Indigenous Radical Resurgence and Elemental Cartographies
As we bear witness to the wastelanding of the earth by late liberal settler capital, now taking the form of melting glaciers, rising seas, acidification of the ocean, extended droughts, pulse flood events, the extinction of species, Indigenous peoples have been working to green the earth once more. Indigenous land-based governance is an arrangement of life premised on the laws of the elements, which supercede the profit-driven motives of the laws of humans. Rather than seeing climate change as apocalyptic, we can see that climate change is leading to the demise of capitalist economies of scarcity, making way for Indigenous economies of abundance.
As Anishnaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains, Indigenous radical resurgence is based on reciprocal relationships between humans and the more-than-human worlds. We will begin the course by reading Simpson’s beautiful book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2020), which documents a conversation where Simpson convinced Naomi Klein that it was not enough to critique extractivism: the larger problem is capitalism, leading Klein to retitle her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. We will read the work of a range of Indigenous writers, artists and scholars, including Potawatomi writer Robin Wall Kimmerer’s personal essays in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (2015), Australian aboriginal writer Alexis Wrights’ novel The Swan Book (2018),and the controversy over Rebecca Roanhorse (Ohkay Owingeh)’s novel, Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World), all in the context of Indigenous scholars who show us how to envision Indigenous resurgence, arctic imaginaries, speculative futures, and decolonial love.
We will then turn to Hawaiʻi to consider the literary representations of the work of Kanaka Maoli and their settler allies who advocate for working with the elements, not against them. We will start with the work of Dr. Pualani Kanakaʻole Kanahele and her team of researchers who provide us with a blueprint for stewarding the twenty-one wao or horizontal realms of islands. My book, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi, maps the stands that Kānaka Maoli have taken four major land struggles in Hawaiʻi: a light industrial park in Lualualei, the birthplace of Māui, the proposal to construct the Thirty-Meter Telescope, an eighteen-story observatory on the sacred lands of Mauna a Wākea, and maps used by restoration projects at Hoʻoulu ʻĀina in Kalihi and Paepae o Heʻeia at the Hale o Meheanu fishpond in Heʻeia Uli. The restoration projects of these places in have led to cascading impacts that work against climate change. We will look to the moʻolelo that teach us lessons about the kānāwai a ke akua, the laws of the elements, including Keaomelemele.
We will then focus on two places where Kanaka Maoli are regreening the earth. Kahoʻolawe can be seen as a microcosm of the military and corporate Anthropogenic impacts upon the earth. We will explore the element of the wind and the ways that mapping the winds is critical to the work of planting and bringing the rains back to the island of Kaho’olawe, which had been used as a military target for fifty years. We will look to the mele that map the 300 winds of Kahoʻolawe and moʻolelo serialized in Hawaiian language newspapers, including Moses Kuaea Nakuina’s 1902 account, The Wind Gourd of Laʻamaomao. We will end the class by considering the 2023 anthropogenic fires in Lahaina, Maui, focusing on the Kanaka Maoli storytelling on planning and action to rebuild Lahaina.
All studies courses require a 15-page research paper. Students will be working on a 15-page research project on either a text from the course or a text of their own choosing, growing their own archive, curating research on a literary text illustrating ancestral knowledges that help us to make key interventions into climate change. Assignments will help to grow this research project.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) include an awareness of the contributions of Indigenous literatures to the formation of the contemporary field of English Studies, including such subfields as twentieth-century world literature, ecoliteratures, speculative fiction, ethnic literatures, rhetoric, genre studies and cultural studies, written and oral ability to situate the study of these literatures within broader critical and historical conversations.
Required Texts:
1) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2020)
2) Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (2015)
3) Alexis Wright (Waanyi, Aboriginal Australian), The Swan Book (2018)
4) Rebecca Roanhorse (Ohkay Owingeh), Trail of Lightning (1) (The Sixth World) (2018)
5) Candace Fujikane (Japanese settler), Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i (2021)
6) Moses Manu (Kanaka Maoli), He Moolelo Kaao o Keaomelemele / The Legend of Keaomelemele (1906)
7) Moses Nakuina (Kanaka Maoli), The Wind Gourd of La’amaomao
Other readings will be uploaded to Laulima: Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu, Eyak, Alaska Native), Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan), Naomi Klein, chapters form This Changes Everything; Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi), Malia Akutagawa (Kanaka Maoli), Patty Krawec (Anishnaabe), Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua (Kanaka Maoli), Jessica Hernandez (Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec), Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, Margaret Wickens Pearce (Potawatomi), and others.
Students will conduct independent research and will be assigning their research findings as course readings for the last weeks of the course.
Course Requirements
- 15-page research project (35%)
- Three-page project proposal with annotated bibliography that will grow into the research project (10%)
- 2 3-page papers (10% and 15%)
- Short assignments that will become parts of your research project (20%)
- Peer-editing (5%)
- Final exam (5%)