Utopian fiction by indigenous authors anywhere

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Utopian fiction by indigenous authors anywhere

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1rogerbelling Erste Nachricht
Bearbeitet: Jun. 22, 2007, 4:36 pm

I would like to catch at an early stage anything that comes out on how indigenous people see their future. Possibly a quiet beginning by Graham Hurlburt is http://wpl-pac.winnipeg.ca/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=P1822701Y684K.12413&menu=..., in my local public library. There are hints to the future in Bernard Assiniwi (http://wpl-pac.winnipeg.ca/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=11825XW869Q88.41643&menu=search&aspect=subtab24&npp=10&ipp=20&spp=20&profile=wpl&ri=3&source=%7E%21horizon&index=.GW&term=Assiniwi+Saga+des+Beothuks&aspect=subtab24&x=10&y=8#focus) and Darlene Barry Quaife (Bone bird).
Does anyone know more than that?
Thanks.

2Qwofacenosehead
Jun. 20, 2007, 11:24 pm

Cool. Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction?

3rogerbelling
Bearbeitet: Jun. 22, 2007, 4:47 pm

My topic line and internal 'logic' suggest fiction. (Non-fiction about natives Ward Churchill has taken about as far as one can go without losing a tenured professorship.)
Another tentative indication I see that the world is ready for utopian fiction by natives is a utopic poem that Ward Churchill helped to get into print, on Page 370 of Since Predator Came (the paragraph in italics). From other ethnicities, and retrospective rather than utopian, I have in mind examples like Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfuz or The Famished Road by Ben Okri. A trilogy would be nice, to cope with the complexity of changing cultures, but all the ones I can think of so far did not really work beyond the first volume.

4rogerbelling
Jun. 23, 2007, 10:28 am

The idea to look for indigenous utopian fiction came to me while reading a passage by Ward Churchill on pp. 34-35 of Since Predator Came, very briefly excerpted here:

"At long last, we have arrived at the point where there is a tangible, even overriding, confluence of interest between natives and non-natives.
. . . The information required to recreate this reality is still in place in many indigenous cultures. The liberation of significant sectors of Native America stands to allow this knowledge to once again be actualized in the "real world", not to recreate indigenous societies as they once were, but to recreate themselves as they 'can be' in the future. . . . It follows that it is incumbent upon every conscious human - red, white, black, or yellow, old or young, male or female, to do whatever is within their power to ensure the next half-millennium heralds an antithesis to the last."

This is not the only visionary passage in Churchill's book, which clearly does not content itself with drawing a new bottom line under the old past.

Marx steadfastly refused to provide a "blueprint" of the future he had in mind, and fulminated against utopian socialists. But after well over a century of deadends, the distinction of Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias was discovered, and maybe by analogy, that is applicable to indigenous writing. Crafty novelists might have a less vulnerable ego at stake than an already-famous world-revolutionary. And the few mainstream utopias we know have "lasted" quite well.

5Qwofacenosehead
Jul. 2, 2007, 10:46 pm

From the Churchill quotation you have here, I would guess that--and correct me if I'm wrong--you are looking for fiction that reflects "utopian" ideals, not (only) speculative utopian fiction--is that right?

6rogerbelling
Jul. 5, 2007, 8:12 pm

I am largely a layman in literature, and even after consulting yahoo.com about utopian ideals, I don't understand your question, partly perhaps because I am rather absorbed in a pragmatic phase of my website's #1 priority (pesticide research - I am near the culminating stage of analyzing cancer data of 2 cities that spray malathion against mosquitoes). One of my literature teachers believed that novelists sometimes have trail-blazing ideas before scientists get around to them, giving as an example that Balzac seemed to understand modern psychology before Freud did. For a long time I have been fascinated with experimental communities which can be thought of as social laboratories, an alternative to arguing social theories forever. Apparently there are reasons why there are not more experimental communities; they are "en duda" as the Spanish Wikipedia article about kibutzim plausibly observes, and as one is lead to expect after reading the very protective, very hesitant foreword by B.F. Skinner to Walden II. (I ran into an academic literature review on experimental communities once, and it was rather pessimistic.) In a utopian novel, as I understand it, one can pursue "thought experiments", without incurring the risk of putting real people in jeopardy. There are considerable incentives for novelists to be realistic in some sense - competitive with lab experiments in a sense - otherwise nobody much would buy their books and support their fame. Although writing a novel is well beyond my ambition - I never got beyond autobiographic sketches that derive from personal correspondence - I think it would be nice if the medium of the novel were used more to explore alternative societies. And perhaps it has been done more than I am aware of, and Library Thing knows about it.
(Although I searched the tag clouds somewhat, to no avail so far.)

7batsao Erste Nachricht
Jul. 14, 2007, 8:18 am

Roger,
Have you read LeGuin's Always Coming Home yet? It is my favorite Utopian fiction novel, and there is even a recording associated with the novel, which I had once upon a time, but am moving around the country so much, am not certain I could find it right now.

8batsao
Jul. 14, 2007, 8:25 am

Just found website with some samples of the poetry and music of the "Kesh":

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/ach/Index.html

9rogerbelling
Jul. 14, 2007, 12:41 pm

Thanks to AnnaO for the utopian references. As an engineer and a grandson of H. Belling who was an abundantly published reviewer of Latin poetry, I have a certain respect for the craft of poetry and am vaguely aware, as a former computer designer, of the computer help one could get to deal with the mechanics of poetry (for which even my old-fashioned grandfather showed guarded fascination with quantitative explorations on Vergil's verses, and he wrote a book on Latin prosody). But for my routine personal consumption, and for appeal to a broad public that would have to agree to any change of the world for the better, I am looking to conventional epic prose fiction, if possible as attractive as video which I don't have. (I do find that my public library has the book you recommend, and I was able to read its author's This Stone on the website you gave. It reminded me of hearing Ruby Dee tell the parable of The Half-People, to a community audience in my old American hometown, and with great artistic effect. I never got around to reading Rilke, and so far I am left with a suspicion, that much poetry has something "half" about it!)
Perhaps the most advanced aboriginal author I know so far, in this direction of exploring the future of aboriginals and of all of us, is Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water, which I prioritized after seeing an enthusiastic comment on LT, and am only 1/3 through with. It is somewhat hard for a white person to get into, being prickled by discrete little arrows incessantly, but it starts in a deft trickster story format that I was familiar with from a culture similar to my own (the Tünnes and Scheel stories in the Rhineland), and it seems to focus with poetic vision power on the question why indecisiveness seems to be the fate of aboriginals. A starkly futuristic setting is not necessary to get into the mood for such issues. I heard of some aboriginal science fiction, and didn't spend time yet to follow up on it because I suspect it is only "technical trash". (The only science fiction novel I can remember reading was by Isaac Asimov, one of his Foundation titles, and it seemed to me as emotionally barren as his life with a pedantic wife.) As a down-to-earth kind of philosophical novel, Green Grass reminds me somewhat of "the greatest Catholic novelist of the modern times", whose name I wished I could recall: it is a first and last name reversed, somewhat like in the case of William Trevor (a sharp Irish ethnic author). That forgotten author was a doctor who never practiced and ended in suicide, like I think his father and maybe his grandfather. The existential acuity in that book was about as intense as in Camus, and I think Thomas King intentionally doesn't go quite that far, to catch a wider level-headed audience and do something useful for them.
I will keep reading and keep using LT members as my guide.

10rogerbelling
Jul. 14, 2007, 5:47 pm

A note to "AnnaO" though not related to aboriginal lit except through the suicide theme: The mysterious "greatest Catholic novelist" with the reversed name who came to my mind as a philosophical novel contrast with Thomas King, is Walker Percy. (I wasn't able to clarify this with LT, interestingly, though they have a suicide tag and a list of related authors. But plain yahoo.com did it via Wikipedia. There are over 2,000 books by Walker Percy listed by over 1,000 LT members.)

11Qwofacenosehead
Jul. 15, 2007, 4:23 pm

I have to disagree, rogerbelling. I don't think that King is a more "advanced" writer than other Aboriginal/Native writers, and I'm more than a bit concerned with the way some of this discussion is beginning to smack of racism. If you are including King in this idea of "utopian" Native writers (and I'm not sure we're using the term the same at all--I'm meaning literature that imagines an ideal future society and I'm thinking that you're), then I think there are countless Native writers that could fall into this, in fact I think most of us could. An integral part of the role of our literatures as Indigenous people is to imagine a future. And if you've already decided that Native science fiction is going to be "technical trash" without reading it, it is difficult to know what directions you should go.

I should hope that, if you are interested in Aboriginal/Native writing, you would begin by reading the literature and the scholarship first. It is difficult for me to not challenge the interest in looking at Aboriginal/Native literatures as places of imagined "social laboratories," considering the very real ways that European colonialism in North America has--in fact--used (and continue to use) Native communities for both scientific and social experimentation in very real and horrific ways against our will.

My apologies that my tone here is so sharp, but it does seem perhaps you should pause and re-evaluate your relationships to Aboriginal literatures and communities before continuing this line of thought, which is certainly coming across--at the least--condescending and intensely problematic.

If you haven't read them, I would recommend these books of scholarship: Muting White Noise: Native American And European American Novel Traditions by James H. Cox, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism by Craig S. Womack, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875-1928 by David Wallace Adams, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith.

12rogerbelling
Jul. 16, 2007, 3:12 pm

Thanks for the constructive critisicm, Qwofacenosehead; you sure know more than my local librarians, although two of the authors you mention are represented in our public library, and I can go into university libraries to some extent. The term "utopian" is apparently a problem that maybe one should avoid for the time being. I mean it more as "hypothetical" than as "guaranteed ideal and benign". I imagine it is a big chore for a novelist to put a whole future world, independent of present stereotypes, together in a credible fashion. Perhaps one should include the audience in the venture and realize that they will decide anyway what they can believe in, while one should perhaps leave the novelist free to concentrate on the creative task of suggesting something new that hasn't been tried, and showing it in all its human ramifications. One could still expect a more satisfying result than from asking a politician to suggest a future world.
Now I will do the obvious and turn to more reading and less corresponding.

13Qwofacenosehead
Jul. 16, 2007, 7:18 pm

I hope you are well. This book might be helpful, too. Out of the Depth: The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia by Isabelle Knockwood.

14rogerbelling
Bearbeitet: Mai 7, 2008, 9:15 pm

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin meets and exceeds my quest for works dealing with the aboriginal future, and with intercultural synthesis like Ward Churchill seemed to anticipate. It raises the question if people will argue with details and differences of taste - but a novelist is pretty safe in that respect. I am looking forward to finding time to read other works by the same author, and to comparing with other authors' details and tastes. Le Guin is awesomely authoritative, with the range of her creativity!
As an old man with fading memory I did not jump on Le Guin's bandwagon of learning another languge, having considered and chickened out of Swahili once after learning that it was a synthetic language. But I recognize a synthetic literary language and culture like that of the Kesh as a stroke of genius for aboriginals with their diversity problems in a conformist world.
Special thanks to annaO for matching my thoughts!
(I had found and liked in the meantime the two volumes of Renewal (Prophecy of Manu, and Teoni's giveaway) by Barbara Smith, or Gua Gua La with her native name, as of 05/07/2008 finally in LT with one copy. It is daring and engaging but not dazzling, in comparison.)

15Qwofacenosehead
Feb. 23, 2008, 2:27 pm

Le Guin isn't Native, of course. Is this other author you mention? This group is a space for mostly for a discussion of Indigenous literatures, by Indigenous authors.

16rogerbelling
Apr. 7, 2008, 11:50 am

I don't know, Qwofacenosehead. Having a native name, like Grey Owl, doesn't mean anything. And culture-mongering is a very dangerous trade. One has to remain discriminating, as is appropriate for literary scholars! (Even if Raven's Cry gets endorsed by natives and native authors, and was a remarkable, liberating demonstration.)

17rogerbelling
Mai 7, 2008, 9:53 pm

As Qwofacenosehead mentioned LeGuin is not Native, it remains as a shadow on my mind that Always Coming Home with all its benign intentions takes a very definitive assertive stance against nomadic lifestyle, which is quite essential to many aboriginal people. They addressed survival with flexibility rather than technological overhead and overproduction, in a world where population density was no problem. Even among whites there is a prejudice against apartment renting and in favour of "ownership" and its political benefit of resultant docility of the little "owners". Some mainstream people adapt to the rigours of industrial society by keeping their life flexible as much as possible, rather than heading into foreclosure like many American real estate customers now. From Europe I am somewhat familiar with how the Gypsies hold on to their traditions, although they have websites now (e.g. http://romove.radio.cz/en/), and some of them have become recording stars. Can fiction bring the discussion to a head, in a patient, caring spirit?

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