Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality (original) (raw)
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Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore
Contrasting with much of Western discourse, Native American myths frequently ascribe world-creating deeds to non-human animals. Further, Native American stories display a remarkable slippage between the worlds of the human and non-human animals, a slippage that continues into worldview, rituals, and everyday life. Using these stories as a starting point, this article seeks to connect the current theoretical movements in posthumanism with those in mythology, in line with Graham Harvey's call for "academic animism", a re-appraisal of the role of non-human agency and culture. New developments in animal studies have revolutionized the way scholars perceive of non-hominid mental lives and abilities, which has led to challenges to traditional Western beliefs and practices. Many of these new concepts would be old news to Native Americans, whose traditions fundamentally and categorically posit radically different relationships than the non-native. In short, this paper will present a mytho-evolutionary blueprint for broadening our understanding of culture and narrative far beyond the human, yet including the human as well, as part and parcel of cultural life on earth.
Beyond Beasts: Some Cases of Native American AniManism
Literary Studies, 2020
We all are animals and animals (are) us. There is only a thin line between both of us and beasts. We often tend to fall towards the beastly line. This paper, however, will show how the Native American tribes maintain their ties and wisdom with the animals. For them, animal spirits stand for life and livelihood. They regard animals as “the messenger for wisdom about life, nature, and power. These also prophecy future (events), as we take dogs’ moaning to herald earthquake and cats’ growling to trumpet troubles. The tribes represent those spirits through symbols on clothes, art and ceremonial items as “Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” or TEK, in short (Grayson). For example, northern Plains peoples used buffalo images in holy rites and placed its skulls on homes to honor its spirit while others name clans after animals, and use animal amulets, talismans, and fetishes. In Nepal also, some Tharus have Gajaraj (King of Elephants) clan; and Hatti (elephant) is the clan name of a Vaishya...
Predators and Pests: Settler Colonialism and the Animalization of Native Americans
Environmental Ethics, 2020
The tethering of Indigenous peoples to animality has long been a central mechanism of settler colonialism. Focusing on North America from the seventeenth century to the present, this essay argues that Indigenous animalization stems from the settler imposition onto Native Americans of dualistic notions of human/animal difference, coupled with the settler view that full humanity hinges on the proper cultivation of land. To further illustrate these claims, we attend to how Native Americans have been and continue to be animalized as both predators and pests, and show how these modes of animalization have and continue to provide settlers motive and justification for the elimination of Native peoples and the extractive domination of Native lands.
Snake(s)kin: The Intertwining Mêtis and Mythopoetics of Serpentine Rhetoric
Snakes suffer from a bad reputation, and few human allies stand to prevent their extirpation. Yet more rhetorically powerful than any ethical injunction halting human violence upon nature, a sensuous moment of intertwining with the serpent can enact onto-epistemological shifts and dispositional transformations. Through a serpentine mêtis and mythopoetics of cunning wisdom and knowledge production, we can imaginatively, transversally, re-member the feeling of raising serpentine energy along the spine, sloughing off old skin, and slithering down among the roots and rhizomes into the depths of uncertainty. Opening up a space for the otherwise, responding to the hum of rhetorical energy coursing through our more-than-human relations, we may still live to tell new stories with the snakes and the rest of our strange kin. Keywords: becoming-animal, cunning, entanglement, narrative identity, posthumanism
At the Crossroads: Disability and Trauma in "The Farming of Bones"
MELUS, 2006
In October of 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered his troops to massacre as many as 15,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. 1 The attack came as a complete surprise to these Haitians, as well as to many Dominicans; no prior event had warned them of what was about to take place. The killings were swift and particularly brutal. 2 Trujillo ordered his soldiers to use machetes and other crude weapons instead of guns, a brutality captured by the name of the massacre: in Spanish, El Corte, the cutting, and in Haitian Krèyol, kout kouto, the stabbing. 3 Those who survived lived with permanent injuries, scars, and impairments as well as the psychological trauma of having experienced a massacre.
Protectors, Aggressors, and Kinfolk: Dogs in a Tribal Community
Free-roaming dogs are a common phenomenon on many American Indian reservations as well as globally. Lack of canine restriction may be pathologized by outsiders, assumed to be a "problem" that reflects underlying individual or community dysfunction. Seldom investigated are the cultural logics underlying the lack of restriction, and the positive role that dogs may be playing in the community. This paper examines relationships between a northern plains reservation community and their dogs. We found these relationships to be complex and multifaceted, harkening back to a pre-contact past when human survival itself depended on the dog, and extending into a present shaped by a broad range of cultural notions about the human-dog relationship. We explore the concept of dog restriction, asking what it means for connections with dogs in a context where relationships with dogs run deep, but have been disrupted by settler colonialism. We found a community that very much desires dogs and views them positively, with their role as protector highly valued on nearly every level. While traditional notions guided many behaviors toward dogs, other conceptualizations were simultaneously in play, including rural ideas about animals as well as American popular culture. Our findings call into question the ethnocentric bias that construes all free-roaming dogs as strays, which is linked to cultural notions of "pet ownership" that equate love for dogs with restrictions on their movement.
Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies
Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, 2020
The fields of critical disability studies and critical animal studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavors intersect? Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of more-than-human animals and disabled humans are interconnected. Composed of 13 chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Lori Gruen, the book is divided into four themes: • Intersections of ableism and speciesism • Thinking animality and disability together in political and moral theory • Neurodiversity and critical animal studies • Melancholy, madness, and misfits This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars, interested in animal studies, disability studies, mad studies, philosophy, and literary analysis. It will also appeal to those interested in the relationships between speciesism, ableism, saneism, and racism in animal agriculture, culture, built environments, and ethics.
Reclaiming Indigenous Identity through Animal Advocacy In Art
Humanimalia, 2019
If you had to pick an animal that was going to be the soul of your existence, the one thing that made life possible, you would be hard pressed to choose better than the North American plains bison (Bison bison bison).-Jack Brink (Imagining Head-Smashed-In 46) Introduction. Early modern European colonizers who arrived in North America were already experiencing a sense of disconnection from the natural world and its inhabitants, yet animals have always remained at the center of First Nations cultures, traditions, spirituality and identity. Roger Boyd writes that a harmonious relationship between human and non-human animals is at the core of Indigenous ways of life and identity ("The Indigenous and Modern Relationship between People and Animals"). Furthermore, "Indigenous hunter-gatherer societies treat other animals as fully sentient beings which have equal status to humans, and must be shown respect [especially] when they are hunted" (Boyd). Indigenous beliefs attribute spiritual qualities to animals that elevate their social position; "The Cree also share the view of animals as having souls, and experiencing rebirth, in the same way that humans do." The buffalo 1 in particular is an animal that has co-existed alongside many Plains Indigenous tribes and is regarded with the utmost respect. 2 The Plains Indigenous call the buffalo by several names in various languages, distinguishing them by gender, age, and physical appearance (Brink 52). This conveys the way Indigenous cultures have perceived nonhumans as capable of possessing their own identities. Ken Zontek writes that the buffalo is an animal that "traditions of tribes historically identified with ... [and the] history of human-bison interaction extends back to time immemorial, to creation itself" (3). In our interview, artist Adrian Stimson elaborated on the particular significance of the buffalo in the Blackfoot tribe: The Bison plays a very important role in Blackfoot life, it is the foundation of our spiritual societies; the "Motokiks" Buffalo woman society is one of our most respected societies. The Blackfoot see the bison as not only a resource for food, clothing, shelter, tools and spiritual life, we see it as our kin, and it is in our DNA. ("Beyond Redemption and the Buffalo")
The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2013
In The Birth of a Jungle, Michael Lundblad calls for a new taxonomy of "animal studies," the growing body of literary and cultural studies scholarship that has emerged under the heterogeneous influence of poststructuralist theory (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), posthumanist philosophy (Cary Wolfe et al.), and multispecies ethnography (Donna Haraway et al.). Since the term is already taken to imply an "advocacy for nonhuman animals" (12), Lundblad proposes, in effect, a doubling-down: animal studies should be defined as the project to "identif[y] whether texts and practices succeed or fail in modeling ethical treatment of animals" (12). He coins the term animality studies for works in "historicized cultural studies" that, like his own, take seriously the constitutive role of animals in human political discourse but are primarily, fundamentally grounded in concerns for social justice among humans (12). In positing the need for an animality studies with a distinct political and methodological agenda, Lundblad raises an important question. Is the "animal turn"-along with, one might add, the move towards affect, cognition, the material, the posthuman-a turn away from the politically engaged race/ gender/class intersectionalist analysis that has animated American literary and cultural studies since the late twentieth century? If a course adjustment is needed, does it require a reprioritization of the human? Susan McHugh's Animal Stories, it seems to me, offers a productive alternative road map. Following a conceptual itinerary via feminist and queer theory, McHugh puts forth a species politics that goes beyond ethical advocacy for animals and insists on multispecies coagency-of humans acting with animals-in social transformation. One cautionary, one utopian, together the two works under review offer divergent but, in important ways, complementary models on how to engage questions of animal/ity in a field of multiple, differential, and entangled inequalities and vulnerabilities. The Birth of the Jungle powerfully delineates a pivotal moment in US cultural history in which discursive identification with the nonhuman animal went hand in hand with violent social domination. The book's title refers to the "Darwinist-Freudian jungle," a discourse of the essential animality of human beings that coalesced at the turn of the twentieth century, as Lundblad's coinage asserts, under the influence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Sigmund Freud's of sexual instinct, and continues to hold sway today. "'Naturally' violent in the name of survival" and "heterosexual in the name of reproduction" (2), this newly ascendant human-animal sprang into Progressive-Era US cultural politics, giving fresh form and force to racism, classism, and hetero-American Literature
Natural Violence, Unnatural Bodies: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Human In MMIWG Narratives
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2020
Released in 2019, the final report on the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) terms the high rates of murder and disappearance an ongoing genocide. The connected forms of violence that Native American women in the United States experience, however, remain largely unacknowledged. This essay considers how two contemporary cultural narratives attempt to render violence against Native American women speakable, through a focus on the film Wind River (2017) directed by Taylor Sheridan and the novel The Round House (2012) by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich. By analyzing these texts, this essay examines how cultural narratives mediate the boundaries of human life, emphasizing the extent to which such borders are framed by racial and gendered experience. Placing Mel Y. Chen’s understanding of animacy hierarchies into dialogue with Judith Butler’s work on ungrievability, I argue animalistic associations can alternately work to reproduce or disrupt normative conceptualizations of the human. I contrast the dehumanizing rhetoric that is produced in Wind River with The Round House, which I argue disrupts the boundaries between human and nonhuman, through the recovery of Ojibwe ontologies. Through this comparison, I locate the pervasiveness of a discourse that de-animates Indigenous women in the public sphere, as well as consider the potential for cultural narratives to disrupt this violent logic.