Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Andrea Hairston's Redwood And

Haint Stories Rooted in Conjure Science: Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe) Several years ago Robert Warrior (Osage) spoke at the Native Student and Community Center at Portland State University in Oregon. Almost digressing from his prepared comments on social justice issues, he brought up his advocacy for the decolonization and restoration of Freedman peoples to their Cherokee bands and for recognition of Seminole Black Indians as accepted members of the Seminole Nation. Was he amplifying his own views in “Native Critics in the World,” or echoing Taiaiake Alfred’s Peace, Power and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (2009)? Both sources call upon a new generation of Native leaders who will work toward decolonization “in concert with the restoration of an indigenous political culture within our communities…not a matter of nostalgia, or any other uncritical attempt to capture the past in the present” (Alfred 143-44). Restoration is, in Warrior’s rephrasing of the idea, “a sincere attempt to find ways to use insights, practices, and structures from our Indigenous traditions as the basis for contemporary forms of democratic polities in the Native world” (Warrior 208). A good bit of internal conflict and controversy exists in the broad Native community on these issues. Advocating for restoration of status to so-called “Black Indians” and decrying recent attempts to legally disenfranchise currently enrolled tribal members who share African and Native heritage amounts to openly reprimanding the Cherokee, the Seminole, and many other Nations. As he humbly spoke to us about how one cannot ask another nation to shift its policies generally, he acknowledged moments, civil rights moments, that require speaking out, and he had chosen this moment to bear witness. Witnessing Professor Warrior’s reaction to his Portland audience’s wholehearted endorsement was therefore amusing. He probably did not 1 realize that a Black Indian who had recently discovered his Native heritage had anonymously donated substantial seed money for the very Center he was speaking in that afternoon. Nor did he know that Portland State’s Indigenous Nations Studies Program is closely affiliated with our Department of Black Studies in the ongoing development of a graduate degree in Gender, Race, and Nation. In fact, our chair of Black Studies, Kofe Agorash, is an African archeologist famed for his digs in Jamaica that have established the direct ancestral lineage of the Maroons to the Taino/Arawak, as run-away African Diasporic slaves joined communities of Indigenous peoples who sought safety from colonial enterprises by living in remote parts of the Jamaican mountains. Nor could he have known that this particular audience included members of a literary studies class on Indigenous science fiction who had been busy consuming Andrea Hairston’s “Griots of the Galaxy” (2004) and Mindscape (2006) and would soon be reading her Redwood and Wildfire (2011) which I was fortunate enough to have in manuscript form prior to its release the next spring. Just wait, I told my students, until you get to hear the story of Aidan. We had the great honour of inviting Andrea Hairston and Pan Morigan to give a reading and performance at that very same Native Student and Community Center once Redwood and Wildfire was released. Andrea’s “readings” are mesmerizing performances, and in this case she and Pan were introduced by the ceremonial drumming and singing of Indigenous Nations Studies Director Cornel Pewewardy (Comanche), while Pan later accompanied Andrea’s spoken words with music and song. In Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (2006), Daphne A. Brooks chronicles the performance tradition that Andrea Hairston extends into the present generation. Describing the careers of Aida Overton Walker and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Brooks writes, “They shared much in their visions of how black women 2 might utilize performance as a place from which to explore and express the social, political, and sexual politics of black womanhood in America. In the midst of this fruitful era when leading black female activists conjoined the political with the aesthetic in myriad ways and forms, Hopkins and Walker experimented with classic and Pan-Africanist aesthetic practices to imagine how performance culture might serve as a site of revision and self-making for black women and their overdetermined bodies in the cultural imaginary” (286). It is worth noting at the outset of this analysis of Redwood and Wildfire that Hairston casts Aida Overton Walker as a walk-on in the narrative, where she takes in Redwood, Aidan, and Saeed’s performance; in turn, a worn-out copy of Hopkins’s fantastic SF adventure novel Of One Blood (1903) makes its appearance, a marker of influence on Redwood’s sister Iris, on Aidan, and obviously on Hairston herself. Redwood and Wildfire has been categorized as an “historical novel” but is better recognized as a renewed form of the speculative novel; a renewed form of the speculative novel that emphasizes conjuring as science, science as conjuring explicitly. Conjuring, all too often described as a form of magic, might be argued to be in opposition to scientific thought. However, China Miéville’s writings, sometimes categorized as the New Weird, are, as the author himself states, additionally about “magicking science” and his work is steadily studied in the top- peer reviewed journals of the SF field. Less noted but still implicit is his experimentation with Indigenous thinking and sciences more directly in his SF/New Weird novels, The Scar (2002) and Embassytown (2011), the former in a parallel world of Bas-Lag and the latter in a futuristic discovery of a species on a world of truly alien tongue and speech (Extrapolation article). Even Comment [U1]: Which one? Find out! on the backflap of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death? (2010), some reviews identify the novel as a future apocalyptic fantasy, but Okorafor assures audiences and readers in a recent WisCon Guest of Honor speech of her distinctive use of science in this novel, her fascination from 3 childhood with classification and the science of animals/insects/fauna and her Nigerian uncle’s concept of science as “magic” (WisCon 198). Nalo Hopkinson accomplishes an Afro-Canadian and Caribbean Islander re-mix of Taino/Arawak stories in the midst of the organically constructed science of post-cyberpunk novel, Midnight Robber (2000) but, along with her bulk of SF thought experiments, was more recently termed as a “cross-fabulist” who mingles SF, Horror, and Fantasy, in the L.A. Times article establishing her credentials of her recent tenure- track Creative Writing and Science Fiction position at the University of California, Riverside. These dynamic shifts in the SF field, recognizing the science of more than Eurowestern ways of thinking along with numerous other examples such as Indigenous science fiction stories1 express better the stance of Andrea Hairston’s forms of conjuration as science and embedded experiences of life itself, or as Andrea herself might term it as she reminds us in all her work, art as a Spectral Aesthetic from a polyrhythmic perspective (Big Daddy 237). The overall feel of Redwood and Wildfire undermines the late nineteenth/early twentieth century pulpish but electrifying adventures of American Edisonades without resorting to closely intertextual satire, such as evidenced in Joe R. Lansdale’s wickedly funny “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel.” Hairston’s novel instead emphasizes both the agency and presence of Native and African-American sciences intertwined with art via the use of African diasporic, African-American, and Native Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies. Her main characters in this aesthetic of interminglings are a young black woman, Redwood Phipps, and a half-Irish, half-Seminole man, Aidan Wildfire. Events take place primarily in rural Georgia and Chicago between 1898 and 1913. The main actions of the narrative involve responses to the lynching of Redwood’s mother, “Miz Garnett,” by a white 4 mob. Miz Garnett was a well-regarded “conjurer” whom the white community viewed as a healer. When she killed the white man who raped her, their affiliations became clear. Miz Garnett becomes a “Haint” to young, quaking Aidan, who witnessed the lynching and will be forever tormented by his guilt for failing to intercede. But this horrific event ultimately inspires Aidan to recover his own Native identity and to preserve memories of his Seminole’s father’s stories and languages of Seminole, Cherokee and Muskogee Creek, as well as his Irish mother’s Gaelic and family stories. Miz Garnett had taught Aidan as a boy to write down these stories in a red-leather bound journal, which she characterized as “the good medicine” that will keep his mind and heart open. Sea Gullah Islanders, such as Miz Garnett and Miz Subie, who becomes Redwood’s mentor for conjuring; Cherokees, Seminoles, and Creeks, all emphasize the power of literacy, since all their cultures have faced sequestration, lynching, and erasure if found reading or understanding words in print. A decade after the lynching, Redwood has grown into a woman as capable of conjuring as her mother had been. While Aidan’s guilt has wasted his gifts and led him to alcoholism and failed marriages, his friendship with Redwood greatly increases her powers, as demonstrated by a signature event that reappears throughout the novel: Redwood’s ability to capture a thunderstorm in her fist. Aidan and Redwood are soul-mates, kept apart by the illegality of interracial marriage in the South. Yet another tragic event carries forward the narrative. Redwood is raped by Jerome, a former plantation owner’s son who represents white desire to reclaim Cherokee and Choctaw lands and the properties of the colored folk of Peach Grove, including the Phipps’s acreage, treaties and mortgage papers denied.

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