Indigenous Narrative Aesthetics and Ecocritial Activism

Home , Barry Barclay, Homeland, Lawrence Makoare, Patricia Grace, The Narrative

REWRITING HOMELAND(S): INDIGENOUS NARRATIVE AESTHETICS AND ECOCRITIAL ACTIVISM

by Amelia Chaney

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Summer 2020

REWRITING HOMELAND(S): INDIGENOUS NARRATIVE AESTHETICS AND ECOCRITIAL ACTIVISM

Amelia Chaney

Approved: ______John Ernest, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of English

Approved: ______John Pelesko, Ph.D. Dean of the College of College Name

Approved: ______Douglas J. Doren, Ph.D. Interim Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and Dean of the Graduate College

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Emily S. Davis, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______Siobhan Carroll, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______Brooke J. Stanley, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______Lindsay Naylor, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Emily Davis for her continual intellectual advice and emotional support throughout the development of this project from an independent study to a complete dissertation and to Siobhan Carroll for introducing me to ecocritical theory in her classes and honing my project from the bibliography essay to its final product. I wish to thank Brooke Stanley and Lindsay Naylor for their generosity and helpful feedback as dissertation committee members.

I am grateful for the help of the fellow graduate students who assisted me with editing advice throughout various stages of this process especially Michael Harris-Peyton and the members of my Environmental Graduate Group (Samantha Nystrom, Rebecca

Olsen, Meghan O’Donnell, and Kacey Stewart). Our inspiring sessions talking through argumentative structure and big ideas over delicious luncheons were invaluable to me.

Thanks to all my fellow panel participants and respondents in conferences over the last five years especially Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Yuting Huang whose assistance as co-moderators of a panel on settler colonialism helped to advance the early portions of the dissertation and Kyle Bladow whose feedback and encouragement at the

2017 ASLE indigenous studies panel developed my thinking on narrative as activism.

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, my first storytellers, without whose love and encouragement I could never have pursued this project. Thank you for helping

iv me to travel through the world of literary imaginings and Antipodean research and for accompanying me on this journey.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………..viii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………...ix

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………..1

1.1. Where Ecocritical Meets Postcolonial……………………………………..,.4 1.2. Indigenous Texts as Ecocritical Activism…………………………………...8 1.3. Eco-media as Genre Adaptation……………………………………………14

2. GENDERING THE WILDERNESS SETTLEMENT NARRATIVE: DOMESTIC LABOR AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN THE COLONIAL BUSH……………………………………………………18

2.1. Writing Against the Pastoral Grain: Colonial Landscape and Racial Violence……………………………………………………………………23 2.2. Waking to the Nightmare: Struggling for Survival in the Canadian Wilderness…………………………………………………………………27 2.3. Laboring in the Bush: Gender Politics and Resource Consumption………………………………………………………………39

3. NARRATIVE FLOW AS ECOCRITICAL RESISTANCE IN INDIGENOUS WATER FICTION………………………………………...58

3.1. Maori Eco-narratives: Storytelling as Transhuman Communal Art Form…………………………………………………………………….....64 3.2. Undamming the Narrative: Reimagining Ecology through Indigenous Bricolage…………………………………………………………………..78

4. REWRITING THE POLITICS OF PLACE: SCREEN TOURISM AND THE RISE OF DOCUMENTARY FOURTH CINEMA………………100

4.1. New Zealand as Middle-Earth Travelogue: Book, to Film, to Tourist Attraction, and Back Again……………………………………105 4.2. Fourth Cinema as Indigenous Activism: Documenting Violence on the Ground………………………………………………...... 121 4.3. Framing Indigenous Experience: Spatial Relations in Obomsawin’s Documentaries……………………………………………………………128

5. WILDERNESS AND “WILDERPEOPLE”: REIMAGINING THE SURVIVALIST ECO-DRAMA FOR A MULTICULTURAL NEW ZEALAND…………….142

5.1. Eco-Survivalist Adventure as Film Genre…………………………...... 145 5.2. Barry Crump and New Zealand’s Man Alone Myth…………………….149 5.3. Hunt for the Wilderpeople: An Indigenous Comedy of Cultural Relations…………………………………………………………….,,….153 5.4. Adapting Wild Pork and Watercress as Escapist Eco-adventure…...... 164

BIBLOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………...... 174

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1 New Zealand as Pop-up book in 2013 traveling exhibit……………………116

Fig. 2 Oka Golf course as seen from cemetery in the pines……………………….130

Fig. 3 Obomsawin in the journalist lines with soldiers in front of shot holding…..131 confiscated film rolls

Fig. 4 Mother comforting child in Kanehsatake…………………………………..133

Fig. 5 Passing food supplies for Mohawks across the barrier in Kanehsatake……135

Fig. 6 Caring for Spudwrench in Treatment Center after beating…………………135

Fig. 7 Lisa Marie Linklater with children folding laundry………………………..139

Fig. 8 Film still of Uncle Hec’s introduction……………………………………...156

Fig. 9 “Crumpy” off-roading in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)………………164

Fig. 10 Raging Boar in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)………………………..168

viii

ABSTRACT

My dissertation makes an intervention in the emergent study of post-colonial ecocriticism by examining how indigenous writers and filmmakers in Canada and New

Zealand have adapted storytelling forms as a means of socio-political resistance to economic and racial inequalities. This work builds on Rob Nixon’s framing of the environmental vulnerabilities experienced by marginalized peoples of color across the globe. However, whereas scholars like Nixon question the value of literature as a vehicle for social change, I argue that narratives can function both as tools of direct political intervention and ideological opposition to engrained modes of thinking. By placing print and filmic sources in dialogue with the history of real-world disputes between governments, commercial interests, and native peoples over land usage, I analyze how storytelling practices participate in a larger discourse about indigenous sovereignty and cultural reclamation. In combining literary criticism on narrative aesthetics with more explicitly politically oriented readings, I highlight what these texts can teach us about the best methods of negotiating ideological conflicts over environmental practices in our ongoing eco-crisis. This project also makes an intervention in the emergent field of ecomedia by tracing narrative adaptations across mediums to illustrate how creators have drawn upon and or reimagined the conventions of environmental adventure and travel fiction rooted in the colonial period. In reading these films in relation to their production history and reception, I demonstrate how such texts continue to shape modern cultural narratives about settler nations through contemporary travel advertisements and the

ix establishment of tourist destinations like Hobbiton. I argue that this process of adaptation not only builds upon a diverse foundation of prior storytelling and site-specific environmental histories, but in turn continues to shape the economic and ecological realities of indigenous communities.

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

Towards the end of Ravensong, Lee Maracle’s acclaimed novel about the barriers to communication between first nations and white hegemonic culture, her conflicted teenage protagonist, Stacey, wonders about the efficacy of trying to earn a university degree in 1950s Canada. Is it worth leaving her Sto:lo community and struggling to enter a world that fails to understand or value her? Will be she be able to use her higher education to help her people? The social and emotional ostracization she has experienced attending the local public school in the “white town” has led her to doubt the potential for acceptance among those outside her community. Into this moment of despair steps

Raven, who sends her the words of her deceased grandmother in a dream, warning “We will never escape sickness until we learn how it is we are to live with these people. We will always die until the mystery of their being is altered” (192). The sickness referred to is at once literal and metaphorical. The novel centers on a destructive flu pandemic, a return of the 1910s influenza outbreak that had decimated the population, resulting in a loss not only of community members but of the generational knowledge these individuals represented. As her mother before her endured the loss of her father, Stacey must watch as members of her community succumb to disease in greater numbers than those of the white town, who have better access to medical supplies and care. Dedicated to “all those women who fought the epidemic when this country was not concerned with our health,”

1 the novel speaks to the underlying economic and medical inequalities which have placed and in our current moment of Covid-19 continue to place indigenous communities and peoples of color at far greater risk of death. Unable to receive adequate medical care, the native community in the novel must rally together and improvise nursing methods

(dripping water into the mouths of the sick in place of IVs) to save their own population.

The impacts of the influenza outbreak are aggravated by colonial social structures, but the sickness Stacey’s grandmother references is also a metaphor for colonialism itself, a form of oppression that has displaced peoples and driven ideological barriers between them, making it difficult for indigenous communities to be heard and seen by the more privileged majority. The problem as Stacey defines it is a lack of context; neither side fully comprehends the other, yet this ignorance of indigenous experience means the white town often enables abuse while remaining seemingly oblivious to its impacts. Since its social dominance imperils her people, Stacey feels she must learn more about the

“white town’s” values, but she also recognizes the need for whites to understand her village’s experiences of loss. In a key moment of romantic conflict, Stacey tells the socially liberal white doctor’s son, Steve, that “until you have experienced the horror of an epidemic, a fire, drought and the absolute threat these things pose to the whole village’s survival – and care about it desperately – you will be without a relevant context”

(186). Resenting his obliviousness, she rightly argues that you can never understand these types of losses until you have personal experience of them.

Though one can never fully know life from the perspective of another person, narratives are the nearest one can get to this experience since they offer a means of conveying through character and story the type of context Stacey describes. They provide

2 a window into another person’s perspectives and as such their significance lies as much in the mode of storytelling as it does in the thematic material. Artistic creators must contend with a range of issues in developing their work. How should they shape a chosen subject matter shaped into a narrative within a given medium? How does the text address its imagined audiences and participate in a larger conversation on issues like identity politics, political history, or the environment? These types creative choices made in dialogue with a broader media landscape endow narratives with the capacity for resistance to injurious ideologies. Stories are socially powerful tools for those largely discounted or stereotyped by hegemonic culture; by engaging with a history of storytelling in various expressive media (print/digital, visual, audio) marginalized voices can critique or adapt earlier myths to address the needs of their contemporary moment.

Nature is essential to this narrative discourse not only because colonial practices of displacement, pollution, and resource extraction have had severe repercussions for indigenous peoples whose traditional practices are tied to regionally specific ecosystems, but also because in the era of climate change everyone must learn how to collectively respond to the global need of sustaining ourselves on a shared planet. Indigenous ways of living alongside the environment, rather than drawing hierarchal distinctions between man and nature, present one way of reimagining the foundational belief systems which underwrite contemporary economic and political structures. In Maracle’s mythological translation of colonial history in Ravensong, the narrator states, “Far away the earth bled, her bleeding becoming an ulcer. Century by century, the ulcer intensified. It grew more serious millennium by millennium until neither earth nor Raven had any choice. ‘Bring them here to Raven’s shore. Transform their ways. Deliver Raven to the whole earth’”

(191). In this telling, arrival of the white settlers is facilitated by Raven. Yet their behavior, which has as the quote suggests enabled environmental destruction, only succeeds in extending their values more broadly across the Pacific Northwest. Rather than healing them as Raven had hoped, the arrival of “the others” in the New World leads to abuse, violence, and illness perpetrated against indigenous peoples so that a “silence grew fat, obese” between the populations (191). Overcoming this silence in Maracle’s novel requires that people not only share their stories but also listen across generations, genders, and racial divides. They must become attuned to Ravensong, the eco-narrative progressing around them but to which even disillusioned native characters like Stacey have become alienated. With their creative capacity to speak to a silenced political history and problematize early traditions of colonial adventure storytelling, indigenous environmental narratives in print and visual media provide an opportunity for better understanding how we have arrived at our current crisis and how we might through adaptation seek to imagine a different path for our future.

1.1 Where Post-colonial Meets Ecocritical

This need for more effective communication extends from the world of artistic production to the realm of scholarship, where specialized academic conversations, especially in ecocriticism, have for too long spoken past post-colonial issues rather than to them. Developing in the 1990s, first-wave American ecocriticism grew out of the environmentalist movement and as such developed as a meeting point between ecological science and literary studies. Inspired by growing scholarship on the American

4 environmental crises popularized by texts like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), ecocritics voiced concerns about issues of pollution and environmental sustainability.

Whereas ecology had traditionally concentrated on biological research, ecocriticism sought to address the intersection of real-world scientific problems with the humanities.

As a touchstone for later work, anthologies like The Ecocriticism Reader concentrated on how nature was and is constructed in written representations, studying how ideologies historically shaped people’s conceptions of and attitudes towards nature. Consequently, the field was from its inception at once interested in textual aesthetics and a politically oriented agenda. As Greg Garrard explains in his introduction for the new critical idiom series (2012), “Ecocritics generally tie their cultural analyses explicitly to a ‘green’ moral or political agenda” (3). Glofelty summarizes this objective as an ethical responsibility of the academy to “contribute to environmental restoration, not just in our spare time, but from within our capacity as professors of literature…by recognizing that current ecological problems are largely of our own making, … a product of culture” (xxi).

Inherent in the field’s literary examinations from the beginning was an interest in increasing public awareness of how social ideologies contribute to environmental dilemmas as well as how environmentalist fiction might suggest ways of combating these problems. As such, nascent ecocriticism was linked with a political agenda of environmental reform and the protection of the natural environment. Yet, it equally evinced substantial blind spots concerning issues of cultural history and identity politics, a subject on which post-colonial studies had already made considerable intellectual strides, fueling diversification of academic hiring practices and curricula.

Whereas post-colonialism emerged as a similarly politically minded mode of reading, its anthropocentric analysis often glossed over environmental factors. Despite the presence of environmental writer-activists like Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai,

Mahasweta Devi, and Ken Saro-Wiwa from post-colonial countries, the field within academic discourse tended to occlude ecocritical issues early in its development. Identity politics for post-colonialists has always been tied to the analysis of how specific places were and are represented. With the publication of Cultural Identity and Imperialism, Said expanded on his earlier theory of Orientalism, concentrating on the strains of colonialism that undergird canonical Western literature from Austen to Conrad. In developing these readings, Said explicitly indicates the importance of spatial relationships to postcolonialism. He declares that

Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we

must think about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to

have more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous

residents….At some very basic level, imperialism means thinking about settling

on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and

owned by others (7)

The land is consistently important for Said as a space that people fought and died over, and whose ownership has had dramatic political consequences for indigenous peoples.

Yet, unlike ecocriticism, which concentrates on the treatment of nature, the land in these post-colonial analyses features only to the degree that it elucidates larger concerns over geographical identity politics. While post-colonialists like Said addressed place, they

6 often did so in ways that examined its socio-historical importance while disregarding the ecological damages of colonization.

Only within the last thirteen or so years have scholars begun to explore the interdisciplinary connections between these two fields to produce a more socially aware form of environmental scholarship. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, in their 2007 essay

“Green Postcolonialism,” called for a “postcolonial environmental ethic” that might critique the legacy of the social domination of ethnic others alongside the conquest of nature. In this influential essay, they assert that the exploitation of peoples and environments are historically linked and as such academics should no longer study the two fields in isolation from one another. Much previous ecocriticism, post-colonialists rightly declare, had for too long ignored the range of environmental abuses and activist responses occurring throughout the world, especially in the global South. As Bonnie

Roos and Alex Hunt affirm in their introduction to Post-colonial Green Environmental

Politics and World Narratives (2010), “scholars associated with post-colonialism see ecocritics as furthering an often unself-concious settler or colonialist project” (4). If ecocritics have censured post-colonialists for their lack of awareness of environmental problems, ecocritical scholars’ initial calls for land preservation also tended to disregard how approaches to the environment were and are shaped by political and economic factors. Into this emergent moment of critical debate on the merger of these two fields burst Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). This monograph was one of the first to address the economic and racial politics of environmental devastation and to think through these issues in relation to temporality. In this work, he connects environmental concerns with the economic experiences of

7 impoverished peoples in post-colonial settings. Nixon’s approach offers a new way of looking at environmental problems by studying damage inflicted over a long period of time, rather than at calamitous individual events that often garner more media attention.

He coined the now well established term “slow violence” to refer to these types of incrementally developing problems, “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Nixon further links this type of slow violence with the ‘environmentalism of the poor,’ whom he claims often suffer from exploitation and a lack of resources to combat environmental problems. In so doing,

Nixon brings together a focus on global writer-activists previously disregarded in

American based scholarship and puts ecocriticism into dialogue with post-colonial economic issues.

1.2 Indigenous Texts as Ecocritical Activism

Reading Nixon’s work sparked many of the ideas that have gradually coalesced into this dissertation. By addressing the role of writer-activists, Nixon paints a picture of post-colonial peoples not merely as victims of exploitation, but rather as environmental campaigners in their own right, interested in maintaining their natural resources and by extension their community’s well-being. While Nixon criticizes the exploitations of post- colonial countries by global -- often Western owned -- companies, he also focuses on activists like Ken Saro-Wiwa, who challenged the practices of the oil industry in Nigeria, and Wangari Maathai, cofounder of the Kenyan Green Belt Movement for preventing

8 deforestation and erosion. By analyzing these types of leaders, Nixon indicates how environmentalism has developed in post-colonial countries and arisen often from among marginalized peoples, like the rural women in Kenya whose tree planting gradually acquired a larger political resonance as a call for greater civil rights. Such examples are not limited to Africa, as similar forms of grass roots activism have been practiced in other locations like India, where fiction author Arundhati Roy has voiced concerns over nuclear facilities and Megadam construction in a series of polemical essays (160).

Though Nixon addresses literature in his monograph, he concentrates largely on the historical figures of the activist movement through the use of journalism and essays; alternatively, I want to explore the role literary and filmic storytelling can play in the expression of an indigenous ecocritical agenda. He opened the door to looking at how race and economics interface with the environmental impacts of industrial and governmental policies. I want to use this as a foundation for examining how storytelling across various genres in the settler nations of Canada and New Zealand might function as a means of resistance. What does it mean for an indigenous creator to write and publish a text within a culture haunted by the legacy of colonial genres like adventure literature or settlement memoirs that have largely shaped how mainstream readers view nature? What role should oral storytelling and other artistic modes of expression play in literary or cinematic productions? Indigenous artists face these types of problems and an array of inherited modes of storytelling both from the white settler culture and from their native ancestry. They must endeavor to adapt, blend and reinterpret to fit the needs of their modern communities and to speak to the ongoing issues of environmental politics in their countries. One of the main problems they face is the question of land rights and usage in

9 relation not merely with industrial big business or governmental forces, but the modern service industry of travel and recreation.

Studying Nixon’s text spurred my interest in the connected issues of global tourism and land rights in settler colonies, where indigenous political agency remains fraught. How have texts shaped the ways in which these places are packaged and marketed to both national and international audiences? How have indigenous producers entered into and reshaped representation within a neoliberal discourse reliant on colonial ways of seeing? Given its status as a popular destination of modern tourism and its relatively recent colonization, New Zealand has garnered substantial criticism from tourism scholars like Margaret Werry, who focuses on the production of identity from early 20th century photography of Rotorua, the spa resort, to the rise of Wellywood, a film production city. Though nature figures in the first chapter of her monograph The

Tourist State, political history tends to overshadow environmental issues. Anthony

Carrigan’s Post-colonialism Tourism has perhaps done the most to initiate connections between these fields and environmental issues with his focus on island tourism. His chapter on “Contested Environments: Tourism, Indigeneity, and Ideologies of

Development” examines the treatment of tourism in Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986) and

Dogside Story (2001) and Apio’s Hawai‘ian play Kamau. He argues that the thematic changes between Grace’s novels mark a gradual reclamation of ecotourism by indigenous peoples, but his discussion overlooks issues of narrative style and the real-world histories of land activism with which Grace’s work interfaces. Though Carrigan is invested in questions of imagination and literature, he does not trace in-depth the literary production of genres nor the question of how narrative forms take shape across different mediums.

The issue of how ideas about nature are codified and reimagined across colonial histories and/or reshaped by indigenous creators for the political aims of the moment offers fertile ground for further analysis, and one which current scholarship is only beginning to fully unpack.

Post-colonialism has long been attuned to how literature engages with the ongoing socio-cultural exploitation of indigenous peoples but work on this topic in the academy poses its own set of problems. One of the key dangers of this work is the co- opting of indigeneity by the dominant culture to assuage cultural guilt and environmental alienation. As Sean Cubitt notes in “Decolonizing Eco-media,”

The posthumous cult of indigenous ecological knowledge is nostalgia for place,

for environmental belonging. What is lacking from this nostalgia, which powers

so much North American environmentalism from Henry Thoreau to Aldo

Leopold, is an understanding of the process whereby land becomes environment:

how land environs the increasingly economically defined human domain only

because it has been progressively, meticulously, and methodically excluded from

the narrowing field of what counts as human. (283)

Cubitt argues that anthropologists sometimes turn to indigenous practices to ameliorate the sense of otherness many Westerners feel within colonized landscapes because the lineage of native peoples offers an identification with place that seems comforting to modern audiences. This move may provide temporary relief for entertainment consumers, but it fails to address the larger economic forces underlying not only the psychic emptiness they experience, but the problems of waste production and industry that facilitate contemporary global trade. In fact, he argues this nostalgic trend runs the risk of

11 romanticizing native populations and ignoring their participation in modern politics.

Native peoples, in contrast to popular cultural stereotypes that position them in a distant or ahistoric past, are as entangled in issues of resource extraction, technology, and waste pollution, as any other contemporary population but often in ways that place them at a greater disadvantage. Films like Avatar, Cubitt alleges, allow “us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle” (283). Thus, the study of native populations runs the risk of appropriating indigeneity in popular media in ways that are as ideologically exploitative as are the more obviously capitalist motivations of the big businesses like the petroculture that Nixon critiques. This is a danger for academics and one that I as a white female scholar working with indigenous texts have sought to address by relying on indigenous author’s framings of issues surrounding identity politics and history. While acknowledging my own privileged position, I aim to analyze these texts as a means of enabling further discourse across fields and among diverse participants both within and outside of academia.

By remaining attentive to the connections between history and economics, post- colonialist scholars in indigenous studies with whom I align my work have sought to avoid these pitfalls and have gradually inserted themselves into the discourse of ecocriticism. Foundational texts like Susan Najita’s Decolonizing Cultures of the Pacific

(2006) look to contemporary fiction as a means of reacting to the trauma of colonialism.

Though indigenous studies have always addressed themes of nature in literature, only within the last few years has this subject developed its own specialized focus amongst scholars. Indigenous ecocritical scholarship emerged in national anthologies like

Greening the Maple (2013), on readings of Canadian texts. Similarly, discussions also

12 developed within medium specific studies like Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s article

“Ecocinema, ecojustice, and indigenous worldviews: native and first nations media as cultural recovery” in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (2010).

These types contributions advanced indigenous studies and effectively integrated them into the new directions of film and post-colonial studies. However, the broader significance of how diverse indigenous peoples have adapted narrative devices across mediums remained under discussed. As such the conflicted histories of indigenous narrative production through an ecocritical lens merit further exploration as much of the work on these topics has remained within somewhat isolated scholarly discourses. Only recently have these various threads begun to come together more explicitly. ASLE

(Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) only developed an official special interest group for this topic in 2017. That same year, Salma Monani and Joni

Adamson published one of the first monographs on the topic, Ecocriticism and

Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos. This work addresses the need not only for more anthologies on global indigenous ecocriticism, but for an approach that extends beyond bounded definitions of research materials. This work, though predominantly interested in cinema, also extends to topics of literature, dance, and ethnography. Given the fluidity of storytelling across different forms (oral, musical, body art, architecture, sculpture, etc., not to mention filmic and print genres) scholarship on indigenous ecocriticism must expand to address the totality of such production.

1.3 Eco-media as Genre Adaptation

The movement towards this type of scholarship is evidenced by the rise in popularity of the term eco-media. As Sean Cubitt notes, “Ecocritical work on media has developed from a genre criticism focused on nature-themed films to one that addresses cinema, TV, and media arts more broadly as articulations of the human-natural relation and its mediation through technologies” (276). This greater attention to a range of media acknowledges the materiality of production in ways sometimes previously elided. The term also suggests the interconnected systems involved in their production; Cubitt avows that “the media required to produce and consume these fantasies are immensely material, as are the energy sources required to build and power them, and those materials are intensely implicated in the ongoing processes both of coloniality and of utopianism (284).

What remains undertheorized, however, are the ways in which creators have revisited and translated various forms across both time and different mediums.

My dissertation makes an intervention in the emergent study of post-colonial ecocriticism by examining how indigenous writers and filmmakers in Canada and New

Zealand have adapted storytelling forms in dialogue with ancestral and colonial modes of expression. The existing scholarship has often examined indigenous literary and filmic production in isolation from one another or as removed from an intellectual participation in mainstream genres like adventure or travel narratives rooted in its colonial past. I investigate how storytelling choices in these texts interface with first nations and Maori environmentalism and cultural recuperation to consider how stories can serve as a means of political resistance. In doing so, I aim to bring together formal literary criticism with

14 more explicitly politically activist work to highlight what texts can teach us about the best methods of negotiating ideological conflicts over environmental practices in our ongoing eco-crisis. I argue that literary and filmic texts offer a means of understanding how we have arrived at our current Anthropocene era and, more importantly, provide an opportunity of imagining alternative ways of being with nature that can inform our future environmental behavior.

Chapter one concentrates on the fracture lines inherent in the system of colonialism itself, examining how anxieties of overconsuming natural resources to produce British settlement are mapped onto concerns over the treatment of women’s bodies. I analyze Jane Mander’s Story of a New Zealand River and Susanna Moodie’s

Roughing it in the Bush, asserting that these texts establish a connection between the need for sustainable environmental resource management and women’s rights over reproductive labor. Notably these texts, despite their problematic racial depictions and/or erasure of indigenous peoples, undercut the heroic imperial rhetoric of male travelogues, stressing the fault lines that run through Eurocentric myths of settlement.

My second chapter transitions to the postcolonial period to look at how Patricia

Grace’s Potiki and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water address the ways in which narratives function as a means of political resistance to real world construction projects and industry that threaten native land rights. If early settlement literature faced the conundrum of adapting European landscape tropes to a New World, often in uncomfortable ways, indigenous writers have met a perhaps more challenging task of using the literary tools of production to write back against an on-going assault on their land and heritage. In particular, I look at how authors use water as a device for structuring

15 narrative resistance to colonial development projects. As an element essential to human survival and perpetually in flux, water signifies the agency of the natural world and man’s reliance on it. By using water as a way of looking at human/natural relationships, these novels offer alternative method for reshaping environmental ideologies to counter the trajectories epitomized by the capitalistic large-scale construction projects. I argue that these texts dramatize two distinct uses of the novel as a means of environmentalist protest through articulations respectively of community collectivism and anarchism.

In my third chapter, I turn to how the literary genres I discuss in chapters one and two have informed modern film productions ranging from the Lord of the Rings as fantasy travelogue to the growth of fourth world cinema through Alanis Obomsawin’s documentaries on Canadian first nations land issues. This discussion looks at how genre conventions can cross between print and film mediums in ways that can be potentially stultifying, as in the persistence of colonial stereotypes in fantasy adventures, or that can redefine how these storytelling modes function for community empowerment. What types of texts a settler country uses to define itself, I argue, raise questions about how who is included in the national discourse and how colonial heritage is negotiated.

In my fourth chapter, I revisit issues of gender performance and settlement narratives through the genre of the wilderness survival film. I discuss Taika Waititi’s role as an independent Maori director who has crossed over into popular Hollywood blockbusters and read his Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) as an example of blending

Western adventure genres with indigenous cultural politics. Ending with this text, I seek to highlight a progressive example of reworking narrative archetypes while tying the chapter back to my earlier discussion of gender and nation-building myths. This ending also

16 suggests the ways in which indigenous creators are themselves caught within textual histories of romanticizing and marketing nature in accordance with the aims of modern eco-tourism.

By looking at the process of adapting inherited forms of storytelling both from pre- settlement print culture to contemporary indigenous genre films, I seek to illuminate the creative potential of narratives to reimagine environmental engagement and to address some of the ideological obstacles to ecoactivism that these forms represent. I raise these concerns to argue not for a complete rejection of certain traditional literary or filmic genres, but rather to call for a greater articulation of their inherited limitations and an exploration of how these modes might be further reimagined for more radical ends.

Chapter 2

GENDERING THE WILDERNESS SETTLEMENT NARRATIVE: DOMESTIC LABOR AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN THE COLONIAL BUSH

In her autobiographical reminiscence “A New Generation,” Olive Schreiner sympathetically describes her English mother as a naïve young woman arriving in South

Africa unprepared for the hard, domestic labor required when homesteading in the bush.

She states that her parents “Landed at the Cape in…[1838]; the little Rebekah, with her

French and Italian, her flower painting and music, [and] her album full of farewells, the outpourings of young ladies who regretted that they too might not be ‘a missionary’s bride’” (12). This language evokes the optimism of the colonial settler’s arrival fresh off the boat. Yet the harsh realities of homemaking that Rebekah faced in the colony differed substantially from the middle-class lifestyle for which her education had prepared her. In describing the outcome of this immigration, Olive Schreiner bluntly asserts that in South

Africa her mother faced “forty years of labor, of cooking dinners, and the making of pairs of shoes, and the white washing of rooms, and the sweeping of yards, and the rearing of one dozen babies….poor little Rebekah began her life-long drudgery” (13). Though

Schreiner’s words refer specifically to her own mother, this description typifies many middle-class white women’s experiences of colonial settlement in the 19th century who

18 were often unprepared for the difficult living conditions and unable to hire the extensive domestic labor force available to them in England. Underprepared for the challenges of homesteading in the wilderness, these women who followed their husbands into the bush were forced to adapt both mentally and physically to the necessities of survival in a new environment. Narratives of such women’s frontier lives represent a foundational genre in colonial Anglophone literature, dramatizing the adaptation of British practices to new environments and the formation of distinctive cultural identities for settler communities.

Women were viewed as important to in this process since imperial rhetoric figured their domestic and reproductive labor were foundational to the growth of settler nations. Amy Kaplan explains in “Manifest Domesticity,”

part of the cultural work of domesticity might be to unite men and women in a

national domain and to generate notions of the foreign against which the nation

can be imagined as home. The border between the domestic and foreign, however,

also deconstructs when we think of domesticity not as a static condition but as the

process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild, the

natural, and the alien (582)

She argues that despite the separation of spheres, women in their role as homemakers and educators of children were perhaps even more significant to Westward expansion than its more overt proponents. She concentrates on a particularly American history of imperialism through Manifest Destiny, but this rhetoric also holds true for colonialism more broadly. As Kumari Jayawardena notes in The White Woman’s Other Burden:

Western Women and South Asia During British Colonial Rule, white women’s functions as cultural signifiers meant that their behavior was of considerable concern for male

19 audiences as it reflected on the health of the imperial project (5). Female settlers who defied conventions by associating with native peoples were viewed with suspicion, but even less overt acts could read as potentially resistant. As Jayawardena explains the very rise of more educated women capable of geographic mobility posed a social risk as they were capable explains of making “their mark as writers, artists, travelers, and actresses, leading independent lives and often breaking away from the accepted family roles” (5).

Women’s settlement accounts and fiction participated in this gradual advancement of social opportunities as the inclusion in print allowed them to comment upon their position caught within the colonial superstructure.

Yet, despite women’s importance to the colonial project, women’s settlement fiction remains under-explored and merits further scholarly examination of its underlying anxieties in relation to environmental representation. Annette Kolodny, one of the first to address women’s settlement extensively, rightly argues that the sexualized metaphors of environmental conquest typically prevented women writers and female protagonists from easily occupying the traditional masculine pioneer persona (42). In her monograph, The

Land Before Her, Kolodny asserts the masculinist narrative, reliant on metaphors of land as both mother and sexual object hints at a darker incest plot, pointing to anxieties that underlie even the more triumphant celebrations of exploration and conquest. Yet, if the masculine mode for viewing settlement was reliant on a framework of sexual assault, the gendering also left women reliant on a narrative model that denied them agency. As

Kolodny explains “the psychosexual dynamic of virginal paradise meant, however, that real flesh and blood women – at least metaphorically- were dispossessed of paradise…[and] struggled to find some alternate set of images through which to make

20 their own unique accommodation to the strange and sometimes forbidding New World landscape” (3). By tracing various tropes in American fiction, Kolodny argues that women had to formulate new ways of relating to the environment mainly through gardening, producing “a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity” (xiii). While she duly acknowledges that for some women this “dream of a domestic Eden … [became instead] a nightmare of domestic captivity,” Kolodny projects forward beyond these horrified reactions to instead construct a trajectory of women’s gradual embrace of the

American Western frontier (9). Rather than glossing over this psychological distress, instead, I want to concentrate on it, highlighting the struggles women writers faced in trying to reshape inherited modes of reading nature that disadvantaged them. I will concentrate on two texts which exemplify settlement fiction, both of which have acquired canonical status in their respective nations: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush, set in 1830s Ontario, and Jane Mander’s Story of a New Zealand, written in 1920 but harkening back to her mother’s generation in the late 19th century.

As both of these texts illustrate, gendered readings of settlement literature provide not only an alternative perspective on frontier living, but also reveal underlying historical tensions about the use of natural resources and the environmental sustainability of settlement. The association between women and nature, a problematic topic in feminist discourse, raises interesting discussions for how female authors negotiated the binaries in which they found themselves. As Stacey Alaimo argues

if we are all constituted by discourses implicated in oppressive systems, there is

never any untainted path to liberation, only, as Judith Butler would have it, the

possibility of "reworking that very matrix of power by which we are constituted:'

The fact that women's bodies, experiences, and labor have long been denigrated

for their supposed proximity to a degraded natural world creates the potential for

feminist epistemological positioning and discursive reworkings that challenge the

constitution of both "woman" and "nature:' Though "women" are constituted

differently along several axes of power-race, class, and sexuality, for example—

many of these axes are also inflected by pernicious notions of nature, which lays

the groundwork for a diversity of women to rework "the very matrix of power by

which we are constituted” (9)

Alaimo makes the case that “feminism can instead cobble together a myriad of adulterated alternatives that neither seek an untainted, utterly female space outside of culture nor cast off bodies, matter, and nature as that which is forever debased (10). The type of ambivalence she describes is certainly representative of early colonial women writers who sought to critique their labor exploitation in ways that often relied or responded to the culturally constructed nature/female association. By replicating the established gendering of nature as feminine, women’s settlement literature casts the question of turning wilderness into homesteads as one about the struggle for control over reproductive labor (both domestic and biological). This narrative framework with its gendered binaries remains ideologically problematic, but female authors nonetheless provisionally succeeded in reoriented the nature/female, male/culture divisions by using it to comment upon the dangers of overconsumption both of natural resources and women’s bodies. These types of texts promoted a proto-environmentalist rhetoric about domestic frugality and the dangers of rapacious consumption. However, they

22 fundamentally failed to address the underlying problems of class and racial privilege upon which their transplanted images of the ideal home were founded.

2.1 Writing Against the Pastoral Grain: Colonial Landscapes and Racial Violence

One of the main difficulties in producing settlement fiction was that the “home” environment colonists were entering failed to fit and, in many cases, proved resistant to the ideal image of the country retreat envisioned by the European pastoral tradition. The pastoral is a somewhat slippery category to define in a European setting, but even more so in the context of colonial environments where Romantic ideals collided with the conversion of the “wilderness” into cultivated land. Terry Gifford explains in his monograph on the pastoral that one of the main critiques against this form “is the suggestion that pastoral in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created a false ideology that served to endorse the status quo for the landowning class who had been the reading public before the nineteenth century” (7). The pastoral offered a comforting image of landscape as viewed through a gauzy haze of timeless, untroubled fantasy where shepherds and shepherdess romped in lush meadows. These scenes were far removed from the emphasis on land management and agricultural labor embodied in the georgic tradition and proved especially popular as subjects for poetic romance. The pastoral’s capacity to bolster the current social order in ways that obscured its history and violence made it a genre well-suited to the expansion of a national mythos, the kind of stories written about and for social norms already well-engrained. However, these same qualities also made it an uncomfortable match for narrating the process of colonialization. Huggan

23 and Tiffin, in Post-colonial Ecocriticism, note that the pastoral is a highly problematic genre for adaptation to the colonial world because it traditionally “appeals to fictions of contentment and social harmony through its pleasingly domesticated images of working farm and fruitful garden; it conveniently forgets the division of labor that makes such productivity possible” (83). While scholars have long recognized the pastoral as a social fabrication or fantastic ideal, its visual and written representation as an already extant setting in European contexts naturalizes or at best disguises the evidence of its own social construction. Conversely, the colonial environment makes the production involved in the establishment of such norms immediately visible, highlighting the ongoing transformation of wilderness into rural countryside through the clearance of both trees and native peoples, and the establishment of pasture lands. As such Huggan and Tiffan argue that the colonial pastoral carries with it the burden “of the suppressed violence that helped make its peaceful visions possible, and ‘[is consequently] always engaged with the very histories from which it appears to want to escape” (85).

In response to this ill-suited genre, post-colonial fiction developed a tradition of the anti-pastoral, which scholars have addressed mainly in African and Australian contexts. For instance, Pat Louw’s examines Doris Lessing’s blending of anti and ecocritical post pastoral in African fiction, arguing that she uses this genre to critique racism and sexism, while using landscape to enable the resistance of native peoples.

Similarly, Ivor Indyk concentrates on the tensions in white Australian literature over the status of Aboriginals as both the “true” pastoralists and as a haunting reminder of colonial violence. He argues that they represent a “disruptive force” that defies the conventions of the classic pastoral (850). The South African farm and the Australian bush station, reliant

24 on pastural farming are deeply haunted by the legacy of racial genocide and the forced displacement of native peoples so that any romantic representation of place is necessarily undercut by the history of exploitation. By this period post-colonial authors, even white women like Lessing had become more attuned to their complicity within a larger history of racial abuse in ways that necessarily problematized the pastoral genre for them.

Though this aversion to the genre predominates contemporary fiction, an examination of settlement literature reveals that earlier texts were similarly uncomfortable with applying the conventions of the pastoral to their colonial setting though perhaps for different reasons. They did so with less self-conscious attention to their roles in racial injustice, but with a recognition that the old poetic archetypes were a poor match for the narrative challenges of their real-world existence. As such the landscape remains a troubled subject for them even its function as a register of racial injustice is largely marginalized or absent from early colonial narratives.

Concerns over race, explicitly foregrounded in many post-colonial novels, occasionally surface in earlier women’s settlement fiction like Schreiner’s Story of an

African Farm or receive glancing coverage in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It, but are sometimes wholly absent as in the case of Mander’s Story of a New Zealand River.

Though Schreiner never directly questions the rights of white colonists to settle the land, her novel registers some unease over the “haunting” presence of indigenous peoples as narrators through the rock art, evidence that speaks to their claims of prior land ownership and recent dispossession. Though the native Africans are pushed to the margins of Schreiner’s tale, remaining unnamed archetypes, the landscape nevertheless draws attention to their historical presence even when they are physically absent from

25 scenes. For instance, when the children in Schreiner’s novel come across the bushman’s rock paintings Waldo views them as a mystical artifact from an earlier period when the desert was a lake “filled with strange fishes and animals…that are turned into stone now”

(61). This places them in such a remote past as to associate them with an extinct population. The people who created them are as removed from the children as are the fossils of a South Africa geographically antithetical to the present time. This mark of the

Africans’ life in the plains before European settlement echoes that what Anne

McClintock calls the “myth of the empty land.” In Imperial Leather, McClintock notes that the false conception of environments as empty or virgin territories prior to European arrival helped justify colonial settlement but required ignoring the very real presence of indigenous peoples both bodily and through their material culture (30-1). Yet, even in this context the indigenous presence remains an inescapable marker. The people are removed but their writing on the landscape persists, reminding colonials of an earlier history. Even oral narratives of prior settlement can produce this type of unsettling effect, as when Susanna Moodie, first assured by others settlers that Canada is too young to have ghosts, later hears that the spirit of a drowned Native American man haunts a local lake

(178, 196). In recounting this indigenous presence, Moodie treats the native peoples as she does many of her white neighbors: like a colorful backdrop for her personal narrative.

Yet, to the observant reader this moment exposes the logical fallacy undergirding the myth of Canada as unsettled territory. As this discussion evidences, imperial settlement accounts, like their post-colonial counterparts, remain troubled by indigenous people’s displacement. The attempts to relegate indigenous presence and narratives to the margin in these texts, however, fails to resolve the ideological problems of adapting European

26 pastoral landscape conventions to the colonial home. Stories that virtually erase the native presence, like Mander’s Story of a New Zealand River, nonetheless remain troubled by underlying social anxieties about the stability of colonial settlement.1

In this chapter, I argue that the treatment of landscape in women’s settlement narratives destabilizes frontier mythology, questioning the sustainability of colonial settlement projects and environmental resource management. Both Roughing It in the

Bush and Story of a New Zealand River feature British women exiled by social circumstances from the motherland to the colonial margins, where they struggle and ultimately fail to sustain rural homes, retreating to urban sites after economic and emotional hardships. This pattern, which runs counter to the traditional celebratory rhetoric of pioneer settlement through celebratory expansionism, reveals tensions about the social and environmental sustainability of the colonial project present at the very heart of imperial home front.

2. 2. Waking to the Nightmare: Struggling for Survival in the Canadian Wilderness

Long ensconced in the Canadian literary canon, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1851) has garnered a wide body of scholarship and served as a popular

1 Conflicts between white settlers and Maori were common in the North Island during the 19th century. Mander’s own grandparents themselves fled their home in Ramarama due to Maori raids (McGregor 17). However, Mander not only disregards historical disputes between indigenous peoples over land rights, she practically excises the Maori from the landscape. The only image of them in the novel occurs when David Bruce anchors the boat in a channel on Alice’s initial journey upriver. The Maori are described as “quite harmless…brilliant spots of color, wav[ing] their hands at him [Bruce] from the fields (17). 27 reference point for many contemporary novelists from Margaret Atwood to Carol

Shields. These creative writers’ and critics’ persistent interest in the text may lie not merely with its perception as a classic, but rather with its narrative contradictions and complicated authorial persona. Atwood was one of the first to draw attention to these elements in the “Afterword” to her poem series, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970).

In this brief reflection upon the memoir, she famously characterizes Moodie’s voice as

“schizophrenic, avowing that

Mrs. Moodie is divided down the middle; she praises the Canadian landscape and

then accuses it of destroying her; she dislikes the people already in Canada, but

finds its people her only refuge from the land itself; she preaches progress and the

march of civilization while brooding elegiacally upon the destruction of the

wilderness (62)

This psychological take on Moodie fueled an explosion of criticism about Roughing It’s narrative construction, with scholars throughout subsequent decades unpacking issues of gender and audience to better understand the speaker’s ambivalent attitudes towards the

New World.2 Any attempt to understand the work seems to demand an unpacking of

Moodie’s sense of identity in relation to place. Scholars like Glickman have pushed back against prevalent evaluations of Moodie as completely revolted by Canada, arguing instead that any vacillating emotional responses result from her indoctrination in

European aesthetic conventions of landscape. Glickman argues that Moodie’s text is

2 For criticism on the publication history and the text’s construction see Alison Rukavina’s "'Of the Irritable Genus': The Role of Susanna Moodie in the Publishing of Roughing It In The Bush." and Alec Lucas’s "The Function of The Sketches in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It In The Bush." 28 ambivalent because “she is not hiding imperial discourse –she is wrestling with it” (512)

This instability in reading place leads to a sense of emotional disconnect. If Moodie cannot reconcile Ontario with the image of a comfortable home, she cannot easily identify with her new environment, resulting in a swinging pendulum of emotional highs and lows as any optimistic progress is punctured by the return of doubt and anxiety.

If such scholarship has built a better picture of Moodie’s conflicted position as a settler and an author, the turn towards ecocriticism has encouraged interest in her more routine interactions with the environment often overlooked by previous scholars. Shelley

Boyd broke new ground in “Transplanted into Our Gardens” by examining Moodie and her sister Catherine Parr Traill’s gardens as hybridized spaces, demonstrating their processes of adaptation to the new setting through their choice of plants. Boyd defines the garden as a “pseudo-wilderness,” a place for working through cultural identity and aesthetics. Though such a process certainly occurs in Moodie’s garden, I want to fashion a more comprehensive analysis of the farm as an anti-pastoral example, examining not simply the garden, but the space cleared for the homestead and crops. The instability of this entire setting and Moodie’s anxious relationship to it conveys broader social concerns about adapting to the colonial environment. Whereas Boyd stresses Moodie’s gardening as a successful process of adaptation, I want to reveal the tensions about the sustainability of the colonial farm and its resource use that persist despite the narrative emphasis upon self-reliance. The length of time involved in the process, and its dragging on in a state of incompletion with the space surrounding the home as a kind of ongoing construction project, dramatizes the unattainability of pastoral fantasies for settlers.

Moreover, the ever-present fear of failure, prevalent in the text, undermines the veneer of

29 imperial rhetoric, highlighting a concern about fashioning an enduring new aspirational image of the colonial environment.

Moodie articulates an uneasy relationship to the Canadian homestead, perpetually casting it in pejorative comparison to the idealized British countryside. The daughter of a well to do British family fallen on hard times, Moodie emigrated with her husband largely against her personal inclinations and mainly to help sustain her middle-class status in a country where land was cheaper. Owing to the early loss of her family’s home,

Reydon Hall, due to debts when Moodie was a young child, her perspective of Canada is always colored by nostalgia for a remembered but lost rural ideal, a type of backward gaze against which the contemporary colonial project is always cast as falling short.

Throughout her memoir the bush environment consequently suffers frequently in comparison to the idyllic English landscape, where “woods were bursting into leaf, the meadows and hedgerows were flushed with flowers, and every grove and copsewood echoed to the warbling of bird and the humming of bees” (48-9). This abundantly verdant description conforms to a long history of Arcadian imagery, typified by flora and fauna of the meadows and peopled by shepherds and shepherdesses (18-19). Nature in this type of idyll is often abundant and sensual as the language suggests, the hedgerows “flushed” with flowers. The setting is lush and set in a timeless paradise. This imagery clashes with the disordered world of the Canadian landscape Moodie encounters immediately outside her windows in North America where views are marred by “charred and blackened stumps” left after clearing the forest (183). The space she encounters daily evidences the labor of its construction in ways the pastoral can more convincingly elide in favor of a seemingly “naturally” flourishing land through which humans and animals graze at ease.

Her husband’s attempt to produce a cleared space adaptable for use as pastureland or the agricultural labor more associated with georgics, results only in a type of liminal space.

Neither wilderness nor pasture nor field, it stands as an eyesore and continual reminder of the failure of the colonial home to live up to its narrative antecedents in Britain.

The otherness of the colonial environment provokes Moodie’s reliance on the

British rural landscape as escapist fantasy. Dissatisfied with her surroundings, she frequently dreams of fleeing the realities of the backwoods bush by imagining herself in

Britain, exclaiming “nightly I did return; my feet again trod the daisied meadows of

England…I wept with delight to find myself once more wandering beneath the fragrant shade of her green hedge-rows (60). The British pastoral for Moodie represents a space of intellectual and aesthetic contemplation where she can spend her time writing poetry, painting, and contemplating the scenery, a setting of leisure rather than hard labor. Her nostalgia represents a class position that the labor of settlement prevents her from sustaining. The escapism the pastoral meadows of her imagining promise entices Moodie so much that even her waking hours are often spent musing on England. She states “I would sit for hours at the window as the shades of evening deepened round me, watching the massy foliage of the forests pictured in the waters, till fancy transported me back to

England and the songs of birds and the lowing of cattle were sounding in my ears” (205).

This image of England as pastoral idyll requires ignoring the reliance on deforestation, enclosure of common lands, and the serfdom of estate tenants needed to produce this image. The pastoral was always artificial and fabricated by economic exploitation. Her claiming of Britain as the better home relies on a negation of the social realities that forced the Moodie family to emigrate in the first place. As David Stouck asserts, “a

31 conviction of guilt and failure is her actual legacy from the mother country which did not provide her family with a livelihood (429). The pastoral retreat is hence doubly haunted by failure, firstly by the economic stressors that prevented Moodie from maintaining a middle-class rural life in England and later by the instability of her precarious colonial alternative. Dreaming offers a means of sustaining the reassuring myth of the pastoral as the sanctuary it could only ever be as an imaginary space for the wealthy elite. Moodie’s unfocused gaze and the cover of darkness enable a mental flight from the enclosing bush to the lush meadows, but such transport is, of course, fleeting. The necessity of living and laboring in the surrounding bush requires her to confront the colonial environment on a daily basis.

A rough, chaotic, and haphazard space, Canada unsettles Moodie precisely because it draws attention to its own on-going construction. As Christa Zeller Tomas explains, Moodie’s second, more remote home near her sister, Catherine Parr, represents a further retreat into the bush after the economic failure of the Hamilton Township farm

(105-121). The family’s move to Dour then carries added expectations for fulfilling the long dreamed for prosperous homestead. When Moodie sees this backwoods settlement for the first time after her long journey, she balks at its stark, unfinished quality, which defies her aesthetic expectations. She writes that

The small lake in front, which formed a pretty object in summer, now looked like

an extensive field covered with snow, hemmed in from the world by a dark belt of

somber pine-woods, the clearing round the house was very small, and only just

reclaimed from the wilderness, and the greatest part of it covered with piles of

brushwood, to be burnt the first dry days of spring. The charred and blackened

stumps of the few acres that had been cleared during the preceding year were

everything but picturesque. (183)

The debris of clearing the land for farming destroys the illusion of a timeless rural idyll more imaginable in already extant grassland, revealing instead the labor involved in fashioning it. The limited space around the house also reveals the fragility of the settler’s hold on the setting, one “only just reclaimed from the wilderness” (183). In her poems,

Moodie captures the emotions that such landscapes inspired, lamenting that “turn where we will, the landscape’s still the same…the eternal forest girdling either shore…and rugged fields, with rude huts dotted o’er/ Show cultivation unimproved by art, ⁄ That sheds a barren chillness on the heart’’ (109). As a space in the process of changing,

Canadian settlement to Moodie represents a promise of aspirational futurity, the dream of a beatific farmland in keeping with British traditions. However, this ideal is always postponed and overshadowed by the enveloping disarray of the partially cleared homestead, a space that places heavier domestic and imaginative demands on Moodie than her English home. Though aided by a series of female servants, Moodie’s responsibilities as a wife and mother in this new environment are substantially greater than they were in England, necessitating a new relationship to environmental resources.

In running the home, she must cook, clean, garden, and tend to her children, sometimes during the lengthy absence of her husband, who in 1837 joined the British military to help suppress a local rebellion against the colonial government.3 Many of Moodie’s

3 Gillian Whitlock asserts that Moodie’s husband by the social standards of the period failed to fulfill his expected duties as head of the family. Christa Zeller Thomas adds that this failure usually resulted from his frequent absences from the home either on errands to town or eventually as a colonial officer.

33 repeated failings, such as unintentionally producing sour bread or rubbing her hands raw washing clothing, result from prior ignorance of homemaking skills.

In these cases, her middle-class education in female accomplishments has poorly prepared her for the labor requirements of life in the bush. Yet, the harshness of the colonial setting also demands a new relationship to resource management. In Dour,

Moodie learns to catches wild ducks, fishes with her children in the nearby lake, gardens and even turns her hand to more complex processes like making maple sugar. However, the dire economic situation and climatological impacts on their harvest necessitate a more comprehensive use of available resources. Faced with debts and the need for self- sufficient homemaking, Moodie embraces flora that she might have disregarded or even eliminated from her English pastoral. In place of daisied meadows, Moodie trumpets the virtues of the dandelion root, which she dries, grinds, and roasts as a substitute for coffee, using the greens for salad. Boyd asserts that “Moodie elevates the dandelion through its newly acquired cultivated status, but she forms her estimation …because it requires less care” (52). Moodie, she alleges “roots herself firmly in the garden of accommodation,” learning to make use of wild materials (55). Indeed she methodically outlines recipes for the dandelion, explaining that “the time will come when this hardy weed…which forms a constant play thing to the little children rolling about and luxuriating among the grass, in the sunny month of May, will be transplanted into our gardens, and tended with due care”

(239). Such statements reflect a new appreciation of the use value of natural resources, one provoked by a necessity of survival. Whereas Boyd reads this garden as space of empowerment, I would argue that even this emphasis upon adaptation is undermined by the very real dangers of starvation and illness the family continually faces.

Though Roughing It superficially endorses the benefits of self-reliant labor and the possibility for social stability in Canada, these attitudes are undercut by the ever- recurrent themes of sickness, poverty, and near-death experiences. Despite her best efforts the family persistently encounters environmental and economic disaster. Though these struggles for daily existence cause her to elevate the merits of the humblest plants and game like dandelions and squirrels, the Canadian landscape remains a site of jeopardy and vulnerability where starvation is an ever-present possibility. Christa Zeller

Thomas argues that Moodie’s pursuits “suggest a process of adaptation… [but] as a measure of personal agency and effective control of the environment…they are both never enough and ultimately unsuccessful.”4 Throughout the text the landscape threatens to become not only a “prison home” as Moodie initially calls it, but at times almost a death trap. Her house catches on fire with her children inside twice, once due to burning fallow land and another owing to poor chimney ventilation. During the latter, Moodie ends up rescuing her three small children from her burning home in cabinet drawers to protect them from the freezing snow, scrambling with her oldest daughter to salvage their furniture and winter food stores. These repeated disasters, coupled with the family’s debt, spur Moodie to write to the colonial government for assistance, seeking employment for her husband. This desperation compels Moodie to independently look for a means of

4 Christa-Zeller reads Roughing It as a comment on home as both house and family arguing that as a British expatriate memoir the story functions as a type of failed homecoming. He argues that despite her efforts to ameliorate her alienation by defining home as family the material deficiencies of the “miserable hut” they first find themselves in hamper such efforts. Thomas, Christa Zeller. "'I Had Never Seen Such A Shed Called A House Before': The Discourse of Home in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It In The Bush." Canadian Literature 203. (2009): 105-121.

35 escaping both their financial predicament and the backwoods home that helped engender it.

Moodie’s trials of homemaking speak to anxieties underpinning the British colonial project, namely a risk of failure that calls into question the competency of settlers and the attainability of imperial goals to improve the wilderness. If the pioneer home represents the agenda of the Empire in microcosm, the narrative ending of

Moodie’s memoir as a retreat from the bush, throws doubt upon the sustainability of colonial settlement. Moodie and her family eventually leave the rural homestead for the city because they cannot survive on the land. While she expresses nostalgia for “the dear forest home” she does so from a spatial and temporal distance having escaped its privations (324). In a way this type of after-the-fact romanticism is not so dissimilar from her views of the idyll of the lost British estate. Home can only seem to fulfil its ideological role when translated through the lens of fantasy rather than as material setting; This is largely the case because economic issues make the maintenance of the dream impossible for families like Moodie’s caught in the middle class but with pretensions towards a higher social status. Far from the romantic visions popularized in travel propaganda, the text’s colonial landscape promises not a lush bountiful sanctuary, but a place of danger and frugality. The narrative’s recurrent attention to the difficulties of running the home and keeping children alive points to tensions about the sustainability and security of settler colonies; the possibility of defeat by the harsh environment lurks throughout the text, resurfacing in moments of emotional and physical crisis.

At the end of the memoir, Moodie sums up these fears through the description of her own body as consumed by the labor of backwoods life. Having made plans for

36 leaving the farm, she reflects upon the physical changes she has undergone. Moodie avows

For seven years I had lived out of the world entirely; my person had been

rendered coarse by hard work and exposure to the weather. I looked double the

age I really was, and my hair was already thickly sprinkled with grey. I clung to

my solitude. I did not like to be dragged from it to mingle in gay scenes, in a busy

town, and with gaily-dressed people. I was no longer fit for the world…I was

contended to live and die in obscurity” (322).

Jane Floyd notably points to this passage as evidence of Moodie’s reliance on the conventions of spiritual autobiography (68). She alleges that Moodie uses such passages to fashion a virtuous persona, rejecting worldly pleasures in place of solitude and frugality. Certainly, her asserted desire of to “live and die in obscurity” belies the interest in a professional life as an author, which Moodie pursued even in the woods. As such this phrase suggests a deliberate and to some extent disingenuous construction of self.

However, I would also argue that the narrative about her body does more than conform to ideas of a pious spirituality. Moodie is not simply a hermit praying in her forest cell; she is a woman physically aged by living in the woods. Her rejection of the social world to which she is already set to return reflects a concern about her continued adaptability and the possibly irreversible physical exhaustion produced by living in the Canadian woods.

The weathering of her body marks a change in her class position, signifying her need to physically labor, but Moodie also emphasizes the rate of the aging process. After seven years she looks double her age. This description projects a concern about her body as a finite resource. Has she been used up by the experience? Having failed to successfully

37 make it in the bush can she then revert back to urban living? This passage seems to present not so much a love for the backwoods as a worry that she belongs nowhere. At the moment of writing Moodie will soon leave the farm, but fears that she has been marred by the backwoods to such an extent that she cannot reintegrate into a middle-class life.

Moodie’s depiction of herself as humble and resigned conforms to the social conventions of the self-sacrificing 19th century woman, yet the narration of her failures suggests a real anxiety about the capability of emigrants to produce the type of colonial vision sold to them in travel propaganda. Charlotte Gray deplores the hucksterism of lectures like the one Moodie’s husband attended before emigration or contemporaneous publications like Captain Charles Stuart’s The Emigrant’s Guide to Upper Canada which

presented the gloomy acres that were available in the most attractive language

[never mentioning] …the monumentally hard work required to clear the land of

dense forest growth, the total absence of everything most English people

considered essential to their comfort, or the loneliness and poverty that settlers

faced in the early years.” (41).

Moodie’s own text exists in a uncomfortable space caught between conflicting ideological motives. Superficially it seeks to celebrate Canada as an emergent nation, recalling fondly the privations of an earlier decades, but Moodie’s tribulations and loss tarnish the veneer of the memoir’s appeal to national mythmaking. Her work even if unintentionally questions whether colonialists can learn how to use their environment efficiently enough to create a New World ideal or if they in turn will be mentally and physically undone by the labor of fabricating it. Consequently, despite its façade of

38 imperial rhetoric the text actually expresses an undercurrent of anxiety about Britain’s ability to adapt and survive in new environments.

2.3 Laboring in the Bush: Gender Politics and Resource Consumption

If Moodie’s story typifies the challenges of survival in the New World, Mander’s settlement melodrama articulates an even greater concern about unsustainable social and environmental practices. Whereas works like Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush or

Schreiner’s Story of a South African Farm, upon which Mander drew for inspiration, have acquired considerable transnational attention among critics, Mander’s novel remains neglected. 5 Though recognized as a significant milestone in the emergence of a distinctly

New Zealand literature, the novel has failed to garner much scholarly attention.6 Indeed, the majority of literary criticism concentrates not on the novel itself, but on its role as an

5 Critical opinion remains divided as to how much influence Schreiner’s work had on Mander as a novelist. The title Story of a New Zealand River clearly echoes that of Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm and Rae McGregor adds that Mander clearly enjoyed reading Schreiner’s novel, recommending it to friends (64). Her first biographer, Dorthea Turner explains that Schreiner’s courageous use of her colonial experiences as the foundation for her text inspired Mander, however chose to use a different style and tone. She argues that Schreiner defied Victorian narrative conventions, combining poetic lyricism and with deflating reality of daily tragedies. Mander’s novel on the other hand, relies on plot contrivance and “episodic groups of characters” which Turner calls the “stage method” of construction (3). Notably it also supplies a more standard resolution through romantic coupling, though I would argue that the tensions in the text counteract the superficially upbeat ending.

6 Dorothea Turner’s 1972 monograph on Mander remained the primary resource about the novelist until Rae McGregor’s Story of a New Zealand Writer: Jane Mander, published by the University of Otago Press in 1998. Both works concentrate on biographical readings of Mander’s oeuvre. Literary criticism has remained scant with a brief spate of publications in the late 1990s, mainly centered on Mander as source material for Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993). 39 inspirational, albeit unacknowledged, source text for Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993).

For example, Alistair Fox’s “Puritanism and the Erotics of Transgression: The New

Zealand Influence in Jane Campion’s Thematic Imaginary” and Diane Long Hoeveler’s

"Silence, Sex, And Feminism: An Examination of The Piano's Unacknowledged

Sources" analyze thematic issues of gender in the original text, but only as they inform the adaptation of the source material in Campion’s film. Though such criticism raises interesting questions about adaptation practices, it has nonetheless tended to overshadow the study of the novel’s thematic complexities. Those few who have published articles on the novel have concentrated mainly on gender dynamics and the role of religion in sexual repression, with only Mary Paul and Lydia Wevers addressing the representation of the natural environment. Indeed, Wevers, who has written most extensively on the text’s environmental representations, actually argues that “the narrative pays scant attention to the landscape which contextualizes it” (5). However, I would argue that what the novel lacks in terms of lengthy scenery description it makes up for in the dynamism of particular moments of environmental destruction. Indeed, far from the “sexual, social, and cultural predicament” of Alice “effacing” the treatment of landscape, as Wevers states, I argue that the two symbolically inform one another (5). In fact, I would argue that the novel’s gender politics are so intertwined with the logging camp setting and bush homestead environment that the one cannot be fully understood without looking at the other. Mander’s novel reveals a more cohesive adaptation of settlement conventions to the issues of white female homesteaders through its attentiveness to women’s bodily labor and environmental devastation. If Moodie hints at these types of thematic concerns,

Mander takes them one step farther by drawing a clear parallel between how women and

40 nature are treated by male settlers. The narrative’s descriptive language establishes a comparative analogy between women’s experiences of the bush and the consumption of natural resources, evoking concern over the sustainability of colonial social and environmental practices. This decision results in a more explicitly proto-feminist agenda in correlation with conservation efforts, a narrative mode indicative of the shift from the

19th century moment of settlement to the early 20th century’s height of industrial expansion.

As a narrative of colonial settlement, Story of a New Zealand River shares many thematic similarities with Moodie’s memoir, including an interest in survivalist hardships and the process of adapting to the colonial bush. Published in 1920, New Zealand River details the trials of Alice, a cultured, middle-class woman who marries a lumber mill owner to secure financial stability for herself and her illegitimate children, particularly her oldest daughter, Asia. In the opening scene of the novel, Alice and her three children travel up the eponymous river, leaving Auckland for the remote forests of Kaipara,

Northern New Zealand. Like Moodie, Alice enters the backwoods bush unwillingly, out of economic need. Her voyage into the wilderness to join her husband, Tom Roland, is a compromise, a marriage of convenience rather than a quest for adventure. In addition, both women carry the signifiers of their class position with them. Moodie brings not only essential home furnishings, but exotic decorative treasures like a samurai sword to her log cabin. Perhaps even more remarkably, Alice transports a cumbersome piano up the river, unwilling to part with the emblem of social refinement she terms her “one

41 accomplishment” (50).7 Though the protagonists of these two texts share many similarities, Mander’s novel occupies a distinctly different historical moment than

Moodie’s memoir. At once a representation of an earlier Victorian era, typified by

Alice’s behavioral conventions and staunch religious principles, the novel also writes contemporary social concerns onto the moment of 19th century settlement. The narrative’s preoccupation with marital power inequalities and resource consumption connects the concerns of the women’s movement with environmental conservation.

Indeed, though the third person construction of the novel initially distances the reader from Alice’s perspective, it nonetheless draws attention to how she is perceived by the male social sphere of the logging camp.

This narrative device explicitly raises the question about how women’s experiences of the frontier might differ from men’s, foregrounding gendered relationships to the colonial setting. In the first chapter of the text, Alice is viewed almost exclusively through a masculine gaze. David Bruce, Roland’s logging manager and camp doctor, who “had felt the call of the wild and accepted the offer to stay,” provides readers with the first impression of Alice. Yet he himself has difficulty interpreting the meaning behind her expression. Watching her gazing at the passing mountains, he wonders if

Alice “felt about it all as he had done” (14). Bruce’s lack of surety in the opening passages raises questions about what an alternative feminine reading of landscape might

7 Though Alice plays with emotion “to something in her that had no other means of expression,” her piano additionally represents her rigid devotion to social etiquette. This emphasis upon her social propriety contrasts substantially with the more sexually auto- erotic and subversive use of the piano by Ada in Campion’s film. 42 look like, a subject that the narrative subsequently explores through the imagery of the garden.

The frontier garden, a space that Kolodny identifies as an uplifting metaphor for women’s interactions with the environment, appears at first in Mander’s novel to provide a stable sanctuary; yet the very exceptionalism of this space in the text nonetheless raises concerns about its sustainability across generations. Like Moodie, Alice upon entering the bush immediately looks for the familiar signifiers of the rural haven, in this case latching onto Mrs. Brayton’s garden as a type of psychological refuge. Mrs. Brayton, the grandmotherly British matron of the neighboring homestead, embodies the ideal colonial woman, who appropriates a wild space by turning it into an imperial version of the motherland. She plants trees from England and the tropics side by side, along with a mix of flowers, even incorporating a spring that “flowed hidden by ferns, through a corner and down the hill in a little gully of its own making” (43). Her garden re-envisions the native bush and river, transforming it into a microcosmic colony. This setting fits with concept of the garden as contemplative, safe retreat, well-ordered and aesthetically pleasing. However, the novel, far from suggesting the reproducibility of this location, actually draws attention to its exceptionality and fragility. Both Alice and her daughter

Asia carry cut flowers from Mrs. Brayton’s to adorn their home, but never plant a substantial flower garden of their own. This inability to reproduce the pastoral retreat underlines the potential failure of future generations to sustain their colonial inheritance, a key element in the agenda to civilize the bush. Even as Alice’s failure to put down roots troubles the garden sanctuary, the dangers of over consuming pre-existing natural

43 resources dominates the narrative, first appearing when Alice goes on an excursion to the logging camp.

In this key incident, Mander employs description to craft a symbolic comparison between the clearing of the land by the logging industry and Alice’s exhausting childbearing experiences. Although Mander includes the river in her novel’s title, Story of

A New Zealand Forest might better reflect the actual locale of the action. The novel centers for the most part on the homestead and the immediate bush vicinity where Tom operates the kauri mill. Anticipating an exciting sightseeing expedition and picnic, Alice instead finds the logging camp traumatically upsetting. The narrative stresses the difference between her perception of the logging industry and her husband’s. Whereas

Alice considers cutting the ancient kauri trees a “sacrilege,” her husband sees it as a

“great adventure that has earned him recognition among Auckland business circles as a bold spirit and as a coming man” (53-4). He perceives logging as both a heroic masculine endeavor and as a practical necessity for the colony, responding to Alice’s shock and

Mrs. Brayton’s resigned disapproval with the line “timber is cheaper than bricks” (54).

This business- oriented attitude clashes with Alice’s more visceral, emotive response upon seeing the tree felled. These distinctions set up a gendered conflict over environmental readings in which men perceive nature through an imperial monetary framework and women a more affective one. This response falls into gendered binaries of culture/nature divisions, but it also suggests a greater attentiveness to environmental history on the part of the female protagonist.

The usually restrained Alice’s grief-stricken reaction to this scene underscores her identification with the kauri. The language of the tree felling scene metaphorically reads as a commentary of sexual assault with the narrator avowing that

There was not as yet a quiver in the dark foliage, no sign of capitulation to the

needs of man…Suddenly there was a suggestion of quiver. The skyline wavered.

“She’s coming,” said Roland.

The whole world seemed to lurch, slowly, slowly; then the top branches

shook, the great trunk swayed, the foundations cracked. The whole tree gave one

gigantic shiver, poised for an instant suspended, hesitating, and then realizing as it

were the remorselessness of fate, it plunged forward, filling the whole visible

world, and cracking horribly, till its longest branches caught the ground with a

series of tearing, ripping sounds, preliminary to the resounding roar as the

massive truck struck and rebounded and rolled upon the earth.

…. “There, that’s over,” said the boss cheerfully. “I guess we can have lunch

now. You stay here. This is a good place by the creek.”

He could not understand why Alice had tears in her eyes, or why she

looked at him as if he had committed a crime. He set off for the luncheon backets,

swinging his arms and whistling gaily. (59)

Notably, she is the only one in camp moved to tears when witnessing the felling of the thousand-year-old tree. The emotional impact of this moment relies on the metaphoric rape of the landscape and its emphasis on physicality; the strong, proud tree subjugated by male violence. The descriptions of the tree echo Alice’s own predicament as a woman in the bush, forced to adapt to a new social context, and to fulfill her sexual duties as a

45 wife. Before her arrival, Alice fears her nightly encounters with Tom, and “thought of the babies to come” and the difficulties of giving birth in the bush. Similarly, when her husband asks her to come to bed on her first night, she knows that “he would not consider the fact that she was tired to death. She knew that he would simply feel injured because her vitality was not equal to his own…In his eyes she would not be equal to her job” (28).

Mary Paul notes this connection between woman and environment in passing, stating that

“Tom Roland is casual and triumphant about felling the tree. His victory over it is similar to the casual victory of a man who demands sexual compliance from the woman he thinks he owns” (117). While I agree with Paul’s point about the analogy between

Roland’s attitude towards the tree and his wife, I argue that the symbolism extends even further. This instance is not simply an isolated moment of literary symbolism. Rather it serves to thematically highlight the similarities between the over-consumption of the forest and Alice’s exhaustive repeated pregnancies.

As such the narrative emphasizes that women in settler colonies were historically constructed as a resource; by raising children they helped to sustain the larger imperial project. As Mary Paul notes Story of a New Zealand River articulates a trope common to contemporaneous texts like Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude: namely “unwilling

[biological] conception in a settler colony, where white women were expected to reproduce for the sake of the nation” (112). Paul adds that the novel addresses “a period when domesticity and child-bearing were of primary importance and primary anxiety”

(112). Women were perceived as essential to colonial survival, but their role was defined through the biological, a position in which Alice finds herself trapped. Though she does give birth to children that survive infancy, she also suffers repeated miscarriages,

46 eventually undergoing surgery to prevent future pregnancies, a decision only predicated upon her poor health. The narrative’s concentration on her reproductive difficulties and her metaphorical identification with felled trees reveals underlying anxieties about social and environmental sustainability in the colonial setting.8

The novel’s representation of women’s bodies as sexually overused parallels the treatment of the natural world itself, a perspective in keeping with a historically emergent concern about environmental overconsumption in New Zealand. Significantly this sexual exploitation is figured through white women in ways that circumvent issues over exploitation of Maori women or interracial relations that certainly persisted throughout the colonial period. Racial violence is absent, but sexual abuse remains present in the metaphoric rape of the forest by logging. As Graham Wynn indicates the logging industry fueled the growth of settlement throughout 19th century New Zealand. By 1881, 7/8th of the total population lived in wooden houses, burning roughly two tons of wood per person per year (Wynn 105). Such milling enabled the expansion of settlement through the construction of railways, bridges, telegraph lines, and in the case of the kauri— “the most magnificent and commercially valuable [tree]”—durable housing (Wynn 105).

However, by the late 19th century, the rate of resource consumption was increasingly worrying many such as G. H. Scholfield, whose 1909 history New Zealand in Evolution

8 The men in the novel including David Bruce and Tom Roland are each physically incapacitated at various points in the narrative, but these experiences, though possibly reflective of a psychic conflict, are presented as episodic. They occur and are succeeded by lengthy periods of untroubled work. Conversely, Alice seems, at least until Tom’s moderation of his sexual desires, to be perpetually caught within a biologic judgment of her usefulness. The difficulties with her miscarriages and fears about her lack of bodily privacy are medicalized as hysteria. Emotional states and biological reproduction are thereby linked in the text. 47 condemns logging as a “pitiful war,” its “doctrine of progress” amounting to an

“unbridled rapine” (qtd. in Wynn 100). The economic value of species like the kauri and the concentration of milling facilities around Auckland led to a quicker deforestation of the region where Mander’s novel is set. In the early 1900s, kauri lumber production rose to 120 million feet per year, or roughly 9% of the entire quantity available, a figure that seriously jeopardized the survival of the species. 9

As consumption steadily increased with colonial expansion, concern over the logging industry grew both among educated intellectuals and politicians. In his 1918 description of New Zealand, William Pember Reeves articulates this increasing ethical conflict over logging. He claims

The men who are doing the melancholy work of destruction are also doing the

work of colonisation. As a class they are acting lawfully and in good faith. Yet the

result is a hewing down and sweeping away of beauty, compared with which the

conquests of the Goths and Vandals were conservative processes. (qtd. in Turner

62)

The author maintains the imperial right to colonisation (which is never in doubt), but also compares the settlers to the “barbarians” destroying culture and history in their wake. He appears to struggle with the problem of attempting to reconcile these antithetical conceptions of New Zealand settlement. By the post- WII era this discomfort with colonial environmental change had become an even more unavoidable issue for white audiences. M. H. Holcroft avows

9Wynn explains that even the highest estimates in the 1900s only placed the total kauri forests extant in all of New Zealand at 1,112 million feet. 48

We today see the results of their activity – prosperous cities, farms, and factories,

roads and railways, and all the signs of comfortable living, but we also see the

bare hillsides, the remnants of forest, the flooding rives, and in some districts

impoverished soil. The balance of nature has been changed. Are we to assume

that a people which possessed the land in this manner —raping it in the name of

progress— can remain untroubled and secure in its occupation? (qtd. in Turner

64)

By this point, the moral superiority of white settlement seems destabilized. White complacency Holcroft argues should be “troubled,” but this attitude is perhaps enabled by a gradual decline in the nation’s reliance on the earlier industries like logging which had by this time flagged considerably. The ending of the earlier era of resource extraction and the rise of the middle-class have to some extent allowed for the acknowledgement of the past abuse after it is too late to redress the widespread effects.

Mander was born into and lived through this turbulent period of both rapid colonial development and public debate over resource management. Growing up in the

1880s, she witnessed the expansion of kauri milling and its consequences first-hand. Her father Frank Mander owned and operated a number of sawmills and the family moved 30 times throughout her childhood as he looked for kauri trees to mill (McGregor 18-9).

With this family background, Mander was likely aware of the growing public disquiet throughout the late 19th century over logging, including its eventual government regulation through licensing and the establishment of protected state forests in the 1880s

(Wynn 113). Indeed, in her biography of the author, Rae McGregor notes that the view of logging Mander espoused as an adult differs dramatically from that of her entrepreneurial

49 father. In 1905 he expressed the view that there was “no use trying to preserve colonial timber…It was like coal in the earth —it was there to be used” (qtd. Turner 62). From his perspective nature was an untapped resource waiting for man to man use of it for nation building. Afterward suitable trees might be planted to replace those lost, but the idea of conserving the kauri was inconceivable to him and others of his generation. Though never an explicit environmental reformer, Mander’s opinions clearly differed from her father’s. In a 1929 article comparing her experiences of London with New Zealand,

Mander writes “We had our skyscrapers in those days, but they were trees…They were our antiques. My first sense of terror, of rage at the ruin of beauty came from seeing them cut down (qtd. in McGregor 22). This childhood experience of logging seems to have produced a strong, emotive memory for Mander since the sentiments she expresses in this article found their way into the dramatic kauri cutting scene in The Story of a New

Zealand River. Though the early memory may have fueled Mander’s response, her critique of kauri logging as the destruction of a precious ancient resource participated in an on-going public debate about environmental practices. Written during an era of heightened concern over resource management, her novel speaks to New Zealand’s nascent environmentalism. In fact, the text makes connections between this proto- environmental interest in sustainability and another social movement of the day, women’s reproductive rights, marking both as key to the maintenance of a healthy colony.

The socially destabilizing environmental consequences of this over-consumption surface dramatically towards the end of the novel when Asia, Alice’s daughter, tends to a man dying in the gum fields, a nightmarish setting resultant from overconsumption. In this depiction, clearing the woodland produces not idyllic rolling meadows, but instead a

50 horrific wasteland populated by dying and diseased loners. Even as the logging industry facilitates homebuilding throughout the country, symbolized by the growth of a small community in Pukekaroro, the surrounding lands are transformed into gum digging fields where miners eke out a meager living by excavating buried tree sap. These fossilized nuggets were collected and sold to company stores, helping to supply an international trade for lacquer and linoleum before the establishment of modern synthetics.10 One of the only critics to address this space, Lydia Wevers, reads them as a space of possibility and untapped potential, a “seductively blank and apparently unpossessed or at least unclaimed [land] … [that] promises riches to those who are able through their labour to exploit its hidden resources” (8). However, I would argue that the economic realities described in the narrative actually belie this interpretation of the fields as a site of upward mobility through hard labor. The diggers are poor down and outs who must pay the land- owner Tom Roland for the right to access the fields, often earning barely enough to support themselves, let alone strike it rich. Rather than a site of unimagined wealth,

Mander portrays the gum fields as a scene of destruction. They are McClintock’s “myth of the empty land” turned on its head, not a “seductively blank” space waiting for settlers to occupy it, but instead a wasteland produced by the white colonialists. In contrast to the lush romantic European dream typified by Mrs. Brayton’s expansive garden these fields lack any vivacious life. Mander describes them as

10 The Kauri Museum. https://www.kaurimuseum.com/ Date Accessed 7/17/2020. The significance of this industry to the foundation of the country is evidenced by the Kauri Museum devoted to the logging and digging industry. When visiting this museum, I was especially struck by the use of kauri gum for aesthetic purposes. The permanent exhibit includes an entire room of gum samples, many of which were sculpted into home décor, and personal accessories. 51

a wide area of what looked like nothingness…pigmy slopes and valleys… merged

into the dead level of monstrous wastes. What vagrant trees it had were

dwarfed…and the ferns, [were] themselves the poorest of their kind, for the blood

of the soil had gone centuries before into the life of the kauri forest, of which now

the only trace was gum, the hardened sap. (312)

As with the depiction of trees in the kauri felling chapter, Mander personifies the land as a body, giving its previous life’s blood to its offspring, the ancient kauri forests since annihilated by the loggers. The use of the term “blood” stresses the literal importance of nutrient rich soil to sustaining plant life, but it also carries the additional connotation of a bloodline, a genealogical inheritance. The phrase “gone centuries before” registers the passing generations of flora and the gradual weakening of nature’s blood line through deforestation. This degenerated environment can now only produce ferns of the

“poorest…kind,” typology that speaks to the popular conflations of evolution and social anthropology. The imagery collapses the boundaries between human and non-human in ways that problematize white colonial land usage.

The narrative extends the blood metaphor to the lives of the gum field inhabitants.

The digging fields cannot environmentally or economically support a homesteading culture. Due to such poverty those who live there, like the unnamed consumptive whom

Asia tends, often meet untimely ends. Like the depleted soil incapable of sustaining much vegetation, the gum diggers fail to put down roots, producing a succession of short-lived

English occupants. Asia explains that the first owner of the consumptive’s hut, the

English earl

built it six years ago, and he died two years later − whisky, Then another

Englishman had it. He was left money and went Home. Then a teacher, also an

Englishman, drifted to it. He died there six months ago − whisky and pneumonia.

Now this poor devil – whisky and consumption. I’ve read the Bible and prayed

for them all in turn. (313)

The pattern of social degeneration and disease followed by death characterizes the gum fields as the antithesis of the homesteaders with aspirations of upward mobility.

Furthermore, the emphasis upon contagious disease registers concerns about the fields as space of pollution. Asia, the patient caregiver to the series of dying men, must burn her dress before leaving the fields for fear of catching the disease. Although they appear only once in the novel, the horror of the gum fields resonates despite Asia’s metaphorical cleansing by fire. The novel associates the gum fields with transient colonial expatriates, but in reality, the workforce was often comprised of Dalmatian immigrants and

Maori’s.11 The use of the metaphor of blood and soil to comment on a weakening English stock also reads as a displacement of the real loss, that of the indigenous people often placed in the precarious position of scavenging a living from the swamps of deforested land. A people who literally tie their origins back to the earth by burying placenta were compelled to make a poor living off these diggings.

Though she displaces the ancestral loss of the indigenous peoples, Mander does force readers to face the darker environmental underbelly that makes colonial expansion

11 Maori were the predominant gum diggers at the start of the industry often working as seasonal labor when crops failed or economic depression pushed them into this type of migrant work. Božić-Vrbančić, Senka. “‘Scars in the Ground’: Kauri Gum Stories.” Oral History and Public Memories, edited by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Temple University Press, 2008, pp. 145–164. 53 possible. Here the pattern of overconsumption reaches an extreme. The first scavenging diggers in the fields make their fortunes quickly by finding the gum nearer the surface of the stream beds. However, she states that “grounds were gone over by succeeding droves of diggers who went deeper and deeper each time, …[leaving] less hope and fewer chances to those who followed” (315). Mander questions the traditional image of the male settler as dauntless hero, instead figuring the diggers as rapacious consumers, whose repeated exploitation of the land only diminishes its value for their successors. Such environmental overuse allegorically mirrors Tom Roland’s sexual domination of Alice to the detriment of her health.

The clearance of the land in this instance produces profits but fails to improve the wilderness for habitation by transforming it into fertile open land. Lydia Wevers in “A

Story of Land”: Narrating Landscape in some early New Zealand Writers” reads the digging field as “the space between vanished landscape, the retreated forest, and as yet an unactualized one, the landscape of commercial and urban development which lies to the

South (9). She asserts that “its apparent worthlessness makes available its potential and offers the possibility of its recuperation to landscape, just as the gum diggers have the possibility of recuperation by labor and fortune” (9).Yet, I argue that the description of the digging fields in Mander’s novel questions the likelihood that the land will be good for any purpose after decades of successive drovers. As Wynn notes the process of gum extraction for use in industrial products like varnish and linoleum was extremely harmful to the environment. He suggests that the diggers “left behind extensive areas pocked with excavations and tailings, the surface comprising only bare clay of no value for agriculture” (108). In this scene, albeit an isolated one, Mander raises the specter of the

54 anti-pastoral, one that cannot be easily supplanted by a return to the supposedly greater normality of the homestead. The gum fields hover on the borders of the bush community, a reminder of the dangers of over consumption that might threaten the well-being of the very colony they seek to supply.

The narrative events of the novel also undercut the romantic coupling of Alice and David Bruce, leaving concerns about the sustainability of bush life unresolved. The sense of security personified by Mrs. Brayton and her garden disappear when she dies towards the end of the novel. Survived by one unmarried son, who has himself left the bush, Mrs. Brayton’s garden home effectively perishes with her. Recovering from her hysterectomy, Alice first hears of Mrs. Brayton’s death and feels that “there was a vacancy in the garden…a dull ache ever present” (285). These two events, Alice’s surgery in light of her exhausting years of miscarriages and Mrs. Brayton’s death, following so closely one upon another, point to the narrative’s recurrent anxieties about gendered reproduction and the passing on of a colonial legacy to a younger generation.

This disquiet persists since Asia, the female character most at home in the bush, not only leaves the woods, but New Zealand entirely at the end of the novel, planning on traveling to Australia with her lover.

While neither Roughing It in the Bush nor Story of a New Zealand River fully call into question the colonial right to settle the wilderness, they nonetheless reimagine the settlement landscape in ways that articulate the social and psychological pressures of women’s lives on the frontier. Similar to Moodie’s memoir, Mander’s novel concludes with the female protagonists’ escape from the rural setting. After the death of Tom

Roland, Alice, now married to David Bruce, leaves the bush for Auckland to create a

“refuge” for remaking women’s “broken lives” (432). This pattern of flight from the rural to the urban, common to both texts, casts doubt upon the vision of the colonial landscape either as a sanctuary or a desirable site for permanent settlement. Whereas Moodie’s account emphasizes the immediate problems of survival and adaptive resource use,

Mander’s text stresses anxieties about the stability of on-going environmental and colonial reproductive and industrial practices, a message in keeping with its multigenerational narrative. Together these stories complicate the triumphant survivalist rhetoric sold to a largely British readership throughout the colonial period, undermining the very mythology which settlement fiction superficially endorses. Such gendered readings of the bush settlement reveal underlying anxieties within white settler culture about the possibility of colonial failure, and the necessity for more effective resource management, raising questions about what narratives get invoked in imperial mythmaking and what gets repressed. The stories concentrate on women’s exhaustion, a depiction that in turn points back to concerns about male management of labor and resources. Without seeking to overthrow the social order, they nonetheless obliquely critique men’s inabilities to live up to the colonial ideals of pioneer homemaking either.

In Moodie’s case this comes as a criticism of the farming competency and business acumen of underprepared male colonialists, whereas for Mander the inadequacy is defined as an emotional and moral obliviousness to the damage of their domineering mindset. Even as the texts register these critiques, the women remain complicit in their husband’s imperial enterprises, working for stability of the colonial order while the narratives seethe with resentment or discontent. Their attempts to reshape narrative in ways that registered this emotive resistance illustrates the adaptability of textual forms for

56 the articulation of disregarded voices. If women carved out a space for themselves in the realm of colonial discourse in the 19th and early 20th centuries, native peoples remained, in print fiction at least, a marginalized population relegated to the backdrop of the frontier landscape. All this would change dramatically in the post-war era with the eruption of militant protests and the emergency of new literary modes of articulating indigenous environmental politics.

Chapter 3

NARRATIVE FLOW AS ECOCRITICAL RESISTANCE IN INDIGENOUS WATER FICTION

In 2016 the Standing Rock Sioux community build a camp on the site of the

Dakota Access Pipeline, a construction project then nearing completion and in the process of litigation. Their resistance centered not merely on their rights to sacred burial grounds, but the considerable threat of oil leaks posed to nearby water systems. Over successive months the Standing Rock camp grew as thousands of indigenous supporters from hundreds of tribal nations across the USA and from as far away as Peru and New

Zealand joined them, swelling their numbers. Those involved in the demonstrations not only physically occupied the contested space, but also engaged in rhetorically defining their environmental agenda. They coined the term “water protectors” to describe their activist aims and adopted the traditional saying “mni wiconi’: water is life” as a slogan for their movement. Though their resistance garnered considerable social media attention and the activists held firm in the face of police violence, the developers eventually succeeded in completing the pipeline project. Despite this disheartening outcome, the movement played an important role in expanding an ongoing conversation about indigenous agency and self-representation. As Kelle Hayes, a queer indigenous organizer and direct-action trainer for the group We Charge Genocide avows, “whatever else happened in that space, our imaginations were re-armed…We didn't stop the pipeline, but we did seize a page of history from those who would make us disappear. The movement

58 in Standing Rock was a vision of ourselves, as Native people: imperfect, beautiful, alive in the face of colonialism, and still rising” (Hayes). While Standing Rock is the most recent large-scale protest to attract such global attention, indigenous activists have long employed protest movements as means of ideological reimagination.

Though political resistance to colonization among indigenous populations persisted throughout the expansion of settler colonies in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it veritably exploded in the post-war era in a wave of mass demonstrations demanding the legal recognition of native sovereignty. Indigenous groups held large scale protests throughout settler nations; in 1969-1973 the US members of the AIM (American Indian

Movement) occupied first Alcatraz and then Wounded Knee to protest poor living conditions on reservations. In 1966 the Gurindji walked off of work to protest for land rights and fair pay while in 1972 aboriginal activists mobilized nationwide, camping out in tents in front of the Australian parliament.12

12 Miranda Johnson explains that Aboriginal activism increased in the 1960s with the Freedom Rides in Sydney protesting segregation. Native activism concentrated on voting rights for aboriginals which was up for debate in 1967 Parliament. Aborigines faced a more difficult battle for land rights as early governments have never recognized their sovereignty through treaties (11). Their struggle for civil rights gradually incorporated land rights when Gurindji occupied Wattie Creek to protest for their land rights. They were pastoralists working for a cattle ranch and earned ¼ the wages of white employees. Johnson, Miranda C. L. The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State. Oxford University Press, 2016.

In 1975 Maori groups marched from the top of the North Island to the capital building in

Wellington.13 In 1990 Canada Mohawk “warriors” wore camouflage and manned barriers to prevent the construction of a golf course on native land,.14 Though their individual methods and grievances differed, such indigenous communities across the global shared a common concern: land ownership and usage. Ecologically scarred by anthropogenic change, the land bore witness to the displacement of native peoples and the traumas of resource capitalism. As such it accrued over centuries a weighty burden as a signifier of a deep ideological conflict between indigenous peoples and European settlers concerning how to best live on our Earth and who should have the legal right to make such decisions.

The occupation of these sites became a microcosmic embodiment of national disputes

13 Wood points out that Potiki comments on this period of history which “draws on such events as the Maori land march of 1975, which protested against further alienation of Maori land, and the Bastion point and Raglan golf course occupations that demanded the return of misappropriated Maori land. It emerged at a time when the movement of responsibility from the Department of Maori Affairs to Te Puni Kokiri or the Ministry of Maori Development signified the emergence of an altered relationship between state and iwi—promotion of Maori language and culture was increasingly state responsibility Wood, Briar. “Mana Wāhine and Ecocriticism in Some Post-80s Writing by Māori Women.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 14, no. 1, 2007, pp. 107–124.

14 King in the Inconvenient Indian explains that the choice of the prison harkens back to the imprisonment of Hopi here in 1895 after they refused to send their children to an Indian school (139). He adds that the site was also chosen because of its many similarities to reservations so that served as a symbol for protests over access to sanitation, health care, education and jobs (141). This occupation lasted until June 10, 1971, fueling the subsequent occupation of Pine Ridge Reservation near Wounded Knee in 1973, which was met with harsh government response. The occupation lasted for over seventy days and resulted in two deaths of native men and the paralysis of one martial. (149-158). The Oka crisis was similarly a violent stand-off that erupted after several hundred years of lands right disputes, aggravated by the rejection of land claims filed in the 1970s. When the mayor announced the planned expansion of a private golf course and condos to be built on the Mohawk “Pines” and cemetery, warriors occupied the site. The conflict ended in several deaths and the Department of Indian Affairs buying up the disputed land and “giving” it the Mohawk’s despite their treaty rights giving them ownership of the space in question (232-235). 60 which had simmered for hundreds of years and with which indigenous peoples were increasingly frustrated.

Through their demonstrations indigenous peoples helped push for a decolonization of social attitudes and governmental policy in former Commonwealth countries. For example, in New Zealand in 1977 Maori protestors occupied Bastion

Point, a disused military outpost in Auckland for 506 days to challenge plans for the construction of a luxury housing development on ancestral Ngāti Whātua land. Protestors employed similar techniques in rural towns like Raglan, where a golf course had been constructed on land initially obtained from the Maori by the government for use in

WWII. These types of political activism provoked real social change in New Zealand throughout the 1980s, leading to the establishment of parliamentary representation for

Maori officials and the Waitangi Tribunal, a court aimed at redressing land seizures dating back to the 1840s. Meanwhile, in Canada, tensions over land claims reached a head in 1990s parliamentary debates. Media coverage of the bloody Oka stand-off over golf course construction on Mohawk territory and Cree demonstrations against the Whale

River Dam brought indigenous land rights into the living rooms of white middle class

Canadians and made the government sit up and take notice. Such public forms of resistance, like the recent events at Standing Rock, captivated broad national audiences, garnering not only the attention of politicians and the press, but emerging creative writers of the indigenous literary renaissance. The attention Standing Rock received not only from Native Americans in the US but First Nations groups from Canada, Maori, and

South American native peoples, with allies joining the occupation from as far away as

New Zealand speaks to the emergence of indigenous resistance as a global movement.

The early national protests were critical to this process as many movements looked to one another across the globe borrowing techniques.

These dramatic protests resonated deeply with contemporary authors, who adopted the theme of resisting commercial land development as a signifier for the ongoing struggle for indigenous self-autonomy. Much of the now iconic indigenous literary canon, including novels like Patricia Grace’s Potiki and Thomas King’s Green

Grass, Running Water, 15 grew out of and responded to this political moment. Born in

Sacramento, CA to a Cherokee father and a German Greek mother, King grew up in

America, but moved to Canada in 1980 to teach at the University of Lethbridge in

Alberta. His transplantation to Canada influenced much of his later work as these settings and indigenous concerns, a topic in which King had earned his academic degrees and that carried over to life in his adopted country.(Andrews) The environments of Green Grass,

Running Water owe something to his identification with this area as the story focuses on a Blackfoot reserve near Blossom, Alberta. Patricia Grace’s writing is also closely associated with indigenous identity as tied to place. Born in Wellington with ancestry in four tribes (Ngati, Raukawa, Ngati Toa and Te Ati Awa) Grace produced fiction is rooted in the land rights issues of North Island activism (Collected Stories) Spurred on by activists’ struggles for the joint recognition of native political rights and sovereignty, both

Grace and King experimented with ways of narrating community resistance. In Grace’s case she concentrates on a planned marine amusement park (a sort of Sea World on the

15 Since their publications both King’s and Grace’s novels have acquired canonical status in their respective national literatures and indigenous literature more broadly. Potiki won the New Zealand Book Award the year of its release and King’s novel was a finalist for the 2004 Canada Reads, a national book club and remains a popular text in higher education.

New Zealand coast) that would threaten both the environmental stability of the surrounding ocean life and the Maori community’s nearby burial lands. She frames this fictional project in relation to real world examples, blurring the distinctions between history and literature by drawing attention to their mutual investment in storytelling itself.

Though less explicitly political, Green Grass, Running Water nonetheless obliquely references through its place and character names the long history of Canadian mega- dams. The through lines of the novels also share commonalities. Both novels culminate in the defeat of the construction plans. The amusement park idea is scrapped, the dam bursts. Though indigenous characters die, and their communities suffer extensive property damage, the narratives’ conclusions largely present the results as a triumph of the disenfranchised Maori (or in King’s case mythic trickster characters) over corporate interests. Notwithstanding their differing tones, Grace’s resolutely earnest and King’s darkly satiric, these two novels share a common thematic concern over ecologically minded modes of storytelling, an agenda largely underrecognized in current scholarship.

Despite its reliance on magical fantasy, Potiki is often approached by critics as a straight forward polemical novel, whereas King scholarship has centered almost exclusively on his post-modern narrative experimentation to the exclusion of environmentally informed readings.16 I want to bring together ecocritical analysis with an examination of both novels’ aesthetic storytelling techniques. By doing so, I will explore

16 Walker’s article represents a common approach in environmental criticism of Potiki, addressing the economic and political histories of the text to the exclusion of in-depth narrative analysis, an element typical of the early responses to the novel throughout the 90s. Often scholarship addresses one or the other individually rather than exploring their intersections. Walker, Holly. “Developing Difference: Attitudes towards Maori ‘Development’ in Patricia Grace’s Potiki and Dogside Story.” Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 27, no. 2, 2005, pp. 215-30.

63 how these two novels use natural elements, especially water, as a means of fundamentally exploring power struggles over ecological practices. The thematic orientation of my argument is indebted to Cheryl Lousley’s historically informed reading of King’s text as espousing a “green radical democracy” (40). Though her work is illuminating in its ecocritical reframing of King’s text, I want to complicate this analysis by thinking about how the representation of water in King informs our understanding of temporal scale and interconnected natural systems. Ultimately, I argue that both novels use multivalent perspectives and cyclical story structures to produce a uniquely indigenous mode of experience, one that collapses the rigid Western distinction between animate/inanimate and human/and nature. Though written in response to specific historical moments, these novels raise larger conceptual questions, asking what role art serves in highly charged debates over place-based identity politics, a topic that in light of climate change and its impending resource crises has only increased in relevance. By placing Green Grass,

Running Water and Potiki in conversation with one another I argue that experimentation with literary form offers a means of culturally reformulating ways of knowing and being which can help facilitate globally sustainable environmental practices.

3.1 Maori Eco-narratives: Storytelling as Transhuman Communal Art Form

Patricia Grace’s Potiki exposes the profound socio-environmental destabilization engendered by the violence of the Anthropocene. The novel centers on a Maori hapu (an extended family or clan), who resist outside developers’ appeals to buy their land in order to build roadways to a proposed marine amusement park. The resultant clash of ideologies between the Maori and the Pakeha (white) businessmen in the story ends in

64 horrific violence as the developers redirect flood waters to destroy the hapu’s gardens and even set fire to their wharenui or communal meeting house. The latter act of arson results in the tragic death of a disabled child, Toko, the potiki (or youngest offspring) from whom the novel takes its name.

The narrative centers on an ideological conflict over place, one which underpins the land rights dispute. The indigenous Maori community in the book regard the local environment as an interconnected ecosystem, the balance of which must be respected in order to sustain their farming and fishing community. In addition, the land represents for them a cultural heritage whose history and ways of life the adult characters indoctrinated in a colonial education system must attempt to reclaim for their children. The marine park development company, however, arrives with a very different view regarding the economic resource potential of the area. They immediately see the Maori land as an untapped location for a roadway needed to make their planned marine park accessible to outside visitors. During the meeting between the aptly named Mr. Dolman (Dollarman), and the Maori community, Patricia Grace demonstrates their contrasting perspectives through a type of double voicing. The businessman’s pitch for “first class accommodation … water amenities …launch trips, fishing excursions, jet boating…[and] marine life areas” is interrupted with pointed parenthetical asides from native characters.

This textual opposition of viewpoints precisely embodies what Rob Nixon terms

“vernacular” and “official” conceptions of land. He explains that “a vernacular landscape is shaped by affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations….[A]lthough neither monolithic nor undisputed, it [the vernacular] is integral to the socio-environmental dynamics of community” (17). The vernacular is

65 based on lived experience of place linked to a cultural heritage and oral traditions across generations. He adds that “by contrast an official landscape whether governmental,

NGO, corporate, or some combination of those—is typically oblivious to such earlier maps; instead it writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often piteously instrumental” (17). This official attitude is one rooted in a long colonial history, echoing the myth of empty land initially used to justify the white settlement in British colonies like New Zealand. In this context, the colonial views of material resource extraction are instead adapted to a modern neo-liberal mindset, the entertainment and tourist industry replacing the more industrially oriented practices of mining or logging.

Though at heart conceptual this conflict is rapidly translated into a physical, geographical confrontation with nature as the key casualty. The indigenous community by rejecting plans for building a road through their wharenui and burial grounds

“incommode” the developer’s plans, compelling them to move their roadwork to land in the surrounding hills, to which the Maori have previously lost access rights. As the construction begins, local protestors stage a sit-in resulting in the developers making hostile reprisals, redirecting natural waterways to flood the local Maori gardens. Toko, the mystic child protagonist and one of the three main narrative voices of the text, explains that “at the back of the land where the creek runs round the base of the hills the people found rock and chucks of concrete and bitumen piled in the creek bed” (130). The community reliant on natural cycles for farming and coastal resources is especially vulnerable to fluctuations in the environment, but in this case doubly so given the severity of the company’s retaliation. The bosses’ decision to block the creek and carve a

66 channel to redirect the run-off of heavy rains towards the urupa destroys the crops the community needs to sustain itself. Furthermore, the erosion from the site gradually pollutes the local fishing. Between the flood and a later arson attack on their meeting hall, the Maori community must attempt to recover and resist the business interests who seek to turn natural elements into weapons to use against them.

Not surprisingly given its coastal setting, water plays an important role in the conflict, one that highlights its unique properties and symbolic potential for articulating conceptions of ecological relations. As Phillip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters assert in their theories of “wet ontology,”

Water’s inherent variability and ease of movement makes it at once a difficult and

potentially dangerous element to attempt to control. Moreover, its importance to

the ecological system means any mismanagement carries heavy repercussions.

Water is simultaneously encountered as a depth and as a surface, as a set of fixed

locations but also as an ungraspable space that is continually being reproduced by

mobile molecules; water has a taken-for-granted materiality (liquidity, or

wetness), but it is also just one of three physical states that exist in continual

interchange (the other two being ice and vapour). Each of these properties can be

ascribed to land as well (land too has depth, underlying mobility, and

transformation across physical states), but in water these properties are distinct in

the speed and rhythm of mobility, the persistent ease of transformation, and the

enclosing materiality of depth. (252)

As they explain, land shares the potential for mobility and transformation but in a less immediately visible form than water, which is forever moving and in constant flux as it

67 changes state. Water poses its own conceptual challenges too, defying the typical methods of mapping which transform its depth and mutability into a flat, two- dimensional plane. These difficulties have real world consequences for contemporary policy makers, especially when trying to determine legal rights to fisheries or waterways.

How can one depict a volume that involves movement in all directions? In addition, they assert that the volume of water resists linear methods of reading history. Unlike the earth, which may be cross-sectioned and its layers dated, moving water cannot be temporally marked. By its very nature then it resists literal means of spatial and temporal containment and by extension conceptual methods of geographic representation.

Fundamentally water embodies a symbolic type of resistance to human attitudes towards nature as static or quantifiable, one that I would argue enables a more dynamic reading of the Earth as active agent. Steinberg and Peters offer a compelling means of articulating our spatial and temporal relationship to water through a reading of oceanic space, but I want to carry this formulation further to think about how reimagining our connection to water alters our thinking about land as well. The significance of these interactions becomes more immediately apparent when looking at the agency of rivers. A river can shift direction, overflow its banks, carry debris and runoff in its wake, or in contrast it might run dry, evaporate, and disappear. At a molecular level then it permeates the landscape so that water and soil are intermingled. Rather than reinforcing the stability of land as a construct, waterpower makes visible the earth’s inherent capacity for alternation. When it rains the ground becomes so soft our feet sink into it; soil gradually erodes, sometimes spilling onto roadways and towns in horrific mudslides. Though

68 distinct the two elements are nonetheless inextricably intertwined so that any question of water circulation carries with it a resonance for land transformation.

Water flows then symbolize a larger interconnected elemental eco-network and as such serve as an especially potent metaphor for dramatizing politically informed environmental readings of place. In Potiki, the efforts to redirect water pathways represent a type of perverse or nightmarish reimagining of the settler colonial struggle over environmental mastery. The construction company controls the flow of water, but not in order to constrain what might be viewed as the potentially threatening agency of natural forces. Instead they deliberately harness the mutable characteristics of water to harm the native community. They co-opt nature, redirecting and changing the water flow to punish the Maori community and materially jeopardize their sustenance.

These events typify “fast” violence, the type of spectacle with immediate impact that Nixon suggests usually attracts media attention. Indeed, the news coverage of the flood and fire in the novel, and especially Toko’s death help turn public opinion against the construction project. Though the novel doesn’t provide a single rationale for the construction project’s termination, this media coverage certainly contributes to the eventual downfall of the development company’s plans by the text’s conclusion. The flood, fire, and childhood death represent extreme, highly public forms of abuse, but they stem from an undercurrent of slow violence which has already made the Maori particularly vulnerable.

Prior to the arrival of the development agents, economic factors have already reshaped Maori communities’ relationships to their indigenous environments in the novel. Claudia Duppé states, “Even though the novel bears a strong resemblance to a

69 fairy-tale, it by no means provides an idealized image of Maori life or actual living conditions ― their ‘land-centered’ philosophy is revealed as a crumbling one” (131).

Many Maori, like the Te Ope, a neighboring nation in the novel, have previously lost their ancestral lands to governmental seizure, resulting in the rupture of close-knit communities through urban rehousing, effectively alienating them from their traditional environmental practices. This history, especially the “fraudulent land sales and confiscations resulting in a loss of economic base,” Duppé explains, have seriously impacted living conditions for the Maori. They experience “higher rates of infant mortality…welfare dependency, and incarceration, and correspondingly lower levels of life expectancy, average income, and educational attainment” than Pakeha citizens (218).

Even the protagonists Hemi’s and Roimata’s reliance on traditional subsistence farming in the novel marks a revival of previously defunct practices for their hapu. Consequently, though Patricia Grace celebrates Maori traditions of fishing and agriculture, her text nonetheless stresses the vulnerability of such practices owing to the environmental impacts of colonialism and its persistent economic inequalities.

Additionally, the image of the flooded landscape caused by the construction project itself speaks to the potential repercussions of slow violence. Toko, the archetypal mystical child wise beyond his years, explains that “in the water story the gardens were ruined by rain and mud…. The sea became silted and yellow, the colour of the broken hills. The creek went in ways it had never gone before. It was a world not thought of but only imagined… this happened because of the stripping of the hills, the cutting away of the land, the dislodgement of the sea rock and the blocking of the shore” (129-30). The

Maori community initially misinterpret the causes of the flooding, ascribing it to erosion

70 from local deforestation. Though the run-off is later revealed as resulting from a deliberate man-made obstruction comprised of concrete waste, the hapu’s initial supposition raises a larger question about the environmental impacts of development projects. What might have happened had the roadwork and development plan reached completion? Might the refashioning of the local typography and the successive cycles of rain as the narrative suggests have produced the same effects? The relationship between all ecological elements, the novel implies, is especially sensitive.

The destabilizing of any single environmental factor can spark a chain reaction with large scale consequences. The removal of trees or the reshaping of hills could potentially alter the path of rain, flooding land necessary for crops and muddying coastal waters, thereby hindering the production of marine life that the local populace relies upon. As Hemi declares, “our whanau (family) is the land and sea. Destroy the land and sea, and we destroy ourselves. We might as well crack open our heads, take the seed and throw it on the flame” (111). The two--“family” and land--are fundamentally interconnected so that human treatment of the environment carries serious weight for both the stability of ecosystems and the survival of the people reliant upon them. The

Maori language itself privileges this connection through the term for indigenous populations, tangata whenua, literally “a people born of the land,” linguistically alluding to the traditional practice of burying a child’s placenta in the ground of their local community. Potiki then reveals the need for this recognition of transspecies interconnectedness. Human decisions made in the name of progress have the possibility to end in environmental self-destruction.

The construction company’s use of nature as man’s tool or even as a weapon against native peoples directly opposes the Maori ideology of place. Grace rejects this colonial rhetoric of man as master of nature represented by the construction company’s actions in favor of a cyclical, free-flowing narrative, where the boundaries between past and present, living and dead, human and earth blur. By establishing a comparative analogy between communal story-telling and unhampered resource circulation, the novel fuses harmonious human habitation with the natural environment and a collaborative multi-vocal approach to narrative making, suggesting an alternative way of engaging with crises of the Anthropocene era.

The conflict over ecological practice in Potiki becomes by extension a fight for narrative, for who gets to define what a place means or how humans should interact with it. On one level this struggle occurs within an explicitly public arena of media coverage.

The characters attempt to use this platform as a way of articulating and gaining public recognition of their historical grievances. Maori populations like the Te Ope fighting for the rights to ancestral lands translate their social activism into news stories that circulate forming discourse networks. For example, Roimata, the title character’s mother, composes the newspaper clippings of Maori land rights disputes from other communities into a notebook, later assigning the local children to turn copies of various historical letters written by Maori leaders to the government officials into small booklets as part of a home school educational project. Cutting, pasting, and arranging these news texts become a way for Maori families to reclaim agency over their cultural narratives in a world that has historically marginalized and wronged them. Journalism offers raw material for materially documenting and retelling the lived experiences of these

72 communities to and for themselves. This form of storytelling is largely about rewriting politically oriented history, concentrating more on the national stakes of disputes, and as such echoes the kinds of political activism of the period which centered on documenting claims for later redress by the Waitangi tribunal. For instance, Toko describes the narrative by citing photo captions and headlines like “Mayor Supports Protest” and

“Washing Offends,” referring to people who were angered by the occupiers hanging up their laundry in the park (93). These types of emphatic claims contrast with Toko’s slow paced recounting of the protests. The news headlines end up reducing the complexities of the interchanges to hollow catch phrases. They don’t capture the impact of events, their human costs, nor the divisions in the community over the eventual compromise of reparations paid to the Maori for the lost land. If anything, the news coverage serves as a type of memorial or marker of events whose meaning is only solidified through its filtration into an oral narrative. The production of this text/scrapbook aims towards an engagement with mass media in ways that differs from the more artistic narrative development associated with the cyclical flowing and recycling of narrative, but even it requires absorption into oral tradition to bring it to life.

Though the novel celebrates this process of self-education and community building, the potential role of the media as a platform for political agency remains more in doubt. The conflict over the road construction becomes a subject of public discourse within the novel as news media coverage of disputes and acts of arson raise some local awareness of the problem. Through this plot the novel participates on a meta level in a complex engagement with real world events. Patricia Grace models much of the fictional coverage on the rhetorical battles of 70s and 80s press coverage, specifically over the

Raglan golf course protests and the year-long Bastion Point occupation movement. In pulling from these sources, Grace captures the geographical and historical scale of

Pakeha exploitation of the environment and native peoples. Despite the press’s arguably significant role in the advances that Maori peoples won in the 70s especially the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal, Grace stresses its limitations. Though the community repurpose media representations, these types of texts remain a problematic form of narration in the novel as media and police attention alone fail to protect the community. Only after a repeated pattern of attacks and the death of Toko is the situation carried far enough to elicit a halt to the construction project. The capacity for redress represented by media is one of incremental change that may achieve the desired ends eventually, but which offers no security for communities under immediate threat.

Authorities enter the community to document trauma only after it has occurred but fail to provide protection to prevent future abuse.

Instead of foregrounding mass media as the solution, the text privileges a less direct, but nonetheless political form of ecological activism, namely its use of literary storytelling modes and its representation of sacred community narrative making. The strongest mode of narrative making in the novel is that of the community by and for themselves. In contrast to the rigid single-minded thinking of the corporate interests,

Grace’s text, as a novel, privileges a more cyclical multivocal structure of narrative making, one that celebrates nature as coparticipant with humans. The novel has a whole operates on this structure with only a singular chapter devoted to Toko’s recounting of media coverage and print journalism. The majority of the novel provides more of a situational experience of place through a blending of voices and artistic forms both

74 sculptural, oral, and musical. Briar Wood notes that this approach is common in Maori publishing. She cites Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s reading of Potiki, which

explicates the significance of spiral time as a concept that touches on both the

sacred time of whakapapa [family genealogy] and ancestors, and the

contemporary linear time of political activism. Spiral time is consistent with

ecological interests because it is connected to the time sequences of geology, life

cycles, cosmology and ecology, which concern themselves with long-term

observations, predictions and calculations. Distinguishing spiral time from linear

time and, for example, the circular time of a life cycle, DeLoughrey writes that

the spiral "signifies repetition with a difference." (68)

This perspective is symbolized in the opening prologue which combines a Maori poem of creation with the story of the carving of the community’s wharenui, a scene later revisited in the novel’s conclusion. In this example the narrative of local history is indivisible from that of the trees used in the meeting house construction. The third person narrator notes

the tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has after its first death, a further fruiting at the

hands of a master. This does not mean that the man is master of the tree. Nor is he

master of what eventually comes from his hands. He is master only of the skills

that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree - a tree that

may have spent further time as a house or a classroom, or a bridge or a pier or

…floating on a sea…or stopping a bank, or sprawled on a beach bleaching… it is

as though a child brings about the birth of a parent. (11-12)

This analogy of creation defies linear views of genealogy (the child giving birth to the parent) and the traditional power dynamics of Western craftsmanship in place of an alternative cocreation in which nature and man’s stories and lives become narratively interwoven. The years of the tree’s experience co-exist and even inform the carving of the community’s ancestral figures.

This visual mode of narrative making is further echoed by oral narration through the religious rites cited in the text. As a disenchanted adult returning to her hometown from life in the city, Roimata witnesses the tangi for Hemi’s family, a funerary ritual which involves a traditional call and response. The lines of the mourning song punctate

Roimata’s perspective, textually appearing as a single voice speaking collectively for the grief of the community. The call reads “assemble the many deceased from there (ages past) with the many deceased of the place we now stand…and now let there be joining – the dead to the dead, the living to the living. Let the strands fall together. …This hill calls to that mountain, the sea calls to that river, hear the calling. Let the strands fall together, entwining so that we are one” (35). This type of perspective acknowledges the agency of the natural world, but rather than seeking to dominate it, participates in a type of comingling or meeting, the many coming together, past and present, living and dead, the earth and water with the human. On the level of plot then the novel stresses interconnected modes of indigenous knowledge, the oral with the material, the two irrevocably tied to a lived understanding of place.

On a meta level, the novel is engaged in enacting indigenous ways of experiencing; the novel becomes as much an object of cultural narration as the meeting house, or funerary songs. When the death of Toko in the fire initiates a police

76 investigation of the arson, the construction project and its machines vanish from the landscape, but the ecological scars remain, again requiring the type of communal healing represented by the tangi and the carving of a new meeting house to replace the one lost in the fire. Following this act of rebuilding, the story concludes with a series of vocal performances by community members. Notably this penultimate chapter relies on unnamed characters who recount events and read poems so that “stories continued well into the night, flowing from one person to the next about the house until the circle had been fully turned” (198). This section functions as microcosm for Grace’s storytelling methods as a whole where the stories of Roimata, the mother, Hemi, the father, and Toko, the child circle back upon and inform one another. Thus, the novel itself operates as a textual enactment of Maori storytelling methods. Meaning for the community, as this section and indeed the text as a whole indicates, can only be produced though the layering or intertwining of voices both human and natural, producing “the plaiting that gives strength to the basket, the weaving that gives the basket its beauty, and the koha

[offering] that makes the basket full” (190).

Grace’s novel presents a way of experiencing multiple forms of communal storytelling at once, through sight and touch in her descriptions of the meeting house, musical rhythm in the chanted tangi, and oral tradition in the storytelling circle. The novel offers readers a type of vicarious participatory experience similar to what Alannah

Young Leon and Denise Maire Nadeau term “embodied practice.” These scholar activists have worked on developing educational curricula about water responsibilities. They combine dance therapy with indigenous teaching practices to help decolonize environmental education. They note that “indigenous resurgence points to Indigenous

77 principles as guiding the future of healthy water on shared lands (136). Engaging in dance, ritual, visual art, and creative writing, these activist authors participate in

“protocols that respect local nations… [noting that] each step contributes to decolonization, to moving with water and out of a static Eurocentric world view that objectifies water and our bodies” (136). Potiki through its mode of narration serves a similar function, embodying an ecological way of being through a merger of artistic representations that offer a potential for real world change. Water becomes a symbol for a living as part of a larger fluctuating ecosystem to in which narratives are continually in motion. Only by exercising this ability to collectively reimagine what stories we choose to tell about place and how we choose to tell them, Grace suggests, can we hope to fashion a more positive environmental future.

3. 2 Undamming the Narrative: Reimagining Ecology through Indigenous Bricolage

Whereas the power of resistance in Grace’s work comes from the gradual merger of voices into one of multivocal collective, King’s novel strikes a more immediate note of playful subversion. If Grace’s nature writing is typified by a poetic lyricism, King relies on the more startling inundation of irreverent humor. This stylistic choice made the novel not only a compelling read, but one popular in the academy. Since its publication in 1993,

Green Grass, Running Water has quickly acquired a canonical standing in world literary studies, owing particularly to its combined interest in indigenous identity politics and its formal experimentation with narrative aesthetics. As scholars have frequently noted the novel exemplifies a hybrid form, intertwining a realistic contemporary narrative about a

Blackfoot community with four oral accounts, each of which in turn interfaces with

Western and Native storytelling traditions. Stylistically, King’s prose blazes with sharp, irreverent humor and exuberant energy even as his intercutting between storylines, often upon a single shared word or line of dialogue reveals his precision as a craftsman. This complex, ever shifting narrative structure makes for a multifaceted, if slightly unwieldy novel, whose oddities and instabilities reward continual revisiting. Given such aesthetic strangeness, most scholars, perhaps unsurprisingly, have focused on dissecting its narrative techniques. The majority have unpacked one of the novel’s many forms of intertextuality, with scholars like Gundula Wilke tackling King’s subversion of Bible stories while others like Robin Ridington, David Heinimann, and Paul Rüsse read the character of Coyote through the Native American tradition of the trickster. In contrast to these studies on oral and written allusions, John Purdy and Gordon Bölling concentrate on King’s depiction of Native Americans in Hollywood film, with Joel Deshaye specifically deconstructing King’s critique of John Wayne as a model of white Western masculinity. These works are significant in that they explore many of the narrative influences upon King’s work, tracing his combination of native oral storytelling with modern pop cultural references like the Hollywood Western or pulp novels. Though such analyses go a long way towards explaining how the novel’s intertextual bricolage operates, they offer surprisingly little study of its overt environmental themes.

More recent critics have turned attention away from purely textual construction and towards the treatment of place and geography, yet despite this trend only Cheryl

Lousley has explicitly examined the text through the lens of environmental justice.

Lousley’s reading presents a historically minded analysis of the plot in relation to

Canadian dam construction projects. Moreover, she foregrounds the role of dialogism and humor in the text, rightly noting its celebration of democracy, the give and take of discussion, the story forever interrupted and conditional in its telling. Though she registers the text’s depiction of water as symbolic of freedom and flexibility, I want to carry this discussion further by examining the narrative’s dialogic juxtaposition between the rhetoric of Western capitalist enterprise and the combined human, animal and elemental story-telling that eventually bursts the dam (39-40).

Though Lousley has facilitated a new direction for ecocritical readings, the textual complexity of King’s work also permits an exploration of temporal scale in relation to indigenous experience, especially through its characterization of land development schemes as a process of slow violence. Nixon stresses the distinctions between fast violence, the environmental disaster that attracts media attention, and slow violence, the incremental impacts of underlying problems like climate change and pollution, at once more difficult to recognize or chart. Land development schemes, as I argue in my earlier discussion of Potiki, represent a bridge between the two, since the construction process, usually slow and laborious in itself, initiates gradual environmental damage in keeping with slow violence, while the operation of the completed industry often increases the risks of fast violence cataclysms like flooding or waste spillage.

In the case of King’s novel, the dam signifies a larger pattern of economic oppression for indigenous peoples, one tied to land exploitation. Stalled by a court injunction against construction by Eli Stands Alone, the dam languishes virtually complete but disused for ten years. It dominates the local landscape, an eye sore for Eli

80 and a source of overwhelming light pollution. It is visually inescapable even as it remains non-functional. King notes,

The dam was there all right. Anyone who wanted to could drive along the river to

the small recreation area and have lunch in the shadow of the dam. Or you could

walk along the lakeshore and enjoy the panorama of water and sky. Or you could

drive along the top and look down the spillway into the concrete channels that

were clogged with spongy moss and small plants.

The dam was there. It just wasn’t working. The lake was there. But no one could

use it. (127)

The language stresses the dysfunctionality of space through the repetition of there. Both the lake and the dam exist but neither is fulfilling its function; the construction because it hasn’t been enabled and the water because its natural movement is inhibited.

Additionally, his description undercuts the “spectacle” of the dam by satirizing the inflated tone of tourist advertising. He paints it as an amenity for readers by alleging

“anyone ... could have lunch in the shadow of the dam” or “drive along the top and look

…into the concrete channels that were clogged with spongy moss and plants.” This language evokes the traditional rhetoric of travel advertisements, which often define romantic views and natural scenery as part of a pleasurable sensory experience. In place of the awe-inspiring verticality of a sublime mountain, he offers instead a luncheon in the

“shadow of the dam.” The movement suggests patterns of sight-seeing: the resting gaze, the leisurely walk, the scenic drive. The aesthetic aims of such nature going pursuits are perverted, however, by the implicit ugliness of the industrial behemoth. The rhetoric of travel writing here plays up the absurdity of sporting and recreating near not only an

81 industrial eye sore, but a non-functional one at that. There is no majesty of human engineering on the spillway, merely clogged concrete. This phrase mocks the popular early 20th century image of dams as emblems of industrial might by instead emphasizing their unsightliness, the concrete channels poorly maintained.

Though the narration lampoons the language popularized by Eurocentric middle- class oriented travelogues that mark nature as an aesthetic ‘other,’ outside the scope of everyday experience, it also hints at the dam’s serious ecological damage to the local community. The stalled construction project is not merely a marker of stasis, as most scholars have alleged, but rather an embodiment of slow violence accruing over a decade.

The high beams of the construction project shine like a beacon at night, “a single floodlight, a giant metal ball that float[s] above the dam on struts and guy wires like a miniature sink” (285). Moreover, the construction itself bars traditional pursuits like fishing. Even though the dam isn’t operational the natural resources have been coopted so that local fishing is unfeasible. These impacts might appear minor inconveniences, however the text asserts that seemingly small and inconsequential environmental changes can produce profound repercussions for the larger community. For instance, the novel dramatizes this impact through a casual exchange between Eli and another indigenous community member, reporting that “Emmett over at Brocket figures that the dam is killing the river…He was on the radio the other day. Said if the river doesn’t flood like it does every year, the cottonwoods will die …. No flood. No nutrients. No cottonwoods.

And if the cottonwoods die, where are we going to get the Sun Dance tree?” (415).

Nature in this example is a signifier of Blackfoot culture and essential to its survival. The

82 ecosystem must continue to function in harmony to produce the tree necessary for their most important ritual.

The Sun Dance with which the novel concludes has a storied history in Canada.

Beginning sometime in the 1700s, the Sun Dance was popular among many Plains tribes.

The ceremony lasts four days and involves the bringing together of the entire community with each band constructing a circle of lodges around a central point. The sacred cottonwood tree is striped and carried to this location for use as a pillar around which performers dance. This event is the main celebration of the year occurring in late summer, drawing visitors and relatives, and functioning as a cleansing ritual for the group at large (Tovías 276-7). Blanca Tovías adds that

The dual signiﬁcance of the Sun Dance was highlighted by Spier, who described

it as a “political unit which functions . . . as a ceremonial unit.” …. Within the

sacred realm, the Sun Dance provided a link between the present and the

mythological past. The vow to hold a Sun Dance was a means to secure divine

intervention in cases of extreme need by an individual. Consequently, the Sun

Dance became critical at times of hardship. (277)

King’s use of the event as the resolution of the novel speaks to this role as the meeting point of mythical and mundane as the two-story lines are blended in this event. The Old

Indians and coyote arriving for the dance and run into the contemporary characters also on their way to the event. It is importance as a call for divine help also fits the symbolism of the novel in which the mythical intervention is needed to save the community both from the building project and its psychosocial stagnation.

The reference to the Sun Dance is moreover significant as an emblem of resistance given its suppression throughout the 19th century. The Sun Dance was viewed as undesirable by the government intent on eradicating native cultural practices. The persistence of such religious rituals threatened the influence of Christian missionaries who sought to exert power over first nations peoples through conversion and education.

The violence of the ceremony also provoked white anxieties as the ritual involved warriors electing to serve as sacrificial figures undergoing physical harm in turn for the blessing of the sun and the resolution of community ills. He adds that

In the ritual, which never involved more than ﬁve warriors, skewers were driven

through the muscles of the chest and back and rawhides attached to these were

tied to the Sacred Pole, to be torn loose by swinging and surging. George Bird

Grinnell describes this part of the Sun Dance as not unlike acts of penance “in our

own centers of enlightened civilization.” (279)

The event was mutually about a communal enactment of pain and healing as Grinnell notes not thematically dissimilar to Christian celebrations of the crucifixion, but white colonial audiences viewed it as barbaric. The Dominion Government sought to eradicate the practice through reeducation of native children away from the community and a refusal to let them return for the ceremony. They also passed legislation between the

1870s-1890s making such dances performances and especially those involving physical

“wounding” as punishable by imprisonment (281) Their reasons against it amounted to a fear of the collective power of native peoples when acting in their own interests rather than those of the state. He avows that Commissioner Hayter Reed argued “by the Indians congregating in this way for a dance, they lose at least from four to six weeks of the time,

84 in which they should be at work, repairing their fences, and breaking new land, and summer fallowing: besides which it unsettles them from steady work for a longer period”

(278) Time spent preparing for and carrying out the ritual meant time away from agriculture. The Sun Dance then dramatizes the same conflict over land usage which lies at the heart of King’s novel; The white Canadians views of natural productivity (like the dam) even in the modern era remain at odds with the reliance on a more spiritual engagement with environment. For the Blackfoot nature is not a thing to be used, but a force with which humans are in dialogue, asking and receiving responses to problems of daily life.

Noticeably in his description King demonstrates this personifying not only the land project and the river as active agents, the one impacting the other. The dam disrupts natural cycles essential to the heath of the local environment and the maintenance of indigenous rituals. The chain impacts of the dam even before its operation threaten not just the ecosystem, but the social identity founded upon it. The cottonwood tree is foundational to the community’s largest ceremony and without it they lose a marker necessary to their affirmation of cultural identity. Eli explains that he heard about the cottonwood problem from Emmett’s appearance on a local radio program and Harley,

Lionel’s father and Eli’s friend, after their discussion concludes that Emmett write his member of Parliament (415). In light of the ten years of unresolved legal proceedings, this aside reads as a comment on the unproductive nature of attempting to direct complaints through the official channels. Someone in the community might send a letter, but if Eli Stand Alone’s injunction hasn’t motivated a resolution in ten years, a single

85 letter landing on the desk of a government representative isn’t likely to move the issue forward.

Land development projects, King suggests, rely on an exploitation of indigenous people’s economic vulnerabilities and their lack of legal protections. As with Potiki, the project developers in Green Grass, Running Water couch the placement of the development scheme on indigenous land as a neutral decision of geography, rather than one of cost benefit or assumed ease of approval. In one of his repeated debates with Eli,

Sifton, the chief engineer, argues for dams as utilitarian projects unrelated to larger concerns, claiming that “They don’t have personalities, and they don’t have politics.

They store water, and they create electricity. That’s it” (120). This claim seems to be a means of deflecting responsibility for the situation by defining the dam merely as an

“thing,” existing apart from human construction or operatives. However, it also suggests the soullessness of industrialization. The dam unlike the personified water, or animal characters has no feelings; unlike the chattering coyote one cannot engage in dialogue with an unresponsive and immovable bulk. Though Sifton attempts to dismiss Eli’s challenge, he fails to offer an explanation as to why so many dams are built on “Indian” land despite the fact that none of the reserve land (held by the members of the Blackfoot community) had been included as recommended sites in initial proposals. The use of

Clifford Sifton as the name of the chief engineer references the Canadian federal minister of the interior responsible for Western settlement (Andrews) His attitude about the of impersonality of the dam smacks of this Manifest Destiny rhetoric of inescapable progress. It also alludes to the history of these attitudes from the colonial into the modern period. The decision for where to locate the dam King implies results from underhanded

86 decision making with any number of potential motivations: either because native land is cheaper, indigenous rights more easily circumvented by developers, or even because other non-native communities have already rejected the proposals.

The land development project essentially functions as a mode of economic and social exploitation, a modern extension of 18th and 19th century settlement practices. As Nixon notes, poor communities of color across the globe have suffered and continue to suffer disproportionally more from environmental pollution and resource extraction. By dehumanizing the construction project and presenting it as infrastructure, a mere thing,

King notes how those in power obscure the larger social objectives of their development decisions. He expounds on this pattern of building industrial projects on native land as a longstanding pattern in his satirical history of US and Canadian indigenous relations, entitled The Inconvenient Indian. In this text he addresses the history of native disempowerment in North America, paying attention to development projects like dams and infamous Alberta Tar Sands, producers of crude oil. This history written after his famous novel points to King’s views on the need for resistance to such projects. Though

King remains skeptical of the efficacy of protest in Green Grass, Running Water (the naïve Lionel suffers arrest and earns a permanent criminal record after attending an AIM rally, causing him to lose his job), he certainly recognizes the need to confront the history of native disenfranchisement and displacement. In his overview of native history, he explains how projects like the Kinzua Dam in Pennsylvania in the 1950s, where the government coopted Seneca land for development despite injunctions against them or appeals to relocate, highlight a common pattern of illegal appropriation of native land.

King states, “Treaty or no, I can’t imagine that many folks in Washington really gave a

87 damn whether or not Seneca land wound up on the bottom of a lake. I know that’s a rather cynical attitude, but if you look at the history of dam building in North America, you might be surprised to discover how many excellent dam sites just happen to have been found on Indian land” (232). The cynical humor of this passage echoes that of his earlier novel, where Eli notes that these projects seem to always end up on native land despite the availability of other alternatives. The narrative critique of King’s work remains sadly pertinent to contemporary life, demonstrating that the tactics defined in the novel have persisted despite continual resistance to their application.

Recently the Dakota Access Pipeline has typified the rhetorical strategies common to this type of construction project, since the oil pipeline was relocated from municipal to indigenous reservation land, a site not only of ancestral burials but one under government treaty to the Sioux. The power dynamics of such projects clearly favor the construction companies, who are better equipped to use police and lawyers to enforce their land claims. Such is certainly the case in King’s novel since the dam construction company can afford to wait ten years over Eli’s lawsuit, writing off the loses on their taxes from money largely subsidized by the Canadian province. Conversely, Eli must endure the economic impacts more directly by fronting the costs of the suit even as his family’s self- made property is imperiled.

King draws a clear distinction then between the indigenous working class and their self-made construction projects and industrial capital. He tells the story of how Eli’s

mother had built the house. Log by log. Had dragged each one out of the small stand

of timber behind the house, barked them, hewn them, and set them. He and Norma

had been too young to help, and Camelot was only a baby then. So they looked after

their sister while their mother coaxed the trees into place. (122)

The homemaking here is characterized by the physical labor required, the wood prepared with hand tools, physically hauled to the building site. This intimate experience of place through bodily exertion stands in marked contrast to the impersonal behemoth of the dam project, surrounded by “bulldozers, semi-trucks, and a couple of portable offices” (122).

If the narrative here pits the single indigenous woman’s labor against the corporate interest, it also contrasts their differing modes of construction. Eli imagines his mother

“coaxing the trees into place,” a phrase that suggests more of a negotiation of materials, a fitting of pieces together. The dam construction, on the other hand, overrides the existing geography. In much the same way, Sifton, upon first meeting Eli, assumes he has come to remove his possessions so they can proceed with the demolition of his home. Natural typography and the indigenous population are obstacles to be removed or reformed. The scale of the dam project then represents the indomitable social and economic forces against which indigenous characters appear relatively ineffectual.

As Lousley notes the stalled dam construction mirrors the fruitless existences of the indigenous characters, each of whom is stuck in an unfulfilling holding pattern. Though he dreamed of pursuing higher education, Lionel at forty works the same dead-end job at a TV appliance store that he did upon leaving school. Alberta, a teacher, is professionally better situated but caught in a rut romantically between Lionel and Charlie, neither of whom she wants a long-term relationship with. Meanwhile Charlie, a local lawyer hired because of his Blackfoot heritage, is stuck working a single case, Eli’s injunction to prevent the dam construction. He is consigned to this case for the sake of the firm’s

89 public image; having a native lawyer on the side of the dam helps their public relations.

This constraint means that Charlie has just as little career mobility as Lionel. The dam thereby epitomizes a larger sense of spatial, temporal, and social stagnation indicative of the indigenous characters’ own positions; they exist socially, interact with others, occupy space, but without fully living. King captures this dismal reality through his infectious strain of black humor, presenting the dam as “an immense porcelain wall, white and glistening in the late morning light” (118). This description fits part of a larger thematic link that Lousley notes that the novel repeatedly establishes around blocked toilets and commercialism. For instance, when Lionel’s sister, Latisha asks how bad the broken toilet is her restaurant Dead Dog Café, catering to white tourists, she receives an answer of “ebb tide from an employee (37). Lousley explains that the toilet stands as a metaphor for junk commercialism and Hollywood cultural domination with Lionel’s place of business referred to as that “toilet store” before he corrects the speaker saying he works at a TV store. Charlie Looking Bear’s mother describes with joy their Hollywood apartment with its pink swimming pool and view, noting if you stood on the toilet you could see the ocean. The celebration of the vulgar chlorinated pool is contrasted with path of the waste sewage system traveling through the city to reach the ocean (Lousley 38) If commercial culture is waste, the dam is the largest and most obvious emblem of this in the novel as

King’s descriptive language develops an analogy between the construction project and a clean gleaming toilet. As with the absurdist travelogue analogy, the adjectives King uses here are seemingly upbeat, but the metaphor of the dam as toilet ironizes the language.

Even shinning in the sun, it remains as unglamorous as a toilet. The eventual destruction of the dam functions metaphorically and literally as clearing away of this cultural waste

90 product. Lousley explains that “King symbolically flushes the colonial-consumer society down the toilet, from the televisions with their stereotypical Indians, to the ‘wave of tourists’ with their invasive cameras and even Columbus’s three ships represented by three cars, a Nissan, a Pinto, and a Kharmann-Ghia, which are washed away from the parking lot (39). This symbolism also contrasts readings of water. If the image of the dam as blocked toilet evokes a cultural pollution, the rainwater flushing it is presented as a natural cleansing.

King’s reliance on irreverent levity to deflate signifiers of Western preeminence is the one of the novels most compelling elements, which extends beyond glancing allusions like the car examples to a reframing of narrative history. The most engaging writerly choices of the novel involve a cycle of retelling origin myths. Four native characters recount indigenous stories in which traditional figures like Sky Woman, Changing

Woman, Thought Woman, Old Woman, and Coyote intersect with the Biblical account of

Genesis, frontier history, literary classics like the Leatherstocking Tales, Moby Dick, and

Robinson Crusoe, and contemporary policies of state and medical bureaucracy. Through this type of bitingly comic bricolage, King critiques Western modes of storytelling that have traditionally labelled as other and disempowered women and people of color. The slippage between fiction and real world history in these accounts emphasizes the mutual dependence of the one upon the other; the ideology of patriarchal social governance that has defined Western culture for centuries, King suggests, bolstered and facilitated the displacement of native populations and the exploitation of nature as “man’s” resource. He undermines the image of the male pioneer represented by the allusions to Western settlement literature by having native characters role play as the Lone Ranger, Ishmael,

Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye. In acting under these names, given to them in moments of misrecognition by white characters, the four old Indians rework the accustomed conventions of male adventure fiction in which the native other is always secondary to the white hero. The gender slippage is also significant here as the novel blurs the distinctions between male/female with the Old Women of the oral accounts referred to by male pronouns and names once in subsequent retellings of Western fiction. This choice gives an intersectional agency to both women and people of color denied in the texts to which King alludes. It also uses native characters as a way of rewriting the relations with nature developed in earlier colonial texts like Robinson Crusoe that center on a domination of the environment.

In contrast, the indigenous narratives always begin in a dialogic relationship with nature, one to which the white settler stories are either oblivious or else entirely reject. In the first rendition Grandmother turtle tells Sky Woman “you are on my back,” to which she replies, “I guess we better make some land” (39). This famous origin myth centers on human and animal cooperation, which requires a mutual recognition and participation in a shared aim. This contrasts sharply with King’s retelling of Genesis, in which First

Woman’s communication with the tree in the garden and her consumption of “God’s” food leads to her leaving to find a new home. The narrative subverts the patriarchal authority of the Biblical text, alleging that the First Woman leaves of her own accord owing to God’s “stinginess” in not being willing to share. This exchange epitomizes the delightful playfulness of King’s prose, but the levity belies a serious comment on the differences between indigenous and Western foundational ideologies. Indigenous mythos sees nature as active participant in world-building alongside humankind. Changing

Woman landing in Noah’s ark converses with the animals and later with Moby-Jane, the female black whale. Old Woman speaks with the tree while trying to dig out a tender root to eat, and Thought Woman traveling down the river fails to hear the warnings of the rocks until it is too late. As iterations of the same foundational origin myth, all these stories fit a common pattern, a woman falling to earth from some higher sky universe.

Yet they also share a perspective of nature as sentient cohabitant of man whereas

European Christian culture constructs nature as man’s inanimate property, a view King mocks by having Ahdamn in the Genesis retelling name the creatures in Eden as commercial goods. Though most of these are nonsensical (he calls the Elk a microwave oven); King includes coded critiques like Ahdamn calling Cedar Tree a telephone book, to which the tree replies “You’re getting closer” (41). In having the natural world carrying on a one-sided conversation with the first man, who misrecognizes them, King plays up the obliviousness of anthropocentric Western culture unable to comprehend nature as anything other than human object.

The methods of structuring the interplay of Western and indigenous ideology differ sharply between Grace and King’s work. Grace’s resistance relies on an ideological comparison between the practices of the native community and the developers signaled by their actions. The views of the Pakeha company are embodied by their destructive practices, over-riding the sovereign rights of the community to get what they want and deceitfully sabotaging their livelihood. The Maori views in the novel are not only conveyed through dialogue but the rituals, meetings, and funerals which form an embodied narrative of what it means to be Maori. King’s commentary on ecocriticism relies instead on humor. His approach fits with what Nicole Seymour’s characterizes as

“bad environmentalism,” the type of text that avoids conforming with the common conventions of ecocritical writing. Seymour claims these types of atypical texts “reject the affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism. In addition to gloom and doom, these include guilt, shame, didacticism, prescriptiveness, sentimentality, reverence, seriousness, sincerity, earnestness, sanctimony, [and] self- righteousness (4). All of these markers common to many well-intentioned environmental appeals across memoirs, fiction, and films can rhetorically backfire, making audiences resistant to engagement with environmental issues owing to the affective responses such preaching produces. Moreover, she astutely points out that our human experience of ecological crises like climate change is characterized by irony, as our own grandiose schemes of progress have fundamentally threatened our future existence. Given that humans face the absurdity of this self-destructive situation in our ordinary lives, she points out that ecocritical discourse should recognize and incorporate the more cynical or ironic responses of “bad environmentalism” previously devalued as non-productive within the field (7-9). King would seem an early advocate of this methodology as his work throughout his career employs comedy for social critique as much as it does emotional catharsis.

His storytelling involves a more convoluted interplay with printed texts than Grace’s necessitating a familiarity with print culture as well as national history in order to make sense of the satire. Whereas Grace makes explicit reference to real events like the dispute over the land appropriated for the air strip these are fairly straight forward and largely comprehensible even without in-depth knowledge of New Zealand’s past. King’s writing on the other hand explodes with an overabundance of references. He uses cheeky word

94 play in character names like Dr. Joe Hovaugh or and alludes casually to numerous literary characters in ways that reward close attention from readers. His reliance on classical works of literature makes the novel function like an intellectual puzzle and punctures the glorification of the academic canon by subverting the narratives like

Robinson Crusoe or the Leatherstocking Tales common to American and British survey courses. Heroes like Ishmael or Natty Bumppo in King’s novel are either fatuous, pompous, or spiteful writing their views about native peoples onto those they. They each attempt to tell them who and what to be rather actually listening to them. The fact that the native peoples always reject the stereotypical categorization of themselves as the native other (Friday, Squanto, etc. ) reads as a type of empowering wish fulfilment; King’s story asks what if the native characters in classic literature not only had a voice but the power to leave the boundaries of the stories they were trapped in and simply abandon their white protagonists.

The irreverent joy of encountering indigenous characters interjecting themselves into canonical religious and literary narratives and defying conventional Western views is continually subverted, however, as the stories always devolve into the suppression of native characters. They continually end with imprisonment at Fort Marion, a historical

19th century Indian prison in Florida. Military force always catches up with the indigenous outlaws. The repeated attempts to restart the world with a different native myth only to arrive at a similar containment of indigenous peoples, narratively dramatizes the extent of colonialism both geographically and historically across North

America. Native Americans, King drolly suggests, can’t seem to catch a break. Yet the

95 female characters’ abilities to adapt and the narrators’ attempts to restart the story offer a type of perpetual ideological resistance.

Whereas the efficacy of direct political resistance is limited, King offers storytelling as a means of breaking the cycle of slow violence. Ecological and narrative resistance unite in the climax as Coyote dances, starting the earthquake and producing the storm that bursts the dam. Throughout the narrative the landscape hints at the agency of nature, whether through moss clogging the concrete channels of the dam or the ominously rising standing water in a parking lot. The text incorporates the activity of natural forces, though they remain at the periphery of the plot, background details of a setting taken for granted by the humans who merely glimpse the daily weather out of office windows. Even as the frequent description of ominous puddles foreshadows the rise of nature, those in positions of economic and social power remain secure. When Eli argues, “You can’t hold water back forever,” Sifton, the chief engineer declares “It’s not going to break, Eli. Oh it’ll crack and it’ll leak. But it won’t break. Just think of the dam as part of the natural landscape” (157). This association of nature with stasis illustrates the lack of ecological understanding on the part of the white characters and the industrial interests they represent. For Sifton, nature exists statically like the man-made dam, unchanging whereas the indigenous proverb from which the book takes its title dramatizes its continual action: the grass grows, the water runs. These actions are continuous in a functioning ecological system, but nature itself is always in flux along this cycle of movement. The agency of nature merges with the indigenous mode of storytelling when Coyote bursts on the scene, disrupting both the narrative cycle of native disenfranchisement and rupturing the dam.

The native characters of the novel seem largely unable to free themselves from their

96 social entrapment. The arrival of Coyote and the other “Old Indians” serves as a kind of deus ex machina. This choice might seem an easy out from a narrative standpoint, but it also celebrates narrative as the key to indigenous empowerment. The arrival of coyote brings magic into the contemporary story, but it also awakens the characters so that they begin to behave differently. Lionel for instance leaves the oppressive TV store and aims to finally act on goals for education and a better job. This alteration falling on his birthday reads as a rebirth facilitated by the mysterious native characters he meets.

Notably this narrative resistance is represented as a merger of native history with as a non-human mythic force, the Coyote of indigenous mythology brought into the contemporary world, destabilizing it much as he has the earlier retellings of origin stories.

He deliberately causes commotion, but significantly he doesn’t himself destroy the dam.

Rather his behavior creates a chain reaction of geological and weather-related forces, the land and the water that together overthrow the industrial project. Water floods the dam site, but is ability to remake lives extends beyond this in ways that further blur the boundaries of human and elemental. Lousley explains that water in the novel goes beyond just a nostalgia for tradition existing in many forms from champagne, urine, drinking water to the amniotic fluid of Alberta Frank’s baby. A college professor Alberta returns to the reserve caught in a relationship with both with the hapless Lionel and smug

Charlie Looking Bear, the lawyer defending the dam in Eli’s lawsuit. By the end of the book she finds herself pregnant and single, an event she had long desired dreaming of her baby’s future in the bathtub (39). The novel uses the fast violence of the flooding as a way of keying readers into the agency of water in mundane experiences which characters might have otherwise taken for granted. Water is bound up with the continuance of the

Blackfoot as a people with the deluge a kind of refashioning of the world, this interjection of the mythic into the ordinary world pulls the characters together uniting peoples largely fragmented throughout the rest of the novel.

Whereas the political resistance of Eli remains futile, a lone act of protest, King suggests that narrative forces have a greater creative power, that of reframing social power dynamics and concepts of our relationship to the natural world. If Grace’s text is invested in how writing can represent a range of community-building art forms, visual, oral, and print, King is more compelled by the potential for perpetual social change that storytelling enables. So long as the story can be shifted, reconfigured, reimagined, his work reminds us that the future and our ways of thinking need not be fixed. Though their styles vary, each of these texts adopts writing as a democratizing form, a way of capturing a multiplicity of voices that make up the communal whole. Today, as climate change and industrial waste pollution weigh especially heavily on disenfranchised communities of color, literature may seem removed from the immediate concerns of our planetary crisis. Yet, I would argue that it fulfills an essential ideological function, dramatizing how traditional Western ways of thinking have contributed to our current environmental emergency. The combined storytelling agency among humans, animals, plants, and elemental forces like water and earth in these novels facilitates a type of alternative identity making. The story of place becomes multivalent and transspecies in composition. This mode of narration defies the binary conventions of man/nature central to Eurocentric traditions and which continue to inform so much of our current policies.

Where does one voice begin in our interconnected ecosystem and another end these authors ask and are they ever really divisible. If indigenous authors struggled with

98 developing narrative forms that enabled social resistance in literature through a variety of approaches, these same battles continued along similar lines in media production. The threads of social realism blended with oral mythmaking that characterize Grace’s work also pervade much of Fourth cinema documentary production both within New Zealand and abroad. Alternatively, the irreverent satire of King’s novels seems to have infused indigenous genre production as filmmakers like Taika Waititi apply the same techniques to the puncturing of expectations for adventure narratives. The nascent storytelling strategies of the indigenous renaissance seeped into cinematic production, but the creators of these films also encountered the new challenges, attempting to promote indigenous resistance in medium haunted by its own complicity in colonial mythology.

Chapter 4

REWRITING THE POLITICS OF PLACE: SCREEN TOURISM AND THE RISE OF DOCUMENTARY FOURTH CINEMA

Anxiously stumbling around the bend of the narrow gravel path, I beheld the nestled valley of Hobbiton spread out before me in the damp winter sunlight. The hobbit holes cozily dotted the surrounding hillocks, their wood piles and clothes hanging from the wash lines seemingly attesting to tiny inhabitants hidden behind their round doors. It was like walking into a living rendition of my childhood fantasies. Memories of hours spent reading the books, watching the films, and role playing as a hobbit in the woods behind my house had led to this momentous experience. I was keyed up but trying to play it cool; I was a post-colonial studies scholar after all as well as an ardent fangirl. The

Hobbiton set, with its stone and brick work, live gardens, and individualized props identifying the occupant of each individual hole attested to the detailed craftsmanship of

Weta’s production team. Originally built on a sheep farm in the lush Waikato region of the North Island in New Zealand, the set was at first only intended to be temporary.

Director Peter Jackson paid a local farmer for the use of a few hills and accordingly demolished the set after the series wrapped. Over the next decade however the massive number of fans trekking to the sheep farm on pilgrimages after the films’ release prompted the farm owner to ask Jackson when rebuilding the set for the Hobbit trilogy to use permanent materials. Today it stands as a unique tourist attraction for countless bus

100 tours, no trip to the site complete without a stop at the Green Dragon pub and the extensive buffet tent, decorated to resemble that of Bilbo’s 111th birthday party. The whole affair was at once earthy and decadent, a perfect embodiment of the cozy hobbit lifestyle. The only thing missing of course were the hobbits; it was a mythic space waiting for moderately adventurous Tolkienites like myself to stroll up the lanes, across the bridge, to sit down to luncheon. This sense of availability to visitors, the empty landscape removed from its prior historical context and repackaged as a comfortable reimagining of Britain thousands of miles from the metropole, evoked a sense of disquiet.

Was the ideology behind this modern tourist site, I wondered, really that different from the Eurocentric travel writing crafted by earlier generations of British settlers?

As with the Hobbiton set that aimed to appeal to a mass audience of global filmgoers, print travelogues of the 19th and 20th centuries usually shaped their sense of place for a foreign colonial readership. When presenting the environments, they often played up the exoticism of local peoples and/or the visual spectacle of regional landscapes. The setting, and by extension indigenous peoples, where defined through a type of ambiguous binary relationship, at once enticing and frightening in their otherness.

The push/pull dynamic of fascination and horror which defined much of the appeal of travel literature throughout the colonial period extended into early filmic representations about settlement. If anything, this rhetoric was more easily translatable into the new medium of cinema as the otherness of place and people could become simplified through a range of visual archetypes: the sensual Polynesian maiden dancing on the beach, or the

Native American chief in war bonnet astride his horse. These types of archetypes help produce what Robert Shields calls “place mythology.” Borrowing from Shields, Anthony

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Carrigan, in Post-Colonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment, explains that

“place mythology” is produced from “‘a widely disseminated and commonly held set of images of a place or space,’ affecting how ‘various discrete meanings’ become

‘associated with real places or regions regardless of their character in reality’” (35). He adds that “these myths have both a constancy and a shifting quality as ‘the core images change slowly over time, are displaced by radical changes in the nature of a place and as the various images simply lose their connotative power […] while others are invented, disseminated, and become accepted in common parlance’” (35). Though discussing the construction of Caribbean islands in travel brochures, Carrigan’s theoretical framework is similarly applicable to film narratives.

Film makes the narration of place at once more immediate and emotionally visceral for its audiences, and through the rapid-fire studio production system and adherence to formulaic genres the stories that early cinema chose to tell about indigenous peoples became deeply engrained in popular consciousness, extending 19th century travel writing conventions well into the 20th century. This is especially true of the American

Western, which transposed the story of white frontier settlement into a grand masculine adventure, the cowboy taming the wildness of the setting and subjugating native peoples through violence. This involved both military violence against indigenous peoples and an attack on their social practices. As Robert Stam explains governments in settler states like

Australia and the US “destroyed long-existing systems of communally held land in favor of Dawes Act deeds of private ownership” (219). Even as settlement imperiled indigenous ways of life, the Western framed the narrative as one of white heroism.

Indeed, the cowboy was often presented as the embattled figure defending women and

102 children against marauding “Indians” firing arrows at careening stagecoaches. These films helped define America’s modern sense of itself as a militaristic moral crusader as much as they reshaped our understanding of our fraught past. The sense of shifting iconography Carrigan describes also perfectly encapsulates the gradual alteration in narrative from a moral alignment with the cowboy killing Native Americans to a critique of the government and an identification with the enlightened white savior seeking inclusion in the Native community. If iconography is mutable, as Carrigan suggests, it is also hard to rewrite once culturally engrained over generations, requiring a widespread social shift to refashion these the prevailing place-myths. Yet even as films largely demonized Native Americans until the rise of the countercultural movement of the 1960s reimagined the genre,17 the Western’s emphasis on the settlement processes meant indigenous peoples could never be erased entirely. They might be vilified, but they remained integral to the story. More insidious but nonetheless problematic are the ways in which filmmaking in former settler colonies has enabled not just a rewriting of history, but the fashioning of alternative fantasies that overwrite one place’s stories onto another’s.

In this chapter, I will examine a representative example of this trend in big budget fantasy films through the marketing of New Zealand as Middle-earth, stressing how the filmic erasure of the nation’s historical context participates in the tradition of the colonial travelogue as escapist and ideologically reassuring for white audiences. I argue that although the conservationist messaging in this text has helped shape New Zealand’s

17 Though well intentioned this co-opting in films like Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves remains deeply problematic for its superficiality and appropriation of native culture as a badge of white liberal progressivism. 103 popular image as a mythic wilderness escape for the ecologically minded global traveler it does so in ways that elide its history of racial conflict and the environmental change engendered by settlement. Whereas, the LOTR embodies the dangers of perpetuating outdated place-myths, the emergence of Fourth cinema offers alternative methods of writing back against engrained narratives. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to how indigenous film production coincided with political resistance to the types of predominant cultural conceptions of place touted by main-stream cinema. By examining the work of Alanis Obomsawin, I argue that documentary Fourth cinema enabled a revision of earlier modes, conveying indigenous experience of social oppression through its treatment of spatial relations. The sweeping camera aerials and pans of the Eurocentric travelogue are replaced by the steady cam of the on-the ground eyewitness. Most importantly this rooting of story in place stresses the impacts of living conditions and community land crises on real brown bodies. For indigenous directors, film became a way of visually capturing how negotiations over land use played out in real time, recording perspectives and experiences that were largely missing from public discourse.

The spatial relations of documentaries like Kanehsatake:270 years of Resistance or The

People of Kattawapiskak River seek to not only dramatize contemporary events, but give audiences a sense of the emotional and physical stresses of the indigenous living situations, enabling a grittier type of vicarious audience participation than more traditional escapist media. Rhetorically outdoor adventure films rely on immersing audiences into sprawling vistas where even characters’ endangerment offers a type of cathartic release for viewers. In contrast, documentaries like Obomsawin’s put audiences

104 in a less comfortable position, inserting them into social conflicts where violence results in real life consequences for those involved and from which there is no reassuring escape.

4.1 New Zealand as Middle-Earth Travelogue: Book, to Film, to Tourist Attraction, and

Back Again

Though typically classified as a fantasy, Lord of the Rings shares much in common with the type of adventure travelogues popularized through colonial settlement.

The quest structure of the text involves a journey across the breadth of the continent of

Middle Earth from West to East. The innocent and inexperienced hobbits face a grueling trek over mountains, forests, rivers, and deserts as they encounter “new” peoples like the

Lothlorien elves, rangers of Ithilien, or orc armies. Despite the urgency of their mission, aimed at surreptitiously destroying a weapon that would threaten the freedom of the world, the novel lavishes considerable time on the description of place and the culture of the communities (at least those of the white races) with which they come into contact.

Tolkien, despite being a homebody, enjoyed nature and spent his boyhood days in the

Birmingham countryside18. Additionally, as a scholar of linguistic history, he was deeply invested in creating a world that felt ancient and lived in. Famously, in order to

18 Though born in South Africa, Tolkien settled permanently in England after his father’s death and spent his formative years in Sarehole playing in the meadow near the corn mill, a setting that echoes the later descriptions of Hobbiton. Despite his colonial origins he identified with his mother’s regional roots. Humphrey Carpenter in his famous biography notes that “Being in a sense a homeless child – for his journey from South Africa and the wanderings that now gave him a sense of rootlessness – he held on to this concept of Evesham in particular and the whole West Midland area in general as being his true home” (27).

105 conceptualize the movement of his characters and to realize the scale of the world they inhabit, Tolkien drew his own maps. The first thing readers of the books experience of

Middle Earth is therefore typically the maps in the frontispiece. Before they ever know the characters, they are forced to confront the ‘otherness’ of place, to navigate as explorers or travelers themselves the map of this other world (a strategy so immersive it has become a staple of fantasy books from middle grade readers to Game of Thrones).

These travelogue aspects of the maps are bolstered by the textual attention to geographic features and weather. The feel of rock, sound of wind, smell of the air. One of the reasons for the trilogy’s great length is its concentration on these details, which offer a sensory perception of place in real time. Tolkien the detail obsessed creator went so far as to calculate the journey in relation to the waxing or waning of the moon so that night-time conditions mentioned in the text would accurately fit the real lunar calendar.19 This type of minute creation makes the environment feel real and has since become the accepted style for much of fantasy literature. Yet it owes a greater debt to the rhetoric of travelogues than has perhaps been previously acknowledged by many scholars. The detailed diaries or logbooks of explorers and pioneers abound in the types of observed detail Tolkien fashions and were historically employed for much the same reason: to vicariously capture for distant readers the physical sense of place experienced by the actors in the story. Moreover, the choice of protagonist facilitates a slippage between character and reader in much the same way that first person travelogues do, casting the

19 Hammond, Wayne G, and Christina Scull. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. Houghton Mifflin, 2005. This source discusses how he used the lunar calendar from 1941-42 as the basis for describing whether the moon was visible or not at different points in the story. 106 arm-chair traveler in the position of the plucky, but unprepared explorer, a small person entering a larger world where they will experience the joys and fears of unknown locales.

If the Lord of the Rings is first and foremost a type of travelogue, it is at heart environmentalist in orientation, embodying a perspective not far different from works by proto-eco-conscious white settlers in nations like in New Zealand or Canada. The narrative centers on the struggle of nature-oriented characters: the rural farming hobbits, the cavern loving dwarfs, the forest dwelling elves, against the technocratic authoritarian industry of Mordor. The evil power of the story corrupts not only the elves to create his orc army but poisons the landscape in which he lives. Mordor’s foul, unnaturally dark air and contaminated water stunts natural life, a reality dramatized by the gradual toxification of lands previously held by Gondor, the seat of the kings of men. The hobbits’ journey through this environment proves life-threatening not merely because of the armies of orcs, but because there are no natural food sources. In other environments the characters have been able to forage and replenish their stores, but here they must persist on bread and water as the landscape does not sustain the typical animal or plant life. The central threat of the book is articulated not just as an enslavement of the hobbits but a destruction of their rural way of life. Sauron’s success would mean the transplantation of Mordor’s atmosphere to the Shire. Indeed, even after defeating Sauron, the supreme evil, the hobbits have to reclaim their homeland from the forces of Saruman, a corrupt wizard and his human cronies who have exploited the land for economic gains, exporting tobacco crops, building a mill, and chopping down trees.

Essentially, then, the story pits small rural peoples against larger industrial forces.

Nor is nature merely a bystander in this dispute. Tolkien endows nature with agency,

107 most notably in his ents, or walking, talking tree shepherds who watch over the forests. In the second installment, they wage war on Saruman, killing his troops, flooding his machinery, and trapping him in his tower, thereby fulfilling Tolkien’s childhood wish of seeing Burnam wood actually come to Dunsinane. The novels privilege an ecocritical message, albeit one that romanticizes early pre-industrial England. Environments are not simply background through which characters move, they are actors in and of themselves shaping the events of the story. Given the importance of place, when it came to a live action adaptation of the novels the decision for where to shoot carried considerable weight for storytelling.

Peter Jackson’s decision to film LOTR, his dream project in his Native New

Zealand might at first seem like an obvious choice. Readers invariably draw upon their personal knowledge base when engaging with literary texts and as a child, Peter Jackson, the franchise’s director, filtered the settings of these books through the familiar environments of his home country. Naturally when it came to shooting the movies, he drew upon these emotional identifications with the national landscape, but this decision was also a momentous one as it helped to conceptualize the at the time often overlooked nation of New Zealand for a global audience. Fueled by practical and economic considerations including cheaper labor costs and an English-speaking workforce, the

Lord of the Rings ‘runaway’ production, a project funded by a Hollywood distributor and filmed in a foreign country, put New Zealand on the map as a site for fantasy films. Yet the choice also raises compelling questions about what stories get financed and why some achieve global cultural dominance while others do not? Lord of the Rings, though a big budget production was by no means the only New Zealand production at the time, nor

108 even the first fantasy film shot in the country. However, its immediate popularity with international audiences and staying power across the last two decades suggests that the narrative tropes of the films offer viewers a satisfying form of escapist consumption for global viewers often previously unacquainted with the landscapes of remote New

Zealand.

The film’s marketing of New Zealand as Middle Earth participates in a rhetorical tradition of imperial tourism common to depictions of many commonwealth nations. As

Alfio Leotta explains in Touring the Screen: Tourism and New Zealand Film

Geographies

Through slogans such as ‘the world in one country,’ Film New Zealand, the

agency responsible for the promotion of the country as a film production site,

encouraged potential film producers to remove the landscape from its socio-

historical context and to use it as an undefined and transposable setting for

international productions. The Film New Zealand campaign echoes the slogans of

the early film productions funded by the tourist department …[that] defined the

country as a ‘world in a nutshell.’ The early tourist films about New Zealand

featured a long series of scenic views of the country’s pristine nature, empty

landscapes devoid of inhabitants. These empty New Zealand landscapes were the

raw material that could be imaginatively and materially processed and consumed

by the tourist/spectator or the settler. The land was possessed, cleared physically

and metaphorically of its features and eventually invested with meaning

originating from the mother country. (183)

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This method of visual myth making itself relies on a broader cultural history of viewing these geographic locations through a colonial lens. Before film existed, other textual and visual mediums ranging from literature, travel memoirs, and guidebooks, to engravings and paintings had already established a rhetorical language for depicting the land as exotic other. These genres often relied on formulaic tropes, many of which have persisted in popular culture today: the “wilderness” as land of adventure, often envisaged through rugged mountains or forests, or the sensual pleasure paradise of palm treed beaches, a trope especially common to Pacific Island representations. As such the colonial space was defined through the gaze of the Western spectator for whom the foreign landscape offered a combination of mystery and spectacle, the chance for imaginative projections onto a kind of grand tabula rasa. However, the colonial space additionally carried with it an ideological tension, at once a location of liberation, pleasure and individualist opportunity for white settlers or tourists, it remained tinged with perpetual danger. The unknown environmental ‘other’ might and oftentimes did kill foolhardy or naïve travelers unaccustomed to native climatological or pathological risks, a concern dramatized in 19th century journalism through cases like the missing Dr. Livingstone. Narrating colonial places through film then historically involved both a commodification of desire and a management of underlying social fears. The audience needed to be sold a space that was other to make the vicarious travel desirable, but this very otherness needed to be minimized or controlled to avoid alienating audiences and destroying their fantasy of escapism.

LOTR fulfils a similar function tempering its harrowing fantastical horrors

(exploding volcanos, spider-infested caverns) and adventure escapism with the familiar

110 comforts of a Western pastoral tradition. For all its intimidating volcanic rock formations or sweeping mountainous vistas, the heart of the film remains the Shire. The film trilogy, like the novels themselves, privileges a return to an idealized image of rural English life, itself on the wane by the Edwardian era of Tolkien’s childhood. Ironically, Jackson’s cinematic production of this fantasy locale was only achievable in the New Zealand context because of the colonial transplantation of pastoral agriculture and the transformation of the forested North Island landscape through a century of sheep and more recently dairy farming. A colonial history of place thus pervades New Zealand’s living landscape, an often uninterrogated reminder of how white settlement has reshaped the original geography. In contrast, by reinscribing regional landmarks like Matamata’s

Hobbiton, with its steep grassy hills as an imagined fictional realm, the films normalize the current environmental conditions, translating them into a mythic alternate history.

Leotta asserts that “the virtual landscapes [the use of digital effects and miniatures] in

LOTR do not simply erase the colonial legacy of the country, they go so far as to give it a new heritage” (185). The complex events that enabled the production of pastoral agriculture, the remaking of Pacific forest to meadowlands involving the displacement of indigenous communities and the industrial consumption of native forests, is obscured by the portrayal of the Shire as primitive, timeless idyll set in opposition to the wave of

Mordor’s industrial technology. The very processes responsible for racially and environmentally altering the make-up of the region are overlaid by a narrative that celebrates a mythic revisionist story of Britain’s origins; virtually normalizes the current landscape. The trilogy transforms the country into an ahistorical signifier capable of

111 embodying a range of the composite settings Tolkien envisioned, itself a mash-up of his rural English childhood and the South African mountains of his birth.

Such choices in location shooting might seem on the surface just a side effect of the filmic process; Hollywood was and often still is invested in the production of fantasy, not socially conscious histories. However, any easy dismissal of these decisions belies the real-world consequences of narrative mythmaking. Just as the stories white travelers told perpetuated the exoticism of the Pacific and the New World, the mapping of fantasy narratives onto New Zealand carries with it significant consequences in terms of its popular perception by global audiences. Little regarded internationally before the blockbuster trilogy, the nation’s landscapes captured the attention of viewers and were for many their first encounters with the country. The blurring of the distinctions between

New Zealand and Middle Earth began in earnest through the home movie release. The

DVD extended editions featured an interactive documentary entitled “New Zealand as

Middle Earth,” where the viewer could select different real-world locations on a New

Zealand map designed to replicate the font and cartographic style of Tolkien’s original.

By moving through the map, fans could see where each setting was filmed and their location scouting and production design footage. For the most part these short segments discussed the landscape in relation to adaptation choices as the designers and production managers looked for environments that best captured the descriptions of the books. The geological history of the country’s terrain or its settlement are elided almost entirely in this making of documentary, a decision that presents New Zealand as the ideal empty landscape onto which audiences can write their fantasy narratives.

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This practice carried over into subsequent tourist campaigns. As Margaret Werry notes, the “100% Pure New Zealand” tourist ad campaign website involved “virtual tours in which the vicarious traveler was incited to acts of exploration, discovery, and wonderment akin to those of Frodo and Sam as they traversed Middle-Earth, or to those of location scouts, designers, and cast as they ‘found’ the sites described in the books”

(202). The National Tourist Board had borrowed strategies of the DVD special features and applied them explicitly for marketing purposes. Werry adds, “The country’s timeworn touristic topoi were reactivated through technological augmentation and kinaesthetic [sic] intensification, what Claudia Bell and John Lyall call the ‘accelerated sublime,’ in which consumption and subjectification occur not through pictorial capture but embodied motion and immersion” (202). The films produce a sense of immersive experience, of being there more viscerally than the text because of the sense of moving through real space that the film camera creates. Owing to the camera, she asserts

“mountains leapt, plains sprawled, and shots had the viewer plummet like a bungee jumper into deep ravines” (202). Yet, this language itself grammatically obscures the presence of the camera eye. Nature is not moving, but rather the god-like roving camera eye is able to both participate in the story and oversee the landscape as a whole. Werry focuses on the politics of the marketing decisions, but it is worth noting that the use of landscape serves an environmentalist aim too; though it relies on traditional archetypes of outdoor tourism, the campaigns also shift these towards a more active and adventurous mode of leisure, promoting guided hiking and boating. The marketing is not merely presenting New Zealand as pristine paradise in ways like that of the 19th century, but one geared to the thrill seeker desirous of escaping the population density and geographic

113 sameness of modern industrial culture. New Zealand, the Tourist board suggests, is a panacea to the modern malaise of the global north.

Notably around the same time as Matamata’s establishment as a permanent tourist venue, New Zealand exported their nation to Hollywood not merely as cinema, but an interactive set piece. In 2013 at the opening of the prequel The Hobbit: The Desolation of

Smaug the Tourism Board of New Zealand constructed a giant diorama exhibit entitled the Book of New Zealand featuring settings from the film. It was constructed as a larger than life pop-up with each set piece seeming to grow out of the pages of a thick book, rather like a horizontally positioned rendition of the fairy tale tome as framing device popularized in classic Disney films. Opened in the Hollywood Hilton Hotel, the exhibit featured Lake Town (Lake Pukaki/Aoraki-Mt Cook), Forest River (Pelorous

River/Marlborough), and Beorn's House (Paradise/Glenorchy and Hidden Bay). These displays included buildings, rocks and other production design props positioned in the foreground with projected backdrops of real New Zealand rivers and mountains (“New

Zealand Pops-up in Hollywood”). This type of marketing decision resembles nothing so much as a 20th century adaptation of older spectacle displays like the 19th century panorama, with its curved painted backdrop aimed at audience immersion.20 Prefacing the development of cinematic representation, the panorama comprised a room-sized canvas painted in 360 degrees, mounted in a rotunda, and lit from above. Panoramas which began as self-portraits of the towns in which they were displayed, gradually shifted into grand depictions of battles and foreign locales, becoming a major attraction

20 For instance, Charles Langlois created a view of a naval battle using real ships boards as part of the railing and used ventilation to simulate the sea breeze. Others introduced live plants and algae into the exhibits. 114 throughout Europe and America. As Bernard Comment explains that “The invention of the panorama was a response to a particularly strong nineteenth century need … it express[ed] the perceptual and representational fantasies that befitted such troubled times, it was also a way of regaining control of sprawling collective space” (8). The panorama offered a consumable view of the world at a moment when industrialization made cities harder to process (8). As a vehicle for tourism, the panorama offered a more engaging sensory experience for audiences than prior visual or printed texts due to its extreme scale, a quality that films later replicated, creating larger than life projections but with the addition of motion.

As this pop-up book exhibit demonstrates, film borrows much of its framework from this earlier form of representation, relying on empowering audiences through a sense of spatial domination. The exhibit itself is practically meta discourse on the process of marketing of place, with a book adapted to a panorama, representing set pieces from a film using location photography. Like a snake eating its own tale the adaptation circles back on itself in interconnected loop. The decisions involved in the design suggest that tourist company was highly aware of the marketing potential and deliberately portrayed

New Zealand as a fantasy travelogue come to life through their slippage between the book’s travelogue title and its fantasy content, between architectural film props and real world location photography. The exhibit suggests that watching the film is like falling into the book, but better still is the complete immersion in the real Middle Earth offered by visiting the country itself. New Zealand is overwritten by a chain of interlinked fictional adaptations so that it becomes ultimately a type of empty simulacrum for

115 audience imagination with the country itself standing in as a space for tourist role playing fantasies.

Fig. 1 New Zealand as Pop-up book in 2013 traveling exhibit 21

This treatment of New Zealand as fantasy paradise has since been further solidified not only by the permanent establishment of the Hobbiton attraction with its extensive décor and live gardens, but also through the production of LOTR designs on

Air New Zealand planes and the inclusion of a giant Gollum sculpture in the airport food court. From transport to day trips, the country has thoroughly embraced the reading of

New Zealand as Middle-Earth. In fact, the function of Lord of the Rings as arm-chair

21Joanna Prisco. “Hobbit Land Comes to Life in Hollywood with World’s Largest Pop-up Book New Zealand unveils enormous installation inside Beverly Hilton hotel.” ABC News. Dec. 2, 2013. https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/hobbit-land-life-hollywood-worlds- largest-pop-book/story?id=21069750

116 adventure travelogue has come full circle with the 2016 publication Middle-Earth

Landscapes: Locations in the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Film Trilogies, a book entirely about New Zealand filming locations. This collection featuring sections for the

North and South Island not only describes the production choices and use of specific sites, but also relevant tourist information about local National parks, boat trips, and backpacking options. Essentially it functions as both a fantasy escape and a traditional travel guide à la Fodors. Though this text incorporates the Maori origin myth in its opening introduction, it largely elides the messy conflicts of settlement in favor of treating the country as a wonderworld for the outdoors enthusiast. The two-page summary of the Maori myth explaining the creation of the offspring of the sky and the earth, resulting in the gods of the wind, sea, earthquakes, war, peace and thought. This overview includes reference to the famous story of Maui, hauling up the land mass that would become the North Island, shaped like a sting ray, with the South Island representing his canoe. The origin narrative ends with the arrival of the ancient Maori, as

Pacific voyagers naming New Zealand, Aotearoa, or “land of the long white cloud.” As a narrative these few pages would at first seem to fit with the tourist orientation of the book, they present an imaginative ancient myth that celebrates natural elements of geography, while acknowledging the perspective of the indigenous peoples. However, the gaps in the text speak volumes. The narrative, never explicitly identified as Maori but rather New Zealand mythology, is immediately followed by a section on location scouting.

As such the book echoes the revisionism of Matamata itself as the site of permanent Hobbiton tourism. Michael Organ in his Metro magazine article on the

117 appropriation of English mythology in New Zealand Tourism explains that rise of

Matamata has overridden a significant historical event in the nearby Peria. This town founded in 1846 “brought Maori and European cultures and technologies together…[and] was broken up around 1866 as a result of the devastation wrought by the Waikato War. It remains an unrestored archaeological site” (61). The narrative of colonial war is disregarded in favor of the cozy English countryside fantasy of the Matamata experience.

Similarly, the guidebook elides the dark history of colonial settlement which had enabled the production of not only the films, but the entire fantasy marketing strategy upon which such guides rely, haunting the text even when the authors attempt to elide it.

This erasure of the real violence involved in the making of New Zealand as country and its transplantation into a mythic heroic quest marks the dilemma inherent in claiming the Lord of the Rings as a founding myth for New Zealand. Werry asserts that

“one might go so far as to argue that in the past ten years Aotearoa New Zealand has been transformed into a cinematic export processing zone for American modernity’s lost racial certainties. Lord of the Rings stages a Manichean struggle of light against dark, in which the ‘race of man’ bests Saruman’s monstrously hybrid multitude, and the implications are writ large in a design aesthetic that pits blond elves against dreadlocked, tattooed, cannibal Uruk-hai” (199). Even at the time of its release the question of its problematic racial representation dominated scholarship. As Sue Kim explains in “Beyond Black and

White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Films” all of the leading villains apart from Saruman are played by people of color; Lawrence Makoare, a Maori actor played Lurtz, the Uruk leader and the Witch King, with Sala Baker, a Samoan stunt person taking over for Makoare when he had to leave (877). The evil characters are

118 played by actors of color whose true faces are themselves hidden behind prosthetics or costuming and who have virtually no English-speaking dialogue in the films. Though the imagery of the books relies on colonialist racial stereotyping these casting choices take on a troubling meaning in the broader context of New Zealand colonial history and cinema. As Kim rightly argues the image of the Uruk-hai bears strong resemblances to native dark-skinned Maori warriors, who in iconic film depictions like Utu use facial tattooing as a sign of cultural resistance to the British. Given this social context the production design’s decisions to further blur the visual markers between the book’s racially mixed Uruk’s born from the mud and native Maori suggests an untroubled acceptance of established stereotypes. This narrative move stands in contrast to the press releases and promotional materials for the film which not only include interviews with

Makoare and allusions to the producer’s compliance with Maori wishes concerning shooting access to sacred sites like Mount Ruapehu. Additionally, the extras that accompany films suggest a familial bonding between actors and extras, directors, and crew across differing backgrounds and cultures. This message of inclusiveness associated with production as well as the surge in economic benefits felt across the country by those involved may in part explain the lack of indigenous backlash against the films.22

However, the persistence of these racist narratives alongside the positive messaging of a unified production family speaks to underlying ideological conflict that remains in modern settler nations. The Lord of the Rings is a profoundly Eurocentric story, presenting a range of white Western peoples who must unite against the dark

22 Other current productions of the time that dealt explicitly with Maori culture and identity like Niki Caro’s Whale Rider received more criticism from indigenous audiences. 119 skinned others, in this case the bestial orcs, Uruk-hai, a biracial population bred by

Saruman from orcs and goblins, and the elephant riding Southrons, perhaps the most obviously racist textual depiction in that the read as a stereotype of African peoples transposed into Middle-earth. Given the centrality of the dark/light binary and the lack of complexity in presenting the opposing armies, avoiding re-inscribing these faults while maintaining the same story elements as the source material would have be extremely difficult. Arguably though the director and production designers did not directly question the racial politics of the original and but instead relied on them even as they changed minor elements of plot or character. By adopting and failing to problematize a trilogy rooted in a colonial mindset then, the films replicate the prejudices of their source material. Even more worryingly, for New Zealand as a post-colonial state to whole heartedly claim these novels as a cultural symbol for their nation through marketing poses serious political problems. In doing so they have disregarded the films’ erasure of prior social history, and its unwillingness to recognize and question the types of prejudices that enabled the colonial project in the first place.

The myth of New Zealand as LOTR then stands, as Werry notes, in stark contrast to the image the nation wants to present of a biracial, progressive democracy that celebrates its blend of British and indigenous cultures. If LOTR’s offers a narrative that at least facilitates an environmental aesthetic in keeping with a greater concern over contemporary problems like global warming, its racial ideology plants it firmly in the past. It is an excellent example of the ideological contradictions at work in many former settler colonies. Like the proto-environmentalist narratives of Jane Mander it affectively identifies with nature and challenges industrial exploitation of resources in ways that still

120 speak to the contemporary green movement, but it also attempts to participate in a shifting political arena alive to ever more diverse voices and perspectives without interrogating its inherited racial stereotypes. As a cultural product then the films seem to pull in opposite directions, environmentally conscious, but fundamentally racist, raising the question as to whether globally we as settler nations have progressed so much from the quaint exotic travelogues of the 19th century era.

4.2 Fourth Cinema as Indigenous Activism: Documenting Violence on the Ground

As the previous case study on the Lord of the Rings illustrates, the process of cinematic storytelling in settler nations has posed substantial problems because anyone seeking to engage with the medium must negotiate their relationship to methods historically employed in the subjugation and exotification of non-white peoples. In order to produce thoughtful content everyone must interrogate their relation to this history when determining what stories to tell and how to tell them, but for first nations peoples this act was especially complex. Filmmaking for indigenous groups means inheriting modes of production traditionally used to misrepresent or oppress them. The methods of storytelling early directors developed necessarily geared the medium towards these aims, turning the camera eye into an extension of the Western colonial gaze. The indigenous struggle for producing alternative filmic stories therefore necessitated coming to grips with the standard modes of production and the very language of cinema itself.

Barry Barclay, the first indigenous director to produce a feature film (Ngati 1987) articulated this challenge in terms of language and the need carve out a place for native media creators. He tried to define this role by asking who am I as an artist? He was not

121 part of the first world, the Hollywood studio system which served as the basis for much of the exported forms of global production, nor was he a participant in the second world of the art house film. Additionally, he did not identify as part of third world production.

In its 1960s conceptualization, third cinema offered an alternative to the capitalist and elitist culture of the first and second world. As Anthony Guneratne explains in his introduction to Rethinking Third Cinema, these films grew out of the decolonial movements in Argentina and Brazil addressing specific injustices, but which also aimed to produce a transnational identification of common social mistreatments (4). Though progressive in its agenda the very term itself has posed problems in film studies. As Ella

Shohat and Robert Stam articulate the term Third Cinema was coined as a type of catch all for works by non-first World or European creators (7). In this way the category borrowed from an engrained social hierarchy, yet these films did make non-white experiences visible in ways that they had not been before. However, the very diversity of peoples and societies included ranging from China, and Cuba, to Brazilian New Wave, or

South African cinema means that the Third Cinema remains unwieldy as a marker. In addition, as a geographic marker it failed to fit the complexity of the situation of indigenous peoples living as second class citizens often in their native first world countries. Could such situated identities of the Maori in New Zealand coincide with a

Term that attempted to draw sharp distinctions between the racial and economic histories of Europe and the Global South? Indigenous peoples in failing to fall neatly into this category risked further marginalization in the discourse of activist cinema.

The process of writing a place for one’s self at the table also posed very real problems when it came to the foundations of cinematic language. As Fernando Solanas

122 and Octavio Getino explain the language of film itself and its apparatuses were geared towards a Western viewpoint from their inception From how film registers skin tones to the use of the zoom to focus on individuals, they note that film as a medium was constructed to depict the stories of white individualist-oriented cultures. (Vanstone and

Winston 234) Moreover, global film production was shaped by the tools it inherited from

American and European cinematic history, particularly the ethnographic gaze. As

Fatimah Rony explains in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle early cinema often perpetuated stereotypes of people of color, viewing them through an ethnographic gaze that produces a sense of fractured cultural consciousness. Bendan

Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas note this “splitting introduces a break, a caesura that maintains the us/them, native/non- native divide thereby reinforcing the marginalization, objectiﬁcation, and representation of Indigenous and minority communities in racialized terms” (xv). Not only did these modes of representation dominate global film production throughout the early 20th century, in many ways they still persist today. Franchises like

LOTR exemplify this method of storytelling. Funded by Hollywood producers as a big genre adventure spectacle the series participates in first cinema, and the films equally employ the type of ethnographic gaze foundational to international film production in the early years of cinema. Stuart Hall theorizes this persistence of racialized tropes in

American and British cinema as a legacy of colonialism. He argues that the

double syntax of racism [the marking of racial difference and its alignment with

social power]—never one thing without the other—is something we can associate

with old images in the mass media; but the problem about the mass media is that

old movies keep being made. And so, the old types and the doubleness and the old

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ambivalence keep turning up on tomorrow’s television screen. (qtd. in Molina-

Guzmán 441).

Molina-Guzmán argues that these patterns are at the heart of persistent problems with representation in Hollywood even in the face an increasingly diverse movie going audience and the publicity of critiques like #OscarsSoWhite (442).

LOTR is a primary example of how producers have recycled these archetypes in ways that reinforces the persistence of the social norms they represent. The us/them, black/white dichotomy though imbedded in the literary source material is echoed by the way the camera eye depicts the different fantasy cultures in the films; the orcs are viewed in mass as a dehumanized conglomerate, whereas men, hobbits, and elves are treated as having their own autonomous personhood. The camera’s gaze is that of an observer throughout, but one always aligned with the white characters.

Given what he considered the limits of third cinema, Barclay sought to circumvent this category altogether and create a new one that might help scholars and filmmakers alike in conceptualizing a different type of production, Fourth Cinema

(Turner 166). Fourth cinema is difficult to define without essentializing the concept of indigeneity, which scholars have substantially debated as a term in and of itself. Broadly speaking Fourth cinema refers to films made by and about indigenous peoples. Barclay notes that these involve not just the trappings of indigenous culture such as “rituals, the language, the posturing, the décor, the use of elders, the presence of children, attitudes to land, the rituals of a spirit world…. [but rather] something else is being asserted which is not easy to access (7). He termed this “interiority,” a sense of identity and voice that can be conveyed and maintained across different filmic genres.

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Growing out of his first-hand experience with making documentaries, namely the

Tangata Whenua TV series, Barclay developed a guide for how directors could create alternative methods of production. In Our Own Image, he explains his filmmaking choices in relation to Maori cultural practice, imagining methods of adapting camera use to indigenous ways of discussion. Barclay writes

Maori People are said to talk in circles. Outsiders say such talk is imprecise and

time-wasting. It is not, of course. It allows many perspectives to surface, and to

die too, should the substance not be appropriate at the time. There is a feeling that

you have had a chance to hear everybody’s voice, and nobody can complain that

there is no opportunity to voice his or her mind. This process is used not just for

idle things, but for debates of great consequence – debates on land matters for

instance, or fishing rights. A debate on fishing rights in New Zealand among just

one tribe could well involve an area of sea equivalent to the entire coastal

resource of countries such as Belgium or the Netherlands. (9)

Even as novelists like Grace were trying to represent this type of multivocal discourse about current land rights in written texts, Barclay was endeavoring to determine ways of capturing it through film. The documentary he notes was traditionally structured around individual interviews and scripted questions. In contrast, Barclay imagined a film as a hui, or Maori meeting with multiple voices participating together. He encouraged directors to film interviews in family groups to capture the relationships among participants, to position the camera further away so as to be less obtrusive, and to consider using clap boards well before the start of a session to capture the natural flow of interactions. As much as possible he tried to treat the camera as a respectful “listener” in

125 the hui or meeting. This methodology applies Maori perspectives about speech practices and knowledge production to the Western traditions of the documentary film.

Though it risks essentializing indigeneity, the concept of Fourth cinema proved useful for filmmakers around the globe who not only shared the experience of dispossession but aspired to governmental acknowledgements of native sovereignty. As

Stuart Murray notes in Images of Dignity, Fourth cinema developed out of Barclay’s politically oriented work in the 1970s. Murray explains that with his increasing success during the 80s and 90s Barclay traveled to other indigenous communities in Canada and

Hawai’i where he was able to share his experiences and compare approaches to film making in other countries. Murray adds that “The parallels he found in the experiences of

Indigenous filmmakers and activists lent evidence for his idea of a cinema that shares common concerns. All Indigenous filmmakers have to negotiate the difficult boundary between achieving a fidelity to the culture being represented and the demands of funding authorities and majority audiences” (28). Despite its epistemological challenges, the concept of Fourth Cinema provides a chance to articulate a collective native identity both within settler countries and across indigenous groups, which has aided in land reparations.

Many indigenous filmmakers who emerged alongside Barclay similarly concentrate on using the documentary form to capture ongoing problems that affect native communities but doing so requires a refashioning of prior cinematic approaches.

Hollywood feature productions tend to make historical conflicts over land into metaphorical abstractions as in the fantasy tropes of the LOTR. The documentary, often a tool of travel advertisements and anthropologists, might on the surface seem likewise

126 problematic. First coined in 1926, Robert Flaherty employed the term to describe his

Polynesian film, Moana (Grierson 48) He asserted that the ‘documentary’ value of recording daily life was secondary in importance to the representation of the setting “as a soft breath from a sunlit island washed by a marvelous sea as warm as the balmy air.” For early documentaries the aesthetics of place could supersede and exist apart from any concern about cultural context. Indeed, Flaherty is perhaps most well-known for his notorious Nanook of the North in which he deliberately manipulated indigenous representations to suit the imaginations of Western audiences. Famously he had the Inuit actors in Nanook feign ignorance of modern technology like gramophones (biting the record) despite the fact that all were participating in the film, and that other Inuit were employed as part of the film’s production crew. Anthropologist, Faye Ginsburg notes

“like the gramophone scene, the film itself obscures the engagement with cinematic process by Allakariallak [who played Nanook] and others who worked on the production of Flaherty’s film in various ways, as in today’s parlance, we might call technicians, camera operators, film developers, and production consultants” (81). Early documentaries like Flaherty’s placed non-white peoples in a mythic, ahistorical era, one that usually disregarded the real-world impacts of colonialism or native peoples’ self- awareness of the filmic storytelling process. Yet despite this history, the documentary also carried a considerable potential for social activism through its attention to the lived experience of a place; it just required a reframing of perspectives by indigenous creators to achieve this end.

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4.3 Framing Indigenous Experience: Spatial Relations in Obomsawin’s Documentaries

Documentaries could by their concentration on current conflicts bring the realities of indigenous life into focus. As the protest movements of the 70s and 80s grew, many native filmmakers got their start by documenting collective forms of resistance. Films like Merata Mita’s Bastion Point: Day 507 and Alanis Obomsawin Kanehsatake:270

Years of Resistance starkly demonstrated the consequences of land disputes for national audiences used to seeing or reading white depictions of indigenous resistance. By reorienting the framework, these directors foregrounded experiences previously obscured or disregarded. In Obomsawin’s work land disputes are not the remote adventures of colonialist fantasy, but rather gritty and unsettling contests in which participants must face barbed wire barricades and military tanks. The war is in the here and now, waged in mundane communities like that of Oka, the site of the 1990-armed face-off between

Mohawk warriors and the regional police and later Canadian military. Arising from plans for the expansion of a private golf course onto the native owned Pines and a local cemetery, the dispute resulted in an excessive show of force by the national government, thereby escalating the tensions between white townspeople, administration and first nations peoples within the Quebec region. Abenaki singer/storyteller turned filmmaker,

Obomsawin, employed by the Canadian Film Board was able cross the police and

Mohawk erected barriers to obtain her footage of the stand-off and eventually produce a quartet of films on the subject. Her first, Kanehsatake, earned many awards including

Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto Film Festival and quickly became an emblem of modern indigenous film production as it challenged mainstream media depictions of

128 the Oka crisis. Her further three films on the history and events leading up to the Oka crisis examine issues of women’s participation, arrest practices, and relations between whites and Mohawk men in the local iron works. These supplementary documentaries complicate the narrative of the underlying social conditions leading up to the crisis, though Kanehsatake remains the most famous of her films. By placing the camera in the middle of these conflicts, directors like Obomsawin insert the viewer into the ongoing action so that they are positioned as vicarious participants in the dispute.

Obomsawin uses many of the same devices as earlier documentaries including expository voice over and contextual maps; however, she employs them as a historical foundation for grounding viewers in contemporary conflicts and indigenous voices. For example, Kanehsatake opens with a map establishing geographic locations for the events before transitioning to footage of the site of the land dispute, the private golf course whose expansion plans from 9 to 18 holes the town of Oka approved as part of a larger development plan which included additional residential development. The film transitions from a map to a closeup of men playing golf before zooming out to reveal the nearby

Mohawk cemetery in the pines, a land threatened by the development plan and later the site of the Mohawk camp. This choice not only dramatizes the underlying ideological clash between an elitist leisure company and community ancestry, but also subtly aligns viewers with the native population. The audience are positioned as outsiders standing among the gravestones and looking in at the golf course, a space to which the documentary never gives viewers direct access. The choice to use this seemingly mundane shot as the opening for a film about violent confrontation emphasizes how colonial history has informed daily experiences of place in ways that mainstream white

129 audiences may take for granted. This understated shot encapsulates the deeper themes of the documentary as the gravesites and even forest become a stand in for indigenous heritage and a long history of spatial attrition to the forces of colonial settlement.

Fig 2. Oka Golf course as seen from cemetery in the pines

In addition, Obomsawin acknowledges her role as participant in the documentary rather than obscuring this fact as many traditional documentaries do. She uses her own voice in recordings of voiceover and includes footage of herself amongst other journalists congregated to cover the dispute. As J. L. Gauthier explains in “Dismantling the Master’s

House,” she is actively on the front lines, “one of the only journalists left behind the lines to record the violence that occurs when the Native warriors and their families surrender and leave the Treatment Center. Her presence in these moments is crucial, as she has noted: ‘I was told many times that the fact that I was there, especially as a Native person,

[meant] that the police and army wouldn’t do certain things there with the camera’”

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(Gauthier). The camera becomes a signifier of a native body or presence and this situatedness of the camera amongst other participants means the audience is never allowed to forget the unseen human recording the events. Whereas camera work like that in LOTR often relies on a distancing or remote view of characters in aerials, the documentaries stress a type of reactive on the ground engagement. When shots are intercut, they work to build up gradual picture of place for audiences, one that has to be pieced together from a range accumulated footage, the camera covering actions from different directions. The camera gaze in this documentary conveys a sense of the physical vulnerability of those involved in the recording and their relative spatial immobility, suggesting the social constraints indigenous peoples face.

Fig. 3 Obomsawin in the journalist lines with soldiers in front of shot holding confiscated film rolls

Scholars have long touted Obomsawin’s work in relation to activism and gender, but they have not studied this aesthetic treatment of place in depth. The voiceover she

131 delivers is largely factual and understated; she instead relies on visuals and background sound effects to carry the emotional weight of the film. The early sections of

Kanehsatake use hand-held shaky cam and offscreen sounds like gunshots and yelling to capture feel of the violent shootout between Mohawks and the police, which occurred before the arrival of the journalists. This footage is contrasted by quiet scenes of the pines and local livestock. This choice puts viewers in the position of native participants, caught up in the disorientation of the first attack which resulted in the death of a police officer and attempting to process its aftermath. As the documentary progresses, she concentrates on capturing the breakdown of communication in the border zone between the two factions. The excessive military presence, 1,000 Canadian troops called in for a town of

1800 people, reshapes the local landscape, bulldozing earthen barricades and moving in with tanks and barbed wire. Her mode of storytelling concentrates on spatial conflict with most shots depicting the aggressive verbal back and forth between Mohawks and the army across an enforced boundary as they argue over what supplies and people can cross the lines into the Treatment Center. As hostilities escalate, Obomsawin reveals the physical danger the Mohawks face especially at night as the movements across borders becomes harder to track, enabling the army to carry out a nighttime raid, beating one

Mohawk man, Spudwrench, left on guard. Later a mother and child are also nearly hit by an unidentified object from a helicopter while seated outside around a campfire.

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Fig. 4 Mother comforting child in Kanehsatake

The moment of the mother humming and comforting the child differs markedly from many louder confrontational scenes in the film, representing the persistence of indigenous social bonds amidst the conflict. The use of clips like this of family or social interaction among the Mohawks challenges the popular media image of the “Warrior” in

1990s media. Amelia Kalant argues that the image of resistance embodied by the warrior in camouflage and with a bandanaed face was a “double-edged sword” at once attention grabbing for the media and reminiscent of earlier cultural stereotypes of indigenous peoples as militant other (187). Across her films, Obomsawin deconstructs this masculinist image by showing the alignment of men and women in mutual activism and explaining their aims in protecting cultural values tied to nature. Significantly, she includes children as a way of foregrounding the continuity of the struggle across generations. As Lindsey Campbell explains the lead subject of Obomsawin’s later film

My name is Kanehtiisota argued for “Kanawake mothers, it was important that children

133 not be hidden from the legacy of violence that has plagued the Mohawk people”

(“(Re)covering Oka”). The figure of the mother and child dramatize this point for viewers, humanizing the warriors and revealing their continued vulnerabilities. Even when rocking her child at night, the documentary stresses the Mohawks are not safe.

Soothing a child must continue under the threat of unseen attacks. Though specific to the situation of the siege the image also suggests the difficulty of raising and protecting a child in a social context that devalues indigenous lives in favor of white financial interests. In this way the images create a grounded experience for audiences, while also harkening back to a longer history of mistreatment.

One of the greatest rhetorical strengths of the film is this sense of bodily endangerment and claustrophobia it produces. The emphasis on barriers and roadblocks visually create a sense of entrapment and anxiety. The constant inclusion of military vehicles, barbed wire, and tanks in the frame intercut with footage of helicopters overhead ensures that audiences cannot forget their presence. As one man, Thompson giving the children a nature lesson in Mohawk, tells them to block their ears as the copter flies overhead, commenting “War is really annoying.” In this way the audio and visual work together to create a sensory experience for the viewer that aligns them with that of the Mohawks, who are shown not simply as bandanaed warriors, by fathers and husbands. The inclusion of women and children in the footage stresses the human costs for a broader community and appeals to viewers’ sympathies. But the cinematic decisions also put viewers in the Treatment Center with Mohawks. There is no reprieve for viewers as there was none for those on the ground at the time during the 78-day siege. The documentary replicates for audiences the experience of constant surveillance.

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Fig. 5 Passing food supplies for Mohawks across the barrier in Kanehsatake

Fig. 6 Caring for Spudwrench in Treatment Center after beating

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Though the film stresses the ever-present threat of violence, it also highlights the absurdity of the situation as the conflict with the army devolves into petty and immature behavior. Major Jean Lavigne refuses to fill Mohawk food requests claiming that they egged his tank. He denies appeals to document the incident on camera only saying that he will bring the eggshells to show the Mohawks as evidence. The army sinks poles and rolls barbed wire across nearby a lake allegedly to prevent warriors escaping as an expensive boat sails by in the distance. The military intercept a roll of film thrown by journalists over a road barrier and by the end of the stand-off send in food supplies to the

Mohawks only after puncturing the packaging, an act that reads as intentional abuse.

These disputes put the Canadian policies in perspective for audiences by showing the irrationality and excessive force enabled by the military, culminating in the violent arrests of Mohawks leaving the siege at the end of the stand-off. By the end of the documentary, the indigenous anger over the development plans that provoked the protest has only engendered more aggressive reprisals on the part of the government. The documentary demonstrates for outside audiences an oppressive process already too familiar to indigenous peoples; the government uses targeted fast violence to suppress native resistance to the forms of slow violence enabled by neo-colonial economic practices.

Whereas Obomsawin concentrated on these types of direct political abuses by the government in the 1990s she has also remained attuned to the incremental impacts of slow violence on indigenous communities and the challenges it poses for family life. The inclusion of the mother and child scene in Kanehsatake foreshadows her later film The

People of the Kattawapiskak River (2012) about a housing crisis in Northern Ontario. If

Kanehsatake shows how years of dysfunctional social relations between indigenous

136 peoples and the Quebec government exploded into violent confrontation, Kattawapiskak reveals how governmental policies impact the domestic space in less publicly visible ways. The people of this community, having transitioned to permanent prefabricated houses in the 1950s are facing an increasing housing problem as Western modes of suburban living do not suit the environmental conditions of the Northern arctic. The cheap materials from which many houses were constructed have proven unable to withstand the hard weather conditions, resulting in the rapid deterioration of homes without any replacement construction. The cost of transporting building materials to this impoverished community means that people often remain in buildings long after they have deteriorated or are instead forced to move in with relatives, going on waiting lists for new homes. This places the population at increased health risks as families are forced to continue living in derelict houses after fire damage and rot or face overcrowding. The documentary highlights the economic hypocrisy of this situation as community members working for the one of the largest raw diamond mines in the world cannot get safe housing and at best must make do with relocated job-site trailers.

As with her Oka films, the documentary has a larger political agenda, but aims to convey this message through the cinematic treatment of space. If the Oka films convey a type of high anxiety spatial entrapment and perpetual government surveillance,

Kattawapiskak is more about a demoralizing domestic imprisonment against which the population resists even through small domestic adaptations of unlivable environments.

Obomsawin opens with establishing shots of the houses, but almost immediately brings the viewer into the interior spaces, showing both their inadequacy and the ways in which families have adapted them to the best of their abilities as in the example of Linklater,

137 folding laundry as her two small children crawl around on the improvised bedding. She lives in the equivalent of an outdoor shed with her four children, the youngest of whom are seen crawling and playing throughout the interview. The use of textiles in this scene on the floor and walls suggests a practical aim of insulating the shed as much as possible, but also the desire to produce a comfortable home out of the available resources.

Obomsawin interviews adults talking about their living situations often with the children playing or resting in the background. Sometimes during the discussion, the camera pans over to them as the parent talks. This use of the children appeals to pathos, but also situates the stress parents are under to provide care for pre-k children in spaces with rotting floors, indoor space heaters, and sometimes no running water. Though less confrontational than Kanehsatake, this film nonetheless uses the cinematic gaze to align viewers with indigenous peoples’ problems on a human level. It brings viewers into the homes of a community, revealing the resilience of young parents even as it visually critiques the Canadian policies and consumerist economy that have exploited and or neglected these remote populations.

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Fig. 7 Lisa Marie Linklater with children folding laundry

Obomsawin uses the spatial positionality of the camera to subtly reframe audiences’ perspectives, to take them out of the distanced exploratory perspective of the panorama or the adventure film and into bounded spaces of conflict where the realities of daily life become impossible to ignore. In this proximity brought face to face with the impacts of social injustice on successive generations of families, on real bodies, her documentaries strike a blow against engrained modes of seeing the native as other. This sense of separation cannot be as easily maintained when the cinematic storytelling tropes are amended to not only record indigenous perspectives but to make them viscerally legible for audiences. This type of narrative resists the easy catharsis of the fantasy adventure with its deus ex machina and last-minute rescues, but instead confronts the socially uncomfortable. Visiting and vicariously dwelling in these places through film, should mean psychological discomfort for audiences even as it poses emotional and physical

139 pain for the native peoples occupying stolen land or inadequate housing. Only by facing the realities of theses lived experiences can one begin to understand the outlook of marginalized groups and move towards political progress.

As part of Fourth cinema, documentaries are tools for resistance, offering a means of intervening in a discourse that has long neglected the impacts of governmental decision making and institutional racism. Rejecting the restrictive parameters of early colonial works like Flaherty’s with their singular narrative perspective, modern documentaries also facilitated a more complex mode of social storytelling. Directors like Obomsawin align the narrative with indigenous peoples, but the documentaries themselves become a form of mixed media storytelling with numerous interviews with community members and governmental officials, TV news clips, historical photographs, maps, newspaper headlines. The documentaries like Kanehsatake capture the on the ground conflicts, but they also produce a type of cross-cultural discourse among participants. She includes the views of elders, and children, women and men, Mohawks and other first nations supporters, the local and national governments, the Quebecois white sympathetic allies and protestors burning Mohawks in effigy. What the contemporary novel enables in textual form through its multiplicity of perspectives, temporal jumps, and bricolage of print media, the documentary proves capable of achieving in visual and media form.

Grace achieves this effect through the incorporation of and response to mainstream journalism and the reliance on performance art traditions. The documentary operates in similar ways, producing a multivocal collective resistance and a reclaiming of narrative control from larger business interests. If the novel seems to lend itself to greater abstract expressiveness, Obomsawin’s work reveals the capacity of the documentary to capture

140 the messiness of real-world disputes. Her filmography across five decades demonstrates the medium’s ability to expand to meet the breadth and depth of unfolding social conflicts. As directors plunged into this form, others coming up behind them would branch out in new courses to explore fictional film genres, grabbling with reframing the conventions of storytelling that raised their own sets of unique problems.

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Chapter 5

WILDERNESS AND “WILDERPEOPLE”: REIMAGINING THE SURVIVALIST ECO-DRAMA FOR A MULTICULTURAL NEW ZEALAND

In a 2019 Guardian interview, Taka Waititi defends his preference for comedic takes on emotionally distressing subjects like those of his recent Jojo Rabbit, about a committed Hitler youth who learns to question antisemitic propaganda through his relationship with a Jewish girl hiding in his attic. He argues that

Comedy has always, for thousands and thousands of years, been a way of connecting

audiences and delivering more profound messages by disarming them and opening

them up to receive those messages. Comedy is a way more powerful tool than just

straight drama, because with drama, people tend to switch off or feel a sense of guilt,

or leave feeling depressed … Often it doesn’t sit with them as much as a comedy

does. (Rose)

The lens of comedy through which Waititi constructs his films relies on humor as a form of satire. He sends up horror tropes about the “foreign other” through a mocumentary about flat sharing vampires in What We Do In the Shadows and tackles familial neglect and Maori emasculation in his coming of age film Boy. The very mass appeal of genres like comedy, adventure, or horror which Waititi describes as an asset initially made

Fourth cinema directors wary of them. Having fought so long for representation, the discourse around indigenous filmmaking was invested in making political statements to

142 advance social issues. Yet, some also recognized the need to expand beyond these parameters.

Despite his concentration on films and TV with explicit appeals for native rights,

Barclay also argued that artists should be given the opportunity to push the boundaries of what constitutes indigenous film. Even as he coined the term Fourth cinema, he was wary of the “system’s cynical support for film projects of this kind” (26). He argued that “such support tends to reinforce the image of the minority film-maker as a valiant artist beating on the outer gates of a comfortable system which whether liberal or conservative is rather pleased to have a little protest” (26). Limiting their visibility only to works of political protest Barclay worried would mean associating native peoples just with the current problems produced by colonialism rather than with a range of cultural narratives and experiences; it would hamper the creative potential of populations that had historically been silenced in media. People he claimed needed the chance to be able to produce films that didn’t have explicit political agendas, works like animated features, soap operas or cross-cultural genre movies like the Maori Fung Fu film he envisions called, The Taiaha

Kid.23 Though his example is fictional, one could imagine child of the 80s and pop culture enthusiast, Taika Waititi, making this exact type of movie. The rise of Fourth cinema through directors like Barclay and Obomsawin, which increased the visibility of indigenous stories, paved the way for later experimentations with genre conventions in works like Taika Waititi’s irreverent genre comedies. The work of these foundational directors enabled the younger generations to not only perceive filmmaking as a career

23 A word play on the iconic Karate Kid; the word Taiaha referring to a wooden staff traditionally used by Maori warriors. 143 option for native peoples but to gradually shift into post-modern experiment with popular genres. This move opened the door for more eccentric and imaginative thinking by filmmakers but doing so has also necessitated a reengagement with colonial era tropes, especially in regard to the outdoor adventure movie.

This type of film owes its development to the popularity of wilderness survival fiction and although scholars have extensively analyzed the textual history of such works in travel literature, their cinematic representations remain largely disregarded. Those who have discussed the topic tend to concentrate on the action genre and gender without addressing their connection to the wilderness setting.24 The one outlier to this scholarly trend is the film Into the Wild, based on John Krakauer’s biography of Christopher

McCandless, which has received extensive discussion as an adaptation in relation to the romanticism of nature, the protagonist’s misreading of place, and his reliance earlier environmental writers like Jack London and Thoreau.25 The literary allusions of the story have perhaps made it more appealing to English scholars, but as a tragic narrative based on a real-life example the film also diverges from the conventions of the more typically inspirational messaging of survivalist Hollywood films. In this chapter, I focus on these types of wilderness survival movie which form the basis of this underappreciated genre

24 Tasker, Yvonne. The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film. 1st ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Tasker covers the development of the action film during the studio era from Douglass Fairbanks and Errol Flynn Swashbucklers to war films, 80s action blockbusters, and superhero films. She reads these in relation to gender and cultural history but doesn’t concentrate on environments.

25 Merino Noël, editor. Wilderness Adventure in Jon Krakauer's into the Wild. Greenhaven Press, 2015. This anthology analyzes the source text and its adaptation to film. This third part of the collection includes chapters on audience reaction and gender politics by Kate Tuttle, attitudes towards nature by Evan Eisenberg, and how the film fueled problems with nature tourism in Alaska by Tim Mowry. The text has also garnered research on its antecedents by C. Hanssen C., Lisa Ottum, Amy Clary, and M. B Hackler. 144 and Taika Waititi’s adaptation of this genre through the lens of Fourth Cinema in Hunt for the Wilderpeople. I will first outline the Hollywood conventions of this genre and then look at how his film critiques these through his unique brand of playful meta-humor in ways that celebrate racial inclusivity, but which fail to unsettle the environmental tropes of the adventure film.

5.1 Eco-Survivalist Adventure as Film Genre

Developing around the same time as the eco-disaster spectacle of the 1970s, which concentrated on an ensemble cast of archetypal characters facing natural catastrophes like fire, earthquakes, or rogue waves, the wilderness film relied on a man vs. nature theme for the central conflict. One of the few authors to look at representations of nature in

Hollywood films, Pat Brereton briefly discusses eco-disaster films, arguing they often express conservative social values and lack of discussion of human based environmental devastation, even as they privilege the agency of natural forces (64) Nature not only became a more prevalent part of films, but a key factor in their plot development.

Although this trend coincided with rise of the Green movement in America, the changes to the production process itself may have also partly contributed to this foregrounding of outdoor environments. With the end of the studio system and its reliance on enclosed sets, movies became more mobile. The shift towards a greater freedom for location shooting facilitated an interest in developing films around a wider variety of real-world environments and climatological conditions, a feature previously restricted to Westerns.

Like the popular eco-disaster movies early wildness survival films like Walkabout

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(1971), Deliverance (1972), or Flight of the Phoenix (1965) rely on the visual spectacle of dramatic environmental cinematography. They built their tension through the fish-out of water experience of the white protagonists lost in a natural environment for which they are unprepared, a standard convention in later iterations of the genre. One of the only scholars to specifically define the overlap between nature and adventure conventions in film, Salma Monani argues in her study of Being Caribou that in these films “nature is a wild space and habitually outside the boundaries of the viewer's life; the adventure lies primarily in the thrill of crossing the boundary and facing the power and unpredictability of the wilderness” (102). She situates these films in relation to the emotional thrills of outdoor recreation and notes that scholarship has increasingly written around this topic without defining the foundation of it as a stable genre. She notes that

scholars such as Gregg Mitman, Derek Bouse, and Cynthia Chris have analyzed such

films within the category of wildlife films. In Reel Nature , Mitman examines historic

films such as Roosevelt in Africa, which documented Theodore Roosevelt's 1909-10

African safaris; the early film entrepreneur Colonel Selig's Hunting Big Game in

Africa, Alone in the Jungle, and In Tune with the Wild; and Osa and Martin Johnson's

expedition films Trailing African Wild Animals , Simba , and Congorella. Each of

these films highlights the thrill of adventuring in wilderness. (103)

Though scholars are addressing many of the same types of films they are not doing so through a common terminology. I want to build on Monani’s framing of the nature adventure film by examining its function in relation to modern genre Hollywood depictions not merely in terms of emotional thrills and escapism, but also current anxieties over human adaptability and re-education processes in a world of mass

146 production urban living. Significantly the protagonists of these movies through trial and error must acquire the skills necessary to adapt to their new circumstances, managing water and food resources, and finding/building shelter from the elements. As with the case of the latter two films, these tropes often combined a sense of the natural threat with a fear of the ethnic other whether it be murderous Appalachian hillbillies or armed Arabs traveling in the desert. Walkabout though slightly more sympathetic in its portrayal of natives similarly registers a sense of cultural confusion and white panic on the part of the white school children in their interactions with an Aboriginal boy.

Though more recent films have to some degree challenged the Eurocentric conventions earlier decades the basic format of the genre, harkening back to an even older literary tradition of the Crusoniade, has remained largely intact. The basic plot involves a neophyte character (often a white, middle-class man) 26who through faulty technology or machinery failure is forced to learn survival skills in a harsh new world.

Films like Castaway (2004), about a Fed-Ex employ washed ashore on a Pacific Island and The Edge (1997), a thriller about a soft-spoken millionaire and a brash magazine photographer facing off against a Kodiak bear exemplifies the modern genre. The latter functions as a contrast in cultural attitudes towards nature as the older untried armchair outdoorsman played by Anthony Hopkins proves more capable of survival, a message that encourages audience engagement with environmental self-education. Consistently popular, these survival oriented films have arguably become more prevalent within the last decade with a string of recent releases including Kon Tiki (2012), Life of Pi (2012),

All is Lost (2013), Against the Sun (2014), Everest (2015), The Revenant (2015), The

26 Monani stresses this racial norm of the genre in her article as well. 147

Mountain Between Us (2017), and Arctic (2018). These types of survival films are often themselves adaptations of a range of print materials from novels like Life of Pi, to personal memoirs, or recreations of historical events. They can also vary greatly in approach with films like Kon Tiki taking a more anthropological approach to recouping indigenous survival knowledge. As these examples demonstrate the genre is quite flexible and directors can mold its genre elements to suit a variety of tones and purposes, from

Walkabout’s dreamlike surrealism, to The Edge’s dramatic tension, from the romance of

The Mountain Between Us to comedy buddy romps like Walk in the Woods. The genre has even crossed over into the realm of science fiction with the perils of space or extraterrestrial terrain in Gravity or The Martian replacing the typical stories of wilderness survival after shipwreck or aviation crashes.

Despite the shift in settings and tone, these films all express a common anxiety about the power of the natural world from which modern characters and presumably audiences have become alienated. The increased reliance on technology and industrial manufacturing to solve the everyday problems of modern life (cellphones, GPS, internet) has ironically fueled an increasing interest in these types of films over the past decade. As obstacles of achieving self-reliance when removed from these conveniences have grown the stakes of such stories have perhaps risen for the contemporary viewer. Characters isolated from rescue or outside communication in these movies are compelled to rely on their natural knowledge and DIY abilities to make or find everything they need to survive. The process of watching others struggle and typically succeed in their adaptations to a new setting serves as a type of catharsis for white urban audiences, increasingly distanced from traditional self-reliant skills common into the mid-20th

148 century like foraging, hunting, sewing, or wood working. These movies about survival also speak to a moment of global anxiety about the environmental instability of climate change; by projecting themselves onto survivors who prove their adaptiveness to unfamiliar natural conditions, these films offer a coping mechanism for audiences.

Moreover, because of their limited cast, these movies also typically serve as character studies by which the protagonists learn more about physical capabilities and emotional fortitude and while coming to terms with their flaws. This aspect fits with earlier literary traditions of living with nature as a road to greater self-knowledge. Though the characters experience this trial by nature it is usually short lived as the resolution of most films involves their return, not always contentedly to the “modern” world. Interacting with nature is a test the characters must pass rather than a perpetual relationship that extends into their futures, a pattern that also makes the films less challenging to the norms of modern living or its capitalist exploitation of nature.

5.2 Barry Crump and New Zealand’s Man Alone Myth

Even as they offer audiences a reassuring message about human adaptability, wilderness survival films also express underlying anxieties about Western masculinity in a modern era. Despite experimentation over several decades and a greater inclusion of women and people of color, the lead in action films is still most commonly a middle-aged white man. Though these types of protagonists are prevalent in action adventure films, they take on a particular resonance in relation to New Zealand history. Borrowing from a tradition of exploration and frontier travelogues, these modes of storytelling traditionally

149 enabled white settlers to negotiate their colonial identities in relation to place, establishing cultural archetypes like New Zealand’s laconic bushman. Indeed, “the man alone” motif dominated the country’s national literature well into the late 20th century. As

Alistair Fox argues, literary expressions by white male authors were complicated by a sense of cultural alienation once the country became self-governing in 1907. He explains that, “Previously, settlers had been able to think of themselves simply as transplanted

Englishmen. Advancing political and cultural separation from Great Britain, intensified by the geographical isolation imposed by 12,000 miles of ocean, produced nostalgia for a lost security, together with a feeling of abandonment (264-5). This sense of searching for an identity engendered an entire subgenre of fiction, named for John Mulgan’s Man

Alone. The 1930s novel focuses on a psychologically vulnerable white male protagonist who shuns social expectations, retreating to work on an isolated farm where he carries on an affair with the owner’s half-Maori wife, later killing him. He then flees into the bush and when he attempts to reintegrate into society, finds it no easier to fit in than he did originally. Fox claims the books expresses “a realization on the part of New Zealanders that they need to work out some kind of psychologically viable relationship that integrates their sense of the geographical reality of where they live, with the cultural legacy that informs the values of the transplanted society in which they must conduct their collective existence” (266). The inability to do this creates a sense of isolation that is at once figurative and spatial: the man alone never seems to fully belong anywhere, nor can he remain in one place for very long.

This sense of the man alone persists even in more lighthearted fare like Barry

Crump’s novel Wild Pork and Watercress (1986) about a Maori boy and a Pakeha

150 woodsman who elude the police by hiding out in the bush. The novel’s Uncle Hec, an older white trapper, mirrors this “man alone” archetype of earlier fiction. Hector, who has served a sentence for manslaughter, later hides out in the bush after the police falsely assume he has kidnapped the young Maori boy, Ricky. Crump, who rose to fame with his

1960 publication, A Keen Man, a novelized account of life as a deer culler in the bush, personified the popular image of the Kiwi hunter. His writing uses a folksy sense of humor to celebrate male outdoorsmanship. Yet Crump equally performed this persona publicly through his popular car commercials for Toyota four-wheelers. In a 1992 ad he mercilessly rattles his partner over bush terrain, off-roading on the “widow-maker” path to ford a river. His wry commentary, asking “Are you married, mate?” before taking the rougher shortcut epitomizes the type of affable outdoorsman popularized in at the time by other actors like Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee. Though these types of media treat gender performance as comedy, they nonetheless draw upon a long tradition of colonial fiction championing male self-sufficiency through bush living. However, underneath such representations lurk a darker side, the troubled man alone archetype, the alienated outsider who can never find his place. As Fox avows in his examination of the trajectory of New Zealand literature,

The picture that emerges is one of a deep, identity-subverting anxiety apparent

beneath the macho surface of the masculine stereotypes historically celebrated in

New Zealand: the self-sufficient, stoical Pakeha “Kiwi bloke” on one hand, and

the fearless, hyper-masculine Maori warrior/sportsman on the other. Indeed, these

mythic stereotypes emerge as compensatory defences by which New Zealand men

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have sought to protect themselves against the anxieties to which antipodean

circumstances have made them habitually prey. (236)

If the man alone myth persists in Crump’s work, Wild Pork and Watercress represents a shift in its reimagining of the genre through a reliance on cross-cultural companionship. By the 1980s, New Zealand’s sense of its own identity and national history where far more contested. The protest movements had awakened the country to concerns over racial inequalities. The nation’s white and Maori populations had to some degree remained socially and emotionally divided, with Pakeha? citizens often ignorant of or prejudiced to the predicaments of Maori peoples. Crump’s novel, based on a real- life friendship with Coonch, a Maori boy, dramatizes this national moment of cultural change responsible for the rise of New Zealand’s image as a multicultural state. The alliance between the young Maori narrator, Ricky, and Hec, an old Pakeha woodsman, evading the capture by the police and social services speak to a modernization of the anti- authoritarian man alone theme. Though the plot is certainly comedic, the novel employs an earnest tone through its young adult narrator, concentrating on his growing relationship with Hec as the old-timer teaches him hunting and foraging skills. The novel is about finding a sense of comradeship across generational and racial boundaries.

Nonetheless it centers on the white male character’s education of the alienated Maori child, a recuperative survivalist narrative that overwrites and sanitizes the history of indigenous displacement and social upheaval which produced the boy’s isolation in the first place.

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5.3 Hunt for the Wilderpeople: An Indigenous Comedy of Cultural Relations

As such, the novel poses compelling problems for filmic adaptation, easily lending itself to the formula of the buddy adventure movie, but also raising issues for how to engage with its social politics. The tone of Wilderpeople follows in this pattern, relying on Waititi’s signature blend of meta satirical humor and heartfelt sentiment. Waititi’s reputation grew out of his early genre films including What we Do in the Shadows, a mockumentary about vampires living in Wellington and Boy, a coming of age film set in the 80s about a Maori child negotiating his relationship to his dead-beat father’s reappearance. Wilderpeople reads as a direct follow up to Boy since it explores some of the same themes of loss and neglect through Ricky’s accounts of the foster care system.

However, whereas Boy drew upon Waititi’s experiences of 80s rural New

Zealand, Wilderpeople draws attention to its source material, especially for a national audience familiar with Barry Crump’s writing and persona. The film wholeheartedly embraces its status as an adaptation by dividing the story into chapters. On-screen text identifies shifts in the story with individual chapter titles, often tying back to earlier character dialogue. In addition, the tile credits for the film feature text flanked by deer antlers mimicking the cover of Crump’s A Keen Man. As such the film playfully draws attention to its textual origins and the process of narrative development.

Though the movie alludes to Crump’s authorship, it also foregrounds Maori perspectives in ways missing from the original text while mitigating the sense of environmental endangerment articulated in the novel. The film firmly establishes the move’s central theme of cultural blending from its opening shot. The overhead views of

153 the bush are underscored by a song called “Makutekahu,” which combines layered chanting tracks in Maori and Latin, merging indigenous and colonial music (Broxton).

Moniker, the band responsible for the soundtrack, explain that the title refers to the name of a lake where Ricky’s foster mother said she had wanted to be buried, where the land meets the cloak of the sky. In addition to centering the story from a Maori perspective through these types of subtle elements, Waititi’s film also functions as a type of environmentalist escapism. He reimagines the plot as a metaphorical homecoming for the

Maori protagonist, fostering a sense of community, but also softening the book’s treatment of nature. In place of the novel’s stark ending prophesying the protagonist’s death in a climbing accident, the film repackages the bush as a space of exuberant play, couching the rhetoric of environmentalist education in the guise of comedic romp. While it offers a compelling message about learning to live in tune with the bush, the movie nonetheless provides a romantic escapism for audiences. Ultimately, such genre films serve dual purposes, providing a means of negoiating lingering tensions over what home means in a nation scarred by long histories of racial violence and offering a reassuring psychological coping mechanism for disaster fatigued audiences in an age of anthropogenic crisis.

If the novel stresses a multicultural basis for the modern New Zealand state through its protagonists, the film goes one step further by building a community of quirky participants with Hector and Ricky at its center. Initially introduced as a potentially threatening character, arriving over the hill with a pig on his back, Hec echoes the image of the Man Alone typified by earlier texts even by Crump’s media persona. As with much of the film’s humor, this introduction is punctuated by a snarky meta aside from the

154 social worker who asks, “Who’s that Crocodile Dundee guy over there?” Initially antagonists, as in the book Ricky and Hec grow to depend upon one another in the wilderness and though they remain the heart of the film, Waititi broadens his canvas. The side characters including a set of three hapless campers, a remote Maori bush family, and a white reclusive conspiracy theorist are all additions to the original story, appearing only in the film. They add to the comedic tone, but also create a greater sense of social interaction than the novel, which is really a three-character story at best. Moreover, the movie builds a greater sense of common interest and shared identity through its coverage of Hector and Ricky as mass media heroes. Whereas the novel only records such events from scraps Ricky learns, the movie includes TV news interviews, print journalism, and images of Ricky on social media. The film becomes an amalgamation of sources not unlike Grace’s Potiki, though tonally it bears more in common with King’s work.

Indeed’s King’s narrative borrows from filmic storytelling techniques by intercutting often on common words of overlapping dialogue. If King drew upon these tricks from popular media, Waititi seems to have embraced the capacity for film to produce playful post-modern mashup of allusions. The humor relies on an undercutting of preestablished modes or audience expectations not unlike King’s rewriting of classic Western literature.

The use of montage as media bricolage is at once a light-hearted romp, yet it also produces a sense of communal investment in the pair from around the country and treats the film audience as similarly vicarious participants in their struggle.

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Fig. 8 Film still of Uncle Hec’s introduction to the audience

In addition, the film even more than the novel stresses the boy’s need to find a home and a sense of belonging. As Sarah Ward notes in her analysis of the film as a family drama the narrative of Ricky’s history supplied by the social worker describes

Ricky as a delinquent removed from previous foster homes. She explains

By circling the rural house he’s being told to call home, choosing not to engage or

say a word, and then returning to try to re-enter the police vehicle that brought

him there, Ricky signals that he expects the same reaction. ‘He’s home now. He’ll

be okay,’ Bella counters. With her wide smile, a friendly glint in her eye and a

homely looking knitted jumper emblazoned with a cat’s face, Bella appears gentle

and perhaps even fragile, but she’s not daunted by the so-called problem child that

will be staying with her (11)

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Ward positions this sense of homelessness in a tradition of Hollywood coming of age films from Wizard of Oz to E. T., but she overlooks the narrative’s relationship to colonial racial politics. Bella, played by Maori actress Rima Te Waita, offers the potential of a kind of cultural homecoming for the character who has never known his own mother.

When this potential of a comfortable existence is snatched away by her death, the traumatized Ricky and the gruff Pakeha, Hec must attempt to overcome their defensive barriers to form a human connection. As outsiders each has spent their live looking for a home. Hec explains that Ricky’s foster mother, Bella, took him in because she herself was without family and recognized what it was to need someone; She is equally accepting of her husband, Hec, another outsider looking for acceptance. Ricky, having moved from family to family before the film associates the maternal care she provides with a sense of home. Unlike more typical depictions of wives in early Pakeha literature, the mother figure is not just a domestic provider though. The film unlike the book establishes her as Ricky’s introduction to the wild since before her death she teaches him to shoot and shows the squeamish Ricky how to kill a pig and skin a possum. The bush then and even their travels become associated not merely with adventure, but a quest to find a home.

The change in the title is especially illustrative in this regard. Whereas the novel title stresses the survivalist food sources of hunting and foraging, the film title instead uses a thematic metaphor about wildebeests. While reading a book in the camping lodge,

Ricky compares himself and Hector to wildebeests who travel over 1,000 miles when migrating to “find a better home.” Ricky later coins the term “wilderpeople” as an impressive name for themselves, owning this label as a sign of their survivalist prowess

157 in outwitting the police. The metaphor carries a double meaning; the duo is hunted like animals by the state, but they are also migrating of their own will, looking for a place to belong. This desire for belonging is characterized not just by interpersonal relations, the growing parent/child bond between Ricky and Hec, but through a desire to belong to a particular place. Ricky carries Bella’s ashes with them looking for the spot Bella claimed she came from where “the cloak got wet by the sky.” Though Bella is probably making a mythical allusion to the sky god Rangi, rather than a geographic place, Ricky later releases the ashes near a waterfall he considers appropriate. Consequently, the film connects place to oral storytelling and family history. Character dialogue here fulfils as similar function to the inclusion of poetry or singing in Maori fiction offering a link to ancestry through narrative.

As a Maori filmmaker, who got his start in New Zealand indies before breaking into Hollywood, Waititi is aware of his privileged public position and uses it to advocate for his community. As Elizabeth Flux notes in her review “He also invests in actors like

Dennison [who plays Ricky] and Boy lead actor James Rolleston, and draws on what is unique to New Zealand – particularly in terms of landscape and culture – to give the country greater prominence internationally…. Woven throughout are comments about

Maori culture in New Zealand today, quietly invoked through Ricky’s mostly unspoken past and rebellions” (111). He provides opportunities for young up and coming Maori actors and champions them in his projects. He had previously worked with Dennison in an anti-drug PSA before casting him in his film. Moreover, Flux notes “This commitment to his community and performers has made a wide-reaching impact. Now, Waititi is also sharing his success for the benefit of aspiring filmmakers at large.” He was a key leader

158 in the 2016 creation of the Sundance Institute’s Merata Mita Fellowship for aspiring indigenous artists, named for New Zealand’s first female Maori director, and a contemporary of Barry Barclay. Though he has since crossed over into mainstream

Hollywood productions with big franchise movies like Thor, he consistently foregrounds the need for indigenous representation in film, including a reference to his heritage in the

Oscar acceptance speech for best adapted screenplay for his most recent film, JoJo

Rabbit (2019).

Despite this activist work, Waititi’s films, especially Boy, have received criticism for their perceived lack of “Kaupapa Maorism,” or a traditional orientation to social practices and values. Set in the 1980s Boy tells the story of a rural Maori family in which a young boy must look after his sibling and cousins when his grandmother leaves for a funeral and his deadbeat dad returns, attempting to dig up a buried stash of drugs. Critics disliked the film’s reliance on pop culture references to American media like Dallas or

E.T, viewing it as too Americanized. However, as Alistair Fox explains by the historical period in which the film is set “Maori culture had rapidly assimilated aspects of the globalized youth culture emanating from America, resulting in a striking cultural hybridity that is everywhere in the film” (191). The film, although less “traditionally”

Maori in its depiction, Fox alleges captures the experience of indigenous youth coming of age in a modern world of global media consumption. This reality of media saturation is as relevant to Waititi’s generation as it is to contemporary viewers. Moreover the lack of specificity in regard to social histories, another element commonly criticized, makes the film less overtly political than earlier films like Merata’s or Barclay’s, but its themes remain pertinent to the experiences of indigenous peoples trying to find their way in the

159 world. As Eva Rueschmann explains this challenging of traditional conceptions of

“authentic” Maori identity as partly due to Waititi’s status as a biracial director. Waititi notes

Pretty much all of my work is about outsiders and I think growing up as neither

full Maori nor full Pakeha - or white. I’ve always been an outsider, felt like an

outsider in both worlds, even as I identified more with my Maori side. (qtd. in

Rueschmann 154)

Rueschmann explains that the director uses his position as multiracial to challenge rigid conceptions of what it means to be Maori. He states “Through his bicultural vision and wry comedic approach, Waititi undercuts orthodox assumptions about indigeneity and asks us to appreciate how contemporary Maori identity is connected to both a locally rooted and a globally consumed popular culture” (154). The fusion of pop culture references to gangster rap, or even Ricky’s use of the haiku as his form of self-expression

(a movie adaptation of Ricky’s journaling) blur the edges of more rigid definitions of indigenousness in the 1980s. The teenager capable of at once participating and using signifiers of global culture even as he learns more traditional rural environmental practices suggests that the two modes of identity definition are not incompatible

The playful style of Waititi’s pop-culture allusions often belie a more serious message about psychological trauma faced by indigenous children. Rueschmann argues that the pop culture references in this film echo those of Boy, Waititi’s previous coming of age movie in which the title character constructs elaborate fantasies about his absentee father, Alamein, and uses Michael Jackson as an escape from his everyday life. He notes

160 that Waititi even as he uses these references acknowledges that they arose out of destructive past. Discussing the character of the father, Waititi says

Alamein is based on a generation of people who were brought up to be ashamed

of their culture. They were punished at school for speaking their language and

were constantly told that to be Maori meant you were stupid […] So all these

guys, and girls too, started living fantasy lives where they changed their names

and became less Maori, preferring to identify with outlaws, rebels, and romantic

heroes like Gunslingers, Native Americans, famous conquerors, and Samurai.

(qtd. Rueschmann 155)

To reimagine oneself through the heroic myths of the dominant culture offered a means of defense to some degree. Rueschmann explains, “This darker meaning of fantasy, make-believe and humour as a psychological mechanism to cope with the corrosive effects of colonization and disenfranchisement is intricately tied to the theme of coming of age” (155). Though she argues that the characters in Waititi’s films must learn to develop a more complex view of themselves, I would note that this doesn’t necessitate a complete erasure of pop culture mediation. Boy dances a Haka at the end of the film using Michael Jackson moves and Ricky continues to prefer gangster urban fashion and refer to himself as a participant in “skuxlife,” a New Zealand term for a thug, even as he moves to a rural life of backpacking. These endings demonstrate the empowerment of rewriting or redefining the meanings of mainstream culture through a Maori orientation; they are not merely trying to fit themselves into other people’s stories but instead co- opting them for creative purposes.

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Waititi positions these moments of pathos within a broader satire of action genre tropes, deconstructing norms of masculinity and adventure in New Zealand. For instance, in Wilderpeople, the TV presenter covering the live search for the fugitives says he is reminded of “first blood, John Rambo, a man alone, obviously they are two men alone.”

With this one line of dialogue Waititi satirizes the macho image of gun toting jungle heroes of Hollywood and the New Zealand literary trope of the man alone. By noting that they are two men he also undercuts the very notion of the man as loner unable to establish a social relationship since Hec and Ricky not only rely upon one another, but eventually are integrated into the Maori family they meet earlier. Rueschmann astutely notes that this Maori family, despite living in a remote location, are presented as middle class and technologically savvy. When the father meets Ricky, he responds to him like a celebrity, asking for a selfie where he poses in a warrior stance with tongue next to the bemused Ricky. He follows this by saying “You’re the man. keep doing what you’re doing, Ricky Baker. Keep striving – stay Maori, bro.” His exaggerated reception is played for comedy, but also suggests how contemporary social media functions as a way of performing masculine ethnic identity and finding acceptance into a larger community.

The signifiers of masculine identity that Ricky tries out throughout the film, Waititi implies, are themselves a tool for role playing necessary to adolescent growth. Ricky ultimately has to decide who and what type of man he will be. From this view point the characters he meets seem to offer a range of expressions with Ricky as the bridge between the Maori family and Hec, the gruff loner.

The movie brings the white Pakeha man into the Maori community, but it also provides a hyperbolic send-up of the Man Alone; whereas Hec is gradually humanized so

162 that he becomes more than a cultural stereotype, Psycho Sam represents the unhinged, dangerous version of the Man Alone. Rueschmann argues that Waititi introduces the most satiric incarnation of the ‘Man Alone’ in the comic figure of Psycho Sam (Rhys

Darby), an anti-social survivalist whose belief in doomsday predictions and conspiracy theories had driven him into the bush years earlier (162). Sam literally appears at first as a moving bush, having disguised himself with foliage; he jokes that he is “bush-man.” He feeds Hec and Ricky moldy biscuits while talking about the dangers posed by the government and its bureaucratic paperwork (There’s a form for everything). Significantly this “mental” character owns “Crumpy,” the same red Toyota four-wheeler popularized in the 90s commercials by Barry Crump. With Ricky underage driving, they careen over the terrain, off-roading in a style that echoes the ads. The overhead shots of the single car pursued by police vehicles allude to the iconic shot of Fellowship of the Ring where the

Ringwraiths chase Frodo on horseback. Even the shot of the Toyota sailing over a tourist taking photos of the local mountains satirizes the New Zealand’s landscape as scenic tourist spectacle. Though Waititi is perhaps best known for his satirical comedy, he often couches serious points under the guise of humor. In this case the heart of the film rests in the struggle to cope with loss and alienation produced by social institutions. The Man

Alone of the film is a humorous send-up, but Waititi also alleges that it is a dead end.

Both Ricky and Hec must move towards one another and stop their defensive posturing,

Ricky as an apathetic “juvie” who hates the country and Hec as the gruff self-reliant hermit happy to be alone. Together they must develop a new shared imagining of masculinity within a familial bond.

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Fig. 9 Crumpy” off-roading in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

5.4 Adapting Wild Pork and Watercress as Escapist Eco-adventure

Though Waititi’s film choices in his adaptation stress a greater sense of community and a meta critique of the macho action genre, his representation of nature echoes many of the tropes of earlier studio films. A buddy comedy, the film also falls into the category of ecotourist adventure. The overhead aerial shots of the two trekking over ground mirrors Jackson’s style of shooting montages in the Lord of the Rings. Waititi also incorporates a meta allusion to this when Ricky hiding from the police mimes putting on the ring to Hector, comparing their situation to the shot of the hobbits hiding from black riders under a tree. Wilderpeople knowingly participates in the larger culture of New Zealand as ecoadventure fantasy by blending the immersive spectacle of earlier

164 adventure films with an appeal to environmental ethos. Ecomedia as a form remains caught between two opposing poles, the profit motives that drive movie production and the subject matter’s potential to promote environmentalist values. This inherent tension mirrors real world divisions between economic opportunism and an increasing awareness of the need for environmental responsibility.

In returning to a comparison of film with the original fictional source, this shortcoming of ecomedia becomes more apparent. Both Crump’s and Waititi’s texts celebrate a type of tramping, anti-authoritarian, backwoods lifestyle, but they employ distinctly differing representations of the natural world. Though the novel certainly romanticizes the bush as a space of sanctuary in opposition to the corruption and institutional power abuses typified by the child welfare system, it also complicates this idealized view to stress the underlying danger of the bush space. Ricky’s training in tramping begins by learning how to carry himself in the bush; Uncle Hec says “If you try to break off every twig and fern that gets in your way, you’ll be worn away long before you’ve made any impression on Urewera.” (67) Ricky adds “The bush had us so absolutely outnumbered in every direction you had to have respect for it. No one could live there without sticking to the rules” (67). He realizes the need to adapt to weather changeability and dense forest growth, avoiding larger boars or game that might pose too much of a physical threat. He must learn to live by the rules of the bush, to find paths through the woods rather than breaking everything in this way. The pair prove adaptable to the environment, sharing many memorable meals of boar, duck, watercress, eel, and crayfish, yet finding food remains a continual challenge, one clearly evidenced when the novel switches perspectives towards the end. The final chapter of the book shifts from

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Ricky’s first-person journal accounts of his travels to an epitaph from Robbie Barton, a trapper friend with whom he and Hector stayed during the winter. Having compiled the notebooks Ricky left in their camping huts into the current “novel,” Barton comments on his first-hand experience of the two travelers and his speculations on their disappearance.

The hopefulness of Ricky’s viewpoint is tempered by the perspective of the trapper, himself a woodsman on a remote station who describes their camp as a “moldy nest of ponga-fronts” and the men “dressed in rags tied around them with strips of torn cloth and flax” (195). Both are worse for wear, especially Hec who limps from his improperly healed foot injury while Ricky initially overweight, has now grown very thin.

The novel’s ambiguous ending exemplifies this presentation of the bush as imposing both in the sense of splendor and its deadly power. After serving time in a welfare home Ricky leaves with Hec for another trip “round a few of the huts” to photograph the birdlife. Yet two years later no one has heard from them. Given their publicity the two have acquired a kind of mythic status, earning blame for any mischief done in the area, but Barton punctures this grandiosity with a suspicion that they “must have dropped off one more ridge in a tricky place…I do believe they are still out there in the Urewera bush, two ragged skeletons lying at the bottom of some bluffs (201). The lack of clarity concerning their end highlights the overwhelming hazards of the bush.

They might still be tramping the wilds as counter cultural heroes or they could be dead.

Bushmen the novel implies can meet an unexpected or violent end just as easily as any other “wildlife.” The ending also fits within a convention of post-colonial literature in which the disappearance of into the bush symbolizes a complete absorption by the landscape as in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Whether read as liberating or frightening, the

166 ending effectively distances audiences from the characters they have followed turning them into mythic heroes of the wilderness, their fate forever obscured.

In contrast to the book’s sobering conclusion and emphasis on the need for humility in the face of the natural world, the film offers a more easily consumable outdoor adventure romp. For example, whereas both texts feature Hec injuring his foot and a wild pig mauling one of the hunting dogs, the film treats such on-screen violence either for comedic effect or as heightened fantasy. The wild boar that attacks them in the movie appears unbelievably large, crazy eyed, and grizzled, evoking a visual equivalent to a verbal tall tale, one rooted in a real-world environment, but with the animal’s characteristics exaggerated for dramatic effect. Similarly, when Hector jumps on the boar’s back the fight choreography is highly mannered in keeping with the fantastical tone of the film. The editing which cuts away from the image of the injured dog and

Hec’s eventual mercy killing (only heard, but unseen) emphasizes the emotional impact of the loss but without its gruesomeness. Even at its worst then, the bush remains a space where physical hardship and violence are refracted through the lens either of comedy or fantasy, all part of the grand adventure rather than foreboding reminders of man’s own vulnerability in the face of nature.

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Fig. 10 Raging Boar in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

Though Hec and Ricky rely on the Forestry Department’s huts for supplemental food and clothing in both texts, the industrialized world in Waititi’s film is more pervasive and ever present. In the novel while on the run the main characters lose track of time and news contact for months, remaining in hiding even after the police searches have died down. In the film the team experience more frequent human contact with other campers, police on their trail, remote Maori families, and even a weird conspiracy theorist. On the one hand such encounters necessarily make for more action and drama conducive to cinematic storytelling; audiences can gage character development through the protagonist’s interactions with various new acquaintances and the director can better maintain a level of suspense about the threat of their capture. However, these decisions also inform the depiction of the bush itself. By limiting the social and geographic

168 isolation experienced in the novel, and by largely eliminating the real potential for starvation or misadventure underlying Crump’s text, the film presents the bush more as a space of adventure than one of serious danger.

Consequently, the film constructs an easily consumable wilderness space for audiences, one that practically markets ecotourism. The film positions nature as a space that enables male bonding, emotional growth, and character building, a type of temporary sanctuary from the stifling bureaucracy and institutionalized control of state authority.

Yet, the bush space is itself government owned land, linked by the type of huts common to many reserves in New Zealand. Given the comedic adventure tropes of the film, Hec and Ricky’s escape into the bush often plays like a buddy road movie albeit with hiking, a kind of genre mash up where the quirky humor of Walk in the Woods meets the criminal chase plot of Thelma and Louise. The bush is as much an escapist locale as

Sherwood Forest, a place of crazy capers to outwit the threatening social worker baddie and her dim-witted police cronies. Whereas franchises such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings fueled an explosion in scenic tourism, imaginatively transforming New Zealand geography into the magical realms of Middle Earth for future visitors, Waititi’s film promotes a more exaggerated or heightened version of real vacation destinations. After seeing the film, one might feel inspired to physically trek New Zealand’s national park trails. As such like the LOTR films it to some degree functions as a filmic advertisement, a modern version of the travel brochure. This appeal even inspired The UK paper The

Guardian to run a story on advertising five tourism options that fans of the movie might enjoy including sessions with SOS Survival Training company where a guide transports clients to the bush surrounding Auckland with trips running from 45 minutes to three

169 days (Smith). This piece also references other popular outdoor New Zealand tourism staples from horseback riding on Waiheke island, hiking on coastal beaches on the

Hillary Trail, to bird watching trips, and cabin stays in the same park used in the film. As this news story reveals the film relies on types of outdoor experiences not only replicable for travelers but actually well established in the New Zealand tourism marketing. The movie might inspire this type of travel, but it operates as a type of ecotourism in its own right, carrying audiences along on a journey of escapism back to nature, one in which the pressing stakes of environmental crises are virtually absent.

The emphasis in the story on Ricky’s discovery of the huia bird thought to be extinct plays into these notions of New Zealand as fantasy where lost natural wonders wait for the patient watcher. Rueschmann explains that “The huia has tapu (sacred) status in Maori culture, and, according to Michael Szabo, ‘[i]n pre-European times, only chiefs of high rank and their whanau (family) wore the distinguished tail feathers in their hair’”

(164). She summarizes a history of the bird from Szabo noting that the Maori gave feathers as a present to the Duke of York in 1901, leading to Maori and Pakeha alike overkilling the birds to imitate the royal fashion statement. This practice as well as the destruction of its habitat led to its extinction. Rueschmann reads the use of the bird as a type of symbolic statement in the film, a recapturing of cultural heritage and a sign of hope for Ricky who promises to return with a camera to find the bird and take a photo of it. Though the huia certainly fulfils this function culturally, the inclusion of the bird without reference to its fraught history, a strategy adapted wholesale from the novel, relies on romanticism to overwrite natural violence. In this world of the eco-adventure, extinct species might not be dead but only reclusive. The aim of returning to the bush to

170 take photos of the bird and gain money and fame from their discovery calls to mind the mentality of earlier white naturalists or colonizers interested in profits rather than in a sacred respect for nature.

The environment, the film implies, is a space of spiritual freedom unhampered by concerns over pollution or the man-made effects of settlement on nature. As such it falls into some of the common traps Monani argues are typical of the adventure nature drama.

In her reading of Being Caribou, a Canadian film about endangered wildlife, she alleges that “depicting nature as something other, a place to visit, play in, or conquer feeds into the cultural logic of capital” (105). She references Carl Talbot’s claim that “those efforts of capital to manage a relation to nature in the sphere of consumption result in nature as a

‘stylized spectacle’ packaged for easy consumption” (105). This perspective is antithetical to more activist ecological messaging, and certainly dominates genre films like Waititi’s. Monani elaborates that Being Caribou matches a type of subgenre in adventure films that are more environmentally engaged as it doesn’t present its characters as fully capable; rather they face the humbling experience of adapting and living alongside nature which to some degree tempers the capitalist consumption rhetoric. To a lesser degree Hunt for the Wilderpeople participates in this by comedically showing

Ricky’s initial lack of ability to take care of himself in wild, but the film largely glosses over the book’s attention to the necessity of physically and intellectually adapting to the bush; Ricky in the text learns how to move in the wild by finding paths and listening to wildlife. By downplaying the difficulties of adaptation, the film makes the adventure seem more attainable and desirable for audiences.

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In a world where audiences are often allergic to more didactic environmental messaging, such a depiction has some benefits, but it additionally poses ethical problems concerning representation. By romanticizing nature as a place of escape the film endorses camping and bush trekking, a popular New Zealand tradition, as a lifestyle pursuit for a broad global audience. It encourages biophilia, but at a fairly superficial level. The film facilitates the audience’s vicarious engagement with the bush experience, a type of educational narrative by which the alienated city dweller is carried along with Ricky through his initiation into bush life. It doesn’t provoke any questions about the management of land through park conservation, its use within a tourist industry, nor its connection to social history. The landscape is stunning, but it is largely a place without context.

If its environmentalism remains limited, the film’s meta commentary offers a knowing wink to its own complicity in the same tropes it sends up. The decision to end the movie by showing Ricky living with the Maori family from earlier in the film and inviting Hec to come stay with them also shifts dynamics of the story. Though it makes nature less threatening, it also offers a positive social resolution. The plot is no longer about two outcasts against the world, but rather a blended family group tied to a settled home in the bush. The film offers a deliberate rejection of the novel’s more pessimistic anxieties about recuperating alienated men. By showing Ricky with the family group still able to go on trekking adventures with Hec, the film offers a sense of stability the novel refuses to supply, providing a more progressive revision of gender in relation to the survival film. The man alone in Waititi’s film is neither rootless nor alone: he has found his home. Yet, in the same way that Fourth Cinema enabled a necessary revision of

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Eurocentric themes, the pressing demands of modern environmental problems necessitate an increasing attention to tropes of nature in genre storytelling. Literary fiction and documentary have proven flexible enough for revisionist imaginings of storytelling. The same is certainly true of genre films like though this requires a greater investment in tackling environmental concerns in a complex way. If comedy, adventure, and coming of age films have proven adaptable to addressing problems of colonial racial history, these genres might equally offer directors the potential for greater engagement with the politics of environmental injustice. In the current moment of social protest, in which creators are reevaluating of our inherited narratives, we need to look for opportunities for reframing storytelling conventions engrained within popular forms of media. In the intersections between race, gender politics and ecocriticism lie a darker satirical comedy ready for the telling.

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