[Pedro Neves Marques:] You already mentioned science, but do you mind going back and talking a little bit more about the notion of “Indigenous science and sustainability”?
[Grace Dillon:] Nowadays, I think in terms of Indigenous sciences rather than science. I feel that’s the way we should think about all sciences, as plural, whether we label them Westernized, Indigenous, or whatever form they may take. Let me quote from Gregory A. Cajete, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo Nation who has worked in the field of Native science or sciences. He asks, “What is Indigenous science?” According to him, “It is knowing how to live in a place sustainably.” [...] What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean. There’s this scene close to the end of the book, after the characters have suffered all of this environmental and extractivist injustice, where the grandmother is passing on her traditional ways of knowledge to her grandson but, since he goes to school, they’re actually teaching each other. “Intergenerational” doesn’t imply a hierarchical, top-down elders’ passing of knowledge only. It’s more of an exchange of ideas. This is what I see going on between generations in our Indigenous communities right now. In the science fiction field, my goal is to quietly change the mission for the top-notch journals in the field that are still simply clinging to stories about advanced technology and this linear way of thinking about knowledge as mere accumulation. [...]
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[PNM]: In Brazil, the word that the postwar fascist regime used for clearing certain areas of the country to allow for so-called development was “pacification,” which was applied to both Native peoples and the landscape. Instead of saying that they would cut down a forested region or displace and “educate” its local Native communities, they’d call the whole process “pacification.” So that’s become an extremely loaded word in the Portuguese language. Beyond the term’s historical associations with the military fascist regime, it reinforces the colonial notion that equates Native peoples with “nature” and a violent wildness, like the threatening woods that you just mentioned. Going back to your ideas, it’s been almost a decade since your anthology Walking in the Clouds was published. And what a decade it was! We saw an intense transformation in the field of science fiction, with a wave of Indigenous, black, Asian, and many other nonwhite authors, [...] being published and offering some of the decade’s most challenging stories. [...] Do you find that multispecies entanglements and the inclusion of nonhuman beings has also grown in visibility, within and outside these stories? I’m asking this because, for instance, in Brazil, debates about the rights of nonhuman or other-than-human beings have been key to Indigenous [...] discussions for at least the past two decades. There, the debate mostly centers around plant or animal persons, and moreover the [...] question of “what is human,” from an Indigenous point of view. That is, the knowledge that terms like “animal,” “plant,” “human,” and “spirit” may mean something much broader than how modern sciences define them.
[GD:] Back in 2012, I was talking about animal persons, rock persons, phenomenological persons, plant persons, and so on, and you could sense a quiet skepticism among some people. They would see it as a form of animism, when in fact I was talking about sciences. For example, plants literally converse among each other; plants that live in toxic areas warn other plants to stay away. There are many examples of nonhuman persons in fiction about sciences. Take Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), a story about a First Nation scientist who is developing chemicals for a bioengineering company that is truly extractivist and toxic, until he sees how that’s impacting the land, together with its animal and plant persons, and he is thrown into a crisis. Does he want to be a scientist? Or at least a scientist in that kind of context?
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[PNM:] How do you see the relation between science fictions and Native myths and mythology? While the modern mind may eventually recognize the cultural value of Indigenous myths, it refuses to see them as scientific evidence. I wouldn’t want to project a meaning onto these stories, so I say this very carefully, but although in Brazil you may not find a great presence of Indigenous science fiction, Native traditions and myths almost seem to perform science-fictionally, in how they both rupture modern categories and expectations and allow for imagination beyond colonial frameworks.
[GD:] I have a lot to say about this. The first thing I’d like to do is to eradicate the term “myth” or “mythology,” because that implies that these stories are false or that they are fictions that should be questioned. Instead, what I do -- and this is what I grew up with -- is to call them “stories.” Everything is storytelling. Indigenous sciences are embedded in stories; this is how we share our Indigenous sciences. I grew up in an [...] anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science. Our word aadizookaanan means “ceremonial stories” or “sacred stories.” Most First Nations don’t share those sacred stories with outsiders. However, in 2012 many of the nations I belong to -- and you should know that we Nish peoples are often called the pacifist-anarchists among other Indigenous nations -- got together and decided to share not only our gikendaasowin, meaning herbal knowledge and science and how they interact with ceremonies and songs, but also our aadizookaanan. We decided that some of our sacred stories needed to be shared globally, because they were necessary right now for dealing with Mizzu-Kummik-Quae, Mother Earth. So the reason I’m interested in science fiction is that when I was little and we had firesides, sweats, and other ceremonies, we were telling stories about star peoples that came to earth in, basically, space canoes. For me, the concept of a spaceship was not unusual. And, of course, we are all star people. We are made of stardust, which is scientifically accurate. Everything is made of stardust.
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All text above by: Grace Dillon and Pedro Neves Marques. “Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms”. e-flux Journal Issue #120. September 2021. At: e-flux.com/journal/120/417043/taking-the-fiction-out-of-science-fiction-a-conversation-about-indigenous-futurisms/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]
