Image courtesy of Santiago X (Koasati/Chamoru)
The Earth is Our Mothership
Andrea Carlson
I had to findanother place where they hadn’t perceived black people to be and that was on aspaceship. - George Clinton[1]
Earthbound.It’s trying to get up that gets us down. - Heid Erdrich, from the poem Earthbound[2]
When Grace Dillon, PhD (Anishinaabe) coined the phrase “IndigenousFuturisms,” a term that pays homage to Afrofuturism, she had sought a place where Native presence could be imagined in science fiction. Her anthology ofIndigenous science fiction, Walking theClouds, is organized under six major concepts such as Native Slipstream,Contact, and Native Apocalypse. Within the context of literature these attributes of Indigenous Futurisms appear well supported; but could IndigenousFuturisms as a larger movement intersect with practices that abandon the subtext of science fiction altogether? Are there places outside of Dillon’s imaginings where visual art, music, and dance are devoid of settler incursion altogether? Are there entirely different metronomes available to us for transcribing time and space that are still identifiable as Indigenous?
I moved to Chicago a few years ago, and have found it to be a case study for the necessity of Indigenous Futurisms. Chicago is a city where Afrofuturism is celebrated; it is where musician Herman Poole Blount became SunRa, and it is the place where Afrofuturist writers of today, including Ytasha Womack and Nnedi Okorafor, call home. Chicago is also a place of prolongedIndigenous erasure. The area that we now know as Chicago is the land of theThree Fires Council: the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe. The Miami, Hochunk, and Menominee are among many other nations who have continually lived in Chicago from time immemorial as well. Gaa-zhigaagwanzhikaagis the Ojibwemowin word for “the place abundant in wild leeks(skunk-grass),” but the truncated Zhigaagong, Ojibwe for “on the skunk,” is Chicago’s likely toponymy.[3] I’veenjoyed living in a city that is filled with the language of my people, if only in appropriated forms. Near Michigan(“Grand Lake”) Avenue sits a site marker for the now-destroyed Shaganash (“English”) Hotel. The plaque explains that the absent building sat on the site of the Wigwam (“lodge”) Building which had occupied that space at an earlier time. There are, like in all North American cities, street names and statues paying tribute to prolific killers of Indigenous people. At the end of Columbus Avenue is a statue of Christopher Columbus that refers to the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 held in Chicago and a nation celebrating its “handiwork.”[4]
Beyond Chicago’s tributes to genocidal settlers, there is one place-name that doesn’t fit that category, nor does it fall neatly into recognizable Indigenous reference. I had heard of the name Jean Baptiste Point du Sable only after moving to Chicago. On the north side of the DuSable Bridge is a likeness of Point du Sable in the form of a handsome bust with a plaque characterizing him as the first non-Native who established the settlement that would become Chicago. He was a man of African descent through his Haitian mother, and he is commonly referred to as Chicago’s “founder.” The plaque explains that he established the “first trading post” in what would become Chicago. That seems important, until you consider the fact that Chicago is on the land of the Odawa people and odawameans “he/she trades” in Anishinaabemowin. Are we to infer that the Odawa had no trading posts among them despite their entire nation identifying as traders? We know that Point du Sable was Potawatomi kin, by way of marrying and having children with a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa. Anishinaabe people didn’t know ourselves in terms of race, but in terms of nations, kin (or clans), and family. Point du Sable was Potawatomi kin, adopted into a Potawatomi familial and political structure. Venerating him in isolation from his family renders his adoption by the Potawatomi people as immaterial to his identity while erasing the context that allowed him to participate under Potawatomi sovereignty. To hear Point du Sable’s story told through the plaques on the city’s monuments, one might assume that the Chicago of the 1770s was in a fog of otherworldliness. It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to view Point du Sable as a lonely astronaut arriving on Mars as the “first non-Martian founder of Mars.” If Point du Sable were alive today would he even recognise this legend as his own?
The fleeting joys of seeing one’s Indigenous language in our environment—these positive affirmations of Indigenous presence—is easily tamped down by an ongoing history of dispossession meant to extract from, supplant,and disappear Native presence. Severing Indigenous people from our ancestrally given epistemologies is part of the settler-colonial project of assimilation,but negating Indigenous existence was carried out in the minds of settlers too. Historian Jean M. O’Brien (WhiteEarth Ojibwe) precisely characterises this method of settler erasure and rebranding that was and is used to disappear Native people as “firsting” and“lasting.” We all have examples: the first trading post, the last of the Mohicans, the last Native nation to leave any given city, the first cemetery, the first baby born in any location, or the first experience by non-Natives of anything already known by Native people termed as a “discovery.” Jean O’Brien’s book furthers the work of Indigenous Futurisms because Indigenous Futurisms do not have to be deemed fictional, are often true, and we can expose foreclosures of Indigenous presence of the past. From our ancestors’ vantage point, we are the beings of the future. We are in a position to interrupt continual Indigenous erasure by advocating our presence now. Indigenous Futurisms are as much about healing in the present time and a process of truth telling found in re examining our pasts, as it is about reimagining the future.
Native peoples’ current existence in the world has been characterized in the dominant culture’s imagination as anachronistic, a failure of order in place and time. Native people are denied contemporaneity. In Beyond Settler Time, Mark Rifkin writes that in this view, “Native people(s) do not so much exist within the flow of time as erupt from it as an anomaly, one usually understood as emanating from a bygone era.”[5]These settler preconceptions are not unnoticed and are targeted by Indigenous Futurists. Grace Dillon’s idea of an “Indigenous slipstream” describes an aspect of Indigenous Futurisms that transgresses settler time by “replicating nonlinear thinking about space-time.”[6] This is an aspect of Santiago X’s 2018 artwork THERETURN (o:lači okhiča) where a slipstream is made visible. In this piece, a triangle constructed of fluorescent-tube bulbs frame the lower corner of the gallery. Within it, a projected view of clouds gives the viewer a false sense of hovering in the sky. The effect virtually erases the partitioned floor and wall segments while creating a boundless space—a space without walls.X (Koasati/Chamoru) poetically states that the work is “scripted replacement in a space without space.”[7]
Image courtesy of Santiago X (Koasati/Chamoru)
X’s refusal of a limited duration that is imposed on Native people is also reflected in his work outside of white-box gallery spaces. Recently Santiago X unveiled a serpent mound in Schiller Woods Park in Chicago, and he plans to build a spiral mound in Chicago’s Horner Park.He is careful to avoid talking about mound building as a historic pursuit, or of Native people in the past tense. He states that the act of mound building is “trying to reinvigorate the [I]ndigenous landscape and is oriented towards giving [I]ndigenous people in this city a place to go. But not be framed in history, but giving us a place that is built by us and where we can celebrate our resilience.”[8]N. Scott Momaday famously said that “the greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.”[9] When we imagine ourselves in public, outdoor spaces where settlers have become comfortable dominating, our presence seems radical. Cultural visibility can be an unintended interruption of the colonial assimilation project. The earthworks of Santiago X are forms of “imagining ourselves richly”[10] in outdoor, public spaces. As much as those works are for the enjoyment of Native people, they are mobile and have the ability to occupy spaces where Native people often go unimagined.
[1] TheLast Angel of History, directed by John Akomfrah(1995). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ54DdUSwRk (accessed January 22, 2018).
[2] Heid E.Erdrich, National Monument (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,2008),89.
[3] TheDecolonial Atlas; “Gaa-zhigaagwanzhikaag (Chicago, Illinois) inAnishinaabemowin (Ojibwe),” blog entry by Charles Lippert and Jordan Engel,December 17, 2014. https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/chicago-in-ojibwe/ (accessed November 11, 2019)
[4] Reference to Simon Pokagon’s “The Red Man’sRebuke,” a publication in response to the World's Columbian Exposition(1893,Chicago, Ill.), 9. https://archive.org/details/redmanquotsrebu00Poka/page/n7 (retrieved November 11, 2019)
[5] Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2017),preface.
[6] Grace L. Dillon, ed. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction(Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2012), 3.
[7] Santiago X’s website https://santiagox.com/work#/thereturn/ (retrieved November 11, 2019)
[8]https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/08/14/horner-park-could-become-home-to-artistic-mound-to-celebrate-areas-native-american-history/ (retrieved November 11, 2019)
[9] N. Scott Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” inIndian Voices: First Convocation ofAmerican Indian Scholars San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970), 55.
[10] N. Scott Momaday, Commencement Address,Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, N.Y., June 1, 1980. Quoted in,Christopher Vecsey, “Envision Ourselves Darkly, Imagining Ourselves Richly” in The American Indian and the Problem ofHistory. Calbin Martin, ed.