UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Refuse Ecologies: Indigenous Posthumanism in Polluted Futures A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Stina Evans Attebery September 2020 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson Dr. Mark Minch-de Leon Dr. Dana Simmons Copyright by Stina Evans Attebery 2020 The Dissertation of Stina Evans Attebery is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Sherryl Vint for her generosity, insight, patience, and constant support throughout this project and to Grace Dillon for introducing me to Indigenous futurisms and welcoming me into this field. I am also indebted to my committee members Mark Minch-de Leon and Dana Simmons for their feedback and support. I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues and friends who have supported me at UC Riverside and at ICFA, SFRA, and SLSA, including but not limited to: Bridgitte Barclay, Kristina Baudemann, Katherine Bishop, Mark Bould, Grant Dempsey, Paweł Frelik, David Higgins, Kylie Korsnack, Cameron Kunzelman, Isiah Lavender III, Sean Matharoo, Graham Murphy, Josh Pearson, John Rieder, Brittany Roberts, Ben Robertson, Kameron Sanzo, Valérie Savard, Conrad Scott, Patrick Sharp, Rebekah Sheldon, Ali Sperling, Taryne Taylor, Christy Tidwell, Lisa Yaszek, and Ida Yoshinaga. I’m grateful to be part of such a friendly and supportive academic community. Special thanks to my summer virtual writing partners—Dagmar van Engen, Katherine Buse, and Miranda Butler—without whom this project may never have gotten through the final stages of writing and revising. Your feedback, commiseration, and companionship mean the world to me. This project received financial support from a R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship, the University of California’s President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship, and a Sawyer Fellowship for the 2015–16 Sawyer Seminar on “Alternative Futurisms.” My first chapter will be published as “Oil, Water, Lightning: Indigenous Posthumanism and Energy Futures in Elizabeth LaPensée’s Thunderbird Strike” in the September 2020 issue of iv American Quarterly. The events and conversations around the Sawyer Seminar were particularly helpful for the early stages of this project, and I would like to thank Nalo Hopkinson and Sherryl Vint for organizing this year-long celebration of race in science fiction and my fellow fellowship recipients Kai Cheang, Taylor Evans, and Brian Hudson for a year of wonderfully generative conversations. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their love and encouragement throughout this process. Thank you to my family, who have insisted on preemptively calling me “Dr. Attebery” for the past few years. I am glad to finally make good on that promise. My love and thanks to my partner, Josh, for reading my drafts, making me laugh, and reminding me that my ideas have value. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Refuse Ecologies: Indigenous Posthumanism in Polluted Futures by Stina Evans Attebery Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, September 2020 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson In an era increasingly defined by apocalyptic climate change and extinction, critical theories often situate politics in strange forms of more-than-human kinship. In this dissertation I explore the ways human lives are entangled with the nonhuman matter of technologies and technological waste in addition to the animal and plant beings endangered by these conditions of environmental precarity. Post-apocalyptic Indigenous futurisms depicts dangerously toxic technological kin created from the refuse of capitalism and colonialism but enlivened through their relationship to Indigenous ontologies which find kinship in a nonhuman world. Indigenous futurisms craft ecologies that incorporate these toxic materials not just as kin but as a form of posthuman kinship. These figures are posthuman not because they are positioned beyond or after the human, but because they are as entangled with capitalism, climate chaos, and colonial science as they are with Indigenous ontologies of nonhuman life. This reorients a set of conversations about technological futurity towards land, sovereignty, and settler colonialism. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Posthuman Kin ...........................................................................................1 Indigenous Ontologies and Critical Posthumanism ........................................................4 Petroleum, Biomedicine, Haunting, and Refuse ............................................................22 Chapter 1: Posthuman Petroleum ..................................................................................26 From Oil Futures to Indigenous Futures ........................................................................30 Living Oil and Dead Fossils ...........................................................................................34 Land, Oil, and Water ......................................................................................................44 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................53 Chapter 2: Posthuman Biomedicine...............................................................................55 Witnessing, Risk, and Toxicity ......................................................................................59 Unmapping Toxic Bodies and Environments ................................................................76 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................90 Chapter 3: Posthuman Haunting ...................................................................................92 Indigenous Media Landscapes .......................................................................................96 Posthuman Time ...........................................................................................................113 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................121 Chapter 4: Towards a Refuse Ecology .........................................................................122 Cars, Holotropes, Genes, and Pollutants ......................................................................124 Anthropocene Stories ...................................................................................................138 Salvage and Refuse ......................................................................................................144 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................153 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................154 vii Introduction: Posthuman Kin We call here for those studying and storying the Anthropocene to tend to the ruptures and cleavages between land and flesh, story and law, human and more- than-human. Rather than positioning the salvation of Man—the liberation of humanity from the horrors of the Anthropocene—in the technics and technologies of the noösphere, we call here for attending once again to relations, to kin, to life, longing, and care. -Zoe Todd and Heather Davis, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” 775 Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. -Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 4 In an era increasingly defined by apocalyptic climate change and extinction, critical theories often situate politics in strange forms of more-than-human kinship, from Donna Haraway’s provocation to “make oddkin” in “hot compost piles” to Zoe Todd (Métis) and Heather Davis’ call to decolonize the Anthropocene by tending to our nonhuman relations on this damaged planet. I would like to propose one such kin: the plastiglomerate. Discovered and named by Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, and Kelly Jazvac along the Kamilo Beach in Hawaii, plastiglomerates are comprised of sand, shells, basalt, wood, coral, and other formerly alive and never alive matter bound together by melted and hardened plastic (Corcoran et al. 4). It is sometimes possible to pick out individual bottle caps, plastic fibers, and other pieces of debris poking out of these rocks, and sometimes the plastic of the plastiglomerate is only visible as brightly colored swirls of blue, green, or yellow in the rock. They can be strangely beautiful objects, even as they portend an increasingly toxic ecosystem. 1 Plastiglomerates defy easy categorization. They are naturally forming and human made, technological as well as geological objects. Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac refer to plastiglomerates as “an anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record,” a way of framing these living and nonliving assemblages through their relationship to a troubled future (4). This language of speculative futurity is picked up in popular science publications on the plastiglomerate, where they are referred to as “Future Fossils” (Nuwer) or as a variety of “Techno-Fossil” (Stone). Unlike the microscopic fragments of “plastic confetti” waste found in our oceans, plastiglomerates are dense objects that threaten to become part of the fossil record. Describing