingly multicultural nation, the Maori minority finds itself marginalized and its culture under siege. Competing in the global economy while preserving a holistic approach to the world may appear as an impossible challenge for Maori communities. In this context, the merit of the Waitangi Tribunal report is both to present very accurate picture of the situation and to raise the alarm: the experts have delivered their report, now it is time for politicians to implement the necessary changes if New Zealand is to remain true to its founding principles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
New Zealand Tourism Board. “Maori culture: kaitiakitanga: protecting New Zealand”. 100% Pure New Zealand.com [Online]. New Zealand Tourism Board, Retrieved December 6, 2011.
MCCLEAN, Robert and Trecia SMITH. The Crown and Fauna and Flora: Legislation, Policies and Practices 1983-98. Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, Waitangi Tribunal Publication, 2001. [Online]. Waitangi Tribunal, retrieved 30 November 2011,
Ministry For the Environment. The New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy, Our Chance to Turn the Tide Whakakohukihukitia Te Tai Roroku Ki Te Tai Oranga. Wellington: MFE, February 2000.
Resource Management Act 1991 No 69, Public Act. [Online] New Zealand Government and Parliamentary Counsel Office, retrieved 30 November, 2011,
Waitangi Tribunal. Report of the Waitangi Tribunal on the Manukau Claim. Wellington: Government Printer, WAI 04, 1983.
Waitangi Tribunal. Ahu Moana: the Aquaculture and Marine Farming Report. Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, WAI 953. Waitangi tribunal Report 2002, 2002.
Waitangi Tribunal. Ko Aotearoa Tenei: A Report into Claims Concerning New Zealand Law and Policy Affecting Maori culture and Identity. Volume 1, Te Taumata Tuara. Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, WAI 262. Waitangi Tribunal Report 2011, 2011.
[Online]. Waitangi Tribunal, retrieved 10 July 2011.
Secondary sources
DUMONT, Louis. Homo Aequalis : Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.
DURIE, Mason. “Race and Ethnicity in Public Policy - The New Zealand Experience.” Social Policy Journal, n°24 (April 2005): 1-11. [Online]. Ministry of Social Development New Zealand, retrieved
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November 30, 2011.
DURIE, Mason. “The Ethics of Indigeneity”. Ninth Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR9), Auckland: Massey University, 2008: 4-23. [On line]. Health Research Council of New Zealand, retrieved December 6, 2011.
MUTU, Margaret. “Ngati Kahu kaitiakitanga.” Māori and the environment: kaitiaki. R. Selby, P. Moore & M. Mulholland, eds. Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2010. 13-35.
SHARPLES, Pita. “Foreword.” Māori and the environment: kaitiaki. R. Selby, P. Moore & M. Mulholland, eds. Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2010. vii-ix.
SOLOMON, Maui. « The Wai 262 Claim: A Claim by Maori to Indigenous Flora and Fauna: Ma o Ratou Taonga Katoa. » Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi. Michael Belgrave, Kawharu, Merata and Williams, David, ed. Victoria: Oxford University Press, 2005, 213-232.
SOLOMON, Maui. “A long wait for justice.” Resistance: an Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism. Maria Bargh, ed. Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2007. 75-84.
WILLIAMS, David V. “Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Unique Relationship between Crown and Tangata Whenua.” Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi. J. H. Kawharu, ed. Auckland: University of Oxford Press, 1989. 64-91.
WILLIAMS, David V, “The Constitutional Status of the Treaty of Waitangi: An Historical Perspective”. New Zealand Universities Law Review vol. 14. (June 1990): 16-18.
NOTES
1. “It is well settled that any rights purported to be conferred by such a Treaty of cession cannot be enforced by the courts, except in so far as they have been incorporated in municipal law.” : Te Heuheu Tukino v Aotea District Maori Land Board [1941] NZLR 590), Privy Council. 2. Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975; Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act 1985. 3. See: New Zealand Maori Council v Attorney-General [1987] 1 NZLR 641, 663. 4. Biculturalism became an official policy under David Lange’s Labour government in the mid 1980s. By the late 1900s –early 2000s, the term started to be phased out, as new immigration policies had changed the traditional pakeha/ Maori make-up of the New Zealand population. Today, New Zealand presents itself as a multicultural rather than bicultural nation. 5. Under the heading “Maori culture”, the official New Zealand Tourism Board website 100% Pure New Zealand includes a popularized version of the kaitiakitanga concept destined to potential tourists planning a trip to New Zealand (New Zealand Tourism Board 1999-2011). 6. Agenda 21 was issued following the Earth summit in Kyoto in 1992. 7. The second volume of the report actually deals with te reo, that is the Maori language. It was released as a pre-report in 2010. Chapter 1 of the first volume deals with taonga (treasures) associated with Maori culture, such as traditional tattoo designs, the haka, sculpture, weaving, etc. 8. Pakeha refers to the New Zealand population of British descent. 9. The glaring discrepancy between the English version of the Treaty and the Maori version has been the stumbling block for Treaty interpretation from the beginning: “The Maori text predicates a sharing of power and authority in the governance of the country between Crown and Maori. The English text is about a transfer of power, leaving the Crown as sovereign and Maori as subjects.” (Williams 1989: 79-80).
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10. New Zealand governments so far have eschewed the issue of the proper constitutionalization of the Treaty of Waitangi which, under the common law, remains subject to the principle of the omnipotence of Parliament. Its force is recognized through certain Acts of Parliament and through a number of Court decisions which have become precedents. On this issue see David Williams (Williams 1990: 16-18). 11. New Zealand domestic law currently provides no such protection. In reviewing the latest developments in international law, the Waitangi Tribunal expresses surprise at the fact that the Crown has not taken any steps so far to translate those into domestic law, particularly section 7 of the Nagoya Protocol. This international instrument was adopted in 2010 by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD 1992). It recommends fair and equitable benefits sharing arising from the utilization of genetic resources. 12. Those principles have been repeatedly spelled out by various reports of the Tribunal; they comprise effective partnership (resulting from the concept of tino rangatiratanga: highest authority or chieftainship), active protection (of Maori taonga or treasures), duty to consult and the principle of redress, “required where the Crown fails actively to protect Maori interests” (Waitangi Tribunal 2002: 71). 13. This is the common law contra proferentem rule of interpretation of a contract, which the Waitangi Tribunal decided to use in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi from 1983. 14. For example in the existing consultation mechanisms relating to the authorization of genetically modified organisms.
ABSTRACTS
The definition of Maori as tangata whenua - literally the people of the land – has been the basis of contemporary Maori activism building on an indigenous version of political ecology. As a consequence, the Maori concept of kaitiaki or guardian of the environment has now become a feature of New Zealand mainstream culture. It has been used to legitimate the claims being brought forward within a western legal framework in the Waitangi Tribunal – an official New Zealand body in charge of examining alleged violations of Maori rights and privileges originally granted in 1840 by the Treaty of Waitangi signed with the British Crown. This communication focuses on the Flora and Fauna Treaty of Waitangi Claim (WAI 262) which deals with indigenous biodiversity and the indigenous system of knowledge relying on this biodiversity. It provides an illustration of conflicting issues over global capitalism and western concepts of intellectual property, versus an indigenous holistic worldview.
Depuis la fin des années 70, la définition des Maoris comme tangata whenua, littéralement « le peuple de la terre », fonde un militantisme contemporain se nourrissant d’une version autochtone de l’écologie politique. En conséquence, depuis les vingt dernières années le concept maori de kaitiaki ou gardien de l’environnement fait partie de la culture néo-zélandaise grand public. Mais l’écologie politique continue de structurer le discours politique maori de manière plus fondamentale et a été utilisée pour légitimer les plaintes déposées devant le Tribunal de Waitangi, structure juridique occidentale et autorité néo-zélandaise officielle chargée d’instruire les allégations de plaintes pour violation des droits et privilèges accordés à l’origine aux Maoris par le Traité de Waitangi, signé en 1840 avec la Couronne britannique. Cette communication a pour objet la plainte déposée depuis 1991 concernant la faune et la flore (WAI 262) et qui
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s’applique à l’ensemble de la biodiversité indigène ainsi qu’au système de connaissance lié à cette biodiversité. Elle illustre les conflits contemporains entre capitalisme global, concept occidental de propriété intellectuelle et vision autochtone holiste du monde.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Nouvelle-Zélande, peuple autochtone, maori, réconciliation, Traité de Waitangi, droit coutumier, biodiversité Keywords: New Zealand, Indigenous people, Maori, reconciliation, customary law, Treaty of Waitangi, biodiversity
AUTHOR
CORINNE DAVID-IVES Corinne David-Ives is an associate professor at the University of Rennes 2. She defended her PhD on the discourse of national identity in New Zealand in 2008. Her research today focuses on the management of ethno-cultural diversity in New Zealand, on indigenous peoples’ rights in the former British colonies of settlement and on the relations between indigeneity and political ecology. Corinne David-Ives est maître de conférences à l’université de Rennes 2. Elle a soutenu une thèse en 2008 sur le discours de l’identité nationale en Nouvelle-Zélande. Elle consacre aujourd’hui ses recherches à la gestion de la diversité ethnoculturelle en Nouvelle-Zélande, aux droits des peuples autochtones dans les anciennes colonies de peuplement britanniques et aux relations entre autochtonie et écologie politique.
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“This land is me”: Indigenous Australian story-telling and ecological knowledge
Susan Barrett
1 A song in the 2001 film One Night the Moon by the Australian director Rachel Perkins neatly summarises the difference between the white Australian and the Indigenous Australian relationship to the land. White Australians see the land as something to be exploited for monetary gain, as the farmer says: “This land is mine.” The Indigenous Australians, on the other hand, see themselves as an extension of the land and the black tracker says: “This land is me.” The film is set in the 1930s but the “whitefella” idea of the land being there for man to exploit continues to be relevant today.
2 This is of course a somewhat simplistic vision and does not mean that all white Australians are indifferent to the natural world and that all Indigenous Australians respect it. Recent research suggests, for example, that it was the hunting practices of the first Aborigines, rather than climate change, which caused the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna while Dr John Magee and Dr Michael Gagan from the Australian National University have even gone as far as to argue that it was Aboriginal burning of the landscape which “triggered the failure of the annual Australian monsoon over the interior by altering the flora enough to decrease the exchange of water vapour between the biosphere and atmosphere” (Morgan) thus creating the central Australian desert and transforming Lake Eyre from a freshwater lake into a huge salt flat. Nevertheless, the idea of exploiting the land for monetary gain was clearly something that arrived with the Europeans since traditional Aboriginal life was based around giving and communal sharing, not selling for individual profit.
3 Mining is a particularly good example of how the appetite for financial gain leads to the wanton destruction of the natural environment. The mining industry accounts for 35% of Australia’s exports, one of the highest rates in the world, and the mine owners have a huge lobbying power. The attempt to change the way the profits of mining industries are taxed by introducing a “Resource Super Profit Tax” of 40%, for example, was one of the reasons which led to Kevin Rudd being ousted as Prime Minister in 2010. And yet,
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mining has always been hugely destructive for the Australian environment; Wittenoom in Western Australia, for example, was the site of an asbestos mine from 1943 to 1966 and contamination is such that in 2006 the State government took the rare decision to de-gazette the town, removing it from maps and closing all access roads to it. In Queensland, the acid run-off from gold and copper mines at Mount Morgan from 1882 to 1991 has left the Dee River a strange orange colour, totally devoid of fish and algae for a twenty kilometre stretch. In a country whose nickname is “The Dry Country,” this contamination of water ought to be particularly worrying but all too often, when faced with the huge lobbying powers of the mining companies, the government would rather invest in the uncertain technology of desalination plants than implement measures to avoid the initial pollution of the water table.
4 However, despite the apparent indifference of those in power, in these times of worry about climate change and global warming, an increasing number of White Australians are starting to believe that the Indigenous population possess useful knowledge about the management of natural resources. After all, for tens of thousands of years the Aborigines lived a stable existence in inhospitable environments where the first Europeans were unable to survive. A good example of the new ‘recognition’ of Indigenous knowledge can be found in The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, 1999 (the EPBC Act). This Act is described on the Australian Government website as the “central piece of environmental legislation” which “provides a legal framework to protect and manage nationally and internationally important flora, fauna, ecological communities and heritage places.” There is nothing particularly remarkable about the act itself but what is worthy of note is that it is assisted by the Indigenous Advisory Committee, which was set up in order to “[take] into account the significance of Indigenous people’s knowledge of the management of land and the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.” Another example of ‘official’ recognition of traditional knowledge can be found in the 2011 edition of the journal Ecology and Society which included a special feature entitled, “Integrating Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Science in Natural Resource Management: Perspectives from Australia,” while the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, has several projects which confront “non-Indigenous ‘western’ science-based perspectives” with “Indigenous values and knowledge systems”, such as the “Aboriginal knowledge partnerships for water planning and assessment in the Wet Tropics region.”
5 This Indigenous knowledge of the land is embedded in the stories of the Dreaming which not only describe the creation of the world but also contain information about the nature of the landscape and the climate. For this reason the stories differ slightly from one region to another and Indigenous people are reluctant to use the term mythology to describe them, feeling that the word carries with it “connotations of untruthfulness and delusion” and that it fails to take into account the on-going relevance of these stories for contemporary life (Devlin-Glass 393). For a long time, only anthropologists took any real interest in the stories of the Dreaming. The majority of White Australians denigrated the Aboriginal belief in the Dreaming as being little more than a primitive, pre-scientific pseudo-religion. If they knew about the stories at all, it was from children’s books with endearing titles such as How Koala lost his tail (Adams). However, as Devlin-Glass has pointed out these stories are far more than children’s tales and white Australian ignorance has “robbed the narratives of their grounded and cosmological functions and obscured the ways in which they operate as a total cultural
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practice, involving, for example, religion, law, morality, economics, maps, cooking manuals and kinship” (394).
6 The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose describes Dreaming as “both a model for, and a celebration of life, as it is lived in the present” (44). For her, the fundamental rule of the Dreaming is balance; a balance in which all relationships and all parts are equal. Hunting for food, for example, is part of this healthy balance but wilful destruction of a whole species is not. Rose underlines the fact that, “a system cannot be life-enhancing if it is out of kilter”(44) and that “the potential is for a completely reflexive relationship: the person takes care of the country and the country takes care of the person […] Damage to people is damage to country. [… and] the reciprocal proposition is also true. Damage to country, and to Dreamings in particular, causes death or injury to people. Intention is not a factor” (107-8).
7 It is this inter-relationship of damage to country meaning damage to people that I would like to look at in Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006). It may at first sight seem rather incongruous to want to analyse actual ecological damage to the environment through a literary text but just as the stories of the Dreaming existed (and continue to exist) to teach people about the world, so too does both the fictional and autobiographical work of many contemporary indigenous writers. As Ruby Langford Ginibi said in an interview: “I write for myself and my people, but I also write for the white world, too, to educate them so they will know more about us and be less racist in their dealings with Aboriginal people” (Watson).
8 Alexis Wright is from the Waanyi people in North-West Queensland. She has for many years campaigned for Aboriginal rights; she was, for example, a co-ordinator for the Northern Territory Aboriginal Constitutional Convention in 1993 and in 2007 delivered a 10 000 word speech criticizing John Howard’s intervention in the Northern Territory. She believes that: “Writing for the sake of writing has no particular purpose. The world’s crying out for useful people to do useful things” (Vernay), but she also believes that writing can be a powerful tool: “I want our people to have books, their own books, in their own communities, and written by our own people. I want the truth to be told, our truths, so, first and foremost, I hold my pen for the suffering in our communities. Let it not be mistaken: suffering is widespread in our communities. I do not write stories of ‘getting on and getting by.’ (1998)
9 Wright’s first short story was published in 1996, and a year later she published two full- length books: a novel Plains of Promise, which tells the story of three generations of Aboriginal women affected by the policies of child removal and a documentary, Grog War, about the Aboriginal community at Tennant Creek and their attempts to restrict the sale of alcohol to members of the Indigenous community, attempts which were continuously thwarted by the Whites who owned the local bars. Her third book, and second novel, Carpentaria deals with “the deterioration of relationships between people in the communities of the Gulf from the negotiations to develop the Century Mine” (2007 : 94). Initially it was suggested that she write a “history of conflict between Aboriginals and the mining industry” (Aitken 21) but, while exploring ideas for what was to be a work of non-fiction, she found herself trying “to come to some understanding of two principal questions: firstly, how to understand the idea of Indigenous people living with the stories of all the times of this country, and secondly, how to write from this perspective” (2007 : 81). In the end, since story-telling occupies such a central role in the Indigenous way of life, Wright decided that a “work of art”
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(2007 : 84), in other words, a work of fiction, would be the best way of giving a voice to her people.
10 Carpentaria is set in the aptly named fictional town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria, in far North-West Queensland. The novel attributes the origin of the town’s name to the fictitious middle name of the explorer Matthew Flinders but for the reader it is an ironic reminder of the town of Esperance in Western Australia. Esperance was supposedly named by French explorers who took shelter there during a storm in 1792 but in 2007 it was hit by a violent storm which caused significant flooding which destroyed hundreds of homes and washed away part of the highway linking it to Perth. The white population of Desperance, who live in what the Indigenous population pejoratively refer to as “Uptown,” exist in a kind of limbo, cutting themselves off from both the Indigenous population, whom they consider to be inferior, and from the rest of White Australia, whom they consider to be ignorant of what life is really like in rural Australia. Their total disregard for urban Australians can be seen when the State Government decides to rename the town “Masterton” in the mistaken belief that this will improve the town’s image. The local inhabitants, however, refuse to use the new name, and simply pull the new signs down.
11 On the other hand, although the “Uptown” whites think they know the land better than the “Southerners,” right from the beginning of the novel, the narrator underlines the inability of the white population to ‘read’ the landscape and the climate. Desperance was built on the banks of a river and was “intended to serve as a port for the shipping trade for the hinterland of Northern Australia” (3) but, “during a Wet season in the last century, the town lost its harbour waters when the river simply decided to change course, to bypass it by several kilometres. Just like that. Now, the waterless port survives with more or less nothing to do” (3). Similarly, at the end of the novel, Will recognises the cyclone bird flying overhead and knows instantly that the sound of its song “was the sound which all species on earth must flee from when they hear it” (458). Not only do the white population not hear the bird, but they also fail to see the visual signs; the narrator comments that: “It was incongruous that with a clear view of the enormous clouds swinging across the coast, which ought to have been enough warning for anyone on earth that a cyclone was heading their way” (465) the residents should carry on chopping down trees in an attempt to get rid of the bats which roost in them. It is only when “The Bureau of Meteorology has called and translated the message from the ancestral spirits” (466) that the white population suddenly realise that they need to evacuate the town immediately.
12 Although white people’s relationship with the land is clearly a troubled one, the Indigenous characters do not all identify with the land in the same way and the novel thus reflects the complexity of the mining issue for Indigenous people. As Marcia Langton pointed out in her 2012 Boyer lecture: Most mining projects are located in remote and rural Australia; 60 per cent of them are located near Aboriginal communities. It is Aboriginal people who have borne the brunt of the impacts of mining, and tamed the industry with a range of campaigns and strategies during the past half-century.
13 However, while many of these communities opposed the mines and the way they destroyed the land, Langton argues that for some Aboriginal people the mines, with their permanent jobs and regular salaries have had a positive effect as they have provided a way out of poverty and the indignity of welfare-dependent life in the Aboriginal reserves. She cites in particular the The Rio Tinto Alcan agreement, or Gove
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Mining Agreement, signed on 13 May 2011, which gives the Yolngu people in Arnhem land an economic stake in the bauxite mine on their land.
14 In Carpentaria the white Uptown thus separates two rival indigenous groups; Norm Phantom’s “Pricklebush” mob, who live on the Westside of the town beside the tip, and the Eastside mob with their leader Joseph Midnight, who live on the other side of the town. Norm Phantom is a man of the water rather than the land: “His ancestors were the river people, who were living with the river from before time began” (6) and he is equally at home on the river and out at sea. He is not really interested in other people and spends most of his time either fishing or turning other people’s prize catches into works of art. Joseph Midnight’s group, on the other hand are neither land, nor river people but recent arrivals who have come from “all over the place” (52), lured to Desperance by “the hint of big bickies to be had from big mining” (52) as a result of the Native Title Laws. To be able to claim the money, Midnight’s mob tell everyone they are the “real traditional landowners” (52) but their tribal name, Wangabiya, is a made up one and they have no more respect for the land than the white people. The town’s cane toad plague, for example, is the result of Midnight deliberately bringing cane toads into the area in order to claim the government’s 50c bounty payment for catching them.
15 A third indigenous group is also present in the novel. This last group are not permanent residents at Desperance but the modern equivalent of the nomadic Aboriginal people. Mozzie Fishman is convinced of the importance of continuing to sing the land in order to maintain life, and travels from place to place, following ancestral traditions. However, he has no qualms about modernising the ceremony and he and his group travel the traditional songlines in a “thirty-car procession” of “second-hand Falcon sedans and Holden station wagons of 1980s vintage” (119). Thus “the pilgrims drove the roads knowing they had one aim in life. They were totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony from thousands of creation stories for the guardians of Gondwanaland” (124). There is, however, one slight problem: “It was hard for spirits to keep up when vehicles travelled faster than a person could run” (365), an ironic comment on the way in which, despite all their efforts, Indigenous people are gradually losing touch with their traditional ways.
16 Shortly before the novel starts, Desperance has been “saved” from its slow decline by the arrival of an American-run mining company: “Gurrfurritt” (a deformation of “go for it”), which provides employment for both the white and black inhabitants. The mine is there thanks to Midnight, who saw it is a means of making money and who has no interest in protecting Country. This was what he got for agreeing to the mine. The government gave him a lot of money, a thousand dollars, and said, Go out there and shoot […] all the feral pigs. […] He was supposed to exterminate them from the entire Gulf of Carpentaria once and for all but he never did that. He let his useless relatives take all the little baby piglets home for pets and they bred up ten piglets each. (52-3)
17 While two of Norm’s sons accept employment at the mine, another son Will, sets out to sabotage it. The ease with which he is able to do so, highlights the fragility of the white man’s exploitation of the land and, although the brutality of the mine’s reaction leaves no doubt about how important material wealth is to white society, it also illustrates how wrong these values are. Murandoo Yanner, one of the leaders of the ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the construction of the Century-Zinc mine (the second
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biggest zinc mine in the world) in the Gulf country, and to whom Wright dedicated the novel, commented to a journalist: ‘What’s alive in this room?,’ he asks, sitting in a Brisbane coffee lounge. ‘These tables are dead, the carpets are dead, even the air outside is dead. You sit in the bush for a second, even the sticks have life, go crack crack crack when you stand on them. A bird swoops, leaves fall, ants come out and take them to their holes. The sun, the shade, the trees, everything has life. Chief Seattle said, when the last tree has been felled, the last fish caught, only then will they realise they can’t eat money.’ (Button)
18 For Wright, one of the challenges was how to convey the Indigenous sense of time as a continuum rather than a linear process, something which is important as a way of showing that humans have always and will always be linked to the land. From the very first page of the novel, the narrator situates the story firmly in the Dreaming. The first chapter, which is entitled “From Time Immemorial” begins: The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity. […] It came down those billions of years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly, all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into – scouring down through – the slippery underground of the mud flats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. (1)
19 The Rainbow Serpent lies at the heart of the novel’s ecological knowledge. The snake’s movements account for the reshaping of the landscape, for the monsoon-type rains, floods and tidal waves. However, “invisible things in nature made no sense to Uptown because of their savoir-faire in being Australians” (77). The tenuous nature of their “ savoir faire” is illustrated by the fact that white memory relies on documents rather than people: “No living soul remembered what the port had looked like before. No picture could be put on display in a showcase at the museum of scarce memorabilia because no one at the time of the heyday thought it was worthwhile to take a photo” (8). Indigenous knowledge, on the other hand, persists because it is oral knowledge. When Will needs to go into hiding from the police and the mine security guards he seeks the help of Joseph Midnight. Somewhat surprisingly, since Midnight has never seemed particularly interested in the traditional Aboriginal way of life: “The old man gave him the directions to the safe place in his far-off country – a blow-by-blow description sung in song, unravelling a map to a Dreaming place had never seen. […] a ceremony [he] had never performed in his life before, and now, to his utter astonishment he passed it on to Will” (375). This sudden, remembrance of ancestral knowledge emphasises the strength of the Indigenous relationship to the land; it may not be at the forefront of their preoccupations but it is never forgotten.
20 Thus, like all other white attempts to modify the landscape, destructive as it is for the environment, the mine is also fragile. Will’s first sabotage attempts are simple but surprisingly effective and leave the mine owners’ and technicians puzzled about what went wrong with their technical plans. It is white rubbish which allows the fire to take hold properly: “the old Pizza Hut box someone had left on top of one of those bowsers that added that little bit of extra fuel” (411), but it is the spirit of the land which protects the Indigenous men who have come to rescue Will, from the force of the fire: “they were thrown down for shelter behind the boulders, in the fold of the ancestral spirit who governed the land” (407). The fire thus destroys the mine but importantly the Aboriginal characters recognise it not just as the end of the mine but as the start of a “new beginning” for fire in Australia is life-giving – certain plants, such as banksias,
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will only germinate after their seeds have been burnt in a bushfire and heated to temperatures above 400°C.
21 After escaping from the mine, Will takes to the sea in search of his wife and child and ends up on an island formed from the detritus of the cyclone. The birds are the first to “accept the drifting structure as a new land” (495); their droppings fertilise it allowing plants to take root, the seeds either blown in by the wind, or washed up by the sea. The arrival of bees and an earthworm “in a single rotting tomato” (495) ensure that the plants flourish and the island provides Will with everything he needs: food, shelter and water. Will’s arrival on the island can be read as a symbolic parallel of the arrival of the whites in Australia but unlike the whites, who immediately tried to exploit the land, Will is initially interested in maintaining the balance on the island and every night he stays awake “to sing the Fishman’s ceremonial song cycles” (496). Eventually, however, solitude weighs on his mind and he longs for rescue, wondering “would the discoverers call the sole inhabitant on his sinking oasis: a native” (502)?
22 By the end of the novel, the town of Desperance has been flattened and the white inhabitants have fled, leaving only their “bony, hollow-ribbed” dogs behind. These dogs have been so shocked by the cyclone that they have become “speechless, dumbfounded, unable to crack a bark” (518), although Norm shoos them off, and it is possible to read them as symbols of their white owners who have also been left “speechless” by the violence of the cyclone, it can also be read more optimistically as the first stage of the dogs’ adaptation to the Australian landscape, since dingoes do not bark but howl, and if the dogs are capable of adapting then, the novel seems to suggest, perhaps white Australians are too. Moreover, although the town no longer physically exists, Norm Phantom, guided by gropers, knows he has come back to the “right” place and that he has come “home”: With the boat secured on the wet land, Norm stared ahead, trying to survey the landscape for familiar landmarks. In every direction he looked he could not discover one familiar feature of Desperance. […] Could he be wrong? No! No! This is right. I was right.’ He mumbled, still confident that he had navigated correctly. They were home. […] In his heart, Norm knew he had no more journeys to make. […] He continued walking ahead, down his memory of the main street of Desperance […] sizing up the landscape, already planning the home he would rebuild on the same piece of land where his old house had been, among the spirits in the remains of the ghost town, where the snake slept underneath. (516-9)
23 The novel thus ends optimistically. The snake brings destruction in the form of the cyclone but it also brings renewal. The cyclone is merely a repetition of the original Dreaming story with which the novel opened. There is nothing either unexpected or alarming about the cyclone – if anything for the Indigenous population it is even beneficial since it rids them of the white town. As Joseph Midnight says “The country looked dirty from mining, shipping, barges spilling ore and waste. Something had to run a rake across the lot” (401) and this is precisely what the cyclone has done; levelled the land to start afresh. This is also in keeping with the Indigenous belief that White Australia is ultimately insignificant – a mere two hundred years in tens of thousands of years of existence and, while white actions have had disastrous consequences for many individuals, they are ultimately unable to damage the land itself. Wright explicitly refers to this in an interview she gave on the writing of the novel: A friend once said to me while we were looking at the Gregory River… that the white man had destroyed our country. He pointed out the weeds growing profusely over the banks—burrs, prickles and other noxious introduced plants grew
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everywhere. It would take decades to eradicate the past decades of harm . . . What he said was true, but what I saw was the mighty flow of an ancestral river rushing through the weeds, which were only weeds fruitlessly reaching down into the purity of this flowing water . . . The river was flowing with so much force I felt it would never stop, and it would keep on flowing, just as it had flowed by generations of my ancestors, just as its waters would slip by here forever. (2007 : 79)
24 However, as Paul Sharrad has pointed out, this creates a possible double-bind problem; without a vision of hope, readers may find the book too depressing but if we accept that the Indigenous view of the world is correct, and that the country will survive no matter what, then the problems which the novel highlights need not be taken too seriously after all. It would thus seem that there is some justification to Tony Hughes d’Aeth’s claim that although Australian writers have always been interested in the environment, the emergence of literary eco-criticism has been much slower to emerge than in North America. And in many ways, Wright’s novel is an important First. Not only does it “[revision] the Dreamtime mythology as an alternative form of scientific discourse, ethno-biology/geography/climatology based in the observation of forces of nature over many thousands of years” (Devlin Glass 393) but it does so in a form that is attractive to white readers, in other words to those with the power to change things. As one of those white readers commented when reviewing the book: “Why does this book move me deeply? Because it stirs up feeling on how one might live in tune with the ecology of place, the cycles of the cosmos? A parable about how, if we don’t live in this way, nature and her beings – ‘the elements’ – make retribution?” (Sharp).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAMS, Lee & G. ADAMS. How Koala Lost His Tail and Other Australian Stories. Sydney: Collins, 1984.
AITKEN, Tom. “A mine in Desperance” Times Literary Supplement. 16.05.2008: 21.
Australian Government “Indigenous Australians Caring For Country” . [Online]. Last update [30.11.2011]. http://www.environment.gov.au/indigenous/index.html.
BUTTON, James. “Warrior from a far country” The Age. 13.7. 1996. . [Online]. Last update [30.09.2011]. http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aar/yanner.htm.
Central Queensland University “Still hope for one of Australia’s most severly polluted rivers”. 12 July 2007. Central Queenslan University News. [Online]. Last update [2.10.2011]. http:// uninews.cqu.edu.au/UniNews/viewStory.do?story=4384.
CSIRO. “Aboriginal knowledge partnerships for water planning and assessment in the Wet Tropics region.” . [Online]. Last update [12.01.2012]. https://web.archive.org/web/ 20140715040102/http://www.csiro.au/Organisation-Structure/Divisions/Ecosystem-Sciences/ Aboriginal-Knowledge-Partnerships-Report.aspx
DEVLIN-GLASS, Frances. “A Politics of the Dreamtime: Destructive and Regenerative Rainbows in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.” Australian Literary Studies 23.4 (2008): 392–407.
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Ecology and Society 16(2): 12. [Online]. Last update [30.11.2011]. http:// www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss2/art12/
HUGHES-D’AETH, Tony “Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment.” Australian Literary Studies 26.1 (2011): 110.
LANGTON, Marcia. “The conceit of wilderness ideology” 9.12.2012. Boyer Lectures 2012. [Online]. Last update [28.04.2013]. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/2012-boyer- lectures-234/4409022#transcript
LOWRY, Elizabeth. “The Fishman Lives the Lore.” London Review of Books 30.8 (24 April 2008): 26–27.
MORGAN, Amanda. “Burning caused megafauna extinction”. ANU Media Release 8 July 2005 [Online]. Last Update [27.04.2013]. https://web.archive.org/web/20110413060426/http://info.anu.edu.au/ ovc/Media/Media_Releases/2005/July/080705magee.
ROSE, Deborah Bird. Dingo Makes Us Human: life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
SHARP, Nonie. “Review of Carpenteria.” Island 111 (2007): 61–67.
VERNAY, Jean-Francois. “An Interview with Alexis Wright.” Antipodes 18.2 (2004): 119–122.
WATSON, Christine. “Interview with Ruby Langford Ginibi and Penny van Toorn”. 10.01.99. [Online] Last update [2.10.2011]. http://www.biomedsearch.com/article/Interview-with-Ruby- Langford-Ginibi/59222894.html.
WRIGHT, Alexis. “Breaking Taboos”. Australian Humanities Review, 1998. . [Online]. Last update [2.10.2011]. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-1998/ wright.html.
WRIGHT, Alexis. Carpentaria. Sydney: Giramondo 2006.
WRIGHT, Alexis. “On Writing Carpentaria.” Heat 13 (2007): 79–95.
ABSTRACTS
A song in the film One Night the Moon (Rachel Perkins, 2001), summarises the differences between the white Australian and the Indigenous Australian relationship to the land. White Australians see the land as something to be exploited for monetary gain (“This land is mine”) while Indigenous Australians see themselves as an extension of the land (“This land is me”). This paper focuses on Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006) whose structure is inspired by the traditional Indigenous Australian Dreaming stories. These stories were a way of handing down knowledge about the environment from one generation to the next and Carpentaria has a similar educational aim. By destabilising what White Australians think they know about Indigenous Australian culture and the Australian environment, the novel shows that Aboriginal mythology has both a political and an ecological relevance in today’s society.
Une chanson dans le film One Night the Moon (Rachel Perkins, 2001) résume la différence entre l’attitude des Australiens blancs et de la population indigène envers la terre. Les Australiens blancs voient la terre comme quelque chose qu’ils peuvent exploiter afin de s’enrichir personnellement (« Cette terre est à moi ») alors que les Aborigènes estiment qu’ils ne sont qu’un prolongement de la terre (« Cette terre est moi »). Cet article étudie Carpentaria (2006) d’Alexis Wright, un roman dont la structure est inspirée par les contes indigènes traditionnels du
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Dreaming. Ces contes étaient une façon de transmettre d’une génération à l’autre des connaissances de l’environnement dans lequel ils vivaient. Carpentaria a le même but éducatif ; en cherchant à déstabiliser l’image qu’ont les Australiens blancs de la culture aborigène le roman montre que la mythologie indigène a une pertinence à la fois politique et écologique dans la société contemporaine.
INDEX
Keywords: Wright Alexis, Carpentaria, Indigenous Australians, environment, storytelling Mots-clés: Wright Alexis, Carpentaria, australiens indigènes, environnement, storytelling
AUTHOR
SUSAN BARRETT Susan Barrett is a senior lecturer in the English department of Bordeaux 3 University. She works on South African and Australian fiction and is particularly interested in the representation of history and the writing of all those who exist on the margins of the dominant society, including white women in the colonial period and Indigenous people in contemporary Australia. She has published widely in both French and English-language journals. Susan Barrett est Maître de Conférences à l’Université de Bordeaux 3. Elle travaille actuellement sur la littérature sud-africaine et australienne et s’intéresse plus particulièrement à la représentation de l’histoire et à l’écriture de ceux et celles qui se trouvent en marge de la société dominante, que ce soit les femmes blanches à l’époque coloniale ou les Aborigènes dans l’Australie contemporaine. Elle a publié de nombreux articles en France et à l’étranger.
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Magical Realism, Spiritual Realism, and Ecological Awareness in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale
François Gavillon
1 Native American peoples are traditionally seen as being engaged in a dialogic relationship with the natural world, a world they do not perceive as an inanimate “out- there” but as a close relative, Mother Earth, whose inhabitants are all partners in life 1. Typically, the relationship is one of respect and reciprocity, but tradition is sometimes flouted. Linda Hogan’s latest novel, People of the Whale (2008) is in part a poetic envisionment of cultural alienation, ecological transgression and consequent natural retaliation: when the traditional ecology of give-and-take is violated by some of the A’atsika people, nature has its own way of talking back. Tsunami, fire, volcanic eruption, and more prominently drought, are nature’s responses to human offenses.
2 Hogan experimented with historical fiction with her first novel, Mean Spirit (1990). Set in Osage Indian territory in Oklahoma in the 1920s, the novel tells a story of violence, crime, and callous despoliation as oil is discovered on Native lands. Already noticeable is the blend of historical material and supernatural elements—physiological alterations, natural and meteorological aberrations, two dead bodies rising from their graves, “in a continuing parallel with the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ” (Casteel 62)—, characteristic of Hogan’s fictions. As in People of the whale, female protagonists are central: grandmother, mother and daughter Lila, Grace and Nola Blanket incarnate the novel’s moral, spiritual, and environmental ethics.
3 The action of Solar Storms, published in 1995, is set in the boundary waters between Canada and Minnesota. It is also a story of women, with seventeen-year-old protagonist and narrator Angel (Angela Jensen) returning to the land of her childhood and reconnecting with her female relatives—and with herself. It is a tale of heritage and coming-of-age, communality and individuality, but the novel also dramatizes the spiritual and physical bonds that unite the characters and their land. Symbolically, Angel’s scarred face embodies the disfiguration of ancestral lands. In Hogan’s fictions, environmental devastation characteristically parallels cultural disempowerment. The
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possibility of personal, communal and environmental healing is adumbrated when Angel sets out to fight the hydroelectric dam project that threatens to flood the area.2
4 Power, Hogan’s third fiction (1998), takes the reader to the Native homeland of the Taiga people of southern Florida. The story is told by sixteen-year-old Omishto whose divided allegiance to Euro-American culture and tribal culture is one of the loci of power conflicts that the novel fictionalizes. The dwindling of the Taiga is paralleled by the diminishing of wild habitats and the endangerment of one of their iconic animals, the Florida panther. In this other coming-of-age tale, two climactic events cause Omishto’s life to shift course: a hurricane of inordinate proportion cuts her from her familiar world; she witnesses her aunt Ama kill a panther, the sacred animal believed to be the ancestor of the Taiga people. From then on, Omishto tunes in to yet unexperienced realities, slowly awakening to the magic and sanctity of nature. For Amy Greenwood Baria, the novel opens on a “near suspension of reality” which “prefigures the alternative world” that Omishto will experience: Omishto’s isolation with Ama in the woods sets up the conflict of the novel by emphasizing its duality: the older, natural world and the outside, civilized world. And, although Omishto initially dismisses the idea of magic […] her post-hurricane experience with Ama and the Florida panther will alter the way she evaluates reality, allowing her the freedom to accept the magical as part of her Native culture. (Greenwood Baria 68)
5 People of the Whale is set among the A’atsika people of the Northwest, focusing on one seaside village, Dark River, where for thousands of years there has been—or used to be, that is the question—a particularly strong spiritual relationship with the sea and its inhabitants, especially the octopus and the whale. Although the setting of People of the Whale, is diametrically opposed to the geography of Power, thematic similarities with the previous novels are visible such as the spiritual connection between Native peoples (the elders, in particular) and sacred animals, rootedness in ancestral lands, problematic coexistence of tradition and modernity. Recurrent formal devices include central female narratorial and/or dramatic agency, and the admission of apparently supernatural elements in an otherwise realistic narrative—which is the simplest definition of magical realism.3
6 Is “magic realism” the best term to describe Hogan’s fiction? This is the first question that this study means to answer. We shall then see that Hogan’s special brand of realism proves a powerful tool to displace habitual oppositions (man v. nature) and expose anthropological-social (male v. female), historical-political (Euro-American v. Native-American), and ecological (respectful whale-hunting v. blind killing) unbalance. Finally, we shall show that by challenging standard polarities, Hogan’s uncanny realism effectively promotes the agency and loquacity of nature, and fosters a more empathetic form of reader’s response, ultimately conducive to ecological awareness and care.
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7 At first glance, Hogan’s People of the whale, with its blend of realism and magic occurrences, presents apparent similarities with fictions described as magic realist. In their valuable collection of essays, Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community (1995), co-editors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris identify several cultural elements which contribute to the characteristically defamiliarizing aspect of magical realism. Texts labeled magical realist, they say, often draw upon
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non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiricism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation. Their primary narrative investment may be in myths, legends, rituals—that is, in collective (sometimes oral and performative, as well as written) practices that bind communities together. (Zamora, Faris 3)
8 In her own essay, “Scheherazade’s Children,” (163-190) Wendy Faris lists five other elements: 1) the text contains an irreducible element of magic, 2) descriptions detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world, 3) the text invites contradictory understandings, thus arousing readerly hesitation and doubt, 4) the reader experiences the closeness or near-merging of two realms, one realist, the other magical, 5) the text redefines notions of time, space, and identity. Let us first examine whether People of the Whale aligns with the criteria recognized by Zamora and Faris.
9 Who are the A’atsika? Where exactly does the action take place and when? To begin with, the A’atsika are a fictional tribe, one among “the paddling nations,” a beautiful albeit vague denomination. The reserve and village where the story takes place are never clearly located. In fact, the narrator takes pains to cover the tracks: “It is a secret place, this world. You could say it is in Washington but that is too far north, by degrees and fathoms. I keep it a secret, the place, the people, though the world will soon hear about it” (Prologue 10-11).4
10 Defamiliarization also occurs because of the presence of “irreducible magic.” Several villagers are endowed with special powers as well as uncanny physical features. The main characters are, in fact, marked out for special fortunes: Witka, the grandfather, can stay under water for long times and “converse” (10) with the whales; his wife Mary (her Catholic name) can communicate with him across land, air and water: And then together, when he saw a whale, the two of them pleaded and spoke. Look how we are suffering. Take pity on us. Our people are small. We are hungry. It was said the whale listened mostly to the woman because who could ignore her pleading, singing, beautiful voice? (21)
11 Ruth, the heroine, is a tall girl, “[l]arge in spirit, strong in hand, big in heart” (27). She, too, is marked out for the sea: As an infant, Ruth was born with gill slits. It had happened before, children being born with gills, but her mother Aurora, said “It’s an omen. I don’t know what, but I don’t like it. She’s bound for water, this one, Like her father.” […] The midwife had to keep the baby in a zinc tub filled with water so she wouldn’t drown in air before they took her to a doctor in town. The gills were right in front of her ears. The doctors were baffled and it took many weeks to sew the gills together and keep Ruth Small breathing through her lungs. Later it seemed she heard things others didn’t. She heard through water, schools of fish and the whales before they surfaced. (27) Her son Marco, likewise, is “bound for water”: When he was born, Marco swam out of the birth canal hands first, like a diver. […] Ruth looked at every part of him, his perfect brown fingers. Then his toes. She laughed. “Well, no wonder, Doctor! Mother, look, he has some webbed toes! Of course he came out swimming.” Webbed feet were not unknown around those parts, but no one liked to admit it. […] They were a family not bound to land, that was for sure […]. Like the whales who were dependent on land, in many ways they lived in two elements. (33-34)
12 Elders, in particular, can show unusual aptitudes like communicating the old way, without exchanging words; they know how to sing the ocean and fish into propitious dispositions; they can stop fires and volcano lava, should nature speak in a catastrophic
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voice. Respect for the natural world, humility, faith characterize the elders, “the traditionalists” as the text calls them without contempt, who live across the bay, in the whitewashed houses, and still live, pray and teach the traditional way. Conversely, the younger generation is depicted as a lost generation. Many, particularly those who fought in Vietnam, have gone off course. Thomas, Ruth’s husband and Marco’s father, is one of them, too deep into his lies, guilt, and trauma to be able to reconnect with his kin and his people.
13 Tribal lore, traditions are endowed with special brilliance as only the rustic ways seem to celebrate and show respect for the natural environment that has sustained the tribe for so long. The phenomenal world is everywhere present. Nature manifests itself in its elemental beauty and force throughout the novel: in the volcanic rocks and blue sea of A’atsika country, in the brown paddies and green forests of Vietnam. This is how the novel begins: We live on the ocean. The ocean is a great being. The tribe has songs about the ocean, songs to the ocean. It is a place where people’s eyes move horizontally because they watch the long, wide sea flow into infinity. Their eyes follow the width and length of the world. Black rocks rise out of the ocean here and there, lending themselves to stories of sea monsters that might have consumed mere mortals. Several islands along the coast are tree-covered green jewels. (9)
14 We notice that the opening lines involve nature and humans as well as stories, and recognize nature as a living being. Common distinctions have already started to blur although nature is affirmed in its formidable presence.
15 The animal world is overwhelmingly present, too—animals of the sea mostly (but not exclusively): fish, whale, octopus. The day before Thomas was born, the whole village could see an octopus walk out the sea on all eight legs and take residence in a nearby cave. Although the word “trickster” is never mentioned in the novel, one reads of “shape-shifters and their deceits and witchery on humans” (17). As we shall see, the octopus plays a central part in the development of the plot.
16 The whale is obviously a highly determined animal figure in American literature. In the novel, it is synonymous with past and tradition (in A’atsika belief, a whale birthed the A’atsika people); it is also a metaphor for ecological harmony between human lifeways and the life of nature. The whale stands for time and place, immemorial time and universal place: He remembers when the whales used to pass by in great numbers. He would watch one, its great shining side, the eye with its old intelligence, the gentleness of it in the body covered with barnacle life and creatures. It was loved by his people. It was a planet. When they killed it, he thinks perhaps they killed a planet in its universe of water. (267)
17 Animals do not solely function as allegorical motifs in the vindication of ecological balance, they are also, and primarily, physical creatures, spiritual partners, whose living presence need be acknowledged and defended. Nowhere in the text do we find prolonged instances of ironic distance between the narrator’s voice and the characters’ perceptions and emotions. Hogan’s vindication of indigenous ecology is implicit in her protagonist’s spiritual connection to the other-than-human world around her. This is perhaps where a dividing line can, and should, be drawn between, say, Gabriel Garcia Márquez—whom Hogan acknowledges as an author she read and learned from (Harrison 164)—, whose magical realist texts are pervaded by narratorial irony, and Hogan’s fiction, whole-heartedly attentive to mysterious realities and adherent to a
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non-Western mode of being-in-the-world. In her 1985 landmark study, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy, Amaryll Chanady scrutinized magical realism in the light, not of cultural studies, but of the developments of structural poetics and narratology. The chief merit of her essay is to successfully define magical realism as a literary mode with specific narratological and modal aspects. One important modal characteristic is that The author of a magico-realist narrative […] implicitly presents the irrational world view as different from his own by situating the story in present-day reality, using learned expressions and vocabulary, and showing he is familiar with logical reasoning and empirical knowledge. The term “magic” refers to the fact that the perspective presented by the text in an explicit manner is not accepted according to the implicit world view of the educated implied author. (Chanady 1985: 22)
18 Although People of the whale is set in its own “present-day reality,” a pedestrian world of modular houses and styrofoam coffee cups, coke machines and Johnnie-Cash haircuts, one never feels the “authorial reticence” that Chanady sees as constitutive of the magico-realist mode.5 Like the young heroines of Solar Storms and Power, Hogan is also in a mediating position between two worlds and two cultures.6 Mediation does not accord with ironic aloofness, however; it means implication and sincerity. For Jonathan Steinwand, Hogan’s protagonists are “[m]arginalized and indigenous peoples,” “liminal figures negotiating the boundaries of the dominant “civilization” and wild nature, of traditional premodern and postmodern late capitalist life-styles” (Steinwand 184). But more importantly The novelists themselves negotiate their liminal positions as cosmopolitan global cultural ambassadors with specific connections that allow them access to the lives of the insiders who dwell more permanently in the locales. Their audiences also include cosmopolitan readers lured by the postcolonial and the ecopastoral exotic. (Steinwand 185)7
19 In the face of engaged authorial negotiation and narratorial adherence to plot and characters, one can hardly describe Hogan’s novels as magical realist texts. Examining what he saw was a major innovative aesthetic strategy in the novels of writers Edna Escamill, Kiana Davenport and Linda Hogan, Patrick Murphy dismissed the label “magical realism” and suggested another term, more indicative of these novelists’ spiritual implication: “spiritual realism.”8 The spirituality these women authors represent, like their sense of ecological responsibility and their inhabitational orientation, forms part of an alternative reality, which in the long haul will prove to be far less illusory than what passes for realistic in the current ecosuicidal milieu of transnational consumptionist culture. (Murphy 10)
20 Mean Spirit and Solar Storms are examples of fictions whose “major female characters engage in spiritual practices that connect them with a more-than-visual reality of interconnectedness among people, other animals, plants, environments, and the land itself” (Murphy 9). The same can be said of People of the Whale, with Ruth, Marco, and the elders engaging in other-than-intellectual interaction with their human and non- human environments. Insistence on the phenomenal world, reliance on non-Western modes of being-in-the world, ecological interdependency and spiritual connection with the other-than-human world are salient features of Hogan’s spiritual realist prose.
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21 Magical realism and spiritual realism may converge on common thematic and political grounds. Often visible in both literary modes is the propinquity between the historical and the imaginary. What does Hogan’s spiritual realism does to/with history, to/with culture, to/with gender? Zamora and Faris underline the potential of magical realism as both disrupting and enlightening force: Magical realist texts are subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monolithic political and cultural structures, a feature that has made the mode particularly useful to postcolonial cultures and, increasingly, to women. Hallucinatory scenes and events, fantastic/phantasmagoric characters are used […] to indict recent political and cultural perversions. History is inscribed, often in detail, but in such a way that actual events and existing institutions are not always priviliged and are certainly not limiting: historical narrative is no longer chronicle but clairvoyance. (Zamora, Faris 6)
22 In its own spiritual realist mode, People of the Whale powerfully exposes political, social, racial, environmental injustices. Part of the action takes place in Vietnam, sometime in the late sixties or early seventies (again time markers are wanting), which allows haunting descriptions of wartime atrocities. The war is a dehumanizing experience for Thomas and his friends. He had been watching keenly the split in the human heart, including his own. He took to the airfield and with orders to report to one of the worst places in the world. When they arrived he found himself seeing a river of blood and he was sick with it and the smell of gas, napalm with its ceaseless burning. God created it and what kind of a creature was this god, and he was afraid at first, then he hated, and then he was no longer Thomas. Monster. That’s what he was with brother M16 and AK and grenades. (175)
23 The smell of “human flesh, chemical, smoke, cordite, napalm, fear” (170-171) is always with him. The other men in his outfit have become killers and rapists of women and children. When they try to set fire to rice paddies that won’t burn, they contaminate them with chemicals. Entire forests are burned down. War destroys nature as much as it destroys human beings.
24 The analepses that revisit Thomas’s Vietnam experience bear witness to modern history, but Hogan’s novel is also an indictment of political cynicism and folly, past and present: Watching the bullets, the men surviving fire, the dying children, what the women saw on television gave them some truth and from then on American wars were not on the television because people would rise up against their own government if they saw what they had done. Then the back of this world, all across the land, began to break. Ruth herself heard the sound of its breaking, almost inaudible, but she could hear it, for her ears could even hear the fish and the whales. Hearing the country break, she knew nothing would ever be the same. (53)
25 Ruth and Marco still experience the old-time spiritual contact with the non-human world, the way their ancestors did. By contrast, Dwight and his clique represent acculturation, hypocrisy, violence, and greed. Dark River’s tribal council has covertly decided to end the moratorium on whale-killing and have their whale-hunt. The tribe has not been consulted, the elders and women have been excluded from the talks and the negotiations to sell the meat and fat to Japan have been kept a secret. Ruth and her mother, who oppose the hunt, are looked upon with suspicion and hostility. Aurora’s house is broken into, Ruth’s boat is ransacked, her dog is killed. People of the Whale is also a story of women, women of courage and resilience: Mary, Linda, Wilma, and also
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Lin, Thomas’s daughter. At the center of the social and diegetic web is Thomas’s abandoned wife, Ruth, “a woman who could stand alone in the world,” (30) whom the text likens less to the biblical figure than to an unsung Penelope. This is how the chapter entitled “The Wife of Marco Polo” begins: No one wrote about the wife of Marco Polo, the first journeyer. As far as one knew, no one wrote about the women who were left at home when their husbands were at war or searching for other worlds or traveling out of pure longing. […Ruth] didn’t know that the women gods on all the islands Odysseus visited awaited any traveling sailors around the Mediterranean, to keep them from returning home. (52)
26 If subversive defamiliarization successfully exposes historical, social and cultural aberrations, it is likely that spiritual realism will as powerfully engage another one of our modern world’s cultural ills: disregard for the natural world. One of the novel’s central episodes is the whale kill decided upon by the council and in which Thomas and his son Marco take part. From the start the cultural alibi is denounced as self-delusion: They argued treaty rights, and their return to tradition. Some of the reporters, especially the white men, thought the tribal hunters were men of mystery and spirit, foreign enough to their own America to be right. Yes, to return to their ways would be the right thing. After all America had done to them, they should be given that. When the animal rights activists arrived, the A’atsika men had to decide if they should have them removed by the police or if that would only look worse for their cause. (68)
27 It is ironic that the tribe’s hunters should side with the police, a force usually associated with Euro-American law and order, against the environmentalists. Indigenous environmental knowledge, respect for the animal land and water inhabitants are recurrent themes in Hogan’s novels. Concern for endangered species was visible in Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, and Power. In People of the Whale, however, because the men fail to respect the traditional ways—praising the whale, fasting, scrubbing themselves with cedar—the kill turns into a bloody fiasco. The men slaughter a young whale, and Marco is killed (we later learn that he was murdered). Soon after, a storm comes: “That night the breakers rose up and took the whale away. In the morning, to the dismay of the people, it was gone. In the water only the dozer and the winch remained” (100). As the weather conditions worsen, the narrative metaphorically aligns the breaking of the ocean with the breaking of the A’atsika people, for men also can be breakers. Then there was the massacre by the Americans seeking gold in the hills and even the babies and elders were bayoneted and shot. There were too few old women left to row and the Americans had burned the canoes so no one could escape. Still some had lived, and gone into the forest and pretended to be trees and thus became invisible, so there are people remaining today. (102) But the breaking went back further, to the Spanish, the Russians, the British, the teachers and American missionaries, the epidemics in 1910 that killed more than three fourths of the tribe, the enormous whaling boats that nearly brought the whales to extinction. A breaker was not just a wall of crashing water, even though people had spoken of the tsunami and collapsing earth walls. (106)
28 Ominous signs of meteorological disorder appear: words like “storm,” “tsunami,” “breakers,” “drought” start overrunning the text. “For every action there is a reaction,” (105) Ruth thinks, and Feather, the elder, prophesies: “Mark my words. There’s going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done. Maybe more than one wrong thing. There will be a drought,” the old man warned Ruth. “Get ready for it. N’a sina” (108). These are the concluding lines of Part One.
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29 The textual ecology of give-and-take, respect-and-offense, action-and-retaliation makes it clear that Nature has its own ways of manifesting itself—of talking back. As predicted, the drought begins. There are long days of sunlight; “the moon no longer pulls water back” (124); the sea is too warm, and nets remain empty. Finally, the people have to leave. For a day or two in the terrible new smell of the place of the receding sea, the drying seaweed, there is a caravan of leavers, some honking at others as if the reserve is a large city. As for Ruth, it seems to her that the wide sea is holding breath, waiting for something, calling for something. (127) They think about the whale and what they’ve done, who they have become in time, each person examining their own world. They do not feel the spirits that once lived in the fogs and clouds around them. The alive world is unfelt. They feel abandoned. (128)
30 Ruth remembers the old stories about the Rain Priest, the man that was once called when the signing of the treaty caused the old drought (130). A sacrifice is needed and Ruth, although she has lost so much already, is willing to pay. When the Rain Priest arrives into town no one recognizes him. He has good looks, long legs, a pony tail: a Jesus-like Rain Priest. He takes Ruth’s boat away (that is her sacrifice), and mysteriously, the rain starts falling and the ocean returns. The moment is one of revelation for the people, whose sense of identity and belonging is also restored: “The rain, through flooding, has returned the past to the people […] the past is still with them. They feel beauty again” (153-154). Revelation about who the Rain Priest really is is also experienced by the reader when old fisherman Vince comes into the café, saying that he has found Ruth’s boat, stranded in the middle of the water: “I saw an octopus climbing down out of it as I approached. I said to myself how strange it was, because it was so large and everyone knows how they hate boats, and yet I swear it looked straight at me like it wanted to be seen” (155).
31 Spiritual realism, we realize, is a powerful tool to restore nature as a living interlocutor in the dialogue between man and nature—an acting and speaking protagonist in its own right, who can at times turn into a violent antagonist. Hogan’s spiritual realism invests the literary vindication of environmental integrity in a holistic way. Cultural integrity and environmental integrity are conceived of as indissociable: traditional practices are based on respect for other-than-human nature, while nature, thus respected and preserved, brings self-respect and well-being to the society of women and men.
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32 If we want to make this literary investigation complete, we probably need to also ask what it means for a writer to elect spiritual realism as her or his preferred literary mode, and how, ultimately, reading spiritual realism impacts readerly habits and competence. Unlike magical realism, spiritual realism, as we have suggested, involves more than just style; it proceeds from some deeper engagement with the natural world. Yet, in his essay, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature,” (1967) Luis Leal wrote that Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open structures. What is the attitude of the magical realist toward reality? I have already said that he doesn’t create imaginary worlds in which we can hide from
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everyday reality. In magical realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts. (Zamora, Faris 121)
33 We see that magical and spiritual realisms may overlap as the same dedication to confronting reality can be seen in Hogan’s idiosyncratic brand of realism.9 Likewise, in 1949, Alejo Carpentier stressed that “To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith” (Zamora, Faris 86). Both Leal and Carpentier hold that magic is not in the writing but in phenomenal reality. Whereas “magical” realism emphasizes the importance of perception and representation, “magic” realism suggests that reality has something in it that is essentially magic.10 Many critics have commented on this distinction, often dichotomized as ontological v. phenomenological magic(al) realisms.11
34 When Hogan uses the word “magic,” she means the magic of the world, not literary strategy: “the land itself and the magic of it” (Harrison 166). Moreover, she does not mean it in the Euro-American sense of the word, as denoting something extraordinary, but precisely as that which is an integral part of reality and reality’s richness. The apparently supernatural elements that stick out in People of the Whale (gill slits and walking octopuses) are only surface devices that betoken a deeper belief in the interconnectedness of all things. It would be wrong however to ignore their poetic function. Books are written for readers to read and ideas to be conveyed. “You have to juggle a lot to be an American Indian writer,” says Hogan (Harrison 164). It takes skill, and sometimes unfamiliar techniques, to reach unfamiliar audiences. Perhaps spiritual realism is the best way to bring indigenous knowledge across to wider audiences: spiritual realism, then, as translation. As Hogan explains : “We say the same thing over and over and we’re just dismissed. So we have to find new ways to say it. Which is why I find ways to say it in books” (Harrison 171).
35 Hogan’s whales and octopuses are translators that speak to the indigenous readers and help them “decolonize their minds” and “re-indigenize” (Harrison 168).12 They also speak to the non-indigenous readers to perhaps help them “re-ethnicize.” “Everybody,” says Hogan, “is indigenous in one way or another, so it’s not particular for just American Indian people. Every human being has that. [Most Euro-Americans think] they don’t have any roots. But they really do, they just have further to go and more de-educating to do” (Harrison 174).
36 Hogan’s spiritual realist prose is instrumental in predisposing the mind to free itself from its cultural and epistemological bounds and reach the state of extreme awareness and faith alluded to by Carpentier. The unfamiliar reader may feel estranged at first; he may also learn to experience and enjoy the closeness and merging of worlds.13 In any case, the experience is likely to foster heightened sensitivity, intuition, and engagement. To approach environmental issues in such disposition constitutes a radical alternative to the more rationalist approaches, a promising alternative which renews not only our relationship with nature but also the relationship of literature with the world around us.
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FARIS, Wendy B. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Eds. Durham, London: Duke UP, 1995. 163-190.
GREENWOOD BARIA, Amy. “Linda Hogan’s Two Worlds.” Studies in American Indian Literatures. Series 2, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter 1998). 67-73.
HARRISON, Summer. “Sea Level: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.1 (Winter 2011). 161-177.
HOGAN, Linda. People of the Whale. New York: Norton, 2008.
HOGAN, Linda. Power. New York: Norton, 1998.
HOGAN, Linda. “Silencing Tribal Grandmothers: Traditions, Old Values At Heart Of Makah’s Clash Over Whaling.” Seattle Times. Dec. 15, 1996.
HOGAN, LINDA. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner, 1995.
HOGAN, Linda. Mean Spirit. New York: Atheneum, 1990.
LEAL, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Eds. Durham, London: Duke UP, 1995. 119-124.
MURPHY, Patrick. “Women Writers: Spiritual Realism, Ecological Responsibility, and Inhabitation.” Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies. No.1 (Summer, June 2009). 5-11.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.
STACKS, Geoffrey. “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 43, No. 1 (March 2010).
STEINWAND, Jonathan. “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the
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Environment. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Eds. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 182-199.
ZAMORA PARKINSON, Lois and Wendy B. Faris. Eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, London: Duke UP, 1995.
NOTES
1. Or “fellows in mortality” as philosopher Cora Diamond puts it (2004: 102). 2. On the notions of femininity, origin and naming in Solar Storms, see Geoffrey Stacks’ “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” The essay postulates that Hogan’s novel offers a critique of embodied geography and land-as-feminine, colonizing mapping. 3. I am using the term “magical realism” in the sense it has been used since the 1950s, in relation to Latin American literature mostly, i.e., denoting the presence of magical elements in an otherwise realist narrative, or “the commingling of the improbable and the mundane,” to use Salman Rushdie’s words in Midnight’s Children. 4. It is no secret, however, that the fictional A’atsika were modeled after the Makah people of the Pacific Northwest. For clear evidence of the parallel between facts and fiction, see for instance Hogan’s 1996 Seattle Times article, “Silencing Tribal Grandmothers: Traditions, Old Values At Heart Of Makah’s Clash Over Whaling,” or Summer Harrison’s “Sea Level: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” 5. It is interesting, however, that Zamora and Faris’s acception of magical realism should point to thematic, and perhaps cultural and political, orientations that also characterize People of the Whale: “[…] magical realism may be considered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representations, at the same time that it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism. Mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female: these are boundaries to be erased, transgressed, blurred, brought together, or otherwise fundamentally refashioned in magical realist texts” (Zamora, Faris 6). 6. Angel and Omishto can be seen as partly autobiographical reminiscences of Hogan’s own childhood and adolescent years, uncomfortably wedged in between two worlds: “And then I started writing about my childhood because I was in Washington, D.C. I lived in Maryland and suddenly Oklahoma seemed so far away. And it seemed like—here was this kid who had grown up and her family had a horse and wagon, and she had an outhouse and no electricity and no water, and suddenly I’m going to the Kennedy Center” (Harrison 163). 7. Joni Adamson remarks that Hogan is an experienced ethnoscientist and gray whale ethologist, which is evidence for her that “Ruth’s prayers do not imply that she is superstitious or given to fantasy. She believes in the ‘world of matter’ and as a lifelong fisherwoman, she understands marine biology” (Adamson 158). “Ruth’s prayers invite all the people and nations of the Earth to extend their temporal gaze so that they might see, as if through the eye of the octopus, the multiple relationships among living organisms and species that have a right to maintain and regenerate life cycles and evolutionary processes” (Adamson 159). 8. For Murphy, spiritual realism “seeks to represent a sense of ecological responsibility to a referentially recognized material more-than-human world on the part of its characters and the need for the adoption of such a sensibility on the part of its readers. It articulates an alternative way of viewing reality and often promotes or defends alternative lifestyles, community formations, and economic practices. And, particularly when practiced by U.S. writers of color, it is often represented as explicitly arising from a history and wisdom of inhabitation, either indigenous or native to place” (Murphy 6).
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9. Unless we are to understand Leal’s “confrontation as essentially epistemological and Hogan’s as primarily expriential. 10. For a succinct presentation of the history and nature of this distinction, see Maggie Ann Bowers’ Magic(al) Realism (2004: 2-3). 11. Delineating the development of magic realism in Latin American fiction, Amaryll Chanady brings the dichotomy into focus: “Arturo Uslar Pietri, the Venezuelan author who was perhaps the first person to apply the term magic realism to Latin American fiction, defined the mode in 1948 as a ‘poetic divination or poetic negation of reality,’ in which man is considered ‘as a mystery.’ His formulation of magic realism differs in several respects from Carpentier’s concept of the marvellous real. The latter appears to have an ontological status, since it is supposed to exist in objective reality in the form of magical rites and imposing natural surroundings, while magic realism is clearly a phenomenological concept (man is considered as a mystery), and a literary mode (an -ism)” (Chanady 1986: 52-53). 12. On the recent turn of environmental literature to cetaceans as liminal animals negotiating between the human and non-human worlds, see Jonathan Steinwand’s “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh.” 13. From the perspective of Reader’s Response theory, the validity of categories such as magical realism and spiritual realism depends on the reader’s degree of acceptance of the text’s implied ontology. Rationalist Euro-Americans readers and more “indigenized” readers will construe the same text as magical, and spiritual, realism, respectively. By the time all readers, indigenous and non-indigenous, reach the level of awareness called for by Hogan’s (and others’) fictions, realism will no longer be “magical.” Nor will it be “spiritual”: it will only be realism.
ABSTRACTS
Most Native American peoples are arguably engaged in a dialogic relationship with the natural world, which they do not perceive as an inanimate “out-there” but as a close relative, Mother Earth, whose inhabitants are all partners in life. Typically, the relationship is one of respect and reciprocity; but tradition is sometimes flouted. Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008) is in part a poetic envisionment of cultural alienation, ecological transgression and consequent natural retaliation. When the tradition of give-and-take is violated by some of the A’atsika people, nature has its own way of talking back: tsunami, fire, volcanic eruption, and especially drought, are nature’s responses to human offenses. Is “magic realism” the best term to describe Hogan’s fiction? This is the first question that this study means to answer. We shall then see that Hogan’s special brand of realism proves a powerful tool to displace habitual oppositions (man v. nature) and expose anthropological-social (male v. female), historical-political (Euro-American v. Native- American), and ecological (respectful whale-hunting v. blind killing) unbalance. Finally, we shall show that by challenging standard polarities, Hogan’s uncanny realism effectively promotes the agency and loquacity of nature, ontologically reinstating nature as a living being, and fosters a more empathetic form of reader’s response, ultimately conducive to ecological awareness and care.
Les peuples indigènes d’Amérique sont réputés entretenir un dialogue avec le monde naturel, qu’ils ne conçoivent pas comme un lieu distinct inanimé, mais comme un parent proche, la Terre
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Mère, dont les habitants sont tous des partenaires de vie. Souvent, cette relation est vue comme une relation de respect et de réciprocité. Pourtant, la tradition est parfois violée. Le roman de Linda Hogan, People of the Whale, paru en 2008, a pour motifs l’aliénation culturelle d’une communauté indigène, les A’atsika, le mépris de certains de ses membres pour la Mer nourricière, et la façon dont la Nature répond à ces transgressions. Lorsque l’équilibre écologique garanti par la tradition est rompu, la nature a sa manière bien à elle de riposter : tsunami, incendie, éruption volcaniques, ou encore, comme c’est le cas ici, sécheresse. Le terme de réalisme magique est-il le plus approprié pour décrire le roman de Hogan ? C’est la première question à laquelle cette étude entend répondre. On verra ensuite que le réalisme insolite de Hogan est fort habile à questionner les oppositions habituelles (l’homme/la nature), et à souligner les déséquilibres socio-anthropologiques (homme/femme), historico-politiques (Euro- américains/peuples indigènes) et écologiques (pêche à la baleine traditionnelle/carnage). Finalement, on verra qu’en déplaçant les polarités traditionnelles, le réalisme très particulier de Hogan est à même de restituer à la nature son caractère agissant et parlant, nature dont le statut d’être vivant est ontologiquement réaffirmé. Il permet aussi au lecteur d’aller vers une attitude plus empathique, consciente et responsable face à ce vivant naturel.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Hogan Linda, réalisme magique, réalisme spirituel, peuple Makah, droits de pêche à la baleine, aliénation culturelle, tradition et modernité, natura loquens, guerre du Vietnam, éthique environnementale, animaux, harmonie ou disharmonie écologique, personnages/ narrateurs féminins et résilience Keywords: Hogan Linda, magical realism, spiritual realism, Makah people, whaling rights, cultural alienation, tradition and modernity, natura loquens, Vietnam war (the), environmental ethics, animals, ecological (dis)harmony, female agency and resilience
AUTHOR
FRANÇOIS GAVILLON François Gavillon is Associate Professor at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale in western France, where he teaches American literature, civilization, and environmental history. He has published a book on Paul Auster’s novels (Paul Auster, Gravité et légèreté de l’écriture, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000). His research and publications have focused for some years on American ecoliterature and ecocriticism. He is the editor of a collection of essays entitled L’invention de la nature (Université de Bretagne Occidentale, 2009). Forthcoming is a volume of essays, Environmental Crisis and Human Costs, François Gavillon and Ufuk Ozdag. Eds. François Gavillon est Maître de Conférences à l’Université de Bretagne Occidentale, où il enseigne la littérature, la civilisation et l’histoire environnementale des États-Unis. Il a publié un livre sur les romans de Paul Auster (Paul Auster, Gravité et légèreté de l’écriture, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000). Sa recherche et ses publications portent depuis plusieurs années sur l’écolittérature et l’écocritique américaines. Il a dirigé la publication d’un recueil d’essais intitulé L’invention de la nature (Université de Bretagne Occidentale, 2009). Il co-dirige avec Ufuk Ozdag la publication d’un volume à paraître, Environmental Crisis and Human Costs.
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« Blizzard de formulaires officiels », ou la trace du mocassin à l’épreuve de la trace d’encre dans Tracks et Four Souls de Louise Erdrich
Elisabeth Bouzonviller
1 Si en 1988 Tracks offrait une sorte d’analepse aux deux premiers romans de Louise Erdrich, seize ans plus tard, Four Souls apportait une suite directe à cette œuvre qui brode à deux voix sur la manière dont Fleur Pillager perd sa terre1. Alors que Tracks se clôt sur le départ de Fleur, Four Souls s’ouvre sur son cheminement vengeur vers la ville. La référence au petit chariot qu’elle pousse, rempli de souvenirs de sa forêt volée, assure le lien entre les deux romans (FS 1-2, T 224)2. Sur les traces de l’expropriant, Fleur n’a de cesse de se venger et de recouvrer sa terre, ce lieu originel des ancêtres. La dépossession territoriale est donc au centre de ces romans ainsi que le remarque Lorena Stookey quand elle affirme : « Tracks is essentially a story about land — and the lives of the people connected to it — and thus earth is the element Erdrich associates with this novel » (71).
2 Liant intimement les expériences géographique, tribale et familiale, Erdrich insiste sur l’attachement territorial et déclare : « In a tribal view of the world, where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history » (Wong 43). Le trope de la menace mécanique analysé par Leo Marx trouve évidemment sa place dans cette écriture métisse contemporaine qui, immanquablement, développe le thème de la perte de la terre suite à l’irruption des Blancs. L’industrialisation comme « menace principale à l’image bucolique de l’Amérique » (Marx 26) ne pouvait pas échapper à celle qui rappelle régulièrement dans ses romans que la terre est non seulement un des points de litige essentiels entre les Blancs et les Autochtones mais que sa perte est aussi la cause de nombreuses tragédies individuelles et collectives, ainsi que le développe en particulier son roman de 2008 The Plague of Doves : « I saw that the loss of their land was lodged inside of them forever.
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This loss would enter me, too. Over time, I came to know that the sorrow was a thing that each of them covered up according to their character [...] » (PD 84).
3 La page titre de Tracks chez Perennial comporte deux empreintes de pas humains à la suite de trois traces de pattes animales. Cette illustration évoque un mode de vie ancestral basé sur la chasse mais est peut-être aussi une allusion à d’autres liens intimes entre humains et animaux qu’offre la société anishinaabe, l’empreinte du milieu suggérant même une étape hybride de transformation inattendue entre les deux espèces. Les liens que les Indiens entretiennent avec la nature font partie des clichés longtemps ressassés. Tracks et Four Souls ne font pas exception à cette tradition ; ils brodent en effet sur un attachement naturel qui se manifeste parfois même par d’étranges mutations génétiques entre humains et animaux, ainsi que le suggère cette illustration.
4 Leo Marx désigne la locomotive comme métaphore principale du trope de « l’idylle interrompue » (27), mais dans Tracks, c’est l’intrusion des forestiers qui menace la terre des ancêtres de Fleur, c’est-à-dire l’Amérique des origines. Mais plus encore que la machine, chez Erdrich, c’est le formulaire, les subtilités administratives, les cartes et hypothèques gérées par des agents peu scrupuleux qui bouleversent l’ordre naturel pérenne des terres indigènes. À l’opposé de ces intrusions mécaniques et administratives, Erdrich célèbre une certaine Amérique des origines où les peuples indigènes respectaient la nature et vivaient en harmonie avec elle. Cependant cette vision pastorale ne reste jamais manichéenne car la société anishinaabe abrite elle aussi violences et traîtrises. Résolument moderne, l’Amérique autochtone d’Erdrich dénonce un gâchis écologique et la disparition d’une culture en lien étroit avec la nature mais, dans son approche ambivalente, elle suggère également l’absence d’un idéal de pureté naturelle où l’Indien ferait partie du décor selon le mythe du bon sauvage. Enfin, de l’oralité à la trace écrite, de la trace de mocassin invisible sur la neige aux documents papier, le parcours suivi est celui de la nature à la culture écrite. Histoire de dépossession, histoire de création littéraire, Tracks et Four Souls sont à l’image de l’œuvre d’Erdrich qui inlassablement raconte une Amérique mue par une impulsion pastorale ambiguë qui est aussi impulsion créatrice.
Sauvageries
5 Tracks s’organise selon neuf chapitres qui correspondent aux saisons. Depuis l’hiver 1912 jusqu’au printemps 1924, ces marqueurs temporels sont donnés successivement en anglais, en anishinaabe, puis en traduction anglaise, par exemple : Chapter One Winter 1912 Manitou-geezisohns Little Spirit Sun (T 1)
6 Ainsi, le cycle des saisons semble régir l’agencement de la narration présentée par les deux narrateurs homodiégétiques autochtones (le vieux Nanapush et la jeune métisse Pauline) et présider au destin des personnages. Ce schéma classique liant l’indien et la nature sous-tend le stéréotype du bon sauvage dans le cadre d’une Amérique naturelle, voire édénique. La nature est omniprésente chez cette communauté anishinaabe imaginaire et marque le discours obstinément, de nombreux personnages étant, en particulier, décrits à l’aide de références animales. Les premières lignes du roman
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offrent une comparaison entre phénomènes naturels et population autochtone, définissant une osmose que le roman ne cessera d’exploiter : « We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall » (T 1). Et Nanapush de poursuivre ses comparaisons naturelles avec une ironie douce-amère : [...] we thought disaster must surely have spent its force, that disease must have claimed all of the Anishinabe that the earth could hold and bury. But the earth is limitless and so is luck and so were our people once. (T 1)
7 Témoin du passage du temps et des transformations imposées à sa communauté, Nanapush tente de raconter à la jeune Lulu l’histoire des siens et surtout de sa mère, Fleur Pillager, dont le prénom n’est qu’une marque parmi tant d’autres de son ancrage naturel et dont le nom présage déjà les dépossessions et saccages3. Rescapé des grandes épidémies importées par les Blancs, Nanapush, le vieux sage, a soigné et sauvé Fleur. Il évoque le destin des siens selon un mode élégiaque recourant à la répétition funeste du terme last qui semble annoncer la fin d’une Amérique pastorale et confirmer la théorie courante du XIXe et début du XXe siècles de la « race en voie de disparition » : I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot. I trapped the last beaver with a pelt of more than two years’ growth. I spoke aloud the words of the government treaty, and refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and lake. I axed the last birch that was older than I, and I saved the last Pillager. (T 2)
8 Dernier élément dans cette liste de destructions naturelles, Fleur est une fois encore l’incarnation d’une nature originelle à l’instar des animaux et des végétaux disparus. Seuls survivants de leur lignée, Fleur et son cousin Moses hantent les bois tels des animaux sauvages. Régulièrement qualifiés par le verbe roam (T 2 ; FS 26), l’adjectif wild et leur sourire de loup menaçant4 (T 3, 23 ; FS 3), caractéristique des Pillager, selon Pauline (T 19), ils sont les dignes descendants du clan de l’ours (Beidler 291), appartenance symbolisée par quatre ours et une martre gravés sur un morceau de bois (T 5 ; FS 2). Un bestiaire fourni alimente l’imagination fertile des focalisateurs internes des deux romans qui ne cessent d’établir des comparaisons plus ou moins effrayantes entre Fleur et son habitat. Elle est tour à tour loup (T 88 ; FS 73), serpent (FS 44, 192), oiseau de proie (T 12 ; FS 19, 31, 92, 203), ours (T 12), loutre (T 106 ; FS 74) et poisson (T 18) mais aussi arbre et sève (T 4, 200 ; FS 183). Van Dyke indique que c’est le monstre du lac de Matchimanito, Misshepeshu, qui prête ses caractéristiques animales à Fleur et sa lignée et leur confère ainsi un pouvoir de transformation (132-133). À mi-chemin entre l’humain et le naturel5, Fleur semble transmettre les paroles des esprits de la forêt : « […] it was as if the Manitous all through the woods spoke through Fleur, loose, arguing. I recognized them. Turtle’s quavering scratch, the Eagle’s high shriek, Loon’s crazy bitterness, Otter, the howl of Wolf, Bear’s low rasp » (T 59). Vêtue de tons naturels, marron ou vert (T 18, 22, 34 ; FS 2), elle est l’inquiétante fiancée du monstre du lac (T 11, 31) capable de survivre mystérieusement à la noyade et d’y entraîner ses ennemis (T 10) : « Her green dress, drenched, wrapped her like a transparent sheet. A skin of lakeweed » (T 22). Même Eli, son compagnon, s’en trouve effrayé : « Sometimes I woke and her hair was a damp braid tossed against me and once, from along her neck, I picked a curl of black weed from the bottom of the lake » (T 107). Étrange sirène anishinaabe, elle pourrait même porter l’enfant mi-animal de l’homme du lac que ses ancêtres avaient su apprivoiser : « I dreamed how it will look, strange and fearful, bulging eyes, maybe with a split black tail » (T 108, 175). D’ailleurs c’est lors d’une partie de chasse qu’Eli a été séduit par la sauvageonne, le texte entremêlant bien sûr les
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références féminines à la biche traquée et à Fleur, le chasseur devenant la proie inattendue d’une équipée qui clame la supériorité de la fille des bois (T 41-43). Van Dyke conclut : « She [Fleur] is always the hunter and never the prey, although some of the male characters attempt to be the aggressor » (133). C’est sans doute Pauline, pétrie de culture chrétienne et facilement assaillie d’obsessions diaboliques, qui est la plus encline à opérer des comparaisons ou métaphores animales à propos de Fleur et à s’en affoler. Se souvenant de leurs semaines de travail commun dans une boucherie de la ville voisine, elle a recours au champ lexical de l’animalité pour la décrire : Fleur’s shoulders were broad and curved as a yoke, her hips fishlike, slippery, narrow. An old green dress clung to her waist, worn thin where she sat. Her glossy braids were like the tails of animals, and swung against her when she moved, deliberately, slowly in her work, held in and half-tamed. But only half. I could tell, but the others never noticed. They never looked into her sly brown eyes or noticed her teeth, strong and sharp and very white. Her legs were bare, and since she padded in beadworked moccasins they never saw that her fifth toes were missing6. (T 18) Ses observations rappellent l’illustration de la page titre et ses suggestions de mutations étranges : She laid the heart of an owl on her tongue so she could see at night, and went out, hunting, not even in her own body. We know for sure because the next morning, in the snow or dust, we followed the tracks of her bare feet and saw where they changed, where the claws sprang out, the pad broadened and pressed into the dirt. By night we heard her chuffing cough, the bear cough. By day her silence and the wide grin she threw to bring down our guard made us frightened. (T 12)
9 Les références insistantes à ses dents, dans les deux romans, suggèrent une férocité qui se manifeste pleinement quand, dans Four Souls, en route pour la ville, elle dépèce un chien et le dévore (FS 2). Brutalisée par les hommes de la boucherie, Fleur réagit aussi sauvagement que la truie promise à l’abattoir et d’ailleurs les souvenirs de Pauline de ces scènes s’ordonnent autour d’un pronom personnel à la troisième personne du féminin qui remplace indifféremment la femme et l’animal, estompant les différenciations d’espèces (T 25-26). Le cyclone qui fait finalement suite à ces violences est, de l’avis de Pauline, la vengeance évidente de celle qui maîtrise la nature (T 26-28). De même, Fleur réussira à retrouver Mauser, l’entrepreneur qui lui a volé ses terres et, dans un premier temps, à le soumettre tel un animal dominé, « I will love you no matter what you do to me, as a dog does. My spirit is meant to be g’dai7, your animal, to do as you wish, let live or kill » (FS 46), et Nanapush de conclure : « [...] she never needed any medicine to snag her men. They fell her way like notched trees » (FS 72). À Minneapolis, hors de son cadre naturel, Fleur inquiète. Une parole de travers et l’on risque d’être « étripé » (FS 60), d’ailleurs Polly Elizabeth la nomme « the savage woman » (FS 19) et conscient du danger, Mauser confie à sa belle-sœur : « She came here to skin me [...] » (FS 128).
Pièges
10 Jacobs remarque : « Fleur represents the old traditional ways in that she, along with the additionally mythical character Nanapush, calls on her animal helpers and exists as their manifestation » (165-166). Si Nanapush et Fleur sont effectivement les descendants respectifs de familles d’hommes et de femmes médecins aux pouvoirs issus de la nature, les temps ont changé et d’autres forces s’opposent à eux qu’ils ne peuvent
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contrecarrer avec leurs seuls plantes et savoirs ancestraux. Le diptyque constitué par les deux romans dit clairement le passage de la nature sauvage à l’environnement maîtrisé suite à l’irruption de la machine sur les terres arrachées aux Autochtones par la ruse ou la force. Les deux œuvres constituent les facettes opposées des deux cultures, anishinaabe d’une part et blanche de l’autre. Tracks est situé presque exclusivement en pleine nature et se clôt sur la perte de la terre de Fleur tandis que Four Souls s’ouvre sur son cheminement vers la ville où elle compte se venger. Ce second roman se déroule alternativement à Minneapolis et sur la réserve où Nanapush tente de faire face à une certaine modernité imposée au cadre naturel. Les narrateurs homodiégétiques ne sont plus exclusivement indiens comme dans Tracks puisque les chapitres de Four Souls alternent le point de vue de Nanapush et celui de Polly Elizabeth, la belle-sœur de Mauser, l’entrepreneur fourbe qui a dépossédé Fleur et bien d’autres jeunes Indiennes. En outre, les chapitres ne sont plus désormais ordonnés selon le rythme des saisons mais comportent des titres descriptifs.
11 Même si, à l’approche de Fleur, la ville semble respirer « comme un gros animal endormi » (FS 3), la nature n’y a pas droit de cité : A city was raised. Gakaabikaang [Minneapolis]. Place of the falls. Wood framed. Brick by brick. The best brownstone came from an island in the deep cold northern lake called Gichi gami. The ground of the island had once been covered with mammoth basswood that scented the air over the lake, for miles out, with a swimming fragrance of such supernal sweet innocence that those first priests who came to steal Ojibwe souls, penetrating deeper into the heart of the world, cried out not knowing whether God or the devil tempted them. Now the island was stripped of trees. (FS 5)
12 Fleur, la sauvageonne, s’étonne de cette absence de nature : « The strange lack of plant growth confused her. [...] For a long while she stood before a leafless box hedge, upset into a state of wonder at its square shape, amazed that it should grow in so unusual a fashion, its twigs gnarled in smooth planes » (FS 3). La ville offre le spectacle d’une nature domptée aux étranges formes grotesques qui font écho à la maison de Mauser dont la construction sophistiquée et tourmentée rappelle la maison maudite aux sept pignons de Hawthorne : High on sloped and snowy grounds, it was unshadowed yet by trees. The roof, gables, porch, all chiseled and bored in fantastic shapes, were frosted with an overnight fall of gleaming snow. Clipped in cones and cubes, the shrubs were coated with the same lacquer, as was the fountain, frozen, and the white cast-iron lacework of the benches and the tea tables in the yard8. (FS 11)
13 Sonorités métalliques des allitérations en [k], formes géométriques, ces arabesques artificielles disent l’emprisonnement et la coercition. La description met en scène la blancheur glacée mortifère d’une demeure bâtie grâce aux arbres de Fleur et autres jeunes Indiennes trompées (FS 6) mais aussi au labeur douloureux des ouvriers immigrants, à l’argent mal acquis et où, précisément, un lynx, rescapé de l’Amérique des origines, fut tué lors du chantier (FS 7-8). Telles des incantations funestes, deux réseaux de répétitions closent ce premier chapitre narré par Nanapush, avec cinq occurrences de « They had this house » et trois de « This house » dévoilant l’envers du décor et annonçant le sinistre destin de ses habitants (FS 8-9). Maison de sang et de larmes, la demeure de Mauser laisse s’écouler une sève qui pleure la perte autochtone : — all this made of wood, fine-grained, very old-grown, quartersawn oak that still in its season and for many years after would exude beads of thin sap — as though
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recalling growth and life on the land belonging to Fleur Pillager and the shores of Matchimanito, beyond. (FS 9)
14 Mais Erdrich, métisse anishinaabe, française et allemande, n’offre jamais une peinture manichéenne des relations entre Blancs et Autochtones. Certes Fleur est la victime de l’avidité de Mauser mais certains Anishinaabeg se laissent librement séduire par les sirènes de la société de consommation9. Dans la réserve, loin de la vie citadine, Nanapush remarque la faiblesse et la cupidité des siens : People traded away their land for pianos they couldn’t play and bought clothing too fancy for their own everyday use. They bought spoons made of silver when there wasn’t food, and gilded picture frames when they had neither pictures nor walls. A strange fancy for zhaaginaash10 stuff came over the best of us. (FS 76)
15 Margaret Kashpaw, la propre compagne de Nanapush, commence par aligner des pierres le long du chemin menant à leur maison et les peint en rose. Pour les Anishinaabeg, les pierres, asiniig (FS 77), sont perçues comme vivantes et représentent les ancêtres11. Nanapush estomaqué s’exclame alors avec surprise et ironie : « ‘Onizhishin’12, I said. For sure, they looked marvelous, so bright in the green scruff and dead leaves. ‘You’ve dressed up our ancestors’ » (FS 77). Elle délaisse ensuite les plantations traditionnelles de son jardin pour de nouvelles semences qui offrent finalement une récolte désastreuse (FS 78) et atteint des sommets d’aveuglement et de reniement quand elle se met à rêver au linoléum vu au couvent : « It was far more beautiful than stone, earth, or wood ; it was more green than leaves, with drops of cream and ink curled through it » (FS 76). À grand renfort de comparatifs de supériorité, elle tente de convaincre Nanapush et finalement opère en douce, vendant un morceau de terrain appartenant à son fils pour acquérir l’objet de sa convoitise. Bouleversé, Nanapush, qui a cru un moment que les forestiers et leurs machines s’étaient indûment appropriés la parcelle (FS 80-81), ne peut croire que celle qu’il célèbre selon de traditionnelles comparaisons animales ait pu ainsi oublier la valeur de la terre : « My sweetheart, my porcupine woman, my prickly dove, had exchanged the real ground for the false ground. My Margaret had betrayed us. She had bought her linoleum and given away Nector’s earth » (FS 82).
16 Habiles chasseurs, Nanapush, Eli et Fleur savent décrypter les traces, traquer le gibier et poser des pièges. Occasionnellement Nanapush piège même les membres de la communauté anishinaabe avec qui il se trouve en conflit ; quant à Fleur, elle joue et gagne au poker contre des adversaires qu’elle piège avec l’assurance et le talent qu’elle déploie d’ordinaire en pleine forêt. Cependant, il est des pièges auxquels ces fins chasseurs n’ont jamais été confrontés. L’Indien, qui autrefois posait des pièges destinés aux animaux sauvages, voire à ses ennemis personnels, est maintenant la nouvelle victime piégée ainsi que le comprend Nanapush : « We were snared in laws by then. Pitfalls and loopholes. Attempting to keep what was left of our land was like walking through a landscape of webs » (FS 79). Le danger est même décuplé quand la propre communauté autochtone, voire les intimes, abrite des traîtres à la cause naturelle qui pactisent avec les intrus et leurs machines destructrices. Nanapush, qui sait lire car il a fréquenté l’école des missionnaires jésuites avant de s’en retourner dans les bois (T 33), pressent la catastrophe mais Fleur, malgré sa sauvagerie effrayante, arbore toute l’innocence naïve du bon sauvage incapable d’envisager le bouleversement de son habitat : « ‘The land will go,’ I told her. ‘The land will be sold and measured’ » (T 8). La forêt et le lac de Matchimanito, espace labyrinthique maîtrisé par les seuls initiés
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autochtones (T 9), attirent de plus en plus d’intrus blancs qui tentent de leur appliquer des règles géométriques urbaines et d’y faire pénétrer leurs machines : Every year there are more who come looking for profit, who draw lines across the land with their strings and yellow flags. They disappear sometimes, and now there are so many betting sticks and dice out near Matchimanito at night that you wonder how Fleur sleeps, or if she sleeps at all. (T 9) L’ère du striage et du quadrillage précède de peu la grande destruction13 : But I watched the wagons take the rutted turnoff to Matchimanito. Few of them returned, it is true, but those that did were enough, loaded high with hard green wood. From where we now sit, granddaughter, I heard the groan and crack, felt the ground tremble as each tree slammed earth. I weakened into an old man as one oak went down, another and another was lost, as a gap formed here, a clearing there, and plain daylight entered14. (T 9)
17 Humanisés par le verbe groan, les arbres tombent tels des Indiens vaincus et vieillissent prématurément le témoin du carnage. Inversement, Nanapush compare les Indiens à des arbres : “We Indians are like a forest,” I had said once to Damien. “The trees left standing get more sun, grow thick.” (T 184)
18 Sa famille décimée par l’épidémie entraîne des cauchemars où les humains et les arbres semblent suivre des destins entremêlés qui s’avèrent en fait être, tout à la fois, souvenirs et prémonitions : « I stood in a birch forest of tall straight trees. I was one among many in a shelter of strength and beauty. Suddenly a loud report, thunder, and they toppled down like matchsticks, all flattened around me in an instant. I was the only one left standing » (T 127).
19 Alors que Fleur dresse sa fine silhouette semblable à un arbre et exhale des effluves boisées (T 22, 200), Nanapush se dit fait de vieux bois qui brûle aisément (T 185) et il ploie doucement, tel un « chêne grinçant », dans les bras enthousiastes de la jeune Lulu (T 226). La coutume anishinaabe qui, malgré les injonctions des missionnaires, consistait à déposer la dépouille des morts dans les hautes branches de la forêt lie intimement Nanapush et Fleur à ces arbres qui leur murmurent la présence de leurs disparus (T 15, 163, 177, 210, 220). L’hypallage « bitter oak » (T 177), qui désigne l’abri du bébé mort né de Fleur, esquisse à la fois l’attachement de Fleur à sa forêt et l’humanité du lieu. Ces figures de style signalent non seulement un ancrage naturel, voire une analogie stéréotypée entre les Autochtones et la nature, mais elles soulignent aussi la possibilité d’une renaissance après le désastre, ainsi David Stirrup conclut : « The tree ultimately becomes a critical metaphor for the undermining of sovereignty, and an emblem of endurance, survival, and resistance » (11).
20 Dans Tracks et Four Souls, les tropes de la pastorale n’opposent pas systématiquement les Blancs et les Indiens. Erdrich compose une vaste tapisserie où se croisent des restes d’attachement forcené à un mode de vie naturel certes, comme dans le cas de Fleur, mais aussi des adaptations plus ou moins louables au fonctionnement occidental moderne qu’il soit mécanique ou administratif. Bernadette Morrissey, par exemple, entreprend de travailler pour l’agent indien, Tatro, qui gère les parcelles, récolte les impôts et se charge des expropriations, voire des extorsions. Elle défendra ainsi ses biens sans difficultés. Quant au jeune Nector Kashpaw, qui deviendra plus tard fin politicien (LM), il est finalement responsable de la perte de la terre de Fleur. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse revient sur une traîtrise intimement liée une fois encore à la mécanique. Seul aux commandes d’un autre engin qui commet des ravages,
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Nector a assis son pouvoir discrètement mais efficacement. Devenu l’utilisateur exclusif de la machine à écrire du bureau de l’agent indien, il finit par détruire tous les documents fonciers originaux, promettant ainsi son peuple à la pire des expropriations : « He was now in charge of history, which suited him just fine, and he was only a boy » (LRM 171). Avec sa mère, Margaret, il utilise subrepticement la somme acquise en commun avec Fleur et Nanapush, grâce à la récolte d’écorces aux vertus médicinales (T 176), pour payer non pas les impôts sur les terres de chacun mais uniquement sur les siennes, entraînant ainsi, à long terme, la saisie du terrain de Fleur (T 207).
21 Quand les forestiers débarquent, ils emploient même des Anishinaabe, dont Eli, qui désormais porte les marques vestimentaires de sa soumission aux forces mécaniques des Blancs : « His hair still hung long, held in a tail down his back, but he now wore a new shirt of checkered flannel and his pants were blue and stiff. Thick boots were on his feet » (T 213). Cette chemise à carreaux typique des Blancs semble proclamer la victoire de la géométrie alors qu’elle annonce un agencement du territoire selon des règles mathématiques qui ont la raideur du jeans et des nouvelles bottes troqués contre la tenue traditionnelle et les mocassins de cuir souple. Le vacarme des chariots et machines n’a alors rien à envier à la métaphore de la locomotive analysée par Leo Marx et signifie clairement le saccage du jardin originel :
Day by day, the rumble of the carts increased and now a barge was operated, pulled along one side of the lake by horses, filled with cut trees. These went to Eli, who worked as a log peeler and lived in a camp constructed on the far shore. Morrisseys and Lazarres worked there too, but never lasted long. (T 217)
22 Nanapush regrette les ventes forcées et la cupidité mal placée mais ne sait pas comment s’opposer au déferlement des forestiers qui, comme les vagues d’immigrants ou les épidémies, se fait toujours plus important : In the past, some had sold their allotment land for one hundred poundweight of flour. Others, who were desperate to hold on, now urged that we get together and buy back our land, or at least pay a tax and refuse the lumbering money that would sweep the marks of our boundaries off the map like a pattern of straws. Many were determined not to allow the hired surveyors, or even our own people, to enter the deepest bush. They spoke of the guides Hat and Many Women, now dead, who had taken the government pay. But that spring outsiders went in as before, and some of us too. The purpose was to measure the lake. Only now they walked upon the fresh graves of the Pillagers, crossed death roads to plot out the deepest water where the lake monster, Misshepeshu, hid himself and waited. (T 8) But no matter how many vanished, more came in their stead, and all of them had crosscut saws, sharp axes, and received for their pay both money and food. (T 217)
Résistance
« I salute my grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, and the four branches of the Ojibwa Nation, those of strength, who endure. » (T)
23 Toujours clairvoyant, Nanapush, qui connaît suffisamment les deux cultures, est l’observateur avisé de cette triste mutation de la communauté anishinaabe et de la transformation du paysage. Si l’absurdité des pierres roses de Margaret pouvait encore attiser son humour, il se défie des aplats de cette même teinte honteuse, semblable à
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des cicatrices, sur la carte des parcelles autochtones car il sait qu’ils signifient l’arrivée d’intrus à la peau de cette couleur pâle et la perte des terres : We watched as Damien unfolded and smoothed the map flat upon the table. In the dizzy smell of coffee roasting, of bannock cooking, we examined the lines and circles of the homesteads paid up—Morrisey, Pukwan, Hat, Lazarres everywhere. They were colored green. The lands that were gone out of the tribe — to deaths with no heirs, to sales, to the lumber company — were painted a pale and rotten pink. Those in question, a sharper yellow. At the center of a bright square was Matchimanito, a small blue triangle I could cover with my hand. (T 173) My concern was the lapping pink, the color of the skin of lumberjacks and bankers, the land we would never walk or hunt, from which our children would be barred. (T 173-174)
24 Subitement, les terres, lacs et forêts ne sont plus des éléments naturels et les familles des groupes humains solidaires mais uniquement des chiffres, des couleurs discordantes, des lignes et surfaces géométriques ridiculement petites au regard de l’attachement qu’elles impliquent : « We traced the list until we found the names we sought — Pillager, Kashpaw, Nanapush. All were there, figures and numbers, and all impossible. We stared without feeling at the amounts due before summer » (T 173). Une visite à l’agent indien, que Nanapush accuse d’être corrompu (T 208), et le vieil homme comprend que Fleur a perdu sa terre à cause de Nector et Margaret (T 208).
25 Dans l’esprit de Vine Deloria qui, dans Custer Died for your Sins, ironise sur l’apitoiement que suscitent les Indiens affublés du terme plight (9), Erdrich refuse les stéréotypes et dénonce les pièges administratifs et la traîtrise des Blancs, bien qu’elle ait été critiquée par Leslie Marmon Silko pour sa fiction aux maniérismes post-modernes pas assez engagée politiquement15. Sa communauté fictionnelle anishinaabe a des ressources infinies. Quand il le faut, elle sait manipuler pièges et vengeances, parfois même selon le mode des Blancs. À la fin de Tracks, Fleur a été dépossédée de sa terre, certes, mais elle subtilise les outils des forestiers et prend de vitesse hommes et machines en sciant partiellement tous ses arbres avant leur arrivée ; elle crée ainsi une « forêt suspendue » 16 ( T 223) qui finalement s’abat sur les envahisseurs sous la pression du vent. La narration offre ainsi une scène cataclysmique rappelant le cyclone d’Argus dont Pauline attribuait déjà la responsabilité à Fleur. Mi-loup mi-sorcière, Fleur, vêtue de rouge et noir, la chevelure illuminée et le sourire féroce (T 221-223) assiste avec jubilation à sa vengeance minutieusement préparée. Hommes et machines sont alors les victimes piégées des hauts chênes que Fleur ne pouvait se résoudre à céder et dont l’humanité se signale dans leur étreinte violente : « [...] they lay mute in the huge embrace of the oaks » (T 224).
26 De nouveau, dans Four Souls, vengeance et résistance s’organisent selon des schémas empruntés aux Blancs puis détournés. Plutôt que de tuer Mauser, selon son projet initial, Fleur se fait épouser pour redevenir propriétaire de sa terre. Quand les affaires périclitent, Mauser décide de fuir ses créanciers. Fleur, qui refuse de le suivre, obtient la voiture et le titre de propriété de sa terre. Elle revient à la réserve en compagnie de son fils, métis attardé mental, avec l’intention de récupérer sa parcelle mais, une fois encore, les subtilités administratives et fiscales l’ont piégée. Malgré ses visites répétées auprès de l’administration, il est évident qu’elle n’est pas propriétaire car Mauser, comme elle-même autrefois, n’a pas payé ses impôts fonciers et la parcelle a été saisie (FS 185-186). Cependant, bien vite, Nanapush reconnaît dans le comportement de Fleur l’art du chasseur déjà pratiqué sur les employés bouchers autrefois à Argus (FS 186). La
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voiture, n’est alors plus le symbole blanc de l’intrusion mécanique mais est détournée pour devenir subtil outil de vengeance et de rétablissement d’un ordre bouleversé. Vêtue de blanc dans son luxueux véhicule de même teinte, Fleur rôde, à l’affût, préparant son piège (FS 186) : « [...] she needed her land. Signed over, safe, and in her name » (FS 189). C’est finalement au poker, à coup de bluffs sur son apparente faiblesse due à l’alcool et celle de son fils attardé, qu’elle réussit à piéger l’agent indien, Tatro, devenu propriétaire de sa parcelle. Contre la luxueuse voiture ostensiblement exposée sur les routes de la réserve, il accepte de jouer la terre et l’île de Matchimanito et il les perd (FS 196-197), la « voiture fantomatique » (FS 189) devenant ainsi medium qui autorise le retour de Fleur à sa vie naturelle. Blessé dans son orgueil, Tatro prétend ne pas tenir à ce terrain qui ne vaut rien : « ‘My land is no good anyway.’ Fleur gloated ‘according to him. Ishkonigan, the leftovers!’ The pleasure in her voice was wild » (FS 200). Le terme anishinaabe pour réserve, ishkonigan, est sans équivoque car il signifie également leftovers et desolate lands (Beidler 386) mais malgré ces connotations péjoratives, Fleur et Nanapush connaissent la valeur de ce qu’ils ont réussi à sauver : I’ve seen too much go by — unturned grass below my feet, and overhead, the great white cranes flung south forever. I know this. Land is the only thing that lasts life to life. Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier. I am a holdout, like the Pillagers, although I told the Captain and the Agent what I thought of their papers in good English. I could have written my name, and much more too, in script. I had a Jesuit education in the halls of Saint John before I ran back to the woods and forgot my prayers17. (T 33)
27 La terre, la nature sont plus puissantes que tout, ainsi que le suggèrent ces comparaisons, néanmoins, à la différence de Fleur la sauvageonne, Nanapush, le vieux conteur, sait aussi la force des mots et le pouvoir de l’écriture. D’autres Anishinaabeg l’ont compris, comme Bernadette Morrissey (T 179) ou Nector Kashpaw (T 57, 207) qui savent défendre leurs intérêts auprès de l’administration car ils savent lire et écrire, mais Nanapush, lui, utilise la langue et l’écriture dans un subtil mélange politique et littéraire. S’il sait que l’anglais est la langue de la tromperie utilisée dans les traités qui ont subtilisé les terres et sur les étiquettes de bouteilles d’alcool qui déciment les siens (T 154), s’il a vu que signer un document de son nom équivaut à se faire piéger (T 2, 32, 99-100 ; FS 79-80), il est néanmoins le narrateur privilégié de Tracks et Four Souls et, pour la fille de Fleur, Lulu, le détenteur de l’histoire familiale et communautaire qu’il tisse au fil de ses récits. Tel Ulysse avec le Cyclope, il prétend avec les Blancs être « Sans Nom » mais quand il s’agit de donner un nom de famille à Lulu (T 61, 178) ou de percer les rouages administratifs pour la ramener à la réserve (T 225), il maîtrise la langue écrite et sait faire usage de son patronyme dans une subtilité à la mesure de sa personnalité : My girl, listen well. Nanapush is a name that loses power every time that it is written and stored in a government file. That is why I only gave it out once in all those years. No Name, I told Father Damien when he came to take the church census. No Name, I told the Agent when he made up the tribal roll. “I have the use of a white man’s name,” I told the Captain who delivered the ration payout for our first treaty, “but I won’t sign your paper with that name either.” (T 32-33)
28 Le Père Damien, qui n’a rien du missionnaire stéréotypé puisqu’il contribue même à la somme réunie par les trois familles pour éviter la saisie de leurs terres (T 191), conseille à Nanapush un engagement politique tribal pour défendre les droits des siens, mais
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dans un premier temps le vieillard recule car, en bon chasseur, il flaire les pièges qui lui seraient tendus : But I saw the snare right then, the invisible loop hidden in the priest’s well- meaning words. Unlike the Pukwans, who were government Indians, I saw the deadfall beneath my feet before I stepped. I would avoid the job. I knew what was attached. “Wires,” I said, “tied to the hands and the arms.” (T 185)
29 Cependant, malgré son dégoût de la paperasserie, il finit par céder dans l’intérêt de Lulu car il comprend la force du crayon et du papier (T 209) : [...] once the bureaucrats sink their barbed pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That’s when I began to see what we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match. For I did stand for tribal chairman, as you know, defeating Pukwan in the last year. To become a bureaucrat myself was the only way that I could wade through the letters, the reports, the only place where I could find a ledge to kneel on, to reach through the loophole and draw you home18. (T 225)
30 L’anaphore dit la déception du témoin de la dérive de sa communauté qui a troqué l’arbre pour sa forme industrielle, le papier. Mais plus que le cynique décrypteur des rouages administratifs, Nanapush demeure avant tout le conteur, le narrateur homodiégétique qui retrace la vie de la réserve, pour Lulu dans Tracks, et finalement, pour le lecteur. Dans Four Souls, il n’est pas le témoin direct du séjour de Fleur en ville et avoue : « I pieced together the story » (FS 4). Grand bavard, il est maintenant narrateur et artisan partiel des deux textes que nous livre Erdrich : « I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words » (FS 210). Récepteur des souvenirs de son peuple, il en connaît les souffrances mais aussi les failles et en fait un récit qu’il nous offre à la manière d’un vieux sage. Dans Four Souls, en particulier, il rompt régulièrement le cours de l’intrigue et signale son rôle de narrateur-conteur et son travail de manipulation de la langue (FS 48, 58) pour finir sur ces mots apaisés : « Within me there has always burned an urge to see how things turn out. To know the story. Now that I know the story, I can rest » (FS 209). Polly Elizabeth, autre narrateur de Four Souls, parcourt un chemin similaire malgré ses préjugés initiaux, elle qui, à la première rencontre avec Fleur, la percevait comme une énigme scripturaire : I see the negative of her as she stooped to her dark bundle, the image of a question mark set on a page, alone. Or like a keyhole, you could say, sunk into a door locked and painted shut, the deep black figure layered in shawls was more an absence, a slot for a coin, an invitation for the curious, than a woman come to plead for menial work. (FS 12)
31 De la tradition orale à la trace d’encre, de la trace de pas invisible sur la neige aux preuves papier qui piègent mais peuvent parfois protéger, Nanapush mène le lecteur de la nature à l’écriture. Le cheminement proposé est celui de la littérature comme trace qui se fait mémoire d’un temps qui, sans être idéal, était simplement humain et différent. Si les textes d’Erdrich célèbrent la force d’un attachement à une nature disparue, ils sont aussi chant de la lettre et de la force qu’elle recèle. La parole, le nom et l’écriture mettent finalement un terme à la souffrance de ceux qui regrettent un paradis perdu naturel qui s’avère pourtant n’avoir jamais existé en tant que tel et n’être qu’un stéréotype parmi d’autres. Ainsi, la romancière offre, non pas la nostalgique
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évocation d’une nature dont la perte serait toujours à venger, mais un appel sage et métissé au souvenir, qui se trouve apaisé par le filtre de la parole et de la littérature. Dans un mouvement métafictionnel, le vieux Nanapush participe non seulement à la reconstruction de vies brisées, comme celles de Fleur ou Lulu, voire celles de sa communauté tout entière, mais il exige aussi l’effort du lecteur qui se voit chargé de recomposer le récit à partir de bribes éparses qui font écho aux distorsions qui ont frappé son peuple : « Fleur left the reservation. Of all that happened day to day, all the ins and outs of her existence, we have what came of the accumulation. We have the story » (FS 74). Nostalgique d’une autre époque, Nanapush rêve de légendes primitives, métaphores d’un mode de vie naturel : « I let myself dream, as I do so often now, of the old days and old people. [...] The winter fires and the aadizokaanag19, the stories that branched off and looped back and continued to imitate the flowers on a vine » (FS 114-115). Malgré sa nostalgie, il est l’artisan d’histoires qui, comme celles du passé, s’enroulent et s’entremêlent dans un enchevêtrement infini qui fait appel à l’imagination du lecteur. Ces histoires sauvent (T 46), réunissent les familles, tissent les liens communautaires (T 216), aident à comprendre le chemin parcouru (T 219) et Erdrich invite le lecteur à décrypter ces motifs qui dans un premier temps laissent perplexes ses propres narrateurs homodiégétiques. Au début de Tracks, Nanapush annonce avec sagesse : « There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs clear. There was so much we saw and never knew » (T 34). À la fin de Four Souls, Fleur récupère sa terre mais, grâce aux rituels ancestraux de Margaret, elle a aussi accès à un nom secret qui lui donnera identité et force de vie (FS 207). La parole et la terre, telles sont bien les préoccupations de Nanapush, vieux sage éclairé, qui conclut : « This scrap of earth. This ishkonigan. This leftover. We’ve got this and as long as we can hold on to it we will be some sort of people » (FS 210). Ainsi, il propose au lecteur ce qui est l’ultime essence de toute chose et qui, à l’inverse des arbres et de la terre, ne saurait jamais être volé : « What is the essence, the soul ? my Jesuit teachers used to ask of their students. What is the irreducible ? I answer, what the owl pukes. That is also the story — what is left after the events in all their juices and chaos are reduced to the essence. The story — all the time does not digest » (FS 71).
32 Dans Four Souls, Mauser ruiné s’exclame : The old type, the old warrior type, they are gone. Only the wastrels, the dregs of humanity left, only the poor toms have survived. Even [Fleur] left. I point that out to her. The reservations are ruined spots and may as well be sold off and all trace of their former owners obliterated. That’s my theory. Let the Indians drift into the towns and cities or subsist where they will. Thinking their tribes will ever be restored is sheer foolishness. There’s nothing left. (FS 127)
33 Tracks et Four Souls viennent justement s’inscrire en faux contre ce mépris ignorant. Ainsi que le prouvent Fleur et Nanapush, il reste précisément quelque chose : la terre, si pauvre et réduite soit-elle, et la parole dont le pouvoir demeure sans limites. Dans ses interviews, Erdrich insiste d’ailleurs régulièrement sur l’importance des histoires dans sa famille et sa communauté anishinaabe (Chavkin 103-104, 175). Histoires et humour sont deux aspects essentiels de la vie et de la littérature amérindienne contemporaine selon elle (Chavkin 49, 68 ; Coltelli 46). Humour et grotesque pimentent son œuvre qui aurait pu n’être que nostalgie de l’Amérique naturelle, voire édénique, des peuples autochtones. En outre, même si son écriture peut se faire rappel élégiaque de modes de vie disparus, elle est toujours dénuée de stéréotypes et nuancée par une multitude de
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références aux forces surnaturelles inquiétantes, parfois même meurtrières, aux vengeances sophistiquées et aux bassesses humaines qui composent également la société anishinaabe de ses romans. La machine a peut-être saccagé le jardin mais elle n’est pas seule responsable, elle est même parfois utilisée comme redresseur de torts. En outre, chez Erdrich, les Blancs ne sont pas tous des envahisseurs avides, comme le prouve le cas du Père Damien ou de Polly Elizabeth.
34 Bernadette Rigal-Cellard remarque que la question de l’appropriation des terres avait déjà été dénoncée par des auteurs comme Hawthorne ou Faulkner avant même l’émergence d’une littérature autochtone largement concernée par ce sujet (139). Si, comme elle le signale, le culte spécifique de la terre n’existait apparemment pas avant que les Blancs ne tentent de s’en emparer (146), le sujet est cependant devenu central pour des populations et des écrivains profondément marqués par le traumatisme de la perte territoriale. Erdrich adopte en effet ce point de vue dans son article « Where I Ought to Be : A Writer’s Sense of Place »20 et Stirrup de conclure : « Abstracted and romanticised, this sense of land-attachment and responsibility nevertheless attests to a sense of the temporariness of human societies that figures prominently in other indigenous writing about land » (12). Au-delà d’une position à propos de la terre-mère que certains trouveront peu authentique car le résultat même de la colonisation, se profile donc le sujet crucial de la responsabilité écologique et de la dépossession historique. Quoi qu’il en soit, la terre comme point crucial de l’histoire des relations entre colonisateurs et Autochtones demeure au cœur de la littérature amérindienne, ainsi que le souligne Rigal-Cellard : « La fêlure que dénoncent les auteurs indigènes et les autres remonte aux origines des États-Unis au hiatus coupant pour toujours une vision paradisiaque du continent de la réalité d’un peuplement forcément destructeur » (205). Cette prépondérance de la dépossession dans la littérature autochtone est mise en avant par Erdrich elle-même quand elle insiste sur une notion de perte qui ne se résume pas nécessairement à la terre mais peut être élargie à la culture en général : « Contemporary Native American writers have therefore a task quite different from that of other writers I’ve mentioned. In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe » (Wong 48).
35 Selon le vieux Nanapush, les Anishinaabeg ne laissaient autrefois « aucune trace » : Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply on the earth. We build roads. The ruts and skids of our wheels bite deep and the bush recedes. We make foundations for our buildings and sink wells beside our houses. Our shoes are hard and where we go it is easy to follow. (FS 210)
36 Si les bottes ont remplacé les mocassins, si les routes se substituent aux sentiers forestiers, il est cependant des traces que le vieux conteur avide d’histoires ne saurait regretter, celle de l’écriture. De l’oralité à la trace d’encre, Erdrich offre un métissage fictionnel qui ouvre la société anishinaabe à une certaine modernité. Finalement, Tracks et Four Souls proposent un cheminement subtil qui part des traces naturelles de la forêt, se poursuit avec les pièges en tous genres des Blancs mais aussi des Indiens pour se terminer sur l’essentiel, ce qui reste quand la chouette vomit, dirait Nanapush, la littérature (FS 71).
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BIBLIOGRAPHIE
BEIDLER, Peter G. et BARTON, Gay. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
BOUZONVILLER, Elisabeth. “Cracks and ‘Bricolage’ in Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife or the Art of Hybridity.” Guignery V., Pesso-Miquel C. et Specq F., eds., Hybridity: Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 147-157.
CHAVKIN, Allan et FEYL CHAVKIN, Nancy. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
COLTELLI, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
DELORIA, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Avon Books, 1972 [1969].
ERDRICH, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 1987 [1984].
ERDRICH, Louise. The Beet Queen. New York: Bantam Books, 1987 [1986].
ERDRICH, Louise. Tracks. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989 [1988].
ERDRICH, Louise. Tales of Burning Love. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997 [1996].
ERDRICH, Louise. The Antelope Wife. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999 [1998].
ERDRICH, Louise. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002 [2001].
ERDRICH, Louise. Four Souls. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006 [2004].
ERDRICH, Louise. The Plague of Doves. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
ERDRICH, Louise. La Forêt suspendue. Paris : Laffont, 1990.
ERDRICH, Louise. “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place.” Wong H. D. Sweet, ed., Louise Erdrich’s Love Medecine: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 43-50.
HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999 [1851].
JACOBS, Connie A..The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of her People. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
MARX, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
PÉREZ CASTILLO, Susan. “Postmodernism, Native American Literature and the Real: The Silko- Erdrich Controversy.” Amherst: The Massachusetts Review 32. 2, (Summer 1991). 285-294.
PETERSON, Nancy J.. “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” New York: Modern Language Association 109. 5, (October 1995). 982-994.
RIGAL-CELLARD, Bernadette. Le Mythe et la plume. La littérature indienne contemporaine en Amérique du Nord. Monaco : Éditions du Rocher, 2004.
SILKO, Leslie Marmon. “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf.” Impact Magazine, Albuquerque Journal, (8 octobre 1986). 10-11.
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STANFORD FRIEDMAN, Susan. “Identity Politics, Syncretism, Catholicism, and Anishinabe Religion in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Religion and Literature. South Bend: The University of Notre Dame 26. 1, (Spring 1994). 107-133.
STEINBECK, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1997 [1939].
STIRRUP, DAVID. Louise Erdrich. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, coll. « Contemporary American and Canadian Writers », 2010.
STOOKEY, Lorena L.. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.
VAN DYKE, Annette. “Of Vision Quests and Spirit Guardians: Female Power in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” Chavkin Allan, ed., The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 130-143.
NOTES
1. Erdrich prévoyait initialement d’écrire une version révisée de Tracks, elle s’est finalement laissée convaincre de ne pas modifier son roman de 1988 et d’en écrire un nouveau (Beidler 56). 2. Nous utiliserons les initiales des romans pour les désigner lors des références : T pour Tracks, FS pour Four Souls, LM pour Love Medicine, TBL pour Tales of Burning Love, PD pour The Plague of Doves et LRM pour The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. 3. Connie A. Jacobs donne un éclairage sur l’origine historique de ce nom qui n’est pas uniquement fictionnel : « […] the historical Pillagers were known as a belligerent, brave, and fiercely independent group. William Warren says they first received their name in 1781 after occupying Leech Lake where they became known as Pillagers, Muk-im-dua-win-in-e-wug, or ‘men who take by force’ (256). They earned this name when, in the late 1700s during contact with a sick trader on the lower Mississippi, this group took advantage of the weakened white man’s condition and carried off most of his merchandise. The trader fled for his life, as the clan, aroused by liquor and by the excitement of the impending Midéwinin ceremony, ‘pillaged’ all of his trade goods » (153). Dans un revirement de situation, les Autochtones seront désormais les victimes de la dépossession dont l’idée est contenue dans le patronyme de Fleur. 4. Dans Tales of Burning Love, Gerry Nanapush, le petit-fils de Fleur, s’évade de prison et, alors qu’il est habilement dissimulé sous un déguisement de femme, seul son « sourire de loup » le rend reconnaissable aux yeux de sa compagne Dot (TBL 175). 5. The Antelope Wife développe plus largement encore cette thématique d’une hybridité entre humain et animal au travers de l’évocation de liens très intimes entre femmes et antilopes ou chevreuils mais aussi de ceux avec des chiens inspirés de la réalité et des mythes de la culture anishinaabe (Bouzonviller 149-151). 6. Je souligne. 7. G’dai signifie ton chien ou animal (Beidler 384). 8. Je souligne. 9. Dans Love Medicine, Gerry Nanapush rappelle l’expression désignant les Indiens qui ont oublié les valeurs de leur propre communauté : « […] an apple […] red on the outside, white on the inside » (LM 259). 10. Zhaaginaash signifie Blanc (Beidler 395). 11. Erdrich remarque : « The word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are called grandfathers and grandmothers and are extremely important in Ojibwe philosophy. Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand » (Beidler 381). 12. Onizhishin signifie joli (Beidler 392).
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13. Ce même processus de destruction par striation est à l’œuvre dans The Grapes of Wrath de Steinbeck quand le tracteur envahit les terres du Dust Bowl des métayers dépossédés (40-41). 14. Je souligne. 15. L. Marmon Silko, “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf.” Impact Magazine, Albuquerque Journal, (8 October 1986). 10-11. Voir la réaction d’Erdrich à ce sujet (Chavkin 237-238) et les articles de Susan Stanford Friedman, Nancy J. Peterson et Susan Pérez Castillo, par exemple, à propos de cette controverse. 16. La traduction française s’est inspirée de cette citation pour le titre du roman, La Forêt suspendue : « Around me, a forest was suspended, lightly held » (T 223). 17. Je souligne. 18. Je souligne. 19. Aadizokaanag signifie mythes, légendes, histoires traditionnelles (Beidler 380). 20. « […] although fiction alone may lack the power to head us off the course of destruction, it affects us as individuals and can spur us to treat the earth [...] as we would treat our own mothers and fathers. For, once we no longer live beneath our mother’s heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying completely on its cycle and elements, helpless without its protective embrace » (Wong 50).
RÉSUMÉS
Les liens que les Indiens entretiennent avec la nature font partie des clichés longtemps ressassés. Cependant, tandis que la romancière amérindienne Louise Erdrich célèbre une certaine Amérique des origines où les peuples indigènes respectaient la nature et vivaient en harmonie avec elle, cette vision pastorale n’est pour elle jamais manichéenne car les individus ont leurs spécificités. Résolument moderne, l’Amérique autochtone d’Erdrich, dénonce un gâchis écologique et la disparition d’une culture en lien étroit avec la nature mais elle suggère aussi l’absence d’un idéal de pureté naturelle où l’Indien ferait partie du décor selon le mythe du bon sauvage. Dans cet article centré sur les romans Tracks (1988) et Four Souls (2004), nous mettons en relief son approche nuancée de la pastorale indigène. Si la fiction d’Erdrich montre la force d’un attachement à une nature disparue, elle est aussi chant de la lettre et de la force qu’elle recèle. Ainsi, Erdrich offre non pas la nostalgique évocation d’une nature dont la perte serait à venger mais un appel sage et résilient au souvenir, qui se trouve apaisé par le filtre de la parole et de la littérature.
The links between Native Americans and nature are part of long-lived clichés. If American novelist Louise Erdrich celebrates a primeval America where indigenous people lived indeed in harmony with nature, her pastoral vision is never Manichean because individuals always behave in their own personal ways. Her Native America is definitely modern and while it denounces an ecological mess and the disappearance of indigenous cultures much attached to their natural habitats, it also rejects an ideal vision in which the Natives were part of a unspoiled setting along the “Noble savage” myth. In this article, we focus on Tracks (1988) and Four Souls (2004) and stress the various nuances of her approach of the indigenous pastoral myth. Whereas Erdrich’s fiction shows the power of attachment to a lost natural America, it also emphasizes the importance of words and memory. Thus, she does not express a form of nostalgia implying a desire for revenge
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for this violent dispossession due to colonization but suggests survival and resilience thanks to her wise appeal to memory through story-telling and literature.
INDEX
Keywords : Erdrich, Tracks, Four Souls, Native American writing, America, North Dakota, Indians, Natives, Anishinaabeg, colonization, forest, land, dispossession, machine, storytelling Mots-clés : Erdrich, Tracks, Four Souls, littérature amérindienne, Amérique, Dakota du Nord, Indiens, autochtone, Anishinaabeg, colonisation, forêt, terre, dépossession, machine, conteur, histoires
AUTEUR
ELISABETH BOUZONVILLER Elisabeth Bouzonviller est maître de conférences à l’Université Jean Monnet de St-Etienne où elle enseigne la littérature et la civilisation américaines depuis 1999. Spécialiste de F. Scott Fitzgerald, elle a publié le titre consacré à cet auteur chez Belin dans la collection « Voix américaines ». Membre de la F. Scott Fitzgerald Society basée à Hofstra University, New York, elle fait partie du comité de lecture de la F. Scott Fitzgerald Review où elle publie régulièrement articles et recensions. Elle a participé à plusieurs émissions radiophoniques nationales sur les Fitzgerald. Elle a contribué au recueil A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald publié en 2007 chez Peter Lang et à l’ouvrage américain F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context à paraître en mars 2013 chez Cambridge University Press. Elle a écrit divers articles sur des romanciers américains du XXe siècle (Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck) et s’est consacrée, plus récemment, à une recherche littéraire tournée vers l’indianité avec des articles et communications consacrés à Emily Carr, N. Scott Momaday et surtout Louise Erdrich, ses dernières publications dans ce domaine faisant partie des recueils De la Peur en Amérique : l’Amérique au défi du frisson (2010), Fiction, Crime and the Feminine (2011) et Hybridity: Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts (2011). Elisabeth Bouzonviller is Associate Professor at Jean Monnet University in St Etienne, France, where she has been teaching American literature and culture since 1999. She published Francis Francis Scott Fitzgerald, écrivain du déséquilibre in the Belin collection “Voix américaines” in 2000. She is a member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and has published various articles and reviews in its Review. She has taken part in several French national radio programs devoted to the Fitzgeralds. She contributed to A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald published in 2007 by Peter Lang and also to F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context to be published in March 2013 by Cambridge University Press. She has contributed to other collected works with articles on Fitzgerald but also on Hemingway, Faulkner or Steinbeck. She is currently working on Native American writers, especially Louise Erdrich whose novels she has dealt with in recent collective publications such as De la Peur en Amérique : l’Amérique au défi du frisson (2010), Fiction, Crime and the Feminine (2011) et Hybridity : Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts (2011).
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“The Truth Hangs over Your Head”: Toward an Indigenous Land Ethic
Lee Schweninger
EDITOR'S NOTE
An earlier, much different and shorter version of the argument set forth here was originally presented as “‘The Truth Hangs over Your Head’: Sanctioned and Unsanctioned Crimes against the Environment”. Indigenous Peoples and the Environment Symposium. Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3, Bordeaux, France. 8-10 December 2011.
1 In the spring of 1999, with the sanction of the International Whaling Commission, among other entities, the Makahs, an American Indian tribe whose reservation is on the Olympic Peninsula in extreme northwestern Washington state, reaffirmed an 1855 treaty right by successfully hunting and killing a grey whale and then bringing it back to the town of Neah Bay. Eight and a half years later, in the fall of 2007, a group of five Makah men (including two veterans of the first hunt) participated in an unsanctioned hunt that resulted in the death of another grey whale. Three of the hunters pled guilty and were put on probation for a misdemeanor violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The two others, Wayne Johnson and Andy Noel, were given five- and three-month prison sentences respectively when a judge rejected their religious freedom defense.1 From a strictly environmental rather than a legal perspective, one can logically and justifiably ask whether or not there is any difference at all between the two instances. In neither case was the hunt part of a necessary subsistence effort, and in both cases a member of a formerly listed species was hunted and somewhat brutally killed. The illegal hunt does differ, however, in that because of the hunters’ poor preparation and lack of expertise, the whale suffered an especially brutal killing. Legally, of course, the differences between the two hunts are immense: one had the approval and sanction of appropriate governing entities, the other did not. The questions I want to ask in this essay are not so much about the differences between
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legal and illegal whaling, but rather whether or not the two hunts differ in the context of an American Indian or Indigenous land ethic, and if so how.
2 In an effort to make an assessment of and a statement about the place of an American Indian environmental consciousness as reflected and represented in American Indian art and life, I compare these two related Makah whale hunts with a seemingly completely different text, the text of an American Indian film, Powwow Highway (1989). In the film the background motivation for the plot is the threat of a devastating mining operation on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana.2 This essay thus argues that the film Powwow Highway (as well as the novel on which it is based) and the actual Makah whaling hunts offer very different but related “texts” through which one can theorize an American Indian environmental consciousness. Several different Native American writers come together speculatively to suggest an American Indian land ethic, an ethic that can be seen to operate in relation to many different forms of environmental exploitation, including whale hunting by tribal members themselves and mining on Indian land by non-Indians.
3 Let me start not with the hunt or with the film, however, but with a few references to how Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday articulates his understanding of the obvious need for humans to maintain a moral and spiritual relationship with non-human nature. In an early essay, “An American Land Ethic” (1970), Momaday writes that “We have become disoriented, I believe; we have suffered a kind of psychic dislocation of ourselves in time and space. We may be perfectly sure where we are in relation to the supermarket and the next coffee break, but I doubt that any of us knows where he is in relation to the stars and to the solstices. Our sense of the natural order has become dull and unreliable.” (Man 47-48). In another essay, “A First American Views His Land” (1976), Momaday insists further that “there are ethical imperatives” in one’s relationship with the land: “Inasmuch as I am in the land, it is appropriate that I should affirm myself in the spirit of the land.” (Man 39). And in a 2008 interview Momaday summarizes an aspect of what he thinks of as an American Indian land ethic: “I believe that we must have a moral understanding of, and regard for, the earth. We must realize that the earth is a vital and spiritual entity. Moreover, it is indivisible with Mankind. We are the land. We cannot do harm to it without doing harm to ourselves” (Walker). For Momaday it comes down to a simple necessity: we must “formulate an ethical idea of the land—a notion of what it is and must be in our daily lives—and I believe moreover that it is absolutely necessary to do so” (Man 48). In yet another essay, “Navajo Place-Names,” Momaday contends that story itself has the power to imbue place with sacredness. Humans must recognize and take advantage of this capability of language. (Man 124).
4 As appealing as these directives might appear as articulations of a land ethic, however, nowhere in his writing and theorizing does Momaday seem to offer anything more specific or concrete concerning a person’s necessary relationship with and attitude toward nature and the environment. His attitudes do nonetheless offer one some means of grappling with questions of an American Indian land ethic in other contexts. Specifically important in the contexts of the Makah whale hunts and a specific moment in the film Powwow Highway are his insistences on the power of story and his sense of the interconnectedness of man and non-human nature.
5 In the film—adapted from the 1979 novel The Powwow Highway by Huron writer David Seals who also wrote the screenplay—two Cheyenne men leave Lame Deer on the
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Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana and, via Pine Ridge, South Dakota, drive to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In this somewhat generic road movie, Philbert Bono (played by Cayuga actor Gary Farmer; Dead Man 1995; Smoke Signals 1998) and his friend Buddy Red Bow (played by A Martinez, Blackfoot)3 drive a beat-up wreck of a car, a 1964 Buick LeSabre—which Philbert names Protector the War Pony—on their mission to rescue Buddy’s sister Bonnie (played by Mescalero Apache actor Joanelle Nadine Romero). Corrupt, non-Native mining entrepreneurs, along with the help of the equally corrupt Santa Fe police and even the FBI, conspire to wrongfully incarcerate Bonnie in order to lure the politically active and tribally influential Buddy away from his center of power immediately prior to an important vote concerning the proposed license renewal of the mining operation on the reservation. Buddy opposes the mine, and the film suggests he has the political power to get the proposal defeated. Philbert has a two-fold purpose in taking the trip to Santa Fe. As does Buddy, he wants to rescue Bonnie, but he also wants to continue a quest he has just begun to gather medicine and become what he understands to be a Cheyenne warrior. When the two men finally get to Santa Fe, they do rescue Bonnie and her children and successfully elude police pursuit. Ultimately they ride off en masse, evidently back to the reservation in Montana. Although the episodes depicting the long drive and literal rescue mission might seem to dominate the film’s plot, the threats of political chicanery and serious environmental exploitation do underlie and motivate the film’s entire action.
6 Despite the underlying motivation, however, scholars have tended to denigrate the film in the context of its actually making any sort of helpful political or environmental statement. In “Culture Isn’t Buckskin Shoes: A Conversation around Powwow Highway,” for example, Toby Langen and Kathryn Shanley lament that even though the end of the film offers some catharsis, politically, “you’re no better off for having seen that film” (Langen 26). Corinn Columpar argues similarly that “the only point of reference that the film has for its vision of the ideal home is the hypothetical past . . . a time when the reservation was not in the clutches of corporations and people had access to the ‘good old Indian wisdom’” (125). Ellen Arnold makes a similar point, even more emphatically, when she argues that after the chase-scene finale, “all the real issues the film raises have been dropped”: the violent regime at Pine Ridge, the concerns with capitalism, exploitation, and racism, for example, and especially in my context here, the mining deal and its threat to the environment and the physical well-being of the residents of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. All these issues seem simply to have disappeared without resolution as the credits roll. Furthermore, according to Arnold, for “Native American audiences, the film carries the disturbing message that political activism and resistance are less effective . . . than lawless revenge.” The ending of the film is especially disturbing in Arnold’s view in that the heroes “must now ‘vanish’ back to the reservation, never to leave again on pain of arrest” (353).
7 These readings of the film, which could apply equally well to David Seals’s novel, focus almost exclusively on Buddy and his political role in the film. If one focuses instead on the other protagonist, Philbert, I believe that one can much more readily find an affirmative message about political activism and resistance and about environmental awareness and environmental ethics. That is, the film depicts Buddy’s lawless revenge and brute force as completely ineffectual. Indeed, the film presents Buddy’s actions as laughable. He bullies shopkeepers and throws temper tantrums, but he accomplishes little. He and his ineffectiveness stand in sharp contrast to Philbert and his successes. Philbert is guided by reflective, considered, and inventive approaches not only to
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rescuing Bonnie, but also to teaching her children about their Cheyenne heritage. Ultimately Philbert can also be seen to offer instruction concerning attitudes toward the natural environment. And here, as I hope to demonstrate, is where the film intersects with the attitudes toward sanctioned and unsanctioned whale hunts in the context of an environmental ethics.
8 A crucial moment in Philbert’s intellectual and moral journey (as well as the literal journey to Santa Fe) is evident in a scene at a roadside stop somewhere just north of Denver, Colorado. The travelers pull off the interstate for fuel and food, and in this scene Philbert tells a story through which he idealistically insists that Wihio, a trickster figure, will somehow protect the Cheyennes specifically and Indigenous people generally from the rapaciousness of “white America.” Wihio the trickster will, in fact, protect the environment itself (the lands, the waters, the animals, and the people) from exploitation and environmental degradation. The film takes care at this moment to intricately contextualize Philbert’s storytelling within an environmentally compromised setting. That is, the mise-en-scène includes the towering smokestacks and the utility poles of a coal-fired power plant which loom in the background as Philbert stands at a petrol station alongside an interstate highway where he has temporarily parked his gas-guzzling 1966 Buick LeSabre. In other words, the setting would seem to belie any environmentally sound message Philbert’s tale might otherwise contain.
Powwow Highway. 1989. Handmade Films. Dir. Jonathan Wacks.
9 Before turning to the trickster story itself, therefore, one might do well to take a closer look at that automobile, Philbert’s war pony. There is the unspoken but unavoidable fact that on their trip of about 1,900 kilometers (almost 1,200 miles) Philbert and Buddy will consume about 227 liters (approximately 60 gallons) of gasoline, and thus, in their rescue of Bonnie, they will be directly responsible for putting approximately 528 kilos
(well over 1000 lbs) of CO2 into the atmosphere as part of their carbon footprint— although that language as such would not have been available to them in the 1980s.4 And of course they would add another 528 kilos were they to drive that vehicle back to Lame Deer, Montana. Within the fiction of the film, furthermore, they make this trip at a time when the city of Denver along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in
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Colorado has some of the worst air quality in the entire United States. In 1987, for example, the New York Times reported that in Denver last Thursday and Friday… an ugly, foul-smelling cloud of carbon monoxide and particulate pollution hovered over the city, producing the two worst days of air pollution this fall. It was so bad that motorists were asked not to drive to work Friday… To many people, the dirty skies were a reminder of recent winters, when Denver consistently had some of the highest carbon monoxide levels in the nation… On one smog-choked day in 1986, carbon monoxide levels here reached… almost three times the Federal standard… and the worst anywhere in the country that year… In the winter of 1985-86, Denver exceeded Federal standards for carbon monoxide on 36 days, which was an improvement over the 45 days the previous winter. (“Western Cities”)
10 So, where does this leave the viewer of the film? In a context in which the Native characters themselves are heavily implicated in the environmental degradation, what can Philbert’s trickster story possibly have to say in light of the storyteller’s complicity in environmental degradation?
11 In this layered context, then, beside the dilapidated old Buick, along an interstate highway, and perched precariously in front of the fossil-fuel powered electricity- generating power plant, Philbert shares his account of the trickster Wihio and the plums. Here’s the story as Philbert tells it: One day he saw some plums floating on the creek. Now, Wihio loves to eat. So, he reached for those plums, but they disappeared, and he fell into the creek. He crawled out, all soaking wet. Saw them plums again, shimmering in the water. He kept diving, and they kept disappearing. Three days later his wife found him still splashing around. “Woman,” cried Wihio, “during the day juicy plums float in this magical spot, but at night they go away.” His wife screamed at him: “Stupid dog of a dog. Those plums are still on the tree. You worthless fool of a husband, chasing shadows when the truth hangs over your head.” (Powwow; see also Seals 201-02)
12 Even though the contextual elements of the storytelling sequence might suggest an environmental context, the story itself, verbally at least, does not seem to be about the environment or about environmental degradation. Nevertheless, the character Buddy immediately makes an environmental connection when he challenges what he calls Philbert’s naïve point of view. Buddy insists that miners and/or developers will not stop simply because of such old-time stories, such fairytales. Philbert maintains that his friend is wrong. They won’t do the mining, he counters, because “Trickster won’t let them.” BUDDY: It’s just too bad those stories don’t tell us how to keep our reservations from turning into sewers. PHILBERT: But they do. BUDDY: . . . white America ain’t gonna hold off much longer, man. They’re hungry. They want our coal, and our oil, and our uranium, and they’re gonna take it, wherever it is. PHILBERT: No they won’t. Wihio the Trickster won’t let them. For Wihio is also the creator of the universe. (Powwow)
13 Philbert reminds Buddy that he narrates “the stories of our ancestors.” These stories describe “how the old ones dealt with problems,” and they are especially relevant, Philbert contends, because “often the problems never change; nor the people.” The stories, implies Philbert, have an unrelenting, palpable power. They embody and make manifest the trickster, and the trickster simply will not allow that “white America” destroy the environment in taking the coal and oil and uranium from Indian land.
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14 The thematic suggestion here is that, ironically, it is the pragmatist Buddy, not the storyteller Philbert, who is looking at a reflection rather than at reality. In this sense Buddy, not Philbert, is the one chasing mirages. Rather than the root causes of the problems, Buddy hacks at some of the more obvious manifestations. In Momaday’s terms, he can be said to know where he is in relation to a coffee break, perhaps, but not in relation to the stars or the solstices. Buddy goes berserk smashing merchandise and breaking windows in an electronics shop, for example, because he erroneously thinks he has been cheated. Meanwhile, Philbert reads the instruction booklet and solves the problem. Buddy risks the entire rescue enterprise when he gets into a pointless fistfight in a Santa Fe bar, and at one point he even carries a pistol he would be a fool to ever use. Even his macho bravado in the Santa Fe jailhouse is ineffectual. Despite all his sound and fury, that is, he accomplishes nothing. In his attitude and approach, as the film demonstrates, he is, figuratively, as stupid as Wihio, deceived by appearances. Philbert, in stark contrast, understands that the real plums are hanging heavy on branches just overhead, and all one needs to do is look up. Buddy is unable to see that reality because he refuses to hear his friend. Philbert’s tale informs the viewers, if not Buddy, however, that one must learn to appreciate the stories, to recognize where one is in relation to the real plums, the stars, the solstices.
15 That appreciation is precisely what Philbert is learning through his quest to become a late twentieth-century Cheyenne warrior. The film emphatically insists that Philbert’s approach, not Buddy’s, is the effective one. Philbert rids Buddy of his pistol, albeit inadvertently. Philbert is finally the one who rescues Bonnie from her jail cell. It is Philbert who recoups the money that Buddy has misappropriated and that Bonnie’s friend Rabbit (Amanda Wyss) has put up as bail and lost. Philbert is the one who retrieves the children and begins to instruct them about their Cheyenne heritage. And it is Philbert (with a little help from friends) who effects everyone’s escape from the Santa Fe police pursuit in the film’s denouement. The film thus cues the viewer to recognize that Philbert’s quest to understand his own heritage and his own place in the cosmos results in effective action every time and everywhere it is needed. The film thus insists that it is Philbert, not Buddy, who does the work of the contemporary Cheyenne warrior, and his methods do not include lawless revenge.
16 Philbert’s successes are so thorough, in fact, that he is even able to rid himself of his automobile, even if his doing so is not completely his own choice: that is, failing brakes make the choice for him. Having used the automobile to rescue Bonnie and evade pursuit, he can legitimately abandon this gas-guzzling “war pony,” and so he leaps from the plummeting LeSabre just before it flies off a cliff and explodes in the ravine. Philbert, with the other fugitives, walks away from the crashed and burning automobile. In the novel, he turns “without remorse to the smoking ruin below, the dead American thing his people no longer wanted” (Seals 293). Literally the car burns, but figuratively, in a sense, the automobile that so heavily contributes to the degradation of the environment, takes its place as a sort of synecdoche representing the polluting disease of American settler culture. In this figurative sense, the automobile signifies an oil-based, highly polluting, rapacious, capitalistic economy, and therefore should, must in fact, be abandoned. And Philbert does indeed abandon it.
17 Despite the film’s insistence on Philbert’s many successes, however, Buddy’s skepticism concerning the power of the story to solve any real problems remains perhaps understandable. How does learning or knowing the stories of the ancestors translate
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into an American Indian environmental ethic? one might fairly ask. And how might that ethic translate into action against mining or timbering or toxic waste disposal enterprises on Indian land? How might stories protect the oceans from the unsanctioned slaughter of whales? Can a trickster story actually translate into deflecting further “real world” environmental exploitation and degradation?
18 According to the character Philbert Bono, the writer N. Scott Momaday, and others, the answer is yes. Yes it can.
19 According to Chickasaw poet, novelist, and environmental activist Linda Hogan, the unsanctioned Makah hunt, resulted in disaster. In an interview with Summer Harrison, Hogan describes her antipathy toward the hunt and the men who undertook it. Her frustration and disappointment are evident in her responses to Harrison, and especially indicative of her emotional involvement is that she tends to fuse the two different hunts, hunts separated by over eight years. In describing the unsanctioned hunt of 2007, she relates that the same guys that killed the whale before—which was televised in the northwest— killed another whale and it just sank to the bottom of the ocean. They just did it because they could, and they didn’t even ask the tribal council or the elders or anything, they just went out and killed a whale. And you have to really work hard to kill a whale, submachine guns and automatic missiles and all that stuff. So this was a major event when they did it because even the Coast Guard was on their side . . . And then the guys didn’t know how to whale and it sunk to the bottom and the Coast Guard pulled it up for them, pulled it up on the land. . . . So it was a disaster, and it was all on television. Everybody on the northwest coast saw it, and they saw the blood and the gore and the suffering of the whale (Harrison 167).
20 A major aspect of Hogan’s concern and disappointment here is the ill-preparedness of the hunters, their lack of spiritual readiness, and their complete and utter disregard for the sentience of the whale itself. The subtext, if you will, is that on some level there could be a better way to put into practice the 1855 Makah treaty right to fish and hunt whales. In another place, Hogan argues that the Makahs could actually retain their tribal identity and at the same time decide not to hunt whales. They could make the fact of their not hunting a living part of their culture. Such a decision, contends Hogan, “might very well restore tradition until the whale and the people reestablish a relationship of offering and receiving from one another. The way it used to be. The heart of the hunter has to care” (Peterson 154, emphasis in original). If there is that better way, it would certainly include that the whalers be capable hunters, that they have a clear sense of the spiritual aspects of their undertaking, and that they care that the hunted animal is a being deserving of consideration, respect, and prayer.
21 Analogously, just such attitudes toward tradition and recognition of sanctity as a necessary component of any kind of hunting are evident in some of N. Scott Momaday’s descriptions of bear hunts. In a book called In the Bear’s House (1999), Momaday writes that part of the difficulty inherent in telling a story is that to be any good it must include, or must encapsulate the spiritual: “Grace is the soul of story. . . . It is a presence without a mask. . . . Or perhaps a mask behind which there is no presence” (25). Similarly, one could argue, much of what Momaday has to say about Bear is similarly elusive: “A mask of words behind which there is nothing, only a silence, a perfect stillness. . . . Grace” (25).
22 In turning from the example of the bear in Momaday’s context to the whale in the context of the Makah hunts, one can find ample ground for comparison. Although
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Hogan might disagree, one can argue that in 1999 the Makahs organized a whale hunt that included spiritual preparation and acknowledgement of the whale as worthy of respect. They modeled their canoe on the traditional Makah whaling canoe and called it Hummingbird. They took similar care with the design and making of the oars and the harpoons. Before the hunt, in addition to physical training, they performed preparatory ceremonial rituals, namely strengthening, cleansing, and purifying rituals. Throughout, they paid careful attention to the sacred aspects of the hunt and acknowledged the spiritual importance of the whale itself. Let’s call that Grace! Many people, including some Makahs on the reservation, opposed the hunt on environmental, ethical, moral, and even legal grounds, especially members of such organizations as Earth First and Greenpeace, but nevertheless in addition to federal and state sanction, the hunters had tribal approval for their hunt. The verb to sanction has significance in this context; it is from the Latin sanctio, meaning to make holy. The very fact of the hunt’s legal sanction thus etymologically and implicitly acknowledges the hunt’s inherent spiritual element. The hunters took great care to establish themselves in relation to their culture, their traditions, their history, and perhaps most importantly, in relation to the whale itself. Although the actual killing of the whale was without a doubt unfortunately inept and clumsy and although many people took and continue to take issue with the hunt and its aftermath, in the realms of the ritual or spiritual or ideal it can be regarded, in Momaday’s sense, as imbued with and aspect at least of grace.
23 Jump ahead to 2007 and the unsanctioned hunt mentioned in the opening paragraph above: Without the sanction of any tribal group or permission from any United States governmental agency, without the approval of the Makah Tibal Council itself, the group of five Makahs used a pretense to borrow the boat, rifles, and harpoons, before going on their botched clandestine hunt. According to a Seattle Times report, “the fatally injured whale swam nine miles. About 12 hours after it was struck, it died and sank in about 700 feet of water” (Mapes). Between the time the gray whale had been shot—”at least sixteen times” and after having been harpooned with at least four harpoons—and the time it died twelve hours later, the hunters themselves were arrested and taken from the scene. (See Gottlieb.) Willingly or not, these hunters abandoned the harpooned whale, left it to flounder, to suffer, to die, and eventually to sink to the bottom of the Strait. According to reporter Paul Shukovsky, Joe McGimpsey, a Makah elder, took a boat into the Strait Juan de Fuca off of Neah Bay to offer sacred chants to the dying whale. “It would not have been right to let the whale die alone,” McGimpsey is reputed to have said. He was also “troubled because the surprise hunt lacked the intense discipline and spiritual preparation that mark tribally sanctioned whaling” (Shukovsky). What McGimpsey’s decision and compulsion to offer a prayer suggest is that he recognizes a spiritual and ethical relationship with the whale; he understands that humans have a responsibility toward non-human nature. In Momaday’s terms he is upholding a “moral understanding of, and regard for, the earth,” and for the non- human life upon that earth.
24 In contrast to McGimpsey and his sense of what is right and what one’s responsibility toward the natural world is, one can argue, the five men who hunted the whale disregarded their moral obligation to the natural world in pursuit of other senses of duty: what they felt to be their legal right and their political responsibility. As Wayne Johnson, one of the hunters, insisted: “The five of us did this to protect the kids. . . . If nobody exercises their treaty right, we don’t have one.” (“Treaty Warriors”). The
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hunters maintained this attitude and repeatedly insisted that they undertook the hunt because it was their treaty right to do so and because they were tired of wading through all the red tape of dealing with the International Whaling Commission and the National Fisheries for permissions. They were simply tired of waiting. In this context, their actions can appropriately be considered a form of civil disobedience, but hardly a religious or spiritual act—in so far as one can separate the two in such a context. That was the determination of the judge at any rate, and perhaps that judicial separation is precisely the point.
25 That separation is perhaps analogous to the differences between Buddy’s and Philbert’s approaches to rescuing Bonnie and coming to terms with their Cheyenne heritage. Vengeful and hot-headed, Buddy practices a lawless revenge, and in this he is a filmic counterpart to the rogue hunters, whereas Philbert puts into play a multitude of considered inspirations. He combines spiritual preparation (gathering medicine and praying as he stands in a cold creek, for example), knowledge of and respect for the ancestors (which he gains, in part, through conversations and visions), and opportunism (noticing on a television screen how one acquires a war pony and how one makes a jailbreak, for example). This combination allows him to look back, look forward, and to borrow where necessary from settler culture. His commitment coupled with versatility enable his successes.
26 In the courtroom the lawyer for Wayne Johnson and Andy Noel argued that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 should protect the defendants from prosecution; not being able to hunt the whale, he argued, was analogous to not being allowed to attend church. The Religious Freedom Act stipulates that in addition to free access to sacred sites and sacred objects, Indigenous Americans have the right to their sacred ceremonial practices. Such a defense maintains that in addition to the 1855 treaty right to fish and to hunt marine mammals, the Makahs have the right to practice their religion and that whaling is a part of that religion. They have the right to hunt grey whales, the lawyer asserted, because the hunt is part of their tribal sacred history and that the hunt itself constitutes a religious ceremony. Recognizing that the spiritual element was precisely what was missing from the rouge hunt, the federal judge rejected this argument, and sentenced each of the two men to several months in jail.
27 When Momaday writes about hunting a bear, he emphasizes the spiritual connection between human and non-human. He describes a bear hunt, for example, in which he devotes several pages to a description of the chase, the kill, and the hunter’s ritual return to the village. Momaday cloaks the fact of killing the bear in ritual, almost as if to ease the pain and associated sadness, commenting on “the hunter’s offering of death and the sad watch of the hunted, waiting somewhere away in the cold darkness and breathing easily of its life, brooding around at last to forgiveness and consent” (87). The acknowledgement of death underlies many of Momaday’s other celebrations of Bear. In the poem “Scaffold Bear,” for example, he writes that … a bear, stripped of its hide, Lay on a scaffold in a range of trees, Bleeding, breathing faintly. Its great paws had been removed. (56)
28 In another instance, “To an Aged Bear”, Momaday reminds the reader that “Mortality / Is your shadow and your shade” (67).
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29 One of Momaday’s recurrent unspoken questions or issues is whether or not the ritual and the hope of regeneration or reincarnation can indeed suffice to maintain the spirit of Bear. He describes a Siberian bear hunt, for example, placing the entire hunt within the parameters of ritual: “everything would have its place in the relief of ritual” (73). He writes that “Bear dances on the edge of life and death, crossing over and back again” (xiii). When Momaday himself was in Siberia, he informs the reader, he experienced several elements of the Khanty bear feast, and his familiarity with the ritual surrounding a bear hunt finds voice in another poem, through which the spirit of Bear is preserved and shared: Let me hear the singer say, “Whose house is this?” And reply “Behold, this is the bear’s house.” (“The Khanty Bear Feast” 75) Where does this leave us?
30 Respecting the hunted bear. Practicing appropriate rituals and ceremonies. Rediscovering where one is in relation to the stars and to the solstices. Telling and appreciating stories. Acknowledging the trickster. Finding grace through story telling. Offering prayers to and for the harpooned and dying whale. Such actions have to be the first steps in (re)establishing a land ethic. To what extent such prayers and realizations will alleviate or reverse the environmental degradation so prevalent on Indian land or anywhere else is perhaps impossible to say. As Linda Hogan argues, however, “You can really change the world with a good story” (Harrison 171). Without such realizations of the capacity of story to recognize and value the standing of non-human life and the land, one could argue, there is no hope at all. Non-human life deserves legal, moral, and spiritual standing. A version of that ethic, as made manifest in the film Powwow Highway, is Philbert’s respectful turn toward tradition in his quest to understand his Cheyenne heritage. One of his realizations is that the truth hangs over our heads. We need simply to look in the right direction and to understand how to respond to that truth. Linda Hogan argues that “tradition is about how you think about the world and how you behave within the world. . . . You have to decolonize your own mind and heart and soul, and then reeducate yourself into understanding what tradition is. Understanding and loving the earth, this land we come from. . . . It has to do with respect for the world, and giving back, and loving in a certain way where you do the least damage” (Harrison 168). Momaday’s imperative is that we realize we are one with the natural world. This realization is fundamental to a respectable relationship with the earth. When in the Strait of Juan de Fuca off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula and the Makah reservation in northwestern Washington, one must realize, as did tribal elder Joe McGimpsey, that “This is the Whale’s House.” Such a recognition marks at least the beginning of an ethical relationship with the natural world. These Native American writers and activists contend that humans must realize that they are guests in another’s home, and they must behave accordingly. Let me hear the singer say, “Whose house is this?” And reply “Behold, this is the bear’s house.”
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
APESS, William. “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man.” 1833. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess. Ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. 155-61.
ARNOLD, Ellen L. “Reframing the Hollywood Indian: A Feminist Re-reading of Powwow Highway and Thunderheart.” American Indian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Contemporary Issues. Ed. Dane Anthony Morrison. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 347-62.
“Carbon Footprint.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2013. http://0- www.oed.com.uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu/view/Entry/27743? redirectedFrom=carbon+footprint#eid110705226
COLUMPAR, Corinn. Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
GOTTLIEB, Paul. “Ten Years Today After Historic Hunt Makah Wait to Whale Again.” Peninsula Daily News, 17 May 2009. http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20090517/news/305179997
“Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle.” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), December 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20130715165439/http://www.epa.gov/ otaq/climate/documents/420f11041.pdf
HARRISON, Summer. “Sea Level: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.1 (2011): 161-77.
LANGEN, Toby and Kathryn SHANLEY. “ Culture Isn’t Buckskin Shoes: A Conversation Around Powwow Highway.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 3.3 (Fall 1991): 23-29.
“Mainstream Hollywood Actors with Native Ancestry.” Native Celebs, 5 May 2009. http:// www.nativecelebs.com/actors8.htm
“Makah Whalers Harpoon and Shoot Gray Whale in an Unauthorized Hunt on September 8, 2007.” History Link, 2007. http://historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=9136
MAPES, Linda. “Grand Jury Indicts 5 Makahs in Illegal Whale Hunt.” Seattle Times, 4 October 2007. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003925167_webwhale04m.html
MARTINEZ, A. “Interview Series Soap Opera Stars.” 1986-87. June 2008. http:// www.imagine92009.net/Interviews/8687SOStarsInterviewSeries.htm
MOMADAY, N. Scott. In the Bear’s House. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999, 2000. Rpt. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
MOMADAY, N. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997.
PETERSON, Brenda, and Linda Hogan. Sightings: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002.
Powwow Highway. Dir. Jonathan Wacks. Perf. Gary Farmer, A Martinez, and Joanelle Nadine Romero. Handmade Films, 1989.
SEALS, David. The Powwow Highway. 1979. New York: Plume/Penguin, 1980.
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SHUKOVSKY, Paul. “Makah ‘Treaty Warriors’: Heroes or Criminals?” Seattle PI, 16 March 2008. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Makah-treaty-warriors-Heroes-or- criminals-1267345.php
WALKER, Carla. “A Virtual Visit with N. Scott Momaday.” Oklahoma Humanities Council. 12 July 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20130212112314/http://www.okhumanities.org/momaday- interview
“Western Cities Move Aggressively to Clear Up Smoggy Skies.” New York Times On-Line, 3 November 1987. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/us/western-cities-move-aggressively-to- clear-up-smoggy-skies.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm.
NOTES
1. “Three defendants —Parker, Gonzales, and Secor— ultimately accepted a plea deal in federal court. They pled guilty to the misdemeanor of violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act in return for the prosecutor recommending probation rather than jail and the tribe waiving the charges in tribal court. Johnson and Noel were convicted of the same misdemeanor after federal magistrate Kelley Arnold rejected their religious freedom defense. Arnold sentenced Johnson to five months in jail and Noel to three months.” (Makah Whalers) 2. The settler culture’s tendency to exploit Indian lands is as old as contact, and as early as 1833, Pequot writer William Apess in “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” maintains that white tree cutters “would think it no crime to go upon Indian lands and cut and carry off their most valuable timber, or any thing else they chose; and I doubt not but they think it clear gain” (Apess 156). In Seals’s novel Buddy challenges Philbert by recounting some such exploitations: “Navaho [sic] uranium miners are getting cancer, Indians are getting fifteen cents’ royalty on a ton of coal while white landowners get a dollar and a half. The per capita income on reservations is a thousand dollars per year—one seventh of the national average, and you gotta tell fairy stories?” (Seals 203). 3. It is not clear that A Martinez, the actor who plays Buddy Red Bow (Red Bird in the novel) has Native American ancestry. On at least one web-site Martinez does self-identify as tribal, however: “My mother was part Blackfoot Indian and they were from the Dakotas” (Martinez). Interestingly in the context of tribal affiliation, it is Martinez’s character who is quite ambivalent about his tribal past and heritage. See also “Mainstream.”
4. The Environmental Protection Agency publishes a formula for computing CO2 produced per gallon of gasoline. (See “Greenhouse Gas.”) The Oxford English Dictionary lists 1999 as its first recorded instance of the expression “carbon footprint.” Although I find no mention before 1990, one finds a plethora of occurrences beginning in the early- to mid-nineties (“Carbon Footprint”).
ABSTRACTS
In an effort to make an assessment of the place of an American Indian environmental consciousness, this essay compares two related Makah whale-hunting events with a completely different text, the American Indian film Powwow Highway, in which a character insists that
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trickster will protect Cheyennes and Indian people generally from environmental degradation. The film, the Makah whaling controversy, and other Indigenous writings offer texts through which one can theorize an American Indian environmental consciousness.
Afin de tenter d’évaluer l’importance de la conscience environnementale/ écologique amérindienne, cet article se propose de comparer deux chasses à la baleine, impliquant toutes deux des membres de la tribu Makah, avec l’approche très différente proposée par le film amérindien Powwow Highway. Dans ce film, l’un des personnages est persuadé que le ‘trickster’, ou ‘Décepteur’, protégera les Cheyennes, et plus généralement le peuple Indien, de la détérioration de l’environnement. Le film, la controverse qui a fait suite aux chasses Makah, ainsi que d’autres écrits indigènes offrent un prisme à travers lequel on peut proposer une théorisation de la conscience environnementale amérindienne.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Makah (les) et la chasse à la baleine, PowWow Highway (film), film amérindien, N. Scott Momaday, éthique amérindienne de la terre Keywords: Makah whaling, Powwow Highway (film), American Indian Film, Scott Momaday N., American Indian land ethic
AUTHOR
LEE SCHWENINGER Lee Schweninger is professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches American Indian literatures and coordinates the American Indian Studies Minor. His recent publications include Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape (U Georgia P 2008) and Imagic Moments: Indigenous North American Film (U Georgia P, 2013). Currently he is at work on a manuscript concerning world Indigenous literature and film. Lee Schweninger est Professeur au Département d’Anglais de l’Université de Wilmington, Caroline du Nord. Il y enseigne la littérature amérindienne et coordonne le programme d’études amérindiennes. Parmi ses publications récentes, on peut citer Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape (U Georgia P, 2008) et Imagic Moments: Indigenous North American Film (U Georgia P, 2013). Il travaille actuellement à la rédaction d’un ouvrage sur littératures et films indigènes à travers le monde.
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