WORLD ECOLOGY, INDIGENEITY, AND EPISTEMOLOGY IN COUNTERCULTURAL AMERICAN LITERATURE

WORLD ECOLOGY, INDIGENEITY, AND

EPISTEMOLOGY IN

COUNTERCULTURAL AMERICAN

LITERATURE

Introduction

She goes through her backpack, keeps her journal and address book, throws away the

muni-bart metromaps. The coins are heavy and they go next, then the greenbacks flutter

through the air. She keeps her knife, can opener, and eyebrow pencil. She puts bones,

pieces of bark, hierbas, eagle feather, snakeskin, tape recorder, the rattle and drum in

her pack and she sets out to become the complete tolteca.

—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

In the moment above from Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa metaphorizes

queer Chicana mythmaking in the accoutrements of a quotidian survival pack. “This step,” she

explains, “is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions” (82).

What Anzaldúa throws out of her backpack—money and maps—shows that she sees these

power structures as intimately part and parcel of the colonial-capitalist order and its destruction

of the earth and living beings, conceptions which echo throughout her writings. The remedy she

turns to (as evidenced by what she packs), is Indigenous spirituality, which she articulates as the

idea that “every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has spirit in it” (36). This

assertion of all being as enspirited is directly tied to her political vision. With these new

resources, “she reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts

new perspectives toward the darkskinned, women, and queers” (82). Borderlands brings forth

suppressed histories of colonialism in the Americas by interrogating the myths of Anzaldúa’s

“Indian,” “Spanish,” and “Anglo” ancestors. The presence of homophobia and misogyny across

all three traditions,

and white supremacy in the latter two, demonstrate the necessity of Anzaldúa’s theoretical

project, which seeks to develop new forms of subjectivity that resist existing identificatory

paradigms and reconnect humans with the more-than-human. Anzaldúa may turn to pre-

Columbian models in order to invoke different cosmological perspectives, but she is adamant

that whatever arises will be entirely new because she will draw what is useful from pre-existing

models (even those articulated within “oppressive traditions”) while also creating “new

symbols” and “new myths” that combat oppressive political realities.

Anzaldúa wants to see how the world, and the possibilities for being in it, might change

if the parameters determining the shape of existence were shifted radically. Her syncretic

practice—metaphorized in the content of the backpack—is not straightforward or unironized.

Emphasizing an Indigenous Studies perspective, for example, we can see how Anzaldúa

performs a particular kind of cultural theft and erasure in her choice of objects. Those in relation

to indigeneity, for example, draw heavily on stereotypical popular representations of Indigenous

spirituality (i.e. “eagle feather”). As María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo reads it, the metaphor itself

mirrors the extractive logics of conquest, figuring indigeneity as something that can be claimed

via a “kind of pastiche grab bag of Indian spiritual paraphernalia” (“Who’s the Indian in

Aztlán” 419-20). Work such as Saldaña-Portillo’s points up the shifting signification of

indigeneity in canonical Chicanx literature and the critical response thereto. If one focuses on

the colonial legacies embedded in the objects she invokes, the metaphor points, potentially,

beyond what it means to signify, encoding and even calling for further critical analysis.

Anzaldúa’s claim that spirit resides in everything, drawn from her understandings of

Indigenous cosmologies, has also led some critics to emphasize how her engagement with

indigeneity presages contemporary posthumanisms grounded in ecological frameworks.1

Anzaldúa’s interest in posthumanist themes is a culmination of decades of theory and autotheory

by women of color; as Zakiyyah Jackson puts it, “exigencies of race have crucially anticipated

and shaped discourses governing the nonhuman” (681). The posthuman landscape lingers on

borders, but also points toward borderlessness—as Ursula Heise notes, Anzaldúa’s portrayal of

the “New Mestiza” prepared the way for the shift in critical focus from a localized to an

internationalist subject that “reaches across national borders” (“Ecocriticism” 382). Across her

writings, Anzaldúa expands borderwork to include passing through borders that are erected

between people via dominant discourses like white supremacy and heteropatriarchy as well as

the “border” between the human and nonhuman.

World Ecology, Indigeneity, and Counterculture

Representations of indigeneity are noticeably present in countercultural American literature and

culture, and Anzaldúa serves as an exemplar of the complex political challenges that emerge

within these formations. In contemporary writings by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous

writers seeking to combat oppressive mainstream American value systems like capitalism,

heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy, what Jodi Byrd calls “ideas of the Indian and

Indianness” are often tied to a desire to change how humans relate to each other and to lively

presences beyond the human (xiii).2 My project, World Ecology, Indigeneity and Epistemology

in Countercultural American Literature, focuses specifically on post-1945 American texts that

1 Other notable discussions of Anzaldúa as an early posthumanist thinker include writings by Joni Adamson, Stacy

Alaimo and Susan Hekman, and AnaLouise Keating.

2 I use the term “non-Indigenous” throughout this project, following Scott Morgensen’s lead, not as a signifier of

racial or ethnic identity but as a (contested) location within settler colonialism (Spaces Between Us 21).

deploy popular representations of Indigenous people in connection with political-ecological

imperatives.

I borrow the term “world ecology” from Vine Deloria Jr., who defines it as a “view of

the universe as a comprehensive matrix of lifeforms” (288). In God Is Red (1973), Deloria Jr.

proposes a collective shift from “our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground

of abstract morality” to the more “mature” and scientifically valid “world ecology” represented

by Indigenous epistemes (288). He offers the possibility of this epistemological shift to all

readers, suggesting it might serve as a means of preventing “the imminent and expected

destruction of the life cycle of world ecology” (288). Deloria Jr. argues that because the

“structure of Indigenous religious traditions is taken directly from the world around them, from

their relationships with other forms of life,” Indigenous thought is far more compatible than

Western thought with a livable future on earth (65). This is in part because the attribution of

difference to the “strength of creation” does not create a framework in which homogenizing

universals and hierarchical attributions of value dominate (88). A conception shared by “the

majority of the tribes,” according to Deloria Jr., is that other living things, even those considered

“inanimate” by Western thinkers, are considered persons (88). Thus “equality is not simply a

human attribute but a recognition of the creatureness of all creation” (89).

Likewise, Vanessa Watts’ account of “Place-Thought,” or “a theoretical understanding of

the world via physical embodiment drawn from Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe cosmologies,

informs my work throughout this project. Watts explains that in many Indigenous origin stories,

“First Woman” falls from the sky and lands on the back of a turtle, then simultaneously creates

and becomes the land (23). If we are “extensions of the very land we walk on, than [sic] we have

an obligation to maintain communication with it” (23). Since land is sentient, and “all living

things contain spirit,” an “ecosystem” might be better understood in “Western” terms as a

“society” (23). This means that land cannot, in Lockean form, be reduced to property. Humans

are the last species to arrive on earth, and their inclusion requires that reciprocal arrangements be

established with animals, plants, and other nonhuman species. Indigenous visions of world

ecology, if widely adopted, could help to constitute a global process of decolonization, a large-

scale transformation of how we understand our relations with other beings and each other.

The above origin stories make the material consequences of language—particularly the

significance of narratives and from whence they are drawn—visible. The recognition of shared

personhood and creatureness they promote potentially serves as an antidote to the hierarchies

that separate people from each other and humans from “nature.” In Deloria Jr.’s vision,

Indigenous epistemes can and should be adopted by all. However, as Philip Deloria has famously

observed, non-Indigenous people’s desire to “play Indian” has often “rested fundamentally on

asymmetrical relations of power,” and the countercultural texts I engage with acknowledge these

existing power relations to varying degrees (186). My methodology throughout this project

lingers in the tensions that arise when artists and critics navigate decolonizing objectives and

colonial traces in the same texts.

My readings here take inspiration in part from Mark Rifkin’s approach to a text like

Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993). Despite Feinberg’s commitments to

“consciousness- raising, tracking differences within and among marginalized groups, and

building a larger and more sustainable movement for social justice,” Indigenous characters

disappear quickly from the narrative once they have served a stereotypical spiritual function for

the protagonist (239). Rifkin emphasizes that his objective is not “faulting the novel for a lack of

political awareness” (239).

He explains that the surprising lack of meaningful engagement with Native characters and Native

struggles—considering Feinberg’s self-reflexivity and lifelong work in queer, socialist, and

antiracist movements—works to illuminate “the extent to which non-Native opposition to

heteronormativity draws on the image of Native people to figure forms of collectivity that can

resist state-sanctioned violence without actually contesting the terms of settler governance”

(When Did Indians Become Straight? 239). World Ecology’s focus is not primarily non-Native

opposition to heteronormativity, but I share Rifkin’s interest in reading countercultural texts that

engage with “ideas of Indianness” for what they reveal about how these popular fantasies are

consumed and deployed for various strategic purposes.

In his analysis of countercultural movements, Philip Deloria demonstrates that

oppositional formations (the least politically oriented of which is the New Age movement,

defined simply by Deloria as “the consumption of other cultures”) often depend on the “original

mysteries of Indianness” to contest “national identities” (173, 4). Ironically, the character of

these “original mysteries” is nearly identical to the projections of indigeneity deployed for the

construction of national identity. Some of the writers throughout this project draw on nonsense

“ideas of Indianness” that echo state logics, and some, in doing so, generate new political

strategies that push against state logics more generally.

What possible forms of new political alliance around reciprocity and land, I ask, might

countercultural attraction to “ideas of Indianness” potentially permit? In what ways do non-

Indigenous engagements with indigeneity often reify settler colonial constructs even as they seek

to generate opposition to oppressive paradigms, thereby potentially undermining the potential to

develop solidarity with the very groups they ostensibly take political inspiration from? How

might looking to various formulations of indigeneity in contemporary texts by Indigenous and

non-Indigenous American authors help us to generate informed coalitional projects that center

anticolonial objectives alongside antiracism, anticapitalism, and opposition to heteropatriarchy?

In Rifkin’s reading of Stone Butch Blues, the labor union is the fluid, contested space of

political organizing which allows characters of different backgrounds to develop solidarity with

each other (243). It is particularly useful as a narrative device because it provides a way of

imagining positive identification with community without reliance on pre-existing identity

constructs, and its structure also helps to reveal the mechanisms by which power seeks to

fragment newfound sense of community among the workers (243-44). In World Ecology,

ecological struggle is the space of political organizing I seek to consider as potentially

accommodating of broadly constituted affinity groups.

As spaces of organizing, labor unions and ecological struggle offer similar opportunities

for coalition-building. World ecology is also a space in which structures often banished to the

underground of thought, such as the ongoing realities of settler colonialism, and their

accompanying constructions of “the human,” become visible. In particular, I read works that

seek to disrupt Eurocentric understandings of the relationship between “humans” and “nature.”

As such, World Ecology is also in dialogue with ecologically focused posthumanisms and

seeks to put them in conversation with Indigenous Studies, critical race theories, queer theory,

and post-structuralism.

Becoming More-Than-Human

In their reflections on “queer inhumanisms,” Mel Chen and Dana Luciano also observe how

Anzaldúa’s “onto-epistemology” anticipates the contemporary “nonhuman turn,” a commonly

used term for the humanities’ increasing tendency to question the automatic assumption of the

human as the center of analysis (186).3 Karen Barad emphasizes how posthumanism refuses the

naturalized boundary between nature and culture and refuses to “presume the separateness of

any-‘thing,’ let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets

humans apart” (136). It rejects the notion “that man is the measure of all things (136). Cary

Wolfe’s posthumanism does not seek an “after” to embodiment but an end to “the cultural

repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically

specific phenomenon” (xvi).

However, as Chen and Luciano also note, the “inclination to vastness” or “hyperbolized

attention to smallness” found in object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and the work of

some new materialist thinkers associated with the “nonhuman turn” has led to “uneven attention

to race and related axes of dehumanization” in the posthumanities (194).4 This critique is

representative of the larger discomfort felt by scholars concerned that turning our attention to

world ecology will supersede analyses of existing oppressions formulated within the logics of

the unequally distributed category of the human. Since Eurocentric conceptions of “the human”

came into being in large part as logics that justified colonialism, slavery, and other acts of

domination on the part of emergent European world powers, there is no reason why these

historical realities should not be centered in posthumanist thought. As Marissa López has argued,

epistemes like planetary consciousness that seem to “move us away from racial considerations”

can actually bring us back to them at the same time (19).

3 For these remarks, see the introduction to GLQ’s “Queer Inhumanisms” special issue (June 2015). As Chen and

Luciano note, the “nonhuman term” is also sometimes referred to as the “posthuman turn.”

4 While Chen and Luciano’s use of “dehumanization” in its familiar negative valence may seem to contradict the

issue’s stated focus on the “nonhuman term,” it also signals that dehumanization proceeds via existing constructions

of “the human,” which do not simply disappear into thin air. Anzaldúa, for example, views “dehumanization as an

opportunity to reconstruct what it means to be human” (186).

Genealogies of what constitutes the posthumanities, these theorists suggest, shift

significantly when decolonial and anticolonial theorists join the current constellation of thinkers

considered posthumanist. My project does not seek to make any claims about Indigenous

peoples. Rather, I focus on how “ideas of Indianness” are mobilized in contemporary

countercultural texts by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. While posthumanisms vary

widely, I focus my attention solely on those that Chen and Luciano describe as “critical” (195).

To claim a critical posthumanism is to insist that posthumanism operate in self-critical

fashion. This newly unfolding notion, as described by Chen and Luciano, is informed by a

materialist approach that understands “the very possibility of making a distinction between the

human and nonhuman” as “constructed by the kinds of actions and processes that we have

named dehumanization” (195). That is, the production of difference is a primary tactic used for

the maintenance of hegemonic control. Simply defined, it is the production of binaries in which

universality/wholeness is ascribed to one term and lack to the other in the pair. Aníbal

Quijano’s well-known essay “Questioning Race,” which speaks to the origins of global white

supremacy, emphasizes how these binaries are often tied to Eurocentric ideas about “nature.”

According to Quijano, ever since the debate in Valladolid over whether “Indians” (the newly

created racial category ascribed to Indigenous peoples) were human,

the old notions of superiority/inferiority implicit in every relationship of domination were

considered to be grounded in nature; they were ‘naturalized’ for all subsequent

history…the foundational myth of modernity…[was] the idea of an original state of

nature and a process of historical development going from the ‘primitive’ (the closest to

‘nature,’ which of course included above all the ‘blacks’ but also the ‘Indians’) to the

most ‘civilized’ (which of course was Europe), with the ‘Orient’ (India, China) in

between. (52)

While there is nothing inherently wrong with binary structures, when they are constructed around

notions of superiority/inferiority, or “relations of domination,” they invariably serve as

justification for violence against the group designated “inferior.” The writings I explore in this

project seek to denaturalize these various separations: nature from culture, art from life, the

human from the nonhuman, people from each other.

Quijano also observes how the separation of “humans” from “nature,” or what Foucault

calls the “disconnection of people from the great narrative common to things and man”

has served this “foundational myth of modernity” (387). Settler colonists seeking to normalize

violence against Indigenous peoples whose lands they wanted, according to Quijano, gave birth

to “the idea of ‘race’ [which] was born with ‘America’; it originally referred to the differences

between ‘Indians’ and their conquerors (principally Castillian)” (50). Quijano links the

development of race itself to indigeneity, which presents the need to naturalize “relations of

domination” between settlers and Indigenous peoples. Race, then, becomes linked to nature in

service of justifying mass murder and the expropriation of land. Notions of “progress” freeze

non-European peoples outside of modernity, relegating them to the past in an attempt to erase

the political potential of Indigenous lifeways.

This section explores the potentially generative relationships among disciplines such as the

posthumanities, ethnic studies, Indigenous studies and postcolonial studies in academic work

seeking to move beyond or refusing to work within dominant conceptions of the human, or what

Fanon called “Man in the technique and the style of Europe,” which is “only a succession of

negations of man” or “an avalanche of murders” (312). Foucault, in a series of related

observations about the Eurocentric nature of the so-called “universal human subject,” calls for

the end of the episteme of “man” that emerged in the 19th century when the human sciences

disconnected people from the aforementioned “great narrative common to things and man”

(387). It is my contention that these interdisciplinary conversations are crucial, as they have the

potential to act as starting points for collective organizing both inside and outside of the

academy.

The anti-capitalist and anti-racist aspirations of projects such as “ethnopoetics” or el

movimiento have not necessarily kept them from deploying popular representations of

Indigenous people that are projections of the white imagination. These fantasies serve non-

Indigenous populations by denying the realities of settler colonialism and contemporary

Indigenous presence in the Americas. Despite the destructive character of stereotypical

figurations in the style of the “noble savage” such as the “ecological Indian” and the “spiritual

Indian,” both non-Indigenous and Indigenous writers have mobilized them to theorize how

we might shift into other modes of being that honor the interdependence of all forms of life.

How might we reconcile the ideological violence beneath these fantasies and their sometimes-

generative potential? If these same projections of indigeneity have been essential to settler states

looking to achieve cultural and physical dominance over Indigenous peoples, what have writers

seeking to protest the conditions produced by racial capitalism challenged and/or reified by re-

engaging these stereotypes for their own purposes?

In addition, I hope to contribute to a growing body of work that calls for us to be more

critical of and less ensconced within disciplinary logics. Non-Indigenous critics and theorists

need to engage with Indigenous thinkers; if, as Jodi Melamed has insisted, the contemporary

moment—which she terms racial capitalism, after Cedric Robinson—is defined in part by the

“complex recursivity between material and epistemic forms of racialized violence,” this means

that the work we do in university settings as knowledge producers has the potential to help

imagine better futures for humans and those with whom we evolve in lockstep (77). Glen

Coulthard, in considering a workable formation between settlers and Indigenous Americans,

recalls the words of Philip Blake, a Dene activist, in his address to the British Crown at the

Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry: “I believe your nation might wish to see us, not as a relic

from the past, but as a way of life, a system of values by which you may survive in the future.

This we are willing to share” (qtd. in Coulthard 72).5 Were non-Indigenous thinkers willing to

engage Indigenous thinkers, these shifts could open up exciting new political formations and

possibilities.

Jodi Byrd’s critical reading of one of the most famous countercultural texts that attempts

to theorize collective liberation, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, serves

as a paradigmatic example for the possibilities contained in this kind of interdisciplinary work.

Byrd argues for a mnemonic methodology of reading that connects “the violences and genocides

of colonization to cultural production and political movements in order to disrupt the elisions of

multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that

birthed settler colonialism through inclusion,” an approach which she applies to poststructuralist

theory (xii). Her analysis illuminates how Indigenous peoples are invoked in French critical

theory as “past-tense presences” (Transit of Empire xx, xv). A Thousand Plateaus has been

particularly influential for posthumanist thought because of its radical refusal of human-centered

subjectivity in favor of relational processes such as the development of new forms of affinity via

assemblage, so Byrd’s intervention is of special importance for my project.

Deleuze and Guattari, Byrd argues, posit America and American literature as embodying

a kind of revolutionary possibility that is foreclosed in a European context. This claim, she

5 For an account of the circumstances of the inquiry, see Glen Coulthard, “Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the

Politics of Dispossession in Denedeh” in Theorizing Native Studies (eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith).

argues, relies in large part on the theorists’ invocation of America’s so-called “Indians without

ancestry” (Byrd 11). She draws our attention to how, in their attempt to understand the “socially

repressed image of the Indian,” Deleuze and Guattari turn to American anthropologist Carlos

Castaneda’s books (along with French anthropological sources such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and

Pierre Clastres), meaning they rely entirely on ideas of “Indianness” drawn from a colonial

archive (Byrd 16).6 By illuminating how “the Indian” functions as an “imperial referent” in the

text, Byrd demonstrates how these evocations ultimately haunt the text, acting as a Deleuzian

event within poststructuralism that reveals the limits of its methodology—the refusal to confront

the colonialist project that makes these ideas of “Indianness” possible:

The Indian sign is the field through which poststructuralism makes its intervention…this

paradigmatic and pathological Indianness cannot be circumvented as a colonialist

trace…Every time a flow or line of flight approaches, touches, or encounters Indianness,

it also confronts the colonialist project that has made that flow possible. The choice is

either to confront colonialism or deflect it. And not being prepared to disrupt the logics

of settler colonialism necessary for the terra nullius through which to wander, the entire

system either freezes or reboots. (17)

Byrd describes what might be figured as a series of crisis points in thought—at each juncture,

when given the opportunity to confront colonialism, Deleuze and Guattari deflect, unprepared to

disrupt settler colonial logics. This deflection, according to Byrd, causes the poststructuralist

“system” to “freeze or reboot.” But the interplay of Byrd’s analysis and A Thousand Plateaus

itself indicates a set of possibilities enabled by the text beyond the options Byrd presents above.

In introducing A Thousand Plateaus, Byrd notes that a reader of the book might both

retain “sympathy for the impulse to nonrepresentational philosophy that aligns in a multiplicity

of regimes of signs” while interrogating the text’s refusal to confront the realities of settler

6 Castaneda was an American anthropologist who was made famous by his “dissertation,” The Teachings of Don

Juan (1968), which was initially passed off as a “genuine” ethnographic account before it was determined to be

completely fictional.

colonialism (13). Her own sympathies for nonrepresentational philosophy emerge at the level of

style, as when she defines transit as such: “to be active presence in a world of relational

movements, countermovements. To be in transit is to exist relationally, multiply” (xvii). Byrd

invokes Gerald Vizenor’s conception of “native transmotion” as a way of describing this

movement. Vizenor says “native transmotion” is akin to his term “survivance,” or an “active

sense of presence, the continuation of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name”

(Byrd xvi, Vizenor 126). The similarity between the passages convey their philosophical and

political affinities, despite the problems Byrd identifies with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of

“ideas of Indianness.” The affinities that emerge through Byrd’s critical reading reveal a process

in which Deleuze and Guattari’s approach still opens up new avenues for thought despite its

reliance on misrepresentations of indigeneity.

Deleuze and Guattari’s propensity for non-representational theory seems to be one of the

reasons Deleuze and Guattari were drawn to Carlos Castaneda’s work. In a passage about Carlos

Castaneda’s “dissertation,” The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), which was initially passed off as

a “genuine” ethnographic account before it was determined to be completely fictional, Deleuze

and Guattari push back against readers’ desire for the book to be a “genuine” ethnographic

account. In response to the charge that the book’s fictionality invalidates its content, they reply,

“so much better if the books are a syncretism rather than an ethnographical study, and the

protocol of an experiment rather than an account of an initiation (161-2).7 Since A Thousand

Plateaus is also an experiment that writes “against the book as image of the world,” refusing the

“tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book)

7 There are obvious problems with this stance; in Chapter One, I explore how Castaneda’s books were damaging to

Indigenous communities.

and a field of subjectivity (the author),” Castaneda’s lie troubles the posited symmetry of the first

two categories (even as it certainly leaves all agency in the hands of the “remarkable” author)

(23).

Throughout this project, I refuse elision of these colonialist traces in the literature and

theory I engage with while, as Byrd does, “retaining sympathy” in regard to shared political and

theoretical objectives. As a scholar of American literature interested in the environmental

humanities and countercultural movements, my thinking has been transformed through my

encounters with Indigenous critical theory in part because it allows me to read familiar texts like

A Thousand Plateaus in new ways. This project came into being because I became curious about

the many representations of indigeneity in texts seeking to envision revolutionary futures. What

lines of flight, I ask, are opened up in these texts, and when do they crash and burn in their

unwillingness to confront colonialist projects? When do they succeed in doing so? What do these

deployments of “Indianness” in countercultural projects accomplish, and how have they affected

attempts at coalition-building around shared concerns?

Indigeneity and World Ecology

Throughout this project, I engage with thinkers that seek to generate broad epistemological shifts

by deploying, and then refiguring, “ideas of Indianness” circulating in popular culture, often for

the purposes of building solidarity in the terms of ecological struggle. The environmental

humanities’ interest in ecological activism outside the academy has meant that many

posthumanist thinkers have engaged with Indigenous struggles against dispossession in

considering how to reformulate relationships between the human and nonhuman, writing about

movements such as the Zapatista Army and Idle No More as well as collectively authored

documents like the 2009 Bolivian Constitution. The Constitution was drafted by a coalition of

Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers and grants Pachamama (approximately translated as

“Source of Light” or “Source of Life”) the right to uninterrupted being. 8 The prevalence of

Pachamama as a concept used widely throughout Latin America in political contexts gestures to

the kind of large-scale epistemological shifts indigenous cosmopolitics have the capacity to

produce. Additionally, as Jodi Melamed has observed,

Neoliberalism has given us an interesting conjecture: its rapacity for natural

resources…has required the current structure of domination to bring indigeneity into

representation, because so much of the natural resources that still exist in the world are to

be found on lands traditionally occupied, owned, belonging with, or stewarded by

Indigenous people (up to 50 percent according to the International Forum on

Globalization). This, in turn, has given Indigenous worldings a tremendous potential

(83).

Ironically, then, despite ongoing global efforts by settler states to erase Indigenous presence in

the Americas, in creating the conditions often characterized as the Anthropocene, global-

capitalist practices of extraction and accumulation, continued from the age of high imperialism,

have put indigeneity and Indigenous peoples front and center. If there is any positive aspect of

this moment, then, it might be located in the fact that, as Mark Rifkin and others have argued,

“[i]ndigeneity puts the state in crisis by raising fundamental questions about the legitimacy of

its continued existence” (When Did Indians Become Straight? 37).

Centering indigeneity in discussions of U.S. empire is an important intervention at this

historical moment in which the “conflation of racialization and colonization . . . masks the

8 For discussions of the Zapatistas, see Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and

Ecocriticism: The Middle Place and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the

Americas and the Age of Development. For Idle No More and the Zapatistas, see Jodi Melamed, “Racial

Capitalism.” For Indigenous activism throughout the Americas, see Joni Adamson, “Indigenous Literatures,

Multinaturalism, and Avatar: The Emergence of Indigenous Cosmopolitics,” Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous

Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” and Jorge Marcone, “The Stone Guests:

Buen Vivir and Popular Environmentalisms in the Andes and Amazonia.”

territoriality of conquest by assigning colonization to the racialized [‘Indian’] body” (Byrd xxvi-

xxiv). By obscuring historical processes, global capitalism naturalizes its destruction of land,

Indigenous relationships to land, human relationships to the nonhuman, and relations between

human groups.

However, the notion of Indigenous peoples as “close to nature” looms in the background

of this theorizing, and this misrepresentation has painful ties to colonial dispossession. As

Mishuana Goeman has stated, the assumption of Indigenous peoples’ “naturalness” is

particularly violent because it mirrors abstract state logics that were central to the “historical,

mental, and physical fragmentation of [Indigenous] people from land” (85). The “doctrine of

discovery” invented by Justice John Marshall in order to justify dispossessing U.S. Native

peoples of their land imported Lockean ideas figuring land as property, a conception that runs

counter to Indigenous relations with homelands (Barker 7-8). This colonial definition of land

provided a rationale for the violent theft of Indigenous lands by the U.S. government and

settler populations by refiguring Indigenous land as terra nullis, “a landscape miraculously

emptied of the accumulated human labour… that has made it what it was” (Wolfe, Traces of

History 23).

This project articulates the tension between the “tremendous potential of Indigenous

worldings” in contemporary discussions of world ecology and the painful history associated with

Indigenous peoples’ figuration by settler states as “close to nature,” (and therefore less human).

This conflict must become a crucial point of inquiry for posthumanisms and the environmental

humanities. By examining these tensions in contemporary decolonial and anticolonial literature,

I work both to offer a reading of how coloniality has operated in countercultural American

literature and to establish some general principles for ethical engagement with Indigenous

cosmologies. Considering Indigenous relationships to land that challenge the property-relation, I

argue, opens up space for understandings of people and land as interdependent that go beyond

“close to nature” fantasies.

Critical Ethnic Studies disciplines like Critical Latinx Indigeneities have emerged in

large part from a greater awareness of misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples across non-

Indigenous Studies disciplines. These critical paradigms seek to acknowledge the ways

stereotypical depictions of indigeneity and/or silence about Indigenous people have previously

circulated in Ethnic Studies disciplines. This is essential bridging work, for, as Jodi Byrd has

noted, the “conflation of racialization and colonization” and reduction of “indigeneity into racial

categories dependent on blood logics” makes it difficult to address the conditions of settler

colonialism, since the state is then able to promise “increasing liberty through pluralization”

(xxvi). Strategies of incorporation and assimilation like “liberal multiculturalism,” in Jodi

Melamed’s terms, which promise to make existing notions of the human more inclusive, pull

focus from the need to transform dominant conceptions of the human itself (Represent and

Destroy 818).

Despite greater conceptual engagement with indigeneity across disciplines,

engagements with Indigenous thought or the lived struggles of Indigenous people are often

lacking, and a number of critics have critiqued this aspect of posthumanist thought in particular.

Danika Medak-Saltzman argues that in the absence of any real engagement with Indigenous

thinkers,

invocations of indigeneity become just another twenty-first century example of cultural theft, and

“even the best-intentioned scholars often end up producing work that is interventionist in its own

discipline by beginning conversations that Indigenous studies has had resolved for decades” (18).

Likewise, Juanita Sundberg suggests that posthumanist theory would benefit from a greater

willingness to engage directly with Indigenous (and other) epistemes that do not split nature from

culture nor ontology from epistemology. To speak about these divisions as though they are

universal, Sundberg argues, exposes unexamined Eurocentrism in the work of posthumanist

thinkers (36). She also identifies the same tendency in feminist new materialisms: Jane Bennett,

for example, expresses “an anxiety that fostering vital materialism via the ‘capacity for naiveté’

risks—and here she cites W.J.T. Mitchell—‘the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism,

anthropomorphism, and other premodern attitudes’” (37). According to Sundberg, Bennett’s

logic exposes her need to identify a nonhuman “Other” against which to uphold notions of

progress and the superiority of “modern” Western thought.

Despite these issues, posthumanism, has, in some cases, brought thinkers in the Western

epistemological tradition closer to Indigenous thought. Particularly in ecologically minded

posthumanisms, increasing emphases on the liveliness of all matter, the falsity of imposed

divisions like nature/culture and animal/human, and the interconnectedness of life on earth have

to some degree shifted modes of thinking in numerous disciplines away from the model of the

“universal” liberal human subject. Whether indigeneity is evoked or not, critical posthumanists

come to many of the same conclusions as Indigenous thinkers. This is a potentially exciting

convergence that might help to shift how in how the formation of coalitions in ecological

struggle is approached. The “overlap” of material Sundberg describes can also be seen as a sign

that the grip of humanism has in fact begun to loosen, and that generalized desire to foster

relationality with the nonhuman seems to be growing.

Karen Barad, for example, has coined the term “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” in order to

describe “the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being” in her theory of agential realism, a

formulation which resonates with aspects of Indigenous thought (90). Cosmologies vary widely

throughout Indigenous communities, but “the human” and “the individual” as they are conceived

of in Enlightenment philosophy are not constructs that generally resonate with Indigenous

thought. As Kim TallBear states in a roundtable for Critical Ethnic Studies on “late identity,”

both the “individualistic part” and the “human-centric” aspects of identity make it a relatively

meaningless concept for her, as to say “I am Dakota” invokes an entire set of social relations

with the human and more-than-human world—“If it is just people, you do not get Indigenous

peoplehood” (101-02).

Indigeneity and the Anthropocene

Since the early 2000s, discussions of ecological thought have inevitably become associated with

the Anthropocene, defined as a new geological epoch in which humans act as a force of nature

generating global environmental change. Anthropocene discourse has been influential in literary

studies for the last half-decade, taking the form of a call to read and write texts with a greater

attention to both planetary scales and nonhuman presences. Despite the seeming

anthropocentrism of the category, the idea of the Anthropocene has been extremely influential

for posthumanist thought. Because Anthropocene conditions indicate that the entire planet is

responsive to human actions, “nature” cannot so easily be rendered as inert and separate.

While I find these developments compelling and useful, as critics like Rob Nixon have

pointed out, the seemingly “equalizing” gesture of the Anthropocene can act as an ideological

paradigm that glosses over the unequal ways in which human populations are responsible for and

affected by large-scale changes to our planet. Nixon notes that “the environmentalism of the

poor is frequently catalyzed by resource imperialism inflicted on the global South to maintain the

unsustainable consumer appetites of rich-country citizens” (22).

If a major issue with the Anthropocene paradigm is that it operates from the perspective

of dominant cultures in the global North, the problems that emerge from this characteristic go

beyond its failure to accurately characterize processes of ecological degradation. As Elizabeth

DeLoughrey argues in Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019), the lack of engagement with

postcolonial and Indigenous thinkers “has shaped Anthropocene discourse to claim the novelty

of crisis rather than being attentive to the historical continuity of dispossession and disaster

caused by empire” (2). Indigenous epistemes, that is, collide with the Anthropocene paradigm in

two important ways. Firstly, they do not assume the current ecological crisis represents a

rupture, as it emerges from extant histories. Secondly, the ongoing existence of Indigenous

lifeways and theoretical paradigms means that humanism has never been the starting point for

Indigenous cosmologies.

Kyle Whyte, for example, argues that some Indigenous peoples already “inhabit what

our ancestors would likely have characterized as a dystopian future,” since the environmental

impacts of settler colonialism have engendered disruptions in Indigenous lives that prevent

access to local relation with “many of the plants and animals that are significant to them” (207).

Therefore, some Indigenous peoples “consider the future from what we already believe is a

dystopia,” a perspective that emphasizes the ongoing horror of colonial occupation (207). Zoe

Todd discusses the need to “indigenize” the Anthropocene by fully accounting for “[h]istorical

consciousness, ethical relationality, and Indigenous Métissage [Dwayne Donald’s term for an

ecological and relational understanding of the world that fosters reciprocal discourse between

colonizer and colonized]” (250).

The chapters that follow seek to help reconceptualize our contemporary ecological crisis

by investigating how theorizations of indigeneity have the capacity to change/have changed how

we approach the world and understand our place in it. My ultimate goal is to theorize how

coalitions seeking to resist our species’ current trajectory on arth organize around Indigenous

epistemes. Accordingly, the final chapter ends where the first begins—at the contested space of

a convention. A convention is not an ideal place to build coalitions, but it is a place in which

different groups gather with people who are like-minded in at least one regard. As such, in the

three chapters that follow, I look to texts and movements which attempt to model this possibility

in order to theorize how such organizing buts up against questions of appropriation, as any

engagement by non-Indigenous people with indigeneity—this project included—is rightly

always open to being charged with.

Conclusion

Haunting the margins of this project is the question of appropriation. In 1998 Louis Owens wrote

that there is more “wrangling” over authenticity, identity, and appropriation in Native American

literature “than in any other nook or cranny of contemporary literature” (xv). In an anthologized

email conversation with AnaLouise Keating, Deborah Miranda attributes this tendency to the

unique situation of federally recognized U.S. Native peoples: “U.S. Indians learn to essentialize

our Indianness because to do otherwise is to vanish completely, legally erased” (Bridge We Call

Home 206). Keating and Miranda are discussing the issue of whether Miranda is comfortable

including Chicanas in the category of “Indigenous women” (203). Miranda ultimately decides

against doing so on the basis of U.S. Native sovereignty. However, she frames her decision to

exclude Chicanas from the “Indian Rolls” as her own refusal to “come out” as mestiza, which

she understands (after Gloria Anzaldúa) as “much larger than simply blood or genetics” (207).

This exchange gestures to the way “being Indigenous” in itself is a contested space. Questions of

appropriation are necessarily more complicated in the case of mestiza or “mixedblood” (in

Owens’ terms) people with some Indigenous heritage.

Zoe Todd’s essay on seeing the “Great Latour” lecture in 2013 demonstrates, however,

that wrestling with appropriation is complicated even when no claims to Indigenous heritage are

being made. Todd relays the experience of hearing Latour discuss the climate as a matter of

“common cosmopolitical concern.” Because recent environmental justice struggles had been

centered around the similar and well-known formulation of Sila, the Inuit conception of spirit

that is also translated by non-Inuit people as “climate,” Todd is disappointed that Latour never

mentions it (“Ontology” 5-6). She wants to hear Latour “credit Indigenous thinkers for their

millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into

complex relationships between themselves and all relations, and with climates and atmospheres

as important points of organization and action…It never came” (5).

Certainly, Latour’s work has admitted the influence of Indigenous cosmologies since the

column he wrote for anthropology today in 2009 on the work of Brazilian anthropologist

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who seeks to transform anthropology by subjecting the discipline

itself to critique via the elaborate philosophical system of the Tupinamba. In the editorial, Latour

asserts that Viveiros’ turn to “Amazonian thought—in particular his conception of

multinaturalism—makes the discourse around “the search for a common world immensely more

complex now that so many modes of inhabiting the earth have been freed to deploy themselves”

(2).The phrasing of this latter statement is strange; surely Indigenous people have been

deploying these modes of inhabitation for quite a while on their own without needing to have

them freed by anthropologists! Todd notes that the only time she hears Indigenous thought

referenced in

European lecture halls is when it is “filtered through white intermediaries” (as in the case of

Viveiros) (7). This tendency might help to explain the odd phrasing around “modes of inhabiting

the earth” being “freed to deploy themselves.”

Todd ends the essay by contemplating what might have happened if Latour had

referenced the conception of Sila, though, asking herself, “[s]hould I welcome his silence: better

that he not address Indigenous thinking than to misinterpret or distort it?” (9). The issue, Todd

explains, is not so much Latour in particular but the way academic structures make it possible for

European thinkers to “advance and consume arguments that parallel discourse in Indigenous

contexts without explicitly nodding to them” (8). The solution to this problem, she suggests, is

for European critical theorists to engage Indigenous scholars and to cite them (18).

So why don’t they? Audre Lorde’s “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” published in This

Bridge Called My Back, considers the costs of non-engagement as a strategy. In it, Lorde thanks

Daly for sending a copy of her new book Gyn/Ecology (1978). Lorde describes reading the book

and finding herself in agreement with Daly’s commentary on goddesses, which was consistent

with Lorde’s own study of African myth. But, Lorde observes, there are no celebrations of

African goddesses, or any non-Western European goddesses at all, anywhere in Daly’s book.

Lorde speaks to Daly as a fellow queer woman and an admirer of her previous work: “[w]hat you

excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and the heritage of other non-european

women, and denied the real connections between all of us” (95). Perhaps Daly did not include

African goddesses because she worried that the material was not “hers” to engage. But Lorde

makes it clear that non-engagement is not a viable option. As Louis Owens says:

To survive on this globe, it has become clear that we must achieve a transition from

egocentrism to eco centrism. More and more we will be required to read across lines of

cultural identity around us and within us. It is not easy but it is necessary, and the rewards

are immeasurable. Finally, it is quite clearly the only way the community we call life will

survive. (11)

World Ecology, Indigeneity and Epistemology in Countercultural American Literature reads

texts that attempt to build coalitions through Indigenous paradigms in order to offer some

provisional answers to this question. We begin in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the

American counterculture’s very public performances of “playing Indian.”

Chapter One: Beats, Curanderas, and Whiteshamans

The Counterculture “Plays Indian”

Many of the major countercultural events of the 1960s and 1970s made use of “Indian”

imagery and practices, or “playing Indian,” to borrow Philip Deloria’s term. For the largely

white, middle-and-upper class young people who identified as the American “counterculture,”

“the

wearing of the symbols of the Indian…signified that one’s sympathies lay with both the past and

the present targets of American foreign policy. To play Indian was to become vicariously a

victim of United States imperialism” (Playing Indian 160-61).

These identifications were rarely based on any in-person contact with Indigenous

Americans or engagements with Indigenous thinkers. The idea of the “Indian” was often

mobilized outside the presence of any Indigenous people, leading to a paradoxical centering

and de-centering of Indigenous struggles. There were moments in which hippies and New Left

radicals joined up with AIM (American Indian Movement) activists, providing support, for

example, during the AIM occupation of Alcatraz in 1971 and the 1968 Poor People’s

Campaign, which brought Black Power, Chicanx, U.S. Native, and white radicals together. For

the most part, however, the American counterculture were content to play with “Indian”

symbols in the absence of any real political engagement. While there were important factional

splits in what now, largely due to the unifying force of anti-war sentiment, can seem like a

single countercultural movement, the accusation of cultural appropriation has been applied in

varying degrees to various subgroups that might be identified within the movement.9

9 In The New Age in the Modern West: Counterculture, Utopia, and Prophecy From The Late Eighteenth Century to

the Present Day, Nicholas Campion helpfully breaks the counterculture down into three distinct strands—the New

For example, one of the posters for the 1967 “Human Be-In,” meant to unify Haight

hippies and the more radical East Bay New Left contingent, featured an image of an “Indian

chief” in full headdress holding a guitar. The event was framed as a “gathering of the tribes”

(Campion 116). At the “Be-In,” Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder chanted Buddhist mantras.

That same year, prominent underground movement newspaper The San Francisco Oracle

published an “Indian issue” featuring primarily white contributors ostensibly representative of “a

generation, considered by many to be the reincarnation of the American Indian [that has been]

born out of the ashes of the slightly-psychedelic zeit-geist of this brand new Aquarian Age”

(Campion 116). During the acid-free first night of Ken Kesey’s “Trips Festival” (1966), photos

of “Indians” taken at Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon by Stewart Brand, the future creator

of the Whole Earth Catalog, which marketed reading materials such as the Castaneda quartet as

“Native American literature,” were projected as a means of giving the viewers a drug-free

transcendent experience (Smith 4).

These examples are indicative of the superficial engagement of the Haight-Ashbury set

with “Indian” iconography, the best takedown of which came from U.S. Native folk singer

Buffy Sainte-Marie in a July 1967 Berkeley Barb interview with John Bryan entitled “Buffy on

Hippies…They’ll Never be Indians.” “It doesn’t make any sense to me, these kids trying to be

Indians,” Bryan quoted Sainte-Marie saying. “The white people never seem to realize they

cannot suck the soul out of a race. The ones with the sweetest intentions are the worst soul

suckers” (10). Sainte-Marie goes on to advise white hippies to focus on acknowledging and

Left (for whom the struggle for social justice and racial equality was at the center), the hippies (who privileged

individual rights and spiritual advancement over collective action), and the consumerist wing, who was just there for

the fashion (100-102).

working to remedy the wreckage their own culture has caused rather than attempting to identify

with those their ancestors colonized.

These appropriative logics characterized by the “sweetest intentions” also come under

fire in subsequent critiques of the beat writer Gary Snyder and other “whiteshamans” by U.S.

Native writers Geary Hobson and Wendy Rose in The Remembered Earth (1979). Hobson coins

the term “whiteshamanism” as a way of identifying a “new version of cultural imperialism” (8).

Some of the primary culprits identified in Hobson’s essay are Jerome Rothenberg and his

“translations,” Gary Snyder’s “shaman songs,” and “other neo-romantic writers posing as

Indians and/or Indian experts/spokesmen, such as Carlos Castaneda” (103). The presence of

Castaneda, as Rose will note in her later article, “The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on

Whiteshamanism,” makes it clear that “not all whiteshamans are Americans, poets, nor even

white” (404).

The story of Castaneda’s ascendency to fame and the consequences it held for

Indigenous communities convey much about how acts of misrepresentation can act as a kind of,

to borrow Saint-Marie’s phrasing, “soul sucking.” Castaneda’s “dissertation,” published by UC

Press as The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Life, became a bestseller among a reading

public with a burgeoning interest in all things “non-Western.” While initially presented as

ethnography, Don Juan was later proved to be a fiction by other suspicious anthropologists.10

The Teachings of Don Juan focuses on a young man named Carlos who undergoes an

apprenticeship with a “shaman” named Don Juan Matus that requires him to ingest a series of

10 Detailed discussions of the controversies within the anthropological community surrounding Castaneda’s work

can be found in Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the ‘Don Juan’ Writings of Castaneda (Daniel C. Noel, editor), The

Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies (Richard de Mille, editor), and Jay Fikes, Carlos Castaneda,

Academic Opportunism, and the Psychedelic Sixties.

psychotropic plants. Castaneda aligned himself with a counterculture eager to throw off the

fetters of rational Western consciousness by making Carlos’s journey in part about becoming

aware of the “all the perceptual possibilities of man” (1998 author’s commentary on Don Juan

xix). Throughout his time of study with Don Juan in the book, Carlos transforms into a dog and

a crow in addition to connecting with the “spirit-manifestation” of “Mescalito,” or peyote (15-

18, 129-131, 69). These experiences lead him to cast off his belief in the disciplinary

suppositions of anthropology. As the books progress—Castaneda wrote seven more about

Carlos’s journey— the representations of so-called “shamanism” cease to resemble Indigenous

spirituality whatsoever. Carlos’s own specialness is further and further centered. These

developments

contributed to Castaneda’s fame as a reclusive millionaire guru (de Mille 13).

Castaneda’s books were damaging to Indigenous people. Their popularity led masses of

non-Indigenous “seekers” to flock to Indigenous communities seeking access to psychotropic

plants and “shamans.” Fans of Castaneda’s initially searched for don Juan among the Yaquis, but

when the Yaquis disappointed their expectations of transcendent experiences they descended on

Huichol communities (Castaneda wrote Don Juan with the unacknowledged help of Huichol

healers and ethnographers) (Fikes 134-41). Upon closer inquiry, readers searching for Don Juan

discovered that the ritual use of hallucinogens as described by Castaneda does to some extent

match up with aspects of Huichol spiritual practice, since Castaneda wrote the book with the

unacknowledged help of Huichol healers and ethnographers (140). His books, then, have also

been destructive to this community, since seekers often turned to Huichol communities. Then

Castaneda groupies intruded upon Mazatec communities as well, since Castaneda claims that

Don Juan’s teacher was Mazatec in order to account for inconsistencies between Don Juan’s

“teachings” and Yaqui practices (59). The increased interest in psychedelics for non-ritual uses

produced by Castaneda and other figures like him resulted in newly strict regulations regarding

access to sacred plants that have interfered with Indigenous spiritual practices (138-39).

Some of the most famous Beat writers were also the first ayahuasca tourists.11 In the

early 1950s, when a good deal of the American counterculture hadn’t yet entered into a full-

blown obsession with ideas of Indianness, William Burroughs, already exiled in Mexico City,

journeyed further south to Peru in hopes of having the ultimate drug experience. Burroughs’ trip

foreshadows the ayahuasca tourism prevalent today among Western seekers. He was one of the

first people from the West to take ayahuasca, as well as the first to correctly identify the genus of

one of the plants local healers would mix with the vine to enhance the drinkers’ experience

(xxii).12 Allen Ginsberg followed his lead in 1960, and Burroughs published an epistolary novel

called The Yage Letters (1963) that was loosely based on their experiences (yagé is another term

for ayahuasca). Most readers assumed the “letters” in the novel from Ginsberg to Burroughs and

vice versa were drawn from actual correspondence, but everything in the novel, likewise, is of

Burroughs’ own invention.

The Yage Letters is an interesting text in relation to countercultural appropriations of

Indigenous “spirituality.” Ginsberg claims his trip to Peru is a spiritual quest, a framework

Burroughs finds questionable. If most countercultural figures saw “playing Indian” as a means of

transcending the limitations of capitalist desire and Western thought, Burroughs acknowledged

11 “Ayahuasca tourism” refers to the popular practice in which Western spiritual seekers travel to the Peruvian

Amazon and adjacent areas to take yagé with local shamans. See Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Andean

Phenomenology and Settler Colonialism,” (Chapter Two of The Extractive Zone) and Michael Taussig, Ayahuasca

and Shamanism and Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.

12 Burroughs’ graduate training (both at Harvard and Columbia) was in anthropology, and in an unpublished

“Appendix Summary” to the novel, Burroughs gives a short bibliography on yagé (accented correctly, unlike in the

title), including everything published between 1911 and 1924 in English and Spanish. “The most complete

collection of material on yagé,” the end of the appendix notes, “is to be found in the Botanical Museum of Harvard

University” (Yage Letters Redux 100).

his complicity with these systems and took Ginsberg along for the ride. The manuscript includes,

for example, a “letter” from Ginsberg to Burroughs in which Ginsberg writes to Burroughs from

Peru pleading for guidance regarding his ayahuasca “journey.” What he gets, instead, are

instructions explaining that Ginsberg is to cut the letter up line by line in order to generate a new

text.13 This response allows Burroughs to posit that Ginsberg’s letter is not motivated by

a genuine crisis, but the desire to construct a worthy self through literary adventures. Burroughs

refuses to let the trips to Peru “in search of yage” follow the stereotypical framework of

countercultural Western seeker becoming enlightened by an ennobling Indigenous spiritual

guide, a blueprint which the character of Ginsberg attempts to imitate, to no avail. Burroughs’

skepticism about the “spiritual” adventures of his fellow Beats is an anomaly. His ability to

articulate this critique stems from his willingness to identify the place he occupies in existing

global structures of power—perhaps because he takes such pleasure in exposing the depravities

of the West/global North.

Burroughs identifies an impulse in his fellow countercultural writers akin to what

Macarena Gómez-Barris has referred to as “New Age Settler Colonialism,” which is

characterized by interactions between foreign visitors and Indigenous peoples in which well-off

tourists, typically from the U.S., “extract” from shamans in order to be relieved of the “alienation

characteristic of consumer capitalism” (53). Gómez-Barris’s critique of extractivism applies not

only to ayahuasca and other literal forms of spiritual tourism but to many of the countercultural

paradigms of resistance I discuss in this chapter more generally. In Ayahuasca and Shamanism

(2002), the anthropologist Michael Taussig connects spiritual seekers to colonial fantasies writ

13 Burroughs made the “cut-up” method famous, but it was developed by his friend Brion Gysin.

large, positing that non-Indigenous middle-class people’s engagement with Amazonian

“shamans” results in:

[I]ncredible fantasies about the powers of shamans…For me that’s where the principle

damage is done: in constructing (as anthropologists do, perhaps with more caution, but

equally guilty) an ‘Indian culture’ by which to make sense of their drug experiences. (14)

Gómez-Barris comments on how spiritual tourism in Peru’s “Sacred Valley,” for

example, has caused local property values to soar as moneyed foreigners build luxury eco-

retreats, pushing Indigenous peoples further toward the margins of their lands and the local

economy (53-55). Likewise, by focusing on an abstracted indigeneity with little to no regard for

contemporary Indigenous existence, much of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture further

marginalized Indigenous communities by disseminating misrepresentations of Indigenous life.

Settler colonial fantasies about the “spiritual” qualities of Indigenous people, particularly as

imagined through the use of ritual plants and shamanism, serve to abstract Indigenous

communities’ material circumstances and circumscribe Indigenous lifeways in the realm of the

“cultural,” somewhere outside of politics and history. The damage done to Indigenous

communities in the U.S. and Mexico by the popularity of Carlos Castaneda’s books is just one

example, then, of how these “fantasies about the power of shamans” can have negative material

consequences for Indigenous communities.

Jerome Rothenberg and the Ethnopoetic Project

I direct the majority of my attention in this chapter on ethnopoetics as a case study of the

American counterculture’s relationship to indigeneity for a few reasons. Firstly, according to

Jerome Rothenberg, its founder, ethnopoetic redefines poetry with “an emphasis on those

alternative traditions to which the West gave names like ‘pagan,’ ‘gentile,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘oral,’ and

‘ethnic’” (Symposium of the Whole xi). Ethnopoetics is a conception that was entirely formed by

artists and anthropologists working in an academic context, making it an important formation for

cultural workers to consider. In addition, while the movement is not particularly well-known, the

First International Ethnopoetics Symposium asked notable participants like Fredric Jameson and

Sylvia Wynter to address the question “what is ethnopoetics?” By inviting thinkers from outside

their circle to contribute, the core promoters opened their work up to critique, which Wynter and

Jameson in particular were happy to provide. I focus primarily in this section on Wynter’s talk

“Ethno or Socio Poetics,” which offers an important counterpoint to the other responses as well

as to posthumanist thought more generally.

The collective orientation of the symposium creates a useful relational element, and the

differences among the diverse thinkers’ answers to this question are helpful in terms of weighing

how different theorists engaged indigeneity in an academic/artistic context during this time

period. A conference, as noted in the introduction, is an excellent place to consider the question

of how to build coalitions in situations where many different individuals and groups may have a

shared focus but quite divergent perspectives. I then focus on Rothenberg’s experiences with the

Mazatec curandera [wise one] María Sabina in order to introduce a material element to the

theoretical conversation—in order to see what happens when his version of ethnopoetics exits

the “ivory tower.”14

Leslie Marmon Silko’s two-part contribution to the aforementioned anthology The

Remembered Earth begins by reflecting on the way in which white ethnologists’ intrusions into

Indigenous communities to “collect prayers, songs, and stories,” and the subsequent publication

14 I translate curandera as “wise one” in accordance with Sabina’s description in her Vida, which I discuss later in

this chapter.

of these lootings, have resulted in the dissemination of “implicit racist assumptions” about

Indigenous literature and culture. The presence of this material in the world gives rise to

“imitation Indian poems” or “translations” of Native songs and poems that Silko sees as mere

rearrangements of ethnographic material; she sees this tendency most prominently in Jerome

Rothenberg’s anthologies (195). The second part of what Silko terms her “old fashioned Indian

attack” focuses on another member of the ethnopoetics circle, Gary Snyder. In particular, Silko

takes issue with Turtle Island, the collection of poems for which Snyder was awarded the

Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Silko here echoes Buffy Sainte-Marie’s earlier critique of white hippies

“playing Indian,” exhorting Snyder to fully come to terms with the history of his own ancestors

and “create new myths” out of this fuller reckoning (213). Silko’s linking of ethnography and

“ethnopoetics” with Snyder’s “whiteshamanism” makes the case that whiteshamanism acts as an

extension of anthropologists’ cultural thefts. For example, Snyder’s later claims to be “born-

again Native American,” and his assertion that “ultimately we can all lay claim to the term

native” indicates that he was unwilling or unable to take critiques from Indigenous writers such

as Silko seriously (Gray 274-75). In Silko’s estimation, by refusing to subject their own

methodologies to self-critique, and to consider their position within global power structures,

proponents of ethnopoetics like Rothenberg and Snyder end up simply reproducing tired and

inaccurate representations of Indigenous peoples.

An avant-garde movement focused on articulating a more interesting definition of

“poetry” in the contemporary “Western” context, ethnopoetics was spearheaded by the poet

Jerome Rothenberg. As Rothenberg explains in the preface to Symposium of the Whole: A Range

of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics, the term felt to the movement’s originators like a natural

extension of terms such as ethnomusicology. In his introduction at the “First International

Ethnopoetics Symposium,” Rothenberg explains that the term ethnic is derived from ethnos,

emphasizing an older meaning of the term that does not function as “an expression of what we

are as groups in isolation” (alcheringa 6). He chooses to focus on ethnos as it was understood in

ancient Greece, where it meant not “this nation (‘us’)” but rather “those nations (‘them’ or

‘others’)” (6). This latter formulation, Rothenberg claims, was used to refer to “people of the

countryside,” or “primitives” and thereby also poets since Plato asked they be driven from the

city (6). Poetry, then, in Rothenberg’s terms, is the language of the “other” (6).

Comprised of Rothenberg and other primarily white avant-garde poets and critics such as

Snyder, David Antin, Michel Benamou, Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), George Quasha,

Nathaniel Tarn, and Anne Waldman, ethnopoetics championed a redefinition of American

poetry that emphasized “ancient” Indigenous oral literatures printed in translation. The range of

anthologies in this tradition edited by Rothenberg—Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of

Poems from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania (1968), Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry

of the Indian North Americas (1972), America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry

from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (1973), and Symposium of the Whole: A Range of

Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics (with Diane Rothenberg) (1983) give a sense of the scope

and ambition of Rothenberg’s project. If an anthology is one way of drawing or redrawing the

boundaries of what constitutes poetry, or American poetry, then Rothenberg’s anthologies

certainly gave the appearance of centering Indigenous “literatures” far more than most American

literature anthologies.

As the titles indicate, Shaking the Pumpkin was limited to works by Indigenous writers,

whereas the other three anthologies, Technicians, America a Prophecy, and Symposium are also

notable for their desire to link the modernist and contemporary avant-garde Rothenberg affiliated

to Indigenous literatures. Canonical European writers like Ezra Pound and Antonin Artaud were

placed alongside new “translations” of Indigenous works. Since the links between Indigenous

oral poetry and experimental poetry are not exactly self-evident, Rothenberg and those affiliated

with his project found themselves tasked with articulating them.

On the one hand, Rothenberg explains the pairing by emphasizing how these

“modernist/experimental” writers are engaged in “a re-viewing of ‘primitive’ ideas of the sacred”

which represent “an attempt—by poets and others—to preserve and enhance primary human

values against a mindless mechanization that has run past any uses it may once have had”

(Symposium xxi). “Primitive” models, Rothenberg explains, are “classless societies” with “a long

subterranean tradition of resistance to the twin authorities of state and organized religion” (xxi).

Rothenberg’s second statement, which exceeds the usual logics of primitivist modernisms, also

shows the influence of thinkers that Fredric Jameson terms “new anthropologists,” like Stanley

Diamond and Pierre Clastres (alcheringa 110). Clastres, for example, theorizes that the

difference between “primitive” and “non-primitive” societies is that non-primitive societies are

ruled by the State, which splits them into two categories: the dominating and the dominated

(Archeology of Violence 88). Through these rhetorics, Rothenberg suggests a connection

between the “otherness” of “primitive models” and the “otherness” of experimental poetry.

On the other hand, Rothenberg sees “contemporary poets as the ‘marginal’ defenders of

an endangered human diversity and poets of other times and places who represented that

diversity itself and many of the values being uncovered and recovered in the new poetic

enterprises” (xv). Rothenberg’s choice to equate the marginalization of Indigenous peoples in the

Americas and the distaste of mainstream American poetry for more experimental forms reveals

that he represses important differences between the material lives of Indigenous peoples and

bourgeois white intellectuals, projecting a hazy multiculturalism that erases present-tense

oppression.

Rothenberg’s primary claim to an affinity between seemingly different sets of materials

is that the experimentalists have “seen the light,” so to speak, and understand that the best

critique of postmodern capitalist society lies not in “the advocacy of some particular system” but

rather in a reverential turn to these “non-Western” models: as Rothenberg’s mentor Robert

Duncan

phrased it, “the old excluded orders must be included” (xxi). In this sense, some of the stated

goals of the ethnopoetic project are shared by many of the other writers discussed throughout

World Ecology. These affinities, along with a belief in poetics as a vehicle for transcending the

limitations of mainstream Western thought, drew Jameson and Wynter to contribute to a useful

definition of ethnopoetics despite their obvious reservations about the movement.

The First (and Last) International Ethnopoetics Symposium

In April 1975, Rothenberg and literary critic Michel Benamou hosted a number of well-known

scholars at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for the first “‘academic’ gathering in

ethnopoetics (tentative definition: ‘the intersection between poetry and anthropology in our

time” –N. Tarn)’ (Benamou, alcheringa 5). Nathaniel Tarn explains his explicit formulation of

the anthropological character of the ethnopoetic enterprise in his contribution to the conference

as emerging from experimental poetry and anthropology’s shared interest in “societies which

have a heavy investment in ‘techniques of the sacred’” (24). Similarly, Rothenberg’s

introductory

remarks articulate a desire to “break with the immediate, inherited past & find resources for our

search, our meeting with the future, in something vastly older: the ‘nature-related cultures,’ as

Snyder calls them, with their roots back to the Paleolithic and the Dream-time” (7). Rothenberg’s

reference to “the Dream-time” echoes the name of the magazine he then co-edited with Dennis

Tedlock, alcheringa, which published a portion of the conference proceedings.

“Dreamtime” is a conception advanced by anthropologists who studied Indigenous

cultures in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Wolfe 61). In his essay

about the concept, Patrick Wolfe argues that Australian “Aboriginal Dreamtime” is “a settler-

colonial discourse par excellence” (58). By figuring the Dreamtime simultaneously as “a sacred,

heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are”—a description that also befits

“the Paleolithic”—and a timeless “everywhen,” anthropologists generated a conception that

disconnected public perceptions of “Aboriginal” peoples from concrete historical and economic

contexts (77-78). By focusing on the “distant origins” and “spiritual presence” of Indigenous

peoples, settler colonial discourses substitute “an ideal horizontal relationship—'encounter’—for

the vertical reality of incorporation” (76). That Rothenberg and Tedlock would choose

alcheringa as the name of their magazine suggests these critiques are potentially applicable to

the ethnopoetic project as a whole.

Rothenberg and Snyder in particular seem to relegate global Indigenous presence to the

past and to a disembodied eternal present. Rothenberg’s introductory remarks characterize the

“remnants” of “hunting and gathering peoples” as “an endangered and ultimately doomed ‘fourth

world,’” a term popularized by Dene (Navajo) writer George Manuel. Manuel became involved

in internationalist organizing for Indigenous self-determination and recognized the need for a

term like “third world” that could assist in producing global solidarity among Indigenous groups

living under settler colonial governments (The Fourth World xvi). Considering this meaning, it is

certainly ironic that Rothenberg invokes this term directly before barreling right into the cliché of

the “vanishing Indian,” which works to diminish Indigenous resistance and survival in the face

of settler colonial terror and strategies of containment. “Fourth World” also refers to the world

beneath this one in Laguna and other Indigenous cosmologies, suggesting the ability to pass

between worlds, a conception which likely appealed to Rothenberg’s understanding of himself as

a poet-shaman. Gary Snyder’s contribution to the symposium also invokes the anthropological

sentiment of Indigenous cultures as “endangered”; Snyder, in discussing the anthropogenic

destruction of human cultures, other species, and the biosphere itself, compares ethnopoetics to

“some field of zoology that is studying disappearing species” (alcheringa 13).

In addition to the “vanishing Indian” trope, Rothenberg also utilizes the commonly

adopted frame of writers as the contemporary equivalents of “shamans” (despite the continued

existence of Indigenous healers Rothenberg would characterize as such). The shaman, according

to Rothenberg, becomes the prototype for the poet in that they are both “solitary, inspired

religious functionaries” engaged with the “visionary and ecstatic” and “the communal” (11).

Like the shaman, the poet is a seer who goes off alone, brings back visions, and performs them

for the community in a public “act of madness” that heals the tribe (11). Even Keats’

formulation of the “chameleon poet” is akin to the “vision of the shaman-trickster” (7).

Rothenberg’s understanding of the poet as a kind of shaman, uniquely responsible for healing

society through the practice of art, is a ridiculous projection of “Indianness” onto himself.

Taussig’s concern about how non-Indigenous desire for “the other’s” spirituality can produce

damaging fantasies about indigeneity seems founded, in this case at least.

Despite these problems, there are also a number of compelling aspects to the ethnopoetic

approach. Rothenberg, echoing many other thinkers discussed throughout this project, identifies

the ideological paradigm of coloniality par excellence as separation—in nature, in species, and in

self (7). He also articulates ethnopoetics as one particular approach to what Nathaniel Tarn calls

“totalization,” or the coming together of “human beings who share between us multiple origins

and identities”—one that has the advantage of “not needing to invent a strategy” (7). It is true

that the continued existence of Indigenous lifeways, and any available knowledge of them, is the

result of generations of survivance on the part of Indigenous peoples. In this sense, turning to

Indigenous thought as a resource for ways of conceiving being that lie outside mainstream

Western philosophical and political frameworks does seem efficacious, in part because simply

the amount of energy settler states have put into eradicating and erasing Indigenous

communities suggests that Indigenous ways of conceiving relationality pose a significant

political threat to colonial-capitalist logics. The term “totalization” raises alarms, but Tarn’s

conception seems to leave space for multiplicity, “totalization” meaning a process of coming

together in new ways b bb while retaining distinctness, rather than becoming a singular

“totality.” Rothenberg refers to this possibility as “an intertribal, universal culture” (11).

This question of how to generate planetary solidarity is central for many thinkers

engaged in theorizing world ecology. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “negative universal history,” Ursula

Heise’s “eco-cosmopolitanism,” Gayatri Spivak’s “planetarity,” as well as Franz Fanon and

Sylvia

Wynter’s attempts at reinventing and revalorizing humanism, for example, all seek to develop

global processes of non-universalizing solidarity “without the myth of a global identity”

(Chakrabarty 222).15 Rothenberg disagrees with the notion that “you can only destroy other

cultures in the attempt to bridge them”; his use of an ambiguous “you” referring to no one in

particular conceals the power relations at hand (alcheringa 7). He doesn’t say “white academics

can only destroy Indigenous cultures in the attempt to build bridges to them,” the greater

15 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of

Planet, Gayatri Spivak, “Planetarity,” Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, and Sylvia Wynter, “Ethno or Socio

Poetics.”

specificity of which might provide an opportunity for self-reflection on the part of the largely

white, well-educated ethnopoetics circle.

At the rest of the Symposium, George Quasha, for example, an artist who co-translated

many of the “Indigenous” materials found in Rothenberg’s anthologies, presented a paper that

primarily discussed the works of Carlos Castaneda—particularly Tales of Power, which, oddly

enough, is also the text Deleuze and Guattari are most drawn to in A Thousand Plateaus. In it, he

heralds Castaneda as “our Ethnopoetic hero” (68). Castaneda receives this title in part as a result

of his desire to critique the discipline of anthropology through the lens of “Indigenous” thought.

In a final assimilative gesture, Quasha imagines a multiplicity of “tribes and anti-tribes” that

“collide, mix, change, and move out toward an optimum membership of one” (76).

Gary Snyder, despite also concluding his talk with a quote from Tales of Power, seems to

find such a formulation disturbing, as he refers to some comments during the conference that

assumed a kind of “one-world assimilation…desirable” (17). Despite his constant figuration of

Indigenous peoples as non-existent presences that need the assistance of the ethnopoets to spread

Indigenous messages (i.e. “we’re just starting, in the last ten years here, to make songs that will

speak for plants, mountains, animals, and children”), Snyder formulates a scenario of being in

community with other people, including nonhumans, that at least does not seek to produce a kind

of undifferentiated totality (20). In all of the above statements, there seems to be a faith in the

notion that, despite our differences, something exists that might bring us together; it seems

difficult, however, to come together if not everyone is invited to the gathering.

For the ethnopoets, moving beyond “Man” means shifting not only our relationship to the

Earth but to our own being-in-the-world and the practice of art. Rothenberg’s circle also sought

to emphasize process—the poem as “everything-that-happens”—through ethnopoetics (10).

Differences among members of the ethnopoetics circle led to very different articulations of this

“impulse toward the oral” that characterized the movement (10). Rothenberg makes reference to

the oral “living tradition of the Jews,” which says that “even in an age of writing, the word must

be renewed by processes of speaking and sounding” (9). Interestingly, there are no mentions of

the living oral traditions of contemporary Indigenous peoples, so Rothenberg is able to posit

himself as the modern shaman-poet who has been called to trace a line back to “THE FIRST

MYTHOLOGIZED SHAMANS OF THE LATER PALEOLITHIC CULTURES” [caps are

Rothenberg’s] (“Dialogue” 529). It would seem to me that a movement interested in “oral

literatures,” performance, and embodied presence might see more value in inviting Indigenous

participants from various communities to perform work, but Simon Ortiz, already a member of

the circle, was the only Indigenous performer.

David Antin, who also performed one of his “talk poems” at the symposium, defines

ethnopoetics as “People’s Poetics or the poetics of natural language” (“Talking to

Discover” 112). Antin explains that his poetics are based in this process, which he

conceives of as

“linguistic acts of invention and discovery through which the mind explores the

transformational power of language and discovers and invents the world and itself” (112). Antin

expresses

concern about the “historical legacy of the term ethnos, a kind of anthropological commitment to

exoticism, to whatever is remote from us and somehow different” (112). He attempts to avoid

this “poetics of the Other” by translating ethnos instead as “people” or “human.”

Like Antin, Jameson and Wynter were sympathetic to the ethnopoets’ desire to

revise mainstream Western understandings of poetics but were less convinced by the “ethno”

component of the project. Fredric Jameson’s very short contribution to the conference

references the original title of Sylvia Wynter’s paper, “Ethnopoetics versus Sociopoetics”

(alcheringa 108).

Ethnopoetics, in Jameson’s estimation, is a sociopoetics, and that makes it exciting (108). He is

also sympathetic to the potential for ethnopoetics to be a “powerful instrument designed to

reawaken the sense of difference within this society” by bringing forth again the sense “that it is

really not necessary to live in this particular way, and that people have been able to live

otherwise” (108). What Jameson refers to as the “new anthropology” (Pierre Clastres, Stanley

Diamond, Marshall Sahlins) has helped to revive “the vision of ‘societies before history,”

helping us to remember that the point of revolution must be to create some “qualitatively

different social form from this one” (110).16 He sees the use of other societies’ poetic forms as

“an implied commentary on our own society,” but is concerned that when a critique is implicit, it

can be hard to know if it accomplishes its task (109).

Jameson then offers the critique he might leverage if he were “a hostile critic” (he insists

that he is not): what if ethnopoetics’ use of “native American poetry” is in fact a symptom of

“the increasing vocation of the system to absorb and to integrate the last of its hitherto

irreducible ethnic minorities?” (109). In referring to “Native Americans” as “hitherto irreducible

ethnic minorities,” Jameson refuses, as per Jodi Byrd’s analysis in Transit of Empire, “the

conflation of racialization and colonization” (xxvi). While he states that he would not necessarily

answer his question in the affirmative, he also posits it would be irresponsible for the conference

attendees not to consider this possibility. Jameson’s real issue is with ethnopoetics’ failure to

(despite their inclusion of Ezra Pound in anthologies) follow the “old Poundian injunction to

16 Jameson’s reference to “societies before history” seems to contradict his criticisms of the ethnopoets. For context,

Jameson is borrowing from Pierre Clastres’ formulation of “primitive societies” as “societies without a State.” In

Clastres’ work, the emergence of the State coincides with two major ruptures: firstly, the divide created between the

dominating and the dominated within State-administered societies, and secondly, between “Savage and Civilized

man…for on the other side, Time became History” (Archeology of Violence 88). If the “history of peoples who have

a history is the history of class struggle…the history of peoples without history is the history of their struggle

against the State” (Society Against the State 218).

‘include history’” (110). It is disappointing, Jameson says, that a poetics which claims to work in

relation to other social forms would elide history to such an extent.

Despite his reservations, Jameson does end on a semi-positive note, noting that the

“ecological thrust” of ethnopoetics is a useful “popular front strategy” that “has the added merit

of reminding us that genuinely primitive social life is a complete system which organizes nature

rather than destroying it” (111). He worries, however, that it is too easy for the viewer to lose

sight of how the attack on the exploitation of nature is linked to the more important project of

combatting the exploitation of human beings (111). Jameson finds it particularly ironic that a

poetry associated with Indigenous culture would forget the relationship between this “politics of

nature” and “a politics which aims at the basic imperializing mechanisms of our own socio-

economic system” (111).

Jameson’s critiques—which seem to apply most to Rothenberg, Snyder, and Quasha—

come out of his frustration regarding the abstract formulations around “the sacred” and “nature”

espoused by these thinkers. As evidenced by many of the previous examples, their contributions

to the Symposium often demonstrate profound incoherency because there is no recognition of

contemporary Indigenous existence nor the potential problems that might arise from either the

“translation” and/or “performance” of Indigenous materials by non-Indigenous artists. If the

three men operate, in Gayatri Spivak’s terms, as “first-world intellectual[s] masquerading as the

absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves,” how does Rothenberg in

particular, who regularly performs his Indigenous “translations,” act as an “absent

nonrepresenter?” (“Subaltern” 292)

Snyder, Rothenberg, and other writers who utilize Indigenous thought and culture under

the rubric of “ethnopoetics,” with its claim both to the authority of “ethnography” and the

“freedom” of artistic production, elide contemporary Indigenous voices while appearing less

directly guilty of appropriation under the auspices of “translation.” If translation can be

conceived of as channeling, then Rothenberg’s invocations of the sacred allow him to present

himself as a shaman-like figure tasked with keeping Indigenous art alive. Since larger spiritual

agencies ostensibly control the performance, the nature of the body delivering the material is

made to matter less. In addition, because Rothenberg does not account for the contemporary

existence of Indigenous people, by his logic he must use the power he has been invested with to

reach back into the “Dream-time” and bring forth these “lost” materials, like the “shaman” who

brings them back to the community. Jameson objects in particular to Rothenberg’s deployment

of “the sacred,” noting how the concept “seems indeed to hold out the possibility of a critique of

our own system, but in fact ends up projecting values and a social nostalgia which are equally

regressive” (110).17

Sylvia Wynter’s Counterhumanist Socio Poetics18

Wynter’s contribution to the Symposium blows the entire enterprise of ethnopoetics wide open.

While she was much in sympathy with some of the modes of thinking and art making being

promoted by the ethnopoets’ circle, she also saw their methodology as flawed. Wynter’s paper

expresses solidarity with the attendees while asking them to change their approach dramatically.

She frames ethnopoetics as “an event in our readiness to think about certain problems not

necessarily called up by literary history or Western cultural history as we are used to viewing it”

17 I disagree with Jameson that invocations of the sacred necessarily represent ineffective critique or project

nostalgia, but in the case of Rothenberg, the accusation lands.

18 I refer to Wynter’s work as “counterhumanist” in accordance with Katherine McKittrick’s designation in Sylvia

Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (11).

(78). In particular, ethnopoetics offers an opportunity to consider how ethnocentrism has

structured the world economy. Ethnopoetics is the “focal point of our poetical/political

assumption of Otherness, an assumption…which alone can negate the we/they dichotomy” (79).

Wynter sees the “assumption of Otherness” as a countercultural impulse; what George Quasha

(whose paper Wynter frequently quotes) refers to as “a sort of permanent subculture, what I am

calling (and will speak of later) as the Other tradition” (66).

Wynter then pivots to ask who constitutes the “we” in George Quasha’s definition of

ethnopoetics. She points out that the “we” gathered at the conference could be broken into two

categories: people from the first world and people from the third world (78). Despite her dislike

of mainstream usage of the term “third world,” Wynter uses it nonetheless to show how these

ranked (1st, 2nd, 3rd) categories in fact define a relation between a “We and an Other” (78). If the

question of who constitutes the “we” of a given utterance is important, then how are we to

simultaneously conceive of the dissolution of the we/they dichotomy? If poetry, as Wynter

submits, contains certain possibilities for the assumption of “otherness,” then how do we

understand the position of non-Indigenous artists performing Indigenous materials?

Wynter’s sympathy for poetry informs her position regarding the possibilities for

ethnopoetics and the Symposium’s significance (87). She posits that when Western man—which

means “ALL OF US, SINCE IT IS NO LONGER A RACIAL BUT A CULTURAL TERM” [caps in

original]—massacred Indigenous peoples and “penned them up on reservations,” he also penned

up a “MODE OF COGNITION…WHICH WESTERN MAN…REMAINS AWARE OF ONLY

THROUGH POETRY” (84). Wynter’s faith in poetry comes out of her sense that it is the

“inventor/guarantor of the concretely human”; poetry is the “agent and product by which man

names the world, and calling it into being, invents his human as opposed to his ‘natural’ being

(86-7). I understand “natural” here to mean “naturalized,” or supposedly given, conditions of

being which are determined by, in Wynter’s terms, the Western bourgeoisie. She argues that

naming the world also means conceptualizing the world, which requires an active and creative

relation to the planet (87). This “active and creative relationship,” however, does not preclude

the existence of power dynamics—Adam naming all the animals to establish dominion quickly

comes to mind.

The real trouble according to Wynter begins with Columbus, who gained the power to

name other men, thus designating them as “other.” The programmed overvaluation of Western

man’s being is enabled by this devaluation of so-called “primitive man” (86). Humanism—the

new dominant ideology of the Western bourgeoisie—thus depends on some humans being

“defined and forced to accept their definition as SUB-HUMAN” (86).The “discovery” of the New

World and the concomitant emergence of a “world economy” leads to an anomalous mutation

that results in the first total commodity culture (79, 87). Poetry, Wynter asserts, with its

“imperative to dereify the market-created signs” is thus a valuable weapon in the struggle against

the colonial-capitalist order (88).

The epistemological mutation Wynter describes emerges from the sixteenth-century

“retotalization” in which “European man was transformed from Christian man to Western

man, the other peoples of the earth were transformed into negroes and natives”—with the

classification “negro” functioning as “a particular form of the generic ‘natives’” (79, 82). This

massive shift from religious to secular ideology also required a radical change to definitions

of the “natural,” situating

Western man as the NORM OF MAN and non-Western man as THE OTHER, the not-quite,

the non-men who guaranteed the Being of the Norm by his own non-being. In creating

themselves as the norm of men, the Western bourgeoisie created the idea of the

Primitive, the idea of the savage. (83)

The “Primitive” signifies ethnos, i.e. otherness—or the idea of the Western bourgeoisie’s

negation (83). As Wynter emphasizes, this image of the “savage” is a sign deployed by the

dominant culture, upon which it is dependent for its own self-conception. In addition to human

groups deemed not-man, nature in the New World, once under collective stewardship, “became

mere land, to be exploited” (82).

Wynter uses Robinson Crusoe to illustrate how this power to name other men is deeply

imbricated with the “world economy.” If, prior to the sixteenth century, “all human cultures

existed as the agent and the product of the process by which man invented himself as human,”

in commodity-culture “objects invent man as another object labelled human” (87). Wynter

discusses Friday’s submission to Crusoe in terms of Crusoe’s gun; the object is what defines

Friday as a servant and Crusoe as a master (87). The gun, in short, establishes Crusoe as Man,

but, predictably, “Crusoe sees his mastery over the Other” as being based not in the use of force

but in something divinely ordained via his superior ethnos (88). Naming, too, plays an important

role in these newly established relations of domination: by calling “the Indian Friday Crusoe

negates his former name, the meaning of his former culture, the architecture of significance”

(87). The power to name, in short, is the power to turn persons into signs, objects, property. If poetry

—as Wynter claims—"creates anew the sign,” then ethnopoetics posits being human as a “praxis”

rather than the occupation of an unevenly distributed category (McKittrick 3).

Wynter asserts that ethnopoetics “can only have validity, [sic] if it is explored in the

context of sociopoetics where the socio firmly places the ethnos in its concrete historical

particularity” (78). Wynter then delivers a particularly crucial reminder to the conference, one

that speaks to my earlier commentary about how Rothenberg, Snyder, and Quasha in particular

erase contemporary Indigenous presence in order to center themselves:

HENCE IT WOULD SEEM TO ME TO BE THE POINT OF THIS CONFERENCE: THE

EXPLORATION OF THIS ALTERNATIVE MODE OF COGNITION IDEOLOGICALLY

SUPPRESSED IN OURSELVES, YET STILL A LIVING FORCE AMONG LARGE

MAJORITIES OF THE THIRD WORLD PEOPLES. IN THIS COMMON EXPLORATION

THERE CAN THEN BE NO CONCEPT OF A LIBERAL MISSION TO SAVE ‘PRIMITIVE

POETICS’ FOR ‘PRIMITIVE PEOPLES.’ THE SALVAGING OF OURSELVES, THE

RECLAMATION OF VAST AREAS OF OUR BEING, IS DIALECTICALLY RELATED TO

THE DESTRUCTION OF THOSE CONDITIONS WHICH BLOCK THE FREE

DEVELOPMENT OF THE HUMAN POTENTIALITIES OF THE MAJORITY PEOPLES OF

THE THIRD WORLD. (84)

Wynter reminds those gathered that the only thing in need of “salvaging”—which calls to mind

the term “salvage anthropology”—is the Western bourgeoisie conception of being that relies on

the devaluation of an “other.” Working to undo this epistemological hegemony is one way of

contributing to the destruction of the conditions of domination perpetuated by the first world,

which interferes with world ecology as a whole.

In invoking the third world, Wynter also suggests to her audience that a movement with

an “impulse to the oral” might additionally consider engaging with Black popular culture since

the Black experience in the New World has been paradigmatic of the non-Western experience of

Native peoples (85). While Wynter sees Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. as being

subject to the same degrading logics, some of her other remarks suggest she sees important

differences between the development of Black and Indigenous culture in the New World. In her

account, “the blacks reinvented themselves as a WE that needed no OTHER to constitute their

Being; that laid down the cultural parameters of a concretely universal ethnos,” while the “fixed

quality” of “the magnificent tribal poetry of the American Indians” is a result of “the fact that

this culture and its bearers have been penned up, corralled on reservations while their ecology,

the world of their cultural imagination, was drained away” (85, 88). While it is certainly true that

many contemporary Indigenous people in the U.S. reside on reservations, some reside elsewhere,

and Indigenous people have, like Black Americans in the New World, continued to make art.

Wynter clarifies her meaning somewhat by asserting that “the real cultural changes that

take place” occur in the creation of new cultural forms “as an accusation against cultural

destitution, and as the dynamic of revolt” (88). She gives the nineteenth century Ghost Dance

and the “Peyote cult of the American Indians” as examples, however, and does not mention

contemporary Indigenous art/activism. Why the development of resistant art forms would be

central to Black survival in the U.S. but not for Native peoples remains unclear. Wynter

concludes her remarks with a call to approach other cultures with an eye to constructing “an

alternative process of making ourselves human…transforming its abstract universal premise into

the concretely human global, the concretely WE” (88). Wynter is clearly interested in solidarity,

but not the pretense of solidarity being offered at the conference.

The Case of María Sabina

A paradigmatic example of the fraught nature of encounters between the Western bourgeoise and

Indigenous people can be found in the interaction between María Sabina, a Mazatec curandera

from a small town in Oaxaca who rose to fame as a healer and poet in large part through the

efforts of amateur anthropologists and the intrusions of the white American counterculture,

including Jerome Rothenberg.

In 1955, the banker and amateur “ethnomycologist” Gordon Wasson arrived in Mexico in

search of a healer who would take him through a ritual involving the ingestion of psychotropic

mushrooms. More importantly, and tellingly, Wasson’s next journey to Oaxaca, in 1956, was

clandestinely funded via the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program under the cover name of the

“Geschickter Fund for Medical Research” (Fikes 33-34). Wasson found the person he was

looking for in Sabina, and he was so impressed by the veladas she sang in her mushroom

ceremonies that he returned in 1956 to make a recording, which was released the following year.

That same year, Wasson published an article about his experiences with Sabina in the Life

Magazine “Great Adventures Series” entitled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” (May 13, 1957)

coining a term that remains in use to this day. While Wasson used a pseudonym, referring to

Sabina as “Eva Mendez,” this did not prevent droves of hippies from swarming to her hometown

of Huaulta, a phenomenon that, according to Sabina, led to the destruction of her calling. As she

puts it in her Vida (1977), a text transcribed into Spanish by her fellow townsman and Mazatec

speaker Álvaro Estrada (Sabina spoke only Mazatec, and did not write), then republished by

Rothenberg in English in two editions (1981, 2003):

The day I did a vigil for the first time in front of the foreigners, I didn’t think

anything bad would happen…But from the moment the foreigners arrived to

search for God, the saint children [Sabina’s name for the mushrooms] lost their

purity. They lost their force; they spoiled them. From now on they won’t be of any use.

There’s no remedy for it. Before Wasson, I felt that the saint children elevated me. I

don’t feel like that anymore. The force has diminished. If Cayetano [a local official and

friend] hadn’t brought the foreigners…the saint children would have kept their power.

(Selections 68-9).

Sabina’s loss of her connection with the saint children is a loss of the most profound nature. Her

calling as a “Wise One” represents an “obligation” to allow the saint children to speak through

her in order to heal those whose spirits have become ill (21). “After I had cured my sister I

understood that I had found my path. The people knew it and came to me to cure their sick” (25).

The curandera’s relationship to the mushrooms, then, is both artistic and spiritual, as they speak

in a language that is distinct from ordinary language. Speaking of the first velada she heard as a

child, Sabina says: “It was a different language from what we speak in the daytime. It was a

language that without my comprehending [sic] it attracted me. It was a language that spoke of

stars, animals, and other things unknown to me” (12).

Sabina’s notion of the singing or chanting produced through her by the mushrooms, and

the particular wisdom commanded by her as a result, was of great appeal to the ethnopoetics

crowd, since the centrality of language to Sabina’s practice could be used to assert the shamanic

function of the poet in modern life. The Beat poet Anne Waldman in particular was drawn to

Sabina’s work, which was brought to her by a friend who imagined she would “use” it.

Waldman did, framing her engagement as shameless appropriation in an essay Rothenberg

included in Maria Sabina: Selections (2003): “I didn’t want to draw on Sabina literally or

faithfully, I wanted to absorb the experience of her works (in translation) in me, and put myself

into her and then let the ‘text’ (meant to be performed or sung) emerge as a kind of intuitive ‘re-

working’”

(179). While Waldman’s nod to her conscious appropriation and seeming refusal to attempt some

kind of “authentic” channeling is refreshing, the language she uses to describe her engagement

with Sabina’s works places her in a position of dominance and Sabina in one of invisibility.

Later in this same essay, in a discussion of her classes in “shamanic and ethnopoetic

literatures” at Naropa, Waldman admits that “in some respects of course the whole shaman

concept is problematic” (Selections 181-82) Despite her recognition that poets aren’t shamans in

the sense of being “enlightened healers,” she still continues to draw the parallel in her work and

teaching on the basis that both poet and shaman act as “antennae of the race” (181-82).

Likewise, Waldman’s reflections on the most famous appearance of her poem “Fast Speaking

Woman” (which draws heavily on the structures of Sabina’s chants) in the Bob Dylan film

Renaldo and Clara. Dylan, apparently, shot Waldman “dressed like a postcard American Indian

(not my idea)” but “[t]his scene, mercifully was not used in the movie” (179).

In a similar deflection of accountability, Gordon Wasson laments the injury he has caused

to Sabina and her community by publicizing his research in the “Retrospective Essay” that

introduces the 1981 book Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants. As Sabina’s Vida attributes her

loss of connection with the “spirit children” in her life to Wasson’s appearance in her life, his

impact on her calling could not be denied. Despite this, Wasson casts himself as the victim: “The

sacred mushrooms and the religious feeling concentrated in them through the Sierras of Southern

Mexico had to be made known to the world, and worthily so, at whatever cost to me personally”

(María Sabina: Her Life and Chants 20). It is unclear what cost Wasson might be referring to,

since his career was made by the 1957 article on Sabina and “the magic mushroom” in Time.

These maneuvers appear yet more absurd if juxtaposed with Maria Sabina and her

people’s lifelong material poverty, a reality that her first encounter with the mushrooms was

deeply intertwined with:

Without thinking much about it, I put the mushrooms in my mouth and chewed them

up…Later we felt good. It was like a new hope in life...In the days that followed, when

we felt hungry, we ate the mushrooms. And not only did we feel our stomachs full, but

content in spirit as well. The mushrooms made us ask God not to make us suffer so

much. We told him that we were always hungry, that we felt cold…

Tears rolled down our cheeks, abundantly, as if we were crying for the poverty in which

we lived. (Selections 13)

The reality of hunger casts the sustaining language of the saint children in yet another essential

context. One might think that Sabina’s status as a kind of celebrity for the counterculture would

have altered her circumstances, but according to the Mexico City hospital she died in, one of the

causes of her death was chronic malnutrition. Tellingly, when reporters interviewed Sabina upon

her arrival at the hospital, she told them: “the government has always denied help for the poor,

even more for the Indians. Before I die I would like to see my people get help. This is one of my

dreams, to see that other Indians like me are rescued from their misery” (167).

Sabina’s final state, then, is one of material and spiritual poverty, making her story a

strong case for anthropological study and literary ethnography as cultural imperialisms. If

Sabina’s material circumstances had been impoverished by colonial invasions, what had

remained to her were Mazatec lifeways, in particular her sustaining connection with the saint

children who sang through her and enabled her to bring healing to her community. With the

arrival of Wasson and most especially his publication of the Time article, a second wave of

outsiders arrived. A banker trailing (unknowingly) with him the cronies of the deep state,

Wasson, despite his professed “love” for his “subjects,” commits a theft the depth of which

cannot be measured.

But—putting Waldman’s very superficial engagement with Sabina and “shamanism”

aside—what do we make of Rothenberg and his collaborators’ efforts to translate Sabina’s

veladas into written poetry, and to publish her autobiography? In his preface to the volume,

Rothenberg acknowledges that by translating Sabina’s calling as “poet” as well as “shaman,” he

“bring[s] it and her into our own generalized kind of reckoning and naming” (ix). Despite his

slight hesitation, Rothenberg is willing to assert that Sabina is a “poet, in short, with a sense of

both a real physical world and a world beyond what the mind may sense, or the mouth proclaim”

(x). Rothenberg’s two statements here call attention to some of the most interesting and fraught

qualities of Sabina’s “texts.” Firstly, are they her “texts?” Is she the “author?” Had Wasson

never come, it is possible they might have remained outside the realm of the written word. What

roles did her transcribers and translators play in the text’s coming into being? Are the texts as

they exist on the page a theft? A collaboration? Both? Ostensibly, Sabina could have refused to

tell her story or to be recorded, but we have no way of knowing the material circumstances of the

text’s creation.

In the Vida, fame is portrayed as something Sabina becomes “accustomed to” and even to

enjoy somehow, despite its lack of material rewards and the spiritual devastation it brought into

her life. In one scene, Sabina discusses a portrait that she has been told is on display in Oaxaca

City: “[t]here’s an enormous photograph of me working the earth with a hoe. The people who

took that picture of me bought my hoe and took it with them. I like people to give me

photographs of myself” (59). Sabina’s reflections on the exchange emphasize the payment she

receives for the hoe (and the photograph, presumably). Her cause of death—chronic malnutrition

—suggests she was likely driven to make these “exchanges” on the basis of material necessity,

and this is also possibly true of her participation in the creation of Vida and other documentation

of her life and chants. The Vida does say that she likes to be given photographs of herself, a

desire I would relate to her interest in other worlds.

It is impossible to know what was of her choosing. Sabina’s reflections on Wasson’s first

visit emphasize that she was completely unaware of the future consequences of sharing a vigil

with Wasson? That she did what she could within the constraints of her new situation is

consistent with her life as a whole as told in the Vida—Sabina survives the murders of two

philandering husbands and an arson possibly committed in revenge after her revelation of the

sacred ceremony to the foreigners (56-57). Making do and surviving impossibly difficult

circumstances were skills colonial invasion had prepared her for.

The texts that came out of this destructive exchange are undoubtedly of great value—the

chants make beautiful poems when transcribed, and I sympathize with Rothenberg’s desire to

make them known. It is also true that by the time Rothenberg came to know of Sabina and to be

curious about her work, the damage had already been done in terms of her community’s

exposure to the wider world of seekers. But Rothenberg’s flippant rebuke of those who would

claim “you can only destroy other cultures in the attempt to bridge them” at the Ethnopoetics

Symposium registers differently in light of her story (7). While he did not meet Sabina or

publish her work until a few years after the Symposium, his preface about her work, reprinted in

the 2003 UC Press edition, was reprinted without amendment. This suggests he has not made an

accounting of his involvement in the costs of Sabina’s “fame.” Her loss, apparently, does not

peoples seem to exist mostly in some ancient past. From this perspective, all still-existing

Indigenous peoples are always already endangered.

Sabina’s work, on the other hand, is all about presence, and I so end with her:

She is a woman who resounds, says

She is a woman torn up out of the ground, says

I am an Apostle woman beneath the water, says

I am an Apostle woman beneath the ocean,

says I am a shooting star woman, says

I am a woman like a wolf, says (Selections 112)

Conclusion

In an essay published in 1990, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that white people’s writings about

Indigenous culture have the potential to displace Indigenous writers, “appropriating” the

culture rather than “proliferating” information about it” (Making Face/Haciendo Caras

xxi). But how do you tell the difference between the two? According to Anzaldúa,

appropriation “steals and harms” while proliferation “helps heal breaches of knowledge”

(xxi). María Sabina’s Vida identifies the arrival of career-minded outsiders as what

caused her loss of connection with the “saint children”; although Sabina performed the

ceremony for Wasson and others voluntarily, we could also characterize it as being

stolen, since she did not know what she was choosing nor what it would cost her.

Wasson’s essay, published alongside Sabina’s Vida, claims that he had a duty to

make sure the world could hear Sabina’s chants. “Helping to heal breaches of

knowledge” is an old anthropological excuse, one reflected in nearly all the papers

presented at the First (and last) International Ethnopoetics Symposium. While only the

central figures identify themselves as the emissaries of “doomed” cultures, even

Wynter’s paper proceeds as though there were no contemporary art made by Indigenous

peoples, who all live on reservations—this despite her rightly faulting the participants for

failing to consider Black art as an important “oral culture” operating outside the

dominant white mainstream of American culture.

My next chapter explores Gloria Anzaldúa’s relationship to indigeneity and ideas

of “Indianness.” Anzaldúa, too, has been accused of erasing contemporary Indigenous

existence as she works to assert counterpublics. I consider Anzaldúa’s relationship to

indigeneity in relation to the pressures of navigating a white supremacist,

heteropatriarchal “majoritarian public sphere” and the “burden of liveness,” in José

Muñoz’s terms (1, 189).

Chapter Two: The “New Tribalism”

This chapter explores Gloria Anzaldúa’s engagements with indigeneity throughout her oeuvre

and critiques thereof in the context of queer theory, Indigenous critical theory, and critical

posthumanisms. In this chapter, I consider this aspect of Anzaldúa’s work in light of its

disidentificatory character and connections with posthumanist thought. Anzaldúa’s relationship

to indigeneity was especially complex; I explore a number of factors that made this so. For

Anzaldúa, Indigenous spirituality offered a different way of understanding subjectivity and thus

diverging possibilities for humanity (Borderlands 37).

Anzaldúa’s understandings of the modes of relation between humans and other lively

presences in many Indigenous cosmologies, which offer an opportunity to “attend to the body of

the earth” rather than exploit it for profit, guide her methodology (68). Throughout her work,

Anzaldúa attempted to formulate what she called, after the title of a negative article about

Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), the “new tribalism,” or an “expanded identity…based on many

features and not solely on race” (9).19 Emphasizing how global white supremacy “has imposed

identities through racial and ethnic classification,” Anzaldua’s new tribalism “disrupts this

imposition by challenging these categories” (9). A “social identity,” the new tribalism is useful

in that it “could motivate subordinated groups to work together in coalition” (9).20

This chapter responds to Scott Morgensen’s call for “distinct and extended discussion” of

how queer-of-color led “primitivist” projects have the counter-hegemonic potential to destabilize

19 The article in question is David Reiff’s article “On Professional Aztecs and Popular Culture.”

20 Domino Renee Perez’s entry for The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, “New Tribalism and

Chicana/o Indigeneity in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa,” offers a thorough critique of this conception. I discuss her

approach in this chapter’s conclusion.

colonial discourses by engaging with them (“Politics of Primitivity” 282). In this same piece,

Morgensen mentions Jose Muñoz’s conception of “disidentification,” which I explore in relation

to Anzaldúa’s work, as well as Chela Sandoval’s “acting differentially,” as possible modes that

might enable this process.

In later work, Morgensen offers a sustained discussion of responses to Anzaldúa’s

relationship to “primitivity” in her work. Engaging with well-known scholars of Latinx literature

who have critiqued this aspect of Anzaldúa’s theoretical project, such as Saldaña-Portillo and

Sheila Contreras, Morgensen rejects interpretations that reject her work outright because she

engages with colonial paradigms of Indianness (Spaces 250). However, Morgensen does not

trace Anzaldúa’s relationship to indigeneity in any extended way, which I seek to do here. I

extend Morgensen’s work by delving further into the question of how Anzaldúa’s desire to

assert her indigeneity functions in the context of what José Muñoz refers to as the “burden of

liveness,” or the pain of being denied history and futurity (189).

Anzaldua, Indigeneity and el movimiento

Anzaldúa’s interest in theorizing this new “social identity” was in part based in her desire

to provide an alternative to solidarity developed via shared racial “identity.” As was true for

many women and queer people, Anzaldúa’s experience in the Chicano movement of the 1960s

and 1970s (el movimiento), was fraught. In particular, Chicanas and other dissenting voices in el

movimiento were disturbed by the nationalism marshaled by the idea of Aztlán [the Chicanx

homeland] and learned from experience that many activists’ monolithic conception of the

“Chicano nation” meant difference within the movement was not welcome (Chicana Feminisms

2-3).21 For this reason, Gloria Anzaldúa and other Chicana writers and activists shift the terms of

discourse by highlighting other concepts, such as the borderlands, and/or seek to transform the

idea of Aztlán, as in Cherríe Moraga’s articulation of “Queer Aztlán.” For Chicana/os, Anzaldúa

argued, “mestizaje, not chicanismo, is the reality of our lives” (Luz 58).

However, Anzaldúa was undeniably influenced by el movimiento’s celebration of mestizo

[defined by Anzaldúa as “people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood”] people’s Indigenous

ancestry (BL 5). This aspect of el movimiento was rhetorically useful in combatting the way

white supremacy within Chicanx communities had previously promoted the valorization of

whiteness, but it also led to criticism from U.S. Native and Black communities. Chicanx

people’s claims on Indigenous threatened tribal nations’ sovereignty; proudly Afro-mestizo

people questioned why el movimiento was not seeking to valorize blackness as well. In addition,

as María Saldaña-Portillo has argued, by claiming specifically Aztec heritage, Chicanx people

“usurp the territorial claims of the indigenous inhabitants of the Southwest, including those of

the Comanche who are part of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family” (Indian Given 140-141).22

In the first pages of Borderlands, Anzaldúa begins with a quote from Jack Forbes that

figures Aztlán and mestizaje as material realities: “The Aztecas del norte…compose the largest

single tribe or nation…in the United States today…Some call themselves Chicanos and see

themselves as people whose true home land is Aztlán [the U.S. Southwest] (Borderlands 1).23 By

21 As Marissa Lopez has argued, Alurista, the writer widely credited with introducing the concept of Aztlán to el

movimiento, conceived of it as an abstract concept that could serve as a “place for all people,” but other activists

took it up as a material space [the U.S. Southwest] as a way of combatting the U.S. government’s constant portrayal

of Latinx subjects as “foreign invaders” (106).

22 For other important critiques of and reflections on “Aztec” identification in el movimiento and Mexican state

indigenismo, see Daniel Cooper Alarcon, The Aztec Palimpsest, Arturo J. Aldama, Disrupting Savagism:

Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation, Sheila Marie

Contreras, Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature, and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable

Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries.

23 The source of the quote is Jack Forbes’ Aztecas del norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán (1973).

spatializing Aztlán, Anzaldúa “reclaims” the U.S. Southwest for mestizo peoples by asserting

their right of return on the basis that their Aztec ancestors potentially resided there before

migrating south.

This construction is quickly followed by an unacknowledged reference to José

Vasconcelos’s La Raza Cosmica (1925), a text central to both Mexican state indigenismo and

U.S. chicanismo. Saldaña-Portillo explains how Vasconcelos’ essay claims that the Spanish

colonial project conjoined the four “great races” [described as “red, yellow, black, and white”] in

the “merging together of all races into one ‘cosmic’ messianic race” (Indian Given 202). Both

“utopian and racist, democratizing and hierarchical,” La Raza Cosmica reifies existing racial

hierarchies and promotes the “eventual erasure of indigenous specificity” (202-203).

Anzaldúa’s own appropriation of Vasconcelos also suggests the birth of a “new hybrid

race,” mestizos, suggesting that Chicanos are the offspring of the first “matings” of people with

Indian and Spanish blood (BL 5). As discussed in the introduction, in Borderlands Anzaldúa

positions herself as borrowing what is useful from existing models (regardless of whether some

aspects of them are problematic) (82). After invoking (but not citing) Vasconcelos, she proceeds

to emphasize the revaluation of the feminine, queer, and darkskinned, sentiments which stand in

contradiction to Vasconcelos. Anzaldúa has been widely criticized for invoking La Raza

Cosmica, but her syncretism could also be read as freeing what is useful within in oppressive

traditions; reclaiming terms and shifting their meaning to serve anticolonial and antiracist

purposes (82). In addition, if we consider her gesture through the lens of what Gayatri Spivak

terms “strategic essentialism,” we can understand it as “a strategic use of positivist essentialism

in a scrupulously visible political interest,” a reading which is supported by Anzaldúa’s quick

departure from mestizaje as a biological category (“Subaltern Studies” 205).

As Saldaña-Portillo also points out, Anzaldúa’s desire for an origin leads her to fixate on

the biological in her earlier work, grounding her own indigeneity in biological ties to pre-

Columbian peoples rather than political ties with other contemporary Indigenous peoples in the

Americas. Saldaña-Portillo reads Anzaldúa’s identification with a romantic Indigenous past as

echoing Mexican state indigenismo, which seeks to provide a heroic “Indian” past to all

Mexicans while simultaneously launching an assault on the lifeways of contemporary

Indigenous peoples (Indian Given 416). These critiques are complicated, however, by the fact

that Anzaldúa is seeking to connect with her own indigeneity and therefore looks to the past as a

way to avoid causing harm by appropriating Indigenous cosmologies from contemporary

Indigenous peoples (SAIL 13-14).

As a queer Chicana subject, Anzaldúa never felt at home in any static version of

“identity” and certainly not in movement politics; her goal in Borderlands and elsewhere was to

create a “New Mestiza” subjectivity that sought to define being human in Indigenous terms.

Because “the heterosexual tribe” has always most feared “being different, being other and

therefore lesser, therefore sub-human, in-human, non-human,” even within the Chicano “tribe,”

Anzaldúa found herself demoted to the status of queer outsider (18). Likewise, in the largely

white feminist and queer movements of the time, there was little to no space made for the

experiences of racialized participants. For Anzaldúa, then, el movimiento was both a source of

inspiration and oppression. Most notably in the prose sections of Borderlands/La Frontera

(1987), Anzaldúa borrows aspects of movement discourse while rejecting others that were

heterosexist, masculinist, and nationalist.

Theory in the Flesh

In the wake of 1960s and 1970s revolutionary discourses, multiply marginalized subjects

like Anzaldúa found themselves in need of new theories of alliance and subject formation. As a

response to these conditions, fellow writer-activist Cherríe Moraga and Anzaldúa designed the

now well-known anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color

(1981). In framing the anthology’s purpose, Moraga emphasizes the need for spaces in which

multiply marginalized women can come together (xiv). Because the differences that regulate

racialization are always coded to keep marginalized groups at each other’s throats, to cut in

advance any threads of solidarity, “Chicana and Black” women must earn each other’s trust by

passing through difference into solidarity, in part by understanding that this passage is never

given (xiv). Coming together through difference is about “the joy of commonness, the

exhilaration of meeting through incredible odds against it” (xiv). While the examples therein can

be particular, the “commonness,” described is not restricted to these relations within

“humanity.” Rather, the anthology seeks to establish a sense of “commonness” which expands

“experience” to accommodate connections across different groups of humans as well as the

human and more- than-human.

This sense is reflected in José Muñoz’s conception of a “brown commons,” in which

brownness operates as an “expansive category that stretches outside of any one group

formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic” (GLQ 209). For

Muñoz, this speculative formulation of “queer thought” is about “casting a picture of arduous

modes of relationality that persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies

of being” (209-210). Being able to think beyond the human here means being able to think of

“brownness,” often imagined as biologically sutured to racialized bodies, as a force in the world.

This is not to say that “brownness” is not part of embodied experience, only that living within a

“sense of brownness” that gestures beyond the taxonomies of race and the separation of the

human from the nonhuman is a starting point for departure from existing constructions of

subjectivity. “Within the category of human intraspecies connectivity,” explains Muñoz, we feel

the formatting force of asymmetrical stratifications both within humanity and outside it” (210).

By perceiving this “formatting force” and bringing a “sense of brownness” to bear upon it, we

become attuned to the “potential and actual vastness of being-with” (210). Muñoz’s “brown

commons,” then, can be seen as continuing work done by Anzaldúa and Moraga which attempts

to use the embodied experiences of minoritarian subjects as a springboard for moving beyond

existing constructions of the human.

I use the term “disidentification,” after Muñoz, to describe the strategies used by queers-

of-color working to develop multiracial coalition politics. Muñoz himself foregrounds his deep

debt to Anzaldúa and Moraga’s work in the preface to Disidentifications (1999). In his account,

1980s queer woman-of-color feminists are responsible for advancing a version of “identity

politics” [quotation marks are Muñoz’s] which “locates the enacting of self at precisely the point

where the discourses of essentialism and constructivism short-circuit” in order to enact “a

radical feminist of color identity that shrewedly reconfigures identity for a progressive political

agenda” (6-7).

As defined by Muñoz, disidentification describes “the survival strategies the minoritarian

subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic public sphere that continuously elides or punishes

the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship”

(Disidentifications 4). The similarity of Moraga’s “how we cope” and Muñoz’s “survival

strategies” is just one of many correspondences between their work. Muñoz also borrows the

term “identities-in-difference” from Anzaldúa and Moraga, understanding it to mean identities

that “use and are the fruits of a practice of disidentificatory reception and performance” (6).

Through disidentification, “damaged stereotypes” are recycled as “powerful and seductive sites

of creation” (4).

Likewise, in her original preface to Bridge, Moraga explains that while many people

want the editors to plot a “‘strategy’ for Third World Revolution, the anthology is interested in a

different “strategy,” defined as “how we cope” (xviii). To clarify, this strategy is not assimilation

to the dominant culture—even a quick skim of the anthology renders this claim ridiculous. Jodi

Melamed, for example, considers the work done in This Bridge as part of “a race radical tradition

of antiracisms” that make the violence of race-liberal orders apparent and “impel desire for

something better” (Represent and Destroy 3).

In order to explore how Bridge both centers the embodied experience of multiply

marginalized people while seeking to move beyond the “formatting force” of the categories

which identify them as such, I consider how two key concepts—“materialism” and “theory in the

flesh”—help to establish the anthology’s posthumanist approach. Moraga defines the

anthology’s approach as “materialist,” explaining that its materialism is grounded in the

embodied experiences of “the flesh of these women’s lives” (xviii). The phrase brings to mind

Moraga’s more famous coinage in Bridge, “theory-in-the-flesh” (23) as well as Maurice

Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of “the flesh of the world.” For Merleau-Ponty, the representative

sensation of being in the world is “affection, being a presence to the world through the body

and to the body through the world,” defined as “being flesh” (239). While his assertion might

appear to privilege individual experience, Merleau-Ponty explains that “[e]ach landscape of my

life, because it is not a wandering troop of sensations or a system of ephemeral judgements but

segment of the durable flesh of the world, is…pregnant with many other visions beside my own”

(123).

That is, if approaching the world phenomenologically potentially carries the danger of

centering individual experience, Merleau-Ponty offers a version in which the experience of life is

a “landscape” which one is part of, of which one’s own vision is only one of many. Merleau-

Ponty’s description is also echoed by Norma Alarcón in her essay “The Theoretical Subjects of

This Bridge Called My Back” (1997): “[c]onsciousness as a site of multiple voicings is the

theoretical subject, par excellence, of Bridge. Concomitantly, these voicings (or thematic

threads) are not viewed as necessarily originating with the subject, but as discourses that

traverse consciousness and with which the subject must struggle with constantly” (365).

Consciousness, here, should not be understood as individual consciousness, just as

Moraga’s “theory in the flesh” and is not intended to assert the centrality of individual

experience. Rather, her objective is to critique the split between ontology and epistemology, or

between experience (understood as “being a presence to the world through the body and to the

body through the world) and reigning epistemological modes with their pretentions to

universality and sorting mechanisms. As Merleau-Ponty notes in the above quote, to become

part of the “flesh of the world” is to perceive a multiplicity of visions rather than privileging

one’s own, which would be just another version of Foucault’s Man.

To give a more contemporary example, Karen Barad’s term “ethico-onto-epistemology”

also helps to frame Moraga and Anzaldúa’s refusal of this separation between collective

experience, politics, and knowledge production. Barad emphasizes processes of intra-action, or

the relation between “the apparatuses of bodily production,” or discursive practices, and “specific

material phenomena (i.e., differentiating patterns of mattering)” over interaction, which relegates

agency to the human realm and fails to account for the way our material experience is created by

dominant paradigms (139). If hegemony is maintained by the assumption of sameness, difference

is what matters; Barad is careful to explain that her theory of agential realism does not “denigrate

separateness as mere illusion,” recognizing it as a neoliberal position that reifies the illusion of

“sameness” despite the realities of racial capitalism (136).

For Barad, mattering is differentiating, a process that need not yield hierarchical results:

“which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences”

(137). This quote helps to clarify what is at stake in the anthology—by interrogating how their

“difference” has been made to “matter” the writers in Bridge seek to construct different modes of

being through the “iterative production of different differences.” Both Moraga and Anzaldúa see

these “different differences” as subject to that same process of breaking down as the “differences

that have come to matter”—a new oppositional “identity” that simply contradicts how one has

been made to matter is not the end goal. Rather, the goal is to enter into a process like that

described by Barad, one which never ceases to continue interrogating the material consequences

produced by discursive formations.

While Moraga’s formulation of “theory in the flesh” has been criticized as essentialist, I

read it along these processual, new materialist lines. Moraga’s “materialism” is realized in her

characterization of the assemblage of elements that make up and surround the book—the

conditions that made creating it necessary in the first place, the writers and editors writing

together, the conversations readers have together about the book, etc. Moraga emphasizes the

anthology as a lively object in the world capable of “transforming” not only lives but life itself

(xiii). Similarly, borrowing from Bruno Latour, Marissa López articulates a methodology of

reading she deems the “critique by assemblage,” in which texts are approached as events and

bodies as “confederations of things” (Racial Immanence 19). According to Lopez, this approach

opens up the possibility of exploring what else Chicanx cultural production might be doing

besides “reflecting history or subjectivity” (19).

Jasbir Puar’s essay, “I Would Rather Be A Cyborg Than a Goddess: Becoming-

Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” which also seeks to bring intersectional frameworks in

the tradition of Moraga and Anzaldúa into conversation with feminist new materialisms, clarifies

how these two seemingly disparate discourses can exist in a productive friction with each other.

As Puar argues in Terrorist Assemblages, “[n]o matter how intersectional our models of

subjectivity…[they] may still limit us if they presume the automatic primacy and singularity of

the disciplinary subject and its identitarian interpellation” (“Becoming-Intersectional” 62).

To indicate the character of these circumscriptions, Puar quotes Norma Alarcón’s famous

question from her essay about Bridge: “[a]re we going to make a subject of the whole world?”

(62-3). Puar proposes that we consider intersectionality (which “attempts to comprehend

political institutions and their attendant forms of social normativity and disciplinary

administration”) and assemblage (which “in an effort to reintroduce politics into the political,

asks what is prior to and beyond what gets established”) as posing different conceptual problems

as well as describing co- existing modes of enforcing hegemonic control (63). I argue that

assemblage does make a subject of the whole world, while intersectionality helps multiply

marginalized subjects find their way into that assemblage by allowing for the rejection of

dominant understandings of being-in- the-world.

New/Old Materialisms

One of Anzaldúa’s solo contributions to This Bridge, “La Prieta,” echoes Moraga’s materialist

focus on embodied experience. Anzaldúa begins by describing how her grandmother would

inspect her buttocks looking for “the dark blotch, the sign of indio, or worse, of mulatto blood”

(198). The essay, that is, opens with a literal examination of how race is “in” the body as “a form

of physical, affective experience that catalyzes personal and political change in the world”

(López 6). Because the young Anzaldúa is “muy prieta,” [very dark] her grandmother tells her to

stay out of the sun. Were her skin to darken further, people might mistake her for “an Indian”;

she must not get her clothes dirty or risk being called a “dirty Mexican” (198). By targeting anti-

Black and Indigenous sentiments within the Chicanx community at the outset, “La Prieta,” like

the anthology more generally, immediately shows its investment in building solidarity across

diverse groups. Anzaldúa reminds the reader that, though it may not yet have dawned on her

grandmother, “though sixth-generation American, we were still Mexican and that all Mexicans

are part Indian” (198).

Anzaldúa follows this description of her grandmother’s racist policing of her body

with another way the body “betrays” her: she begins menstruating at three years old, a

phenomenon the doctor calls “a throwback to the Eskimo.” (199). The “betrayal,” then,

becomes physical

evidence of Anzaldúa’s Indigenous heritage. At the same time that Anzaldúa seeks to eradicate

potential obstacles to coalition building that emerge from the assignation and experience of

bodily difference, she also seeks to establish her own Indigenous ancestry and temperament. I

read this tension as expressive of Anzaldúa’s understanding that it is only through the embodied

experience of race that a politics beyond “identity” might be formulated. The young Anzaldúa,

we are made to understand, did not understand this possibility, feeling like “[a]n alien from

another planet…dropped on my mother’s lap,” lost within the family and unsure of her purpose

in life (199, 208).

As Marissa López has observed, Anzaldúa then compares her body to a book by

following these lines with a description of her father dropping a “25¢ pocket western” (This

Bridge 199) on her lap:

Equating her own body with a book, Anzaldúa connects her physical disorientation to a

tropological racism that she is able to see and re-narrate because of her alien

consciousness; writing about race is, for Anzaldúa, a choratic, corporeal metaphysics of

‘western’ political and geographic space. (131)

If “chora,” described by Plato in the Timaeus as “both the place in which and the stuff from

which” the universe was crafted, “emphasize[s] form as both the matter and energy of text,” then

by comparing her body to a book, Anzaldúa emphasizes what López, borrowing from Rebekah

Sheldon, calls the “emergent property” of matter (17).

The body is a source of pain for Anzaldúa. It is the place in which all –isms and other

betrayals of the body are experienced. The young Anzaldúa’s early menstruation, and the

criminalization of her queerness lead her to dissociate consciousness from the body, or the

material through which others index her. This “survival tactic” allows the young Anzaldúa to

cope long enough that she might enter into a decolonizing process through which she can reform

her relationship to the colonial scripts which injure her (Borderlands 39). This process requires

that the “metaphysics of ‘western’ political and geographical space” be engaged not through

predetermined epistemological formations but through corporeal experiences (López 131).

Anzaldúa’s process of decolonization is initiated by the sense of alienation she feels from

herself. The experience of being denied a place in two cultures (white and Indigenous) as a

queer mestiza leads her to understand that she must establish her own discursive “universe” in

order to

survive. The parameters of this one cannot accommodate her being without producing what she

later calls “la rajadura,” [the split] or the splitting of the brain into “two functions” and reality

into two realities. Anzaldúa attributes these separations to Western culture’s attempt to become

“objective” by making “objects of things and people” while distancing itself from them

(Borderlands 43, 209). According to Anzaldúa, by creating a split between subjects and objects,

Western culture created a set of parameters that uphold racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy,

making objects of all those who do not “fit” the supposedly “universal” criteria for subjecthood

(Borderlands 42-43).

Anzaldúa centers these “[d]ominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as

unquestionable, unchallengeable, [and] are transmitted to us through the culture” in her

understanding of what slit her open (16). In the section on la rajadura she describes a knowing

that she “was the mutant stoned out of the herd, something deformed with evil inside” (43).

Her sense of “abnormality” produces feelings of shame, and she also registers how others’

indexing of her confirms that all can see it: “[t]heir eyes penetrate her; they slit her from head

to belly.

Rajada” (43). Like her grandmother, those who do not “know” her examine her for signs of

deformity in order to cast her out of subjecthood. Anzaldúa is able to perceive what Muñoz calls

the “formatting force,” that is, and eventually to bring a “sense of brownness” to bear upon it.

For Anzaldúa, as well as for Muñoz, it is through this process that the “potential and actual

vastness of being-with” opens up (210).

These themes are already present in “La Prieta”; as evidenced by this passage in which

Anzaldúa rejects the “formatting force”:

A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would

chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label…[t]hink of me as

Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white,

one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man’s world, the women’s, one

limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the

occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web (205).

Anzaldúa refuses the indexing function of these labels, insisting that we are comprised not only

of what one identifies with but what we do not, which allows her to—literally—imagine a

more- than-human body that far exceeds the bounds of “identity” (206). In addition to Shiva,

Anzaldúa also references First Woman, who Paula Gunn Allen says is known to the Pueblo as

the “Old Woman Spider who weaves us together in a fabric of interconnection” (Sacred Hoop

11).

According to Gunn Allen, Thought-Woman is the “spirit that pervades everything…

[and] informs right balance” (13-14). Leslie Marmon Silko figures “Grandmother Spider”

in the Pueblo tradition as a storyteller, as “[h]uman identity, imagination and storytelling

were

inextricably linked to the land…just as the strands of the spider’s web radiate from the center

of the earth” (Yellow Woman 23, 15).

Anzaldúa’s strategy of including both Shiva and a figure from U.S. Native creation

stories is a precursor to the “backpack” strategy of subjectivity found in Borderlands that opens

this project; Anzaldúa, Shiva-like, borrows what works from a range of traditions, taking what

works and getting rid of what doesn’t. As previously discussed, Anzaldúa’s many-armed

reaching can be understood as mirroring the extractive logics of conquest. Scott Morgensen,

citing Chela Sandoval’s account of “a postmodern economy of cultural difference” alongside her

assertion that U.S. Third World feminists traversed oppositional movements to create decolonial

feminist and queer projects, questions whether Anzaldúa facilitates or troubles “globalist logics

of indigeneity and methods for their circulation” (Spaces 251). Considering this question in light

of Muñoz’s theory of disidentification allows us to understand that both can be true.

Disidentification is a messy process because it is often through “damaged stereotypes” that

multiply marginalized subjects “work through the dominant fantasies of the other in a reflective

way” by performing them, making constructions of the “exotic” available as antinormative

options (x).

Anzaldúa’s “exotic” more-than-human body is able to experience a “mixture of bloods

and affinities, which she uses to create El Mundo Zurdo (the left-handed world), a universe in

which “I with my own affinities and my people with theirs can live together and transform the

planet” (209). While “mixture of bloods” might seem, at first glance, to refer to Anzaldúa’s

particular biological composition, the addition of “affinities” and invocation of a more-than-

human body suggests “the mixture of bloods” is not meant to refer to existing paradigms of

racialization, but rather the messy process of being imbricated with other bodies in the “flesh of

the world.”24

“Speaking Across the Divide”

Anzaldúa’s contributions to This Bridge reveal her interest in how strategic essentialism might

be used to construct empowered and multivalent identities from which relational

understandings of subjectivity could emerge. These new epistemological models might enable

humans to move beyond dependence on identity categories for self-articulation, a process she

saw as useful for short-term political gains but ultimately limiting. For Anzaldúa, “identity” is a

“shape-shifting activity” in which “we shift around the work we have to do, to create the

identities we need to live up to our potential” as denizens of the Earth with reciprocal

obligations to each other (Anzaldúa Reader 211).

24 This reading is complicated by other aspects of Anzaldúa’s work, such as her invocation of José Vasconcelos’ La

Raza Cosmica in Borderlands, which will be discussed later in the chapter.

While I find many of the critiques of how indigeneity was mobilized within el

movimiento and then in Chicana feminism useful and salient, I am sympathetic to Anzaldúa’s

sense of deep connection to her Indigenous roots and her desire to build pan-Indigenous

coalitions at a planetary scale. In a joint interview with Simon Ortiz in Studies in American

Indian Literatures (2004), Anzaldúa clearly expresses her sense of solidarity with other

Indigenous groups in her answer to the question of what it means to her to have “Indian”

ancestry. For her, it includes not only having physical and spiritual roots in the North American

continent but also to exist in a state of “mourn[ing] the losses—loss of land, loss of language,

loss of heritage, loss of trust that all Indigenous people in this country, in Mexico, in [sic] the

entire planet suffer on a daily basis” (9). Anzaldúa’s emphasis on the ongoing losses

experienced daily by Indigenous populations suggests that Anzaldúa did not substitute an

identification with pre-Columbian cultures for one with contemporary Indigenous peoples.

Unlike most of the participants in Ethnopoetics Symposium, Anzaldúa seems to be aware of the

existence of contemporary Indigenous life.

She also outlines how the current discourse around Chicanx indigeneity within U.S.

Native paradigms can make the development of pan-Indigenous solidarity in the Americas

especially challenging. Anzaldúa points out that by denying Chicanx people’s claims to their

Indigenous ancestry, Native North Americans deny mestiza/os acceptance in a way that mirrors

U.S. Anglos’ rejection. While the comparison is incorrect in many senses (the power relations

are quite different, for example) Anzaldúa conveys the feeling of being rejected by both “halves”

of her ancestry. Despite the alienation produced by this dual rejection, Anzaldúa maintains an

awareness of the dangers that arise for U.S. Native communities around the question of mestiza/o

ancestry. She expresses the fear that her participation in the interview (and Chicanx claims to

indigeneity more generally) will “violate Indian cultural boundaries” and inadvertently

“contribute to the misappropriation of Native cultures” (12). Anzaldúa also recognizes the

danger the acceptance of mestiza/o peoples would present for “tribalized” but non-federally

recognized Native communities.

As part of the interview, Anzaldúa includes a statement from Deborah Miranda,

who expresses the concern that if her people were to identify as mestiza/o rather than Indian

their indigeneity might disappear completely, which Anzaldúa says would be “tantamount

suicide/genocide” (12).25 Since Anzaldúa speaks from a position of detribalization herself, her

characterization of the stakes at hand illuminates why she seeks recognition of her Indigenous

heritage despite her fear that it will endanger U.S. Native communities’ sovereignty. Regardless

of her deep desire for acceptance from other Indigenous Americans, she understands that her

vision of the new tribalism must remain unrealized until “the Indigenous in Indians and

Chicana/os are ensured survival”—while also insisting that is it a dream that must be pursued.

In the SAIL interview, Anzaldúa expresses global solidarity with Indigenous peoples and

expresses her desire for a “tribalism” that might generate pan-Indigenous coalitions. As

previously discussed, Anzaldúa’s evocation of indigeneity echoes a central critique of el

movimiento, which posits that foregrounding pre-Columbian worldviews perpetuates a nostalgia

that erases the struggles of contemporary Indigenous peoples. In response to this objection,

Anzaldúa explains why she chooses to turn to pre-Columbian models in her work. She insists

that her interest in these sources does not foreclose the possibility of maintaining an awareness

of the continued struggles of Indigenous peoples in the U.S.:

25 In the bio included in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (edited by Anzaldúa),

Miranda identifies as “a mixedblood woman of European and Esselen, Ohlone, Costanoan and Chumash ancestry”

(599).

For me, to bring up these cultural figures and terms is more of a remembrance, an

uncovering, and an exploration of my own indigenous heritage. I do it with a keen

awareness we’re living in Indian land. I do it knowing that native people in this

country suffer…I try to stick to my own indigenous antepasados and not ‘borrow’

from North American Indian traditions. (SAIL 13-14)

Ironically—as discussed speculatively in relation to Lorde’s letter to Mary Daly, Anzaldúa’s

stated reason for failing to engage with contemporary Indigenous lifeways in her writings is her

“fear of stepping on toes.” By only writing about “ancient” cultures, she feels she won’t

transgress any boundaries.

Anzaldúa then expresses a desire for pan-Indigenous solidarity as well as dialogue and

“collaborative work that reveals how connected our past histories and present situations are”

(SAIL 16). In the interview, as elsewhere, she presents herself as a “nepantlera,” a “modern day

chamana” whose purpose is to engage in the “spiritual activism” of “bridging the abyss” between

people—in this case U.S. Native and Chicanx communities—but also more generally to build

bridges that undo false divisions produced by reigning epistemological modes and state-imposed

borders (SAIL 19). Her reliance on “shamanic” paradigms in the interview shows Anzaldúa’s

propensity to invoke this popular fantasy about indigeneity.

Castaneda’s Unlikely Influence

In light of Anzaldúa’s general attempts to demonstrate thoughtfulness and sensitivity around her

claims to indigeneity, the depth of Carlos Castaneda’s influence on her work, only recently

made visible by the publication of Light in the Dark, is puzzling.26 Her reliance on Castaneda for

26 While he did not affiliate himself with el movimiento due to the apolitical nature of his work, the influence of

Castaneda’s writings is also highly visible in early Chicano activist literature. Alurista, for example, dedicated his

collection Nationchild Plumaroja (1972) in part to Carlos’s “teacher” in the Castaneda books, Don Juan, and used

an epigraph from The Teachings of Don Juan within the text (4, 10). Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), the

understanding nagualismo seems yet stranger in the context of her earlier condemnation of Lynn

Andrews, a white woman who “‘rips off’ people of color” by passing off “fiction as fact, an act

that distorts the true picture of Native peoples in a way they, as writers, would not” (Making

Face xxi). She does laud Tony Hillerman, who she frames as a white author who “does his

research” and writes about Hopi and Navajo cultures in a respectful, honest, and informative way

(xxi). In this instance, Anzaldúa seems to see the misrepresentation of Indigenous culture as the

element which either condemns or approves white formulations of indigeneity.

AnaLouise Keating notes that Anzaldúa’s introduction to Making Face, Making

Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (1990) takes an

uncharacteristically “oppositional” approach, by using “overly simplistic descriptions of ‘white’-

raced people and stark self/other binary oppositions and over-generalizations” (124). My take is

different: Anzaldúa, it seems to me, never naïvely presents self/other binary oppositions—in This

Bridge Called my Back and Borderlands/La Frontera, for example, she sees oppositional

consciousness as useful and necessary for short-term political gains and self-refashioning.

Ultimately, however, she sees it as replicating the same limiting structures of violence that help

to enforce racist ideologies:

But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging

patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and

oppressed; locked in mortal combat, both are reduced to a common denominator of

violence…At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will need to leave the

opposite bank. (Borderlands 78-79)

second winner of the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol [Fifth Sun Prize] for Chicanx literature, which is likewise

marked by the influence of The Teachings of Don Juan. Published just a few years later, it also chronicles the

initiation of an apprentice into the world of nonordinary reality at the hands of a wise healer (Nieto 320). Anaya

refers to Antonio’s relative and teacher, Ultima, as a “curandera,” but the structural and thematic similarities

between the two books are undeniable.

The oppressed/oppressor binary, Anzaldúa notes, is drawn from the conceptual register of the

oppressor. This means that when the oppressed become “locked in” a “counterstance,” the

degree to which consciousness can shift is circumscribed. This quote thus echoes the most well-

known text in This Bridge Called My Back, Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never

Dismantle the Master’s House,” in which Lorde argues that the “master’s tools”—i.e., the forms

of thought that bolster “racist patriarchy”)—“may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own

game, but they will never enable us to bring out genuine change” (98-99). Moving beyond

paradigms of subjectivity into the mode of “assemblage,” in López and Puar’s terms, that is,

requires “leaving” oppositional identity paradigms and refusing the epistemological hegemony of

the “West.”

Because “assemblages” must necessarily emerge from the process of navigating existing

material conditions, Anzaldúa considers the possible differences between white writers’

encroachments into representations of Indigenous life and Chicanx people’s explorations of their

own indigeneity. She is critical of Chicanx writers and thinkers who claim Indigenous ancestry

but ignore contemporary Indigenous struggles, and she tries not to represent, as mentioned

previously, concepts drawn from U.S. tribes to which she does not have known ancestral ties in

order to avoid misappropriation. Since both positionality and intentionality are central in

determining whether or not it is acceptable to “borrow,” according to Anzaldúa, “[w]ho does the

appropriating and for what purpose is a point to consider” (SAIL 15). While Anzaldúa looks

forward to a vision of new tribalism, she also continues to insist on the necessary uses of

“strategic essentialism” as long as racist ideologies continue to uphold structural inequity

(Spivak, “Subaltern Studies” 205). As discussed earlier, Anzaldúa deploys select aspects of

problematic texts and concepts like José Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cosmica and a “material” Aztlán

in Borderlands as a means of creating a material component to her more speculative visions. I

would argue that her approach to Castaneda is similar—despite his works being part of an

“oppressive tradition,” she takes what she needs and leaves the rest.

Anzaldúa was certainly aware of the negative impact Castaneda’s books have had on

Indigenous communities: in Luz, she specifically references the critiques of whiteshamanism by

Indigenous critics discussed in Chapter One and expresses understanding that Chicanx people

can collude with whites in the theft of Native spirituality. She cites Wendy Rose’s famous

assertion that “not all whiteshamans…are white,” a remark directed in large part at Castaneda.

Additionally, Anzaldúa identifies Castaneda as the pioneer of the neo-shamanic movement that

has resulted in the mischaracterization of Indigenous practices, and explicitly acknowledges

Castaneda’s deceptive practices, describing his writings as “novels (which he passed off as

anthropological field notes)” (404; Luz 13, 53).

Yet, despite explicitly acknowledging all of these problems, Anzaldúa uses Castaneda’s

writings as a primary model for many of the theoretical paradigms articulated in Luz,

particularly nagualismo. Nagualismo, according to Anzaldúa, is “a type of Mesoamerican magic

supernaturalism,” an “alternative epistemology” based in “shapeshifting (the ability to become

an animal or thing) and traveling to other realities”—a description that very much mirrors the

conception offered in Castaneda’s work (Luz 32). Like Jerome Rothenberg, whose “translations”

and performances of Indigenous oral materials into written “poems” I discuss in the first

chapter, Anzaldúa also draws on the poet-shaman equivalence in articulating the purpose of her

work.

The terms of her engagement with “shamanic” practices shift over time, but throughout her

writings the shaman is figured as occupying liminal space, therefore having the capacity to pass

between worlds and realities. Anzaldúa also shares with Rothenberg the notion that shamanic

figures then return from their travels and convey what they have seen to the community for

healing purposes.

Throughout all of her writings, Anzaldúa centers “shamanic” paradigms. In This Bridge

Called My Back (1981), Anzaldúa describes the movement from ordinary reality into “El Mundo

Zurdo” (the Left-Handed World); in her introduction to Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth

(1996), she develops conceptions of “spiritual mestizaje,” a shamanistic act of border-crossing

and shape-shifting that “nurtures the ability to wear someone else’s skin”; in This Bridge We

Call Home (2002), she articulates the idea of “nepantla,” or “the point of contact between

worlds” and finally, in the posthumously published A Light in the Dark/El Luz en lo Oscuro

(2015), she explores the epistemological dimensions of nagualismo (Bridge 172, Anzaldúa

Reader 230, Bridge We Call Home 1, Luz 2).

Considering this centrality of “shamanic” paradigms to Anzaldúa's writings, not much

had been written on this aspect of her work prior to 2009. Most critics (AnaLouise Keating is a

notable exception) ignored the implications of Anzaldúa’s 1990 essay “Metaphors in the

Tradition of the Shaman,” in which she emphasizes how the writing of Borderlands was her way

of “practicing the oldest ‘calling’ in the world—shamanism…in a new way” (Anzaldúa Reader

121).27 In this essay, Anzaldúa explains that she sees her role as a writer in terms of the shaman’s

call to heal the community: “…through my poet’s eye I see ‘illness’…whatever is harmful in the

cultural body…” and then develop a “cure…that leads to a change in our belief system” (122).

Her self-positioning as shaman, then, provides a position from which to transform thought (and

27 Other notable exceptions to this general trend in earlier scholarship include Irene Lara’s 2005 essay “Bruja

Positionalities: Toward a Chicana/Latina Spiritual Activism” and David Carrasco and Roberto Lint Sagarena’s “The

Religious Vision of Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La Frontera as a Shamanic Space” (2008).

therefore reality) through her writing, as Walter Mignolo has argued in relation to her conception

of “the Borderlands” (Local Histories/Global Designs 326).

Since the publication of The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader in 2009, however, the tendency to

overlook “shamanic” theories in Anzaldúa’s work has shifted, in part due to Keating’s editorial

influence (both in terms of her framing commentary and her selection of texts, about half of

which were previously unpublished). In her introduction to the Reader, Keating asserts that

Anzaldúa’s “poet-shaman aesthetics” and “spirit-inflected approach” have been neglected,

particularly in the case of her later articulations of nepantla and conocimiento (Anzaldúa Reader

8, 10). Keating’s injunction clearly resonated, and in addition to her own comprehensive

explorations of these concepts in Anzaldúa’s later work in Transformation Now! (2014) and

elsewhere, scholarly work on these “spirit-inflected” aspects of Anzaldúa’s later writings has

proliferated.28 This “lag” in responses to “shamanic” paradigms in her work gesture to the

discomfort felt in academic settings about “the spiritual.” The emerging discipline of

posthumanisms—as Keating also suggests in her recent work on Anzaldúa—has also encouraged

scholarship on the more-than-human dimensions of her work as enacted through Indigenous

thought (TN Loc 1423).29

Light in the Dark illuminates the degree to which Anzaldúa’s understandings of

nagualismo have been formed from her responses to Castaneda’s writings. She mentions

Castaneda eight times throughout the manuscript—far more, by a long shot, than any other

28 For examples, see George Hartley, “The Curandera of Conquest: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonial Remedy,”

Martina Koegeler-Abdi, “Shifting Subjectivities: Mestizas, Nepantleras and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Legacy,” Sarah

Ohmer, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonizing Ritual de Conocimiento,” and Kelli D. Zaytoun’s “‘Now Let Us Shift’ the

Subject: Tracing the Path and Posthumanist Implications of La Naguala/The Shapeshifter.”

29 Other recent reflections on the more-than-human and ecocritical dimensions of Anzaldúa’s thought include

Cordelia E. Barrera, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Ecocritical Vision: A Spiritual Journey,” and Allison Steele, “Touching the

Earth: Gloria Anzaldúa and the Tenets of Ecofeminism."

thinker or writer, and cites him six times, along with obscure related literature. Her citations

move across many of his books, including Tales of Power (1974), Journey to Ixtlan (1972), The

Second Ring of Power (1979), The Eagle’s Gift (1982), The Fire From Within (1984), The

Power of Silence (1987), and The Art of Dreaming (1993). She also borrows language from the

first two books of the Castaneda quartet, The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality

(1971), without citing them (as has been the case throughout her writings).

My examination of how Castaneda’s writings move throughout Luz allow for a

consideration of what perceived affinities might have led Anzaldúa to engage so deeply with

them. I hold both Anzaldúa’s explicit statements regarding the status of Castaneda’s writings and

her extensive reliance on them in her last book in mind and consider how what she borrows from

Castaneda is transformed or reified in her adaptations. I also place Anzaldúa’s engagement with

Castaneda in conversation with the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s writings about

the same concepts in Castaneda’s work, expanding on Anzaldúa’s own citation of A Thousand

Plateaus, which she characterizes as advancing a theory of subjectivity similar to the one she

articulates in Luz (68).

Anzaldúa’s interest in Castaneda springs in part from her general immersion into the

“spiritual” literature popularized by the New Age movement discussed in the first chapter, for

which Castaneda’s writings are central. In addition to Castaneda’s books, Anzaldúa also drew on

other popular literature condemned by Indigenous critics, including Gordon Wasson’s writing

about María Sabina’s mushroom ceremonies and Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies.30 In

Borderlands, Anzaldúa conceals the most eccentric of these references by “losing” the source of

30 Wasson is cited in Borderlands, and Anzaldúa made a marginal note in a pre-draft for Borderlands about

Rothenberg and ethnopoetics (BL 97).

a quote from Dane Rudhyar’s book An Astrological Mandala, despite the fact that it is attributed

in every draft of Borderlands in the archive. The associated footnote reads, “I have lost the

source of this quote. If anyone knows what it is, please let the publisher know” (BL 95). This

elision suggests that Anzaldúa initially wanted to hide the influence of New Age materials on her

work, but by the time she writes Light in the Dark, she is willing to be open about it (perhaps

only because the book would be published posthumously). Her willingness to make these

sources visible in later works, however, also opens up the possibility to frame them as part of a

colonial archive (27).

Castaneda’s presentation of himself as someone who escapes the abstract theorizing of

academic life by undertaking a journey into other realities resonates with Anzaldúa’s sense of

her own role in academic settings and as a theorist more generally (Interviews/Entrevistas 144).

In addition, The Teachings of Don Juan is explicitly set up as a rebellion against the tenets of

anthropology—a disciplinary coup enacted via Don Juan’s demonstrations of a totally new onto-

epistemology to his initiate “Carlos.” Anzaldúa’s own sense that she is privileging

epistemologies generally excluded from academic discourse is central to her overall theoretical

project, and so the affinity between Castaneda’s work and her own must have been immediately

evident.

In addition, because Anzaldúa sees narrative as central to the process of “doing” theory,

Castaneda’s disguise of fiction as truth was perhaps less important to her than the success of his

fictionalization. Because Anzaldúa values the “translation” of images as “symbols for concepts

and ideas” and the showing, not telling, of how transformation happens, Castaneda’s success in

this regard must have intrigued her (Luz 7, 25). Anzaldúa, like Castaneda, also theorizes through

experience transmuted into narratives capable of shifting readers’ perceptions. As AnaLouise

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Keating puts it in her editor’s notes for Luz, “her respect for the imagination’s epistemological

and ontological functions prevents her from entirely rejecting Castaneda’s work (because

imagination, according to Anzaldúa, gives us access to important truths—valid and useful

information about reality)” (218-219). Anzaldúa’s response is nearly identical to that of Deleuze

and Guattari’s in A Thousand Plateaus. This is not the only convergence between Anzaldúa and

Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with Castaneda (Luz 65). The overlap between the two

works seems to emerge from shared preoccupations with Castaneda’s work as well as the

authors’ shared goal: to escape existing theories of subjectivity through immersion in the “flesh

of the world” and the casting off of “consensual reality” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms,

“becomings”). I continue my discussion of Deleuze and Guattari in the context of Jodi Byrd’s

work in order to better understand the movement of “Indianness” and particularly the “nagual”

or “sorcerer” in the text.

While my primary focus is Anzaldúa, I place her engagement with Castaneda’s

ideas in conversation with Deleuze and Guattari’s. In part, I seek to remedy a tendency in

Anzaldúa scholarship to read her work as providing primarily experience-based

testimony, ignoring its theoretical implications. Anzaldúa sees high theory as a discourse

that “bashed” Chicanas in the academy and understands her own “elevation” in academic

circles as tokenism (SAIL 14). Her “success” still replicates the “dynamics of

colonialism” practiced by the white/academic mainstream, who “continues to control, to

give or withhold what’s labeled art or theory” (14). She feels that her work is often

included in anthologies or cited as a tokenizing gesture, “a mere referencing” rather than

a “deep exploration” of her theories such as I hope to achieve here, in part by putting

these two important theoretical works that draw on Castaneda in conversation (14).

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Borderlands & Becomings

Another important shared characteristic of Anzaldúa's and Castaneda’s work is

the location of their interventions in the “borderlands,” conceived of not only as a

geographical location but also as space from which to think and enact transformations.

The figure of the brujo, sorcerer, shaman, or nepantlera, to use various terms employed

by Castaneda and Anzaldúa, is the one who inhabits the “liminal space” or “zone of

impetuous transition, the point of contact between the worlds of nature and spirit,

between humans and the numinous (divine) that the borderlands represent" (Luz 28).

Deleuze and Guattari call this border-space a “zone of proximity,” or “zone of

indiscernibility,” formulations that reflect their sense that this liminal space, like the

borderlands, exposes the falsity of separation between bodies of all kinds, land included.

Within these “zones,” ordinary conceptions of bounded subjectivity collapse, opening up

new perceptions of our inter-relatedness. “Crossing” over into what Anzaldúa calls “El

Mundo Zurdo” or into what Don Juan calls “the left side of awareness” thus represents a

radical shift in perception (Luz 50).

In addition to traversing interstitial spaces which allow them to cross into other

worlds and realities, the figure of the nagual is also positioned at the “zone of transition”

between the human and the nonhuman. This proximity allows them to “become-animal,”

in Deleuze and Guattari’s famous formulation, which is drawn from Castaneda’s

portrayal of Carlos’s “becoming-dog” in The Teachings of Don Juan. In their

construction of this concept, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the shaman’s

becoming-animal is not literal: “the human being does not ‘really’ become an animal”

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(ATP 238).31 Rather “becoming” involves crossing over the borders of the (supposedly

bounded and concrete) self, which is “only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two

multiplicities” (249).

“A fiber strung across borderlines” can stretch “from a human to an animal”

along with providing other “lines of flight” from subjectification and representationalism

(ATP 246-49). Anzaldúa’s description of “becoming” her nagual, the snake, operates

along similar lines. When she sees “la víbora,” her body “becomes part of, merges with,

‘disappears’ into my surroundings…my consciousness flows into an animal” (Luz 27). In

liminal spaces, the artificial division between self and world disappears, and a porous,

flexible sense of being emerges.

The importance of starting from a liminal space is also enacted in formal terms.

Castaneda’s “passing off” of his first book as ethnographic material presents, for

Anzaldua and Deleuze and Guattari, a compelling example of how troubling disciplinary

forms can yield surprising outcomes. Anzaldúa’s own hybridizing methodology of

“autohistoria-teoría” can be seen as a formal manifestation of her desire to break down

pre-existing genre separations, and so Castaneda’s ruse appealed to her in this sense (Luz

206). Deleuze and Guattari, too, seem to have taken inspiration from Castaneda’s

disciplinary revolt.

A Thousand Plateaus is Western philosophy thrown in a blender on high.

Experimental and literary, wildly anti-rhetorical, and schizophrenically interdisciplinary,

the text is conceived as an “assemblage” that blurs the lines of who or what “writes”:

31Friends of Don Juan’s at the house where Carlos trips on “Mescalito” [peyote] describe Carlos frolicking with a

dog, barking in such a manner that he “sounded so much like a dog we couldn’t tell you apart” (18).

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“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus [the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia]

together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (ATP 3). As in

the case of Moraga’s characterization of Bridge, a book is not conceived of as an “object”

written by a subject, but rather an assemblage (ATP 3-4). Similarly, in Luz, Anzaldúa

asserts: “It is the writing that writes me” (3). The emphasis on the text’s subjectivity in

Anzaldúa’s writings and A Thousand Plateaus constitutes an ethico-onto-epistem-

ological claim that does not separate language from the material world.

The Tonal and the Nagual

Castaneda’s Tales of Power, the text Anzaldúa and Deleuze and Guattari focus

on the most, contains the formulation that most influenced the three writers. The “tonal”

and the “nagual” occupy a central position in both Luz en lo Oscuro/Light in the Dark

and A Thousand Plateaus.32 Don Juan rejects Carlos’s “anthropological” understanding

of the tonal and the nagual, in which the tonal is a “guardian spirit, usually an animal”

obtained at birth and the nagual is the “name given to the animal into which sorcerers

could allegedly transform themselves, or to the sorcerer that elicited such a

transformation” (Tales 119). Don Juan is deeply amused by anthropology’s conception

of these words, a position which sets him outside the disciplinary boundaries that have

shaped Carlos’s thought.

32 Sheila Contreras identifies the basic structure of primitivist thought as based in “the transvaluation of binaries”

such as rational and instinctual, right-handed and left-handed, etc. (130). Anzaldúa and Deleuze and Guattari’s

adoption of “the tonal and the nagual” gesture to this component of primitivism in Castaneda’s work. Ironically, the

transplantation of this binary renders the three theorists’ critiques of dualistic thinking relatively unconvincing.

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Rather, according to Don Juan—who gives Carlos the “sorcerer's explanation” of

these concepts, the tonal is the “organizer of the world” (Tales 116). While this

“guardian” could be represented as an animal, it more broadly represents the

classificatory force within us—its function is to “judge, assess, and witness”—which

most often turns it “into a petty and despotic guard when it should be a broad-minded

guardian” (123-24; 121). The nagual, on the other hand, is a force that exists outside the

“island of the tonal” and “for which there is no description,” but that we can witness

emerging through us, another form of “becoming” that is experienced as a kind of “jolt”

out of “ordinary reality” that transitions into a feeling of suspension in “nonordinary

reality” (Tales 124-126; A Separate Reality 14). Unsurprisingly, these concepts line up

well with the version of “shamanism” at play in all three works—only special

individuals with special powers are able to traverse both categories.

In Anzaldúa’s understanding of the concept, the tonal typically acts as a reifying

force that holds what Anzaldúa calls “consensual reality” together; “it makes up [and

then enforces] the rules by which it apprehends the world” (Luz 41-42; Tales 123-24). In

this sense, the tonal is similar to what Muñoz describes as the “formatting function.” In

terms of one’s own perception, it represents the failure to move outside the ego-based self

in order to merge with the world, as the tonal fails to capture the porous and relational

nature of our existence: “we are fluid, luminous beings made out of fibers. The agreement

that we are solid objects is the tonal’s doing” (Tales 236; 158).

In Tales of Power, Don Juan gives Carlos lessons on how to “shrink the tonal” in

order to allow for the emergence of the nagual (Tales 242-43). According to Castaneda,

the tonal is “shrunk” when it is “shocked” with information from “nonordinary reality,”

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which causes it to lose its facility for automatic categorization and description of the

world (“stopping the world”) (Tales 236; 294). These moments of “shock,” Don Juan

says, can be dangerous, and so he emphasizes the need for balance between the force of

the tonal and the force of the nagual.

Castaneda’s strange explanation of “stopping the world” in order to access the

nagual captivated Deleuze and Guattari as well as Anzaldúa. In Deleuze and Guattari’s

conception of the tonal and the nagual, the tonal is (in brief) organism, organization,

significance, signification, interpretation and subject; the nagual is the “body without

organs,” experimentation, becomings—in short—what we know must be there outside

the current order but do not have language for and which eludes interpretation (ATP

162).

To demonstrate the dangers, Deleuze and Guattari give examples of how

consciousness-shifting experiments can go too far: Artaud’s peyote experiments with

the Tarahumaras carry him further into madness; Burroughs’ speed-induced creativity

becomes blocked by an episode of paranoia (ATP 164, 152). Balancing the tonal and the

nagual, then, means simultaneous attention to survival in the present and radical

experimentation.

Anzaldúa also pays close attention to “stopping the world” as a means of

accessing nonordinary reality, and takes up the sense that there are dangers associated

with these “jolts” as well. She conceives of the “shock” of the world stopping as

“arrebatos/earthquakes” that “jerk” you out of the familiar and send you spinning into

nepantla, Anzaldúa’s term for the liminal space between realities or worlds that

shamans, or nepantleras, occupy and the second of her “seven stages of conocimiento”

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(Luz 122). Experiencing such a shock results in the condition of “susto” or “soul loss,”

and in order

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to survive this wound, “you must, like the shaman, find a way to call your spirit home”

(Luz 125). The phase of movement that follows, the “Coatlicue state,” is characterized by

being “abandoned to a maelstrom of chaos…cast adrift from all that’s familiar" (Luz

123).33

Being separated from the “tonal” like this turns out to literally be dangerous for

Anzaldúa: while in Coatlicue, she wakes to a hypoglycemic incident and can’t remember

what her doctor has told her to do (130). She refers to her time “stuck” in the Coatlicue

state as “blocks,” the same term Deleuze and Guattari use to describe failed attempts at

finding “lines of flight” away from a overdetermined and stratified reality that does not

admit any conceptions beyond the rationality of the “tonal” (BL 74; ATP 152).

Anzaldúa’s notion of shock or susto [soul loss] is one of “shamanic initiatory

dismemberment that gives suffering a spiritual and soulful value…Torn apart into basic

elements and then reconstructed, the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to

help the community…through the restoration of power, life force or soul” (Luz 29-33).

When Castaneda’s philosophical project is re-oriented toward collective well-being in the

present, the project of interrogating consensual reality in order to reveal the contingency

of the current arrangement of the world takes on potential political utility. While, for

Carlos, the imperative to shift from ordinary to nonordinary realities is solely based on

the acquisition of power, Anzaldúa and Deleuze and Guattari focus on collective

suffering and the desire to “heal” or remedy it.

33 According to Anzaldúa’s citation of C.A. Burland and Werner Forman’s Feathered Serpent and Smoking Mirror:

The Gods and Cultures of Ancient Mexico in Chapter Four of Borderlands, “La herencia de Coatlicue/The Coatlicue

State,” Coatlicue is the “[g]oddess of birth and death,” and “the mountain, the Earth Mother who conceived all

celestial beings out of her cavernous womb” (46). Anzaldúa also quotes María Sabina’s veladas in relation to

Coatlicue: “[c]ome, little green snake” (BL 46).

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Anzaldúa—as previously discussed, sees the writer’s task as shamanic and

associates the “nagual” with creativity, so Castaneda’s nonsense proved useful for her.

As “[i]n the ‘old world,’ art was/is functional and sacred, as well as aesthetic,” Anzaldúa

calls for new perspectives on the imagination, healing, and shamanic spirituality” (Luz

54, 44). She terms this conception of art “Border Arte,” which she defines as "a kind of

making history, of inventing our history from our experience and perspective through our

art rather than accepting our history by the dominant culture” (Luz 62). That is, art has

the potential to help “heal colonialism’s wounds” by reconnecting us to what has been

lost and narrating suppressed histories, thus allowing us to reconfigure our futures on the

basis of other kinds of imaginings and knowings (Luz 44).

Anzaldúa refers to this project as “decolonizing reality”; Deleuze and Guattari

also seek the unraveling of Western philosophical paradigms as part of politics:

“[r]acism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until

those who

resist identification have been wiped out…Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence

and naivete” (ATP 178).

In Anzaldúa’s work, however, the decolonization of reality is a stage that

precedes “spiritual activism,” the necessary precursor to her dream of “new tribalism”

(Luz 43, 19, 67). Spiritual activism,” as she defines it, is an “amalgam” of traditional

spiritual practices and the “technologies” of political activism (Luz 19). Fueled by the

work of conocimiento, a process of inquiry that “refuse[s] to accept spirituality as a

devalued form of knowledge,” spiritual activism means “engaging the spirit in

confronting our social sickness with new tools and practices whose goal is to effect a

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shift. Spirit-in-the-world becomes conscious, and we become conscious of spirit in the

world” (Luz 19).

“Spirituality,” according to Anzaldúa, is the “ontological belief in things outside

the body” that allows one to “become aware of the interconnections between all things”

(Luz 38). “Activism” is defined through notions of reciprocity between humans and

between the human and nonhuman: “According to indigenous belief, we are embedded

in nature and exist in reciprocity with it…We are in partnership with the Earth, but the

partnership must go both ways; we must demonstrate trust, love, respect, and reciprocity

to make this bond work” (Luz 38). As such, spiritual activism is a theory of great utility

in a time of ecological crisis because it asks us to return to seeing the world as infused

with “spirit,” each entity connected to all others by “invisible fibers” (Luz 15).

The sense of planetary interconnectedness and responsibility represented by

spiritual activism also points the way toward freedom from conceptions of “identity” that

limit affiliation. Anzaldúa ties her “symbol” for the new tribalism, el árbol de la vida [the

tree of life], to Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome,” describing them as “similar structural

model[s]” that “spread in all directions” and create networks in which all points can be

connected with each other (Luz 68). She characterizes both figures as describing a

different kind of subjectivity and being-in-the-world.

“New tribalism” is grounded in this rhizomatic conception of affinity; “like other new

Chicano/Latino narratives,” it recognizes that we are individual strands in a web connecting “a

network of living organisms and their physical habitats” made up of this and other worlds (Luz

67). Anzaldúa explicitly identifies new tribalism as a rejoinder to movements based on pre-

existing identity categories, emphasizing that the movement is “about working together to create

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new ‘stories’ of identity and culture, to envision diverse futures. It’s about rethinking our

narratives of history, ancestry, and even of reality itself” (Luz 7, 85).

In this rhizomatic model of self-in-relation, subjectivity is “multilayered,

stretching in all directions, from past to present, vertically and horizontally,

chronologically and spatially” (Luz 69). This “self” is never given, but created “as we

interrelate with others and our alrededores/surroundings…we strategically reinvent

ourselves to accommodate our exchanges” (Luz 75). Anzaldúa’s new tribalism extends

her conception of mestizaje far beyond biologically based conceptualizations. Rather

than depending on “ancestry,” she explains, “[t]he story of mestizaje must include other

planetary groups” (Luz 76). At the text’s end, Anzaldúa asserts that “bridging the fissures

among us means dismantling the identity markers that promote divisions,” a theorization

that differentiates her projects from that of state indigenismo (Luz 77). The vision she

finishes the book with is future-oriented, tinged with prophecy: “[w]e are becoming a

geography of hybrid selves of different cities or countries who stand at the threshold of

numerous mundos” (Luz 81).

New Tribalism or Modern Primitivism?

In her writing on Anzaldúa, Domino Renee Perez figures “New Tribalism” as modern

primitivism, on the basis that Anzaldúa’s “some of this, some of that” approach promotes

cultural tourism (10). If Anzaldúa is merely continuing to disseminate projections of the

“imaginary Indian” at the center of Chicana/o identity without calling it into question, this

undermines the decolonizing objectives of her work. Perez sympathizes with Anzaldúa’s

“privileging of Indigenous thought” and her desire to develop “a way for groups to work

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together in coalition and an organizational structure for bridging humanity,” but argues that

Anzaldúa’s total reliance on metaphor and mythology renders her theories ineffective (6, 12).

Perez sees Anzaldúa as having “played Indian” with no regard for the consequences,

despite Anzaldua’s oft-expressed sense of solidarity with U.S. Native and other Indigenous

women. If Anzaldúa’s early work has been criticized for attempting to connect “material”

conditions to the more-than-human, thus “essentializing” her ideas, her late work seems to

move away almost completely from the former.

As a way of illustrating Anzaldúa’s promotion of globalism, Perez quotes an interview

where Anzaldúa explains, “New Tribalism is a kind of mestizaje. Instead of somebody making

you a hybrid without your control, you can choose” (8). Perez sees this statement as an

expression of cultural tourism; I read it rather as an expression of how Anzaldúa conceives of

“identity politics” as a disidentificatory worldmaking performance (Disidentifications ix). By

turning to the “exotic,” Anzaldúa is able to perceive her being in new ways that help her to

dodge the “formatting function,” the gaze that splits her down the middle (Disidentifications x,

210; BL 43). Anzaldúa refuses to play the part she has been assigned, insisting on something

wildly different.

But there is still the matter of Castaneda. On the one hand, Anzaldúa’s propensity for

fantasy may have encouraged her. Her fear about misappropriation may have led her to believe a

fiction was better to draw from. If so, this means Anzaldúa forgotten her own theories about the

function of art, that the caricatures of indigeneity contained in Castaneda’s books, like all stories,

have the capacity to affect material conditions. By featuring his ideas so prominently in her text,

Anzaldúa—even if she cautions readers that she takes from here and there without demanding

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perfect politics from her sources—still disseminates his damaging portrayal of Indigenous

spirituality.

The subject of this project’s last and final chapter is Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel

Almanac of the Dead, which puts these projections into narrative play in order to destabilize

Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers’ ideas about indigeneity. Almanac is often discussed

alongside Anzaldúa’s work, but these analyses have not focused on how race functions in the

novel in relation to broad coalition-building objectives like ecological struggle, or what Fredric

Jameson termed “useful popular front strategies” in his commentary at the Ethnopoetics

Symposium (alcheringa 111). In it, I build on my work here. Anzaldúa and Silko’s approaches

share much in terms of how they understand their relationships to indigeneity and imaginaries of

“Indianness.” Both, I argue, play with them as a means of subverting colonial fantasies about

“authentic Indians” and to explore the possibilities for popular front strategies therein.

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Chapter Three: The War Against the Destroyers

In Almanac of the Dead (1991), Leslie Marmon Silko presents global capitalism as a “somewhat

weak and very cruel” male epoch known as “Death-Eye Dog” in which a cult characterized by

its greed and love of others’ suffering, the Destroyers or Gunadeeyahs, has come to reign (250-

51, 760). The Destroyers, who first appear in Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), are motivated by

the devaluation and objectification of all life, and since their unleashing of European capitalism

upon the world, are “all around now. Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the

remains of something alive in them” (Ceremony 230). Almanac collects the histories of the ways

in which these “blood worshiping” individuals—usually men of European descent who have

acquired power through the exercise of brutality co-signed by the settler colonial state, or anyone

drawn in by the Destroyers’ ways who has managed to assimilate—have profited from centuries

worth of atrocities (570). That is, Silko’s novel shows how, in Jodi Byrd’s words, that “[t]he

story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime” (Transit of Empire xii).

Published in anticipation of the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in

1492, the novel expands our understanding of the histories and contexts of settler colonial

violence in the Americas by exposing the falsity of Eurocentric narratives, mapping suppressed

histories of anti-colonial resistance, and emphasizing the ongoing need to fight the colonial-

capitalist orders perpetuated by the Destroyers. Almanac articulates a fictional spiritual counter-

history of resistance to the Destroyers that precedes the arrival of Europeans in the Americas.

The novel mobilizes prophecies found in the surviving Maya codices that strongly resemble

Laguna stories—as well as the new almanac being generated by the novel’s characters—in order

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to foretell the end of the Destroyers’ reign.34 The temporal scale of Silko’s novel, as well as its

insistence on time as inexorably connected to place, reminds us that “Native American people

have been on these continents thirty thousand years, and the Europeans have been here for five

hundred” (739). By reframing “history” in this way, Silko asserts that it is far more naïve to

bet on the long-term success of global capitalism than it is to insist that it will fall.35

In this chapter, I will trace Silko’s tale of the war between the Destroyers and those who

fight them—a coalition of human and more-than-human warriors—in order to show how,

through her narratives, Silko models a way forward to a shared future centered on the retaking

of the Americas by coalitions of Native and non-Native people driven by and brought together

by forces beyond the human. The warriors in Almanac are summoned by ancestor spirits that

speak to them in dreams and that will reveal the moment when all the “scattered crazies and

their

plans” will converge to create the necessary shift away from the living death of global

capitalism (755). The story the novel tells is a faith-giving story, one that allows readers to hold

out hope for revolutionary futures regardless of how strong the Destroyers’ hold over the world

seems to be. It shows us not only how to prepare to defeat the Destroyers but also how not to

become one

34 A number of critics have engaged closely with Silko’s use of the codices: Antonio Barrenechea traces Silko’s

engagement with the four surviving Mayan codices (Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier) and notes that in

Almanac “Silko adds to the Mayan archive by inventing a fifth codex” (America Unbound 116); Channette Romero

and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung note that Silko only names the first three codices in the novel (the Grolier is

considered “unauthenticated”) and refers to the new almanac being generated by the novel’s characters as a “fourth

almanac” (“Network” 2, “Economies” 212). In a 1993 interview with Laura Coltelli, Silko says her sources for the

old Mayan almanacs were “fragments of old stories I’ve heard here and there…and to this, I combined what I

could recall from some books…In fact, I really did not spend much time with the Popol Vuh because so many of

the

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stories are almost identical to the Laguna stories” (Conversations 122-126).

35 An early negative review of Almanac by Sven Birkerts claimed the novel was “naïve to the point of silliness,”

because the idea that “oppressed of the world should break their chains and retake what’s theirs…is so contrary to

what we know both of the structures of power and the psychology of the oppressed that the imagination simply

balks” (41). Birkerts’ confidence in the everlasting power of capitalism perfectly exemplifies the “blindness to the

world” that characterize the Destroyers in Silko’s novels (A 224).

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of them, for as Yoeme, the Yaqui woman who passes the ancient almanacs down to her

grandchildren Lecha and Zeta, says, the possibility “trails each one of us” (256).

Silko’s invocation of the relatively short duration of global capitalism and her

constant reminders of Native American and slave rebellions in the Americas and beyond does

far more than just expand the scale in which “history” is thought in Almanac; it also

denaturalizes the colonial-capitalist state of mass suffering in which the few commit atrocities

and accumulate wealth with impunity by reminding us that the existing arrangement of the

world is only one stage of existence, or one possibility. Silko’s novel reminds us that

alternatives to capitalism exist and have existed far longer than capitalism has named itself

ruler of the earth, and

mobilizes the prophecy—or the story that, if told through the generations, will come true—found

in Laguna and Maya cosmologies: “all things European” will disappear, and the land stolen from

Native Americans by the colonizers will be reclaimed (503, 532). A number of potential ways in

which this prophecy might play out are explored in the novel; Silko imagines not only a coherent

alternative to the logic of “capitalism until the earth dies” but multiple ways in which the end of

capitalism might come to pass.36

The novel not only offers an exhaustive critique of colonial violence, history, and logics

over the last five hundred years in the Americas, it also offers a way forward, showing us how

we can prepare for the moment the dispossessed, guided and aided by ancestor and earth spirits

36 Joni Adamson helpfully enumerates the possible (and potentially overlapping) events leading to the

“disappearance of all things European” as follows: “either the arrival in North America of an army from Chiapas,

the violent overthrow of national and state governments by the mafia or ecoterrorists, the interruption of the

national electrical power system, or the collapse of the international computer networking system, and possibly

more than

one of these events” (146). The collapse of global digital networks as the Korean hacker Awa Gee notes, could

result in the disappearance of the international banking system and an instantaneous redistribution of power (A

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680). In addition, if there is any central event that anchors the prophecy, it is the arrival of the people walking

North. The question regarding the latter is whether the U.S. government will fire on the people, an outcome for

which the

novel’s militant women, like La Escapía, will be prepared (A 740).

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and pushed forward by the “tidal wave of history,” rise up against the Destroyers (518). If

the use of force is the means through which the Destroyers rule, Silko demonstrates that

there are other forces their technologies of destruction are no match for.

Almanac exhaustively catalogs the atrocities committed in the Americas since the arrival

of Europeans on the basis of classificatory logics born of so-called “Enlightenment” thought,

exploring the way in which European thought systems developed in tandem with the emergence

of global capitalism engender a world where profit and the sadistic pleasures of the wealthy take

priority over living relationships.37 I will explore how Silko’s definition of the Destroyers and

analysis of their logics of division in Ceremony and Almanac allow her to offer a model of

coalition building which shows us how to reject these divisions and defeat the Destroyers

without falling into common pitfalls that often accompany attempts to bring disparate groups

together in the struggle against this common enemy.

Firstly, she rejects what Byrd refers to as the “conflation of racialization and

colonization,” in which the ability to transcend racialized divisions is located in an ahistorical

false universal that ignores the context of settler colonialism (Byrd xxvi). This crucial refusal

allows her to cut through the settler colonial narrative in which Native Americans are framed as

“another minority”. That is, Almanac not only speaks to the importance of connecting across

difference as a means to reject classificatory logics, it also considers the context of settler

colonialism and asserts that the return of the land to the people—not only in the Americas but

globally— is equally crucial if we are to build a shared future on earth together. Secondly, her

model of coalition building is based on radical, feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist

37 Mishuana Goeman advocates understanding the patriarchal and racist categories imposed on Native people by

settlers as well as other forms of classificatory separation as “stemming from the project of Enlightenment,” a claim

which is central to my understanding of how the Destroyers operate (Mark My Words 15).

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activism rather than in a vague celebration of multiculturalism, which posits itself as a solution

to a worldview made up of divisions while simultaneously naturalizing and disconnecting them

both from their capitalist foundations and the material and psychological suffering they produce.

I will focus on Silko’s broad theorization of how the Destroyers’ primary weapons for

creating divisions are classificatory discourses that work to generate artificial separations

between what is in fact interconnected and shared. The novel shows that refusing these false

separations and the versions of being-in-the-world that coalesce around them is crucial to

defeating the Destroyers. The novel opens up “possibilities for anticolonial action that emerge

outside and beyond the Manichean allegories that define oppression” by demonstrating other

ways of thinking relationality (Byrd xxxv). However, unlike many contemporary attempts to

think relatedness in a frame outside of mainstream European epistemologies, Almanac is

grounded in Native struggles to reclaim stolen land. I turn first to this important difference by

reading Silko’s Almanac in relation to Wai Chee Dimok’s conception of “deep time.” My

analysis here is inspired by Jodi Melamed’s argument regarding the presence of “a race radical

tradition of materialist antiracisms”—whose roots are readily found in literary texts themselves

(in contrast to liberal multicultural literary studies discourses), which disconnect race from

material conditions. (Represent and Destroy 4, 219).

“We Want Our Mother the Land”

Silko’s insists that the future relies on the return of the land to the people, or the abolition

of land as property. This assertion works in opposition to thinkers whose attempts to move away

from anthropocentric constructions of the human and history in the context of “geological time”

in order to center planetary concerns who ignore the particularity of lived histories when they

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move into the theoretical realm (Dimok 176). In particular, Wai Chee Dimok, who invokes

Almanac in her much-cited discussion of “deep time” as a concept that might productively shift

discussions around “American literature,” misses as much as she finds to admire in Silko’s

novel. The turn on the part of non-Native theorists toward “planetarity” often mines indigenous

knowledge for the ways in which it avoids Eurocentric suppositions about being-in-the-world

while failing to recognize land reclamation as a central ongoing concern for indigenous peoples

and for anyone who would like our shared future on earth to be removed from the hands of

craven profiteers.38

Silko’s novel offers an important corrective to this philosophical trend toward expanding

the temporal scales through which we consider history and being-in-the-world while eliding

historically grounded and place-based understandings of so-called “deep time” that rightly center

indigenous land rights. Jodi Byrd characterizes this elision as central to the “transit of empire,”

in which a “postracial and just democratic society” in the United States “is always already

conceived of through the prior disavowed and misremembered colonization of indigenous lands

that cannot be ended by further inclusion or participation” (xxvi). In Through Other Continents:

American Literature Across Deep Time (2006), Dimok seeks to restore the “longer history” or

“longue durée” of American literature in order to push against the borders of the nation, decenter

and deconstruct mainstream Western conceptions of the human, and forge connections between

place and history (3-6). The longue durée as interpretive context, according to Dimok, might

38 “Planetarity” is Gaytri Spivak’s conception that “‘the planet’ is…a catachresis for inscribing collective

responsibility as right,” which she sees as “best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet” (101-102).

There is no recognition in her description of the many living peoples who have ways of imagining the world outside

of a European capitalist framework. As T.V. Reed observes in his 2009 article on Almanac, the novel “was already

doing global decolonial environmental justice cultural criticism many years before the field was named,” and

“critics still need to catch up with Silko” (25).

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allow us to “weave our history into our dwelling place, and…take our place as one species

among others” (6).

Dimok cites Almanac of Dead as an example of a text that illustrates what the concept of

“deep time” can do for literary studies, observing that the novel narrates the “longer history” of

the Americas. According to her reading of Almanac, Silko’s invocation of the 18,000 years the

Pueblo people have inhabited these continents exemplifies the way in which “using geological

time as a human measure…compels us to rethink the phenomenology of race itself” by

acknowledging the existence of a “preracial planet” (176-77). Dimok invokes non-linear

temporality as expressed by Silko (“the past is not left behind and the past is not dead”)

alongside non-Native writer Gary Snyder’s appropriation of Native phenomenology in which he

posits the “ancient world” as “both a point of departure and a point of return, the

undifferentiated unity of the species gesturing toward a unity yet to be born” (Dimok 176-78).

Dimok

understands Snyder’s remark that “[a]nyone is, metaphorically speaking, a Native American

who chooses, consciously and deliberately, to live on this continent, this North American

continent, with a full spirit for the future, and for how to live it right” in the context of this

notion of recursive time (177-178). Her notion of a “preracial planet” echoes Byrd’s observation

that [in poststructuralism] “the Indian” functions as an “ontological prior” that erases the

genocidal history of the Americas and the ongoing struggle on the part of indigenous peoples to

reclaim and restore the land violently wrenched away by European colonists (xxxiv). In addition,

Dimok’s push for an “undifferentiated” unity, a universal paradigm that cannot accommodate

difference among its inhabitants, can only lead to more of the same.

Both Dimok’s inclusion of Snyder’s telling erasure of the non-Northern parts of the

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Americas, and her placement of Snyder’s “undifferentiated unity” that gives rise to a “unity yet

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to be born” alongside Almanac are deeply contradictory. Snyder’s focus on metaphorical

“nativeness” forecloses the notion that invoking deep time “allows us to weave history into our

dwelling place”— precisely what Silko achieves in Almanac, and what Snyder tramples in his

ahistorical universalism. In invoking a “preracial” past, Dimok intends to remind her readers that

race is a recent construct in order to denaturalize it as a given with stable signifying power.

Silko, as evidenced by her commitment to coalition building across these artificial divisions,

shares the desire for a future in which these constructs cease to be the lens through which we see

each other, but the erasure of centuries of colonial violence will never get us there. Almanac’s

model of coalition building posits the opposite: only a full reckoning might bring us on to a

healing path.

Indigenous Americans have emphasized the importance of practicing right relations with

the earth for millennia before the coming of Europeans, and Native academics have been

theorizing the link between colonial-capitalist mentalities and human actions that do not honor

our relationship with the planet for many decades. 39 As Glen Coulthard notes, for the Dene

Nations land is defined relationally and therefore encompasses all living elements: “Seen in this

light, we are as much a part of the land as any other element. Furthermore, within this system of

relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency” (80).

Coulthard explains that in this reciprocal understanding, human beings have ethical obligations

not only to each other but to all beings. If these obligations are met, other beings will reciprocate,

“thus ensuring the well-being of all over time” (80).

39 Shari Huhndorf observes that “postnationalist American Studies tends to devote little attention to Native America,

since “Native Americans present the most radical challenges to U.S. nationalist myths and imperial practices…[and]

implicate[s] all nonindigenous people in conquest” (“Picture Revolution” 368). The same erasure occurs in English,

Comparative Literature, and other humanities disciplines.

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This way of thinking is inimical to capitalist logics, and in addition to the initial push on

the part of settlers to acquire land, the strong opposition Indigenous ways of life present to

profit- driven models of existence is central to the settler colonial state’s ongoing attempts to

destroy Native lives.40 Indigenous ethics present an alternative to life under the misery of

capitalism by refusing to make profit the highest priority. These ethical principles must be

treated as inseparable from material concerns.

As Mishuana Goeman observes, detaching “land” from the idea of “property” is a crucial

component of re-centering the collective good. The conflation of the two terms is born of the

colonial project of land acquisition, as property “is distinctly a European notion that locks

together (pun intended) labor, land, and conquest. Without labor to tame the land, it is closely

assigned the designation “nature” or “wilderness” (“Land as Life” 77). This colonial definition

of land as property serves to perpetuate capitalist ideologies around the primacy of European

“civilization” and the accumulation of wealth as the driver of all recognizable action. In the

settler colonial formulation, land becomes something that is “acted upon” in order to obtain

further wealth, or as Goeman puts it, “colonial logics are always those of ‘possession,’ the ‘act

necessary to lay the basis for property….[that] include[s] only the cultural practices of whites’”

(“Land” 74).

Justice John Marshall’s deployment of the “doctrine of discovery” in the first of the three

cases known as the “Marshall Trilogy” is a paradigmatic example of how redefining land as

property served colonial interests and enforced European capitalist values in North America and

beyond. In the first case, Johnson vs. McIntosh (1823), Marshall imported Lockean ideas about

40 I do not intend to suggest that all Indigenous Americans reject capitalism—only that Indigenous lifeways can

represent alternate political models.

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hunter-gatherer societies, who “might have property in what they found or captured…but not in

the land over which they traveled in its pursuit” (qtd. in Barker 7). Marshall defined “discovery”

as “the appropriation of the lands for agriculture,” meaning, of course, forms of agriculture

recognizable to Europeans (Barker 8). Marshall’s machinations are just one of the “processes of

the state’s abstractions and the historical, mental, and physical fragmentation of people from

land” that are central to the Destroyers’ project of possession of the earth for profit and are born

of settler colonial violence and domination (Goeman, “Land” 85).

“A Story of Witchery”: The Destroyers in Ceremony

The division of people from the land is a central strategy the Destroyers use in working

their “witchery” in the world in both Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. Silko uses the story

of the genesis of Europeans and capitalist-colonialism in Ceremony, which narrates how the

Destroyers came to dominate the Americas, as a starting point for her more in-depth exploration

of Destroyer mentality and the means available to resist it in Almanac. Silko conceives of both

novels as her attempts to “figure out where injustice comes from. Injustice I pretty much equate

with evil, an imbalance and unwellness” (Conversations 105). The phenomenon of global

capitalism with its undergirding logics of patriarchy and white supremacy is reframed in

Ceremony as the objectification of all life at the hands of the Destroyers. European capitalism is

a reality generated by a story told by an indigenous witch of unknown ancestry that brings

Europeans into existence and sets the Destroyers’ “witchery” to work in the world in new ways

(132-138). As Silko observes in a 1998 interview with Ellen Arnold, her novels end up

“accidentally” being about capitalism because “capitalism is so much in the forefront of the

destruction of community and people and the fabric of being, and always was—I mean, slavery

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in the Americas, the destruction of the tribal people, of the world and animals” (19). In her

commentary here, Silko identifies slavery, colonialism, and the separation of “human beings”

from the earth as direct consequences of capitalist logics. “Big Capitalism” is “flat out evil” and

Almanac tells us how to dismantle it (24, 21). What we learn in Ceremony about how European

capitalism came into being acts as a starting point for Silko’s articulations of how the Destroyers

work and think, and how we might stop them, in Almanac.

Ceremony centers around the healing journey of Tayo, a young Laguna man suffering

PTSD after serving in World War II, being held in a Japanese prison camp, and witnessing his

half-brother Rocky’s death at the hands of Japanese soldiers. The Laguna elders in Tayo’s

community send him to Betonie, a mixed-blood medicine man, in hopes that Betonie might

help Tayo to create a new healing ceremony that will benefit the community as a whole. In

preparation for the ceremony, Betonie tells Tayo that although the desire to make things right in

the world by taking back everything the white people have stolen is strong, the Laguna people

“have done as much fighting with the destroyers and the thieves, as much as we could do and

still survive” (128). Betonie also explains that indigeneous people have the ability to “deal with

white people,” as the whites themselves are a product of “Indian witchery” (132). He tells Tayo

the story of how the Destroyers unleashed their witchery on the world: at a “witch contest” in

which Native people from many tribes participate, where the unknown witch tells a story they

say “will begin to happen” and that “cannot be called back” (135, 138):

Caves across the ocean/ in caves of dark hills/ white skin people/ like the belly of a fish/

covered with hair.// Then they grow away from the earth/ then they grow away from the

sun/ then they grow away from the plants and animals./ They see no life/ When they look/

they see only objects./ The world is a dead thing for them/ the trees and rivers are not

alive/ the mountains/and stones are not alive./ The deer and bear are objects/ They see

no life.// They fear/ They fear the world./ They destroy what they fear./ They fear

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themselves…They will fear what they find/ They will fear the people/ They kill what they

fear. (135-136)

The witch’s spell brings Europeans into existence and “sets into motion” the five hundred

years of bloodshed, theft and suffering the indigenous people of the Americas will endure.

Through Betonie’s stories, Tayo also learns that the forces set into motion by the witch affect all

of us and, in truth, could bring us together: “[h]uman beings were one clan again, united by the

fate the destroyers planned for all of us, for all living things” (246). The Destroyers, however,

distort the reality of this shared fate through creating separations that “destroy the feeling people

have for one another,” what Silko refers to as “Cartesian dualities” that cut the human off from

the natural world and set people against each other: “the starving against the fat, the colored

against the white” (C 229, Yellow Woman 31, C 191).

In Ceremony, Betonie teaches Tayo how to temporarily thwart the Destroyers. While

Almanac features a host of Destroyer characters, in Ceremony, Emo, a fellow Laguna veteran, is

the primary representative of the Gunadeeyah clan. Emo hates Tayo because Tayo’s father is

white, and carries around a bag of teeth that he knocked from the mouth of a Japanese solider

after killing him (57-61). Emo is one of those, who, as Silko says of Montezuma and Cortés in

Almanac, is a natural member of the Destroyer clan, a “blood worshiper” who is aroused by

violence: “Tayo could hear it in his voice when he talked about the killing...Emo fed off each

man he killed…Emo liked what they [the military] had showed him…He understood them right

away; he knew what they wanted” (A 570, C 61-62). Tayo stabs Emo in the stomach with a

broken bottle one night at the bar when Emo’s playing with his bag of teeth and bragging about

the lives he’s taken, an act of violence that emerges from Tayo’s feeling that “his own sanity

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could be destroyed if he did not stop them and all the suffering and dying they caused…He

would rather die himself (53-63, 252).

But towards the end of the novel, Tayo completes the healing ceremony by resisting the

impulse to kill Emo with a screwdriver “the way the witchery had wanted” (253). Tracked down

by Emo, Tayo conceals himself between some boulders in the same location that Almanac of the

Dead ends: the Laguna emergence place where the whites dug their uranium mine, and where

the snake looking South in the direction from which the nonviolent religious pilgrims committed

to retaking the land are walking appears in Almanac (C 246-248, A 762).41 The appearance of

this sign in Almanac is presaged in Ceremony, when Tayo sees a yellow spotted snake emerge

“out of the damp earth into the sunshine…carrying this message [that in all directions the world

alive] on his back to the people” (221). In resisting his impulse to stab Emo, Tayo is able to keep

the stories Betonie has told him and that he has gathered on his journey “out of the reach of the

destroyers…[so] their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them” (247). Tayo’s refusal to

succumb to the witchery’s desire enables him to return to the village elders with the stories,

complete the ceremony, and enable the witchery to be “dead for now” (261).

He also comes to understand the broader effects the witchery has on the people:

The witchery would be at work all night so that the people would see only the losses

—the land and the lives lost—since the whites came; the witchery would work

so that the people would be fooled into blaming only the whites and not the witchery.

It would work to make the people forget the stories of the creation and continuation of the

five worlds; the old priests would be afraid too, and cling to ritual without making new

ceremonies as they always had before… (249)

41 In “Silko’s Blood Sacrifice: The Circulating Witness in Almanac of the Dead,” David L. Moore takes the

recurrence of the emergence place in Almanac as a sign that Almanac extends the “act of witness” that Tayo

performs at Ceremony’s end (151-154). Silko, on the other hand, has cautioned against seeing Almanac as merely an

“‘exploded’ version of Ceremony, as to do so ignores the way in which Almanac engages more deeply with the

influence of spirit and animal beings, the power of narrative (by Silko’s account, through her exploration of the

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writings of Marx), and the influence of dreams, through which more-than-human beings can speak, on human

consciousness (Conversations 131).

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Silko’s message to the people throughout Ceremony is that their connection with the earth

remains and cannot be taken away, and that it is of far greater value than what the capitalist

Destroyers say is valuable. Young Native people must understand that the “white things they

admired and desired so much” are “stolen, torn out of Indian land: raw living materials for their

ck’o’yo manipulation,” or the “witchery” of capitalism (255, 204). As in Almanac, the people

must also understand that ceremonies are always evolving and in motion, and what they call for

is dependent on the contemporary reality we inhabit. If, as Silko observes, Ceremony is about

Tayo, who “was ill and wanted to get well,” and Almanac is a collective text about “the whole

earth trying to save herself,” then Almanac will call for different processes: not only healing but

also justice (Conversations 131, 120). The “continuation of the five worlds” is the project at

hand in Almanac, where Silko considers different possible outcomes that could bring about the

end of capitalism. One possible outcome is that humanity will simply disappear from the earth,

a trajectory associated with further violence: “Rain will not follow if La Escapía is forced to use

her hand-held rockets to protect the Twin Brothers and the people from attacks by the U.S.”

(Conversations 132).

However, Ceremony does begin to identify the larger structural forces set loose by the

Destroyers that affect us all. The Destroyers’ lies “fooled everyone, white people and Indians

alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what was being done to

them or what they were doing to each other” (191). If the people must recognize, must feel, that

the land is still theirs because European “deeds and papers” do not matter to the earth, Tayo goes

on to say that settlers must see that “theirs was a nation built on stolen land” in order to perceive

how they are being used by the witchery (128, 191). Witchery, as Betonie tells Tayo, existed

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before white people did; the witch’s story simultaneously brings whiteness into being and sets

into motion the power relations organized around exploitation and profit that affect us all. As

Silko observes, “who did capitalism start destroying first? White people in Europe. The poor

factory workers that got ground up in the spinning machines that Marx wrote about” (Arnold

interview 19).

Silko uses Emo’s racially motivated hatred of Tayo to demonstrate how destroyer

mentality is based not only in the love of others’ suffering but also in the madness for taxonomic

logics that separate people from each other. In both Ceremony and Almanac, Silko pushes back

against these classificatory systems that allow for the novel’s historically located violence to

occur in the first place, insisting that we must find ways to reject discourses of racialization,

misogyny, and anthropocentrism if we are to build a shared future. Almanac articulates forms of

affinity and resistance that bridge what Mishuana Goeman terms “abstractions of difference”

created by the expanding colonial nation state, which attempted to contain “the Indian in a

certain time frame, geographical location, and social hierarchy” (“Land” 83). More generally, as

Goeman observes, “[m]odernity’s conquest of space was driven by the trajectory of taxonomic

descriptions of people, plants, and animals; symbolic and physical violence; geographical

‘truisms’; and a separation of histories (time) and space” (83). Goeman echoes these insights in

her landmark writing on Almanac when she asserts that colonial-capitalist logic “defines

human beings in narrow categories that isolate people from one another, such as by race,

sexuality,

gender, and nation” (Mark My Words 201).

In Ceremony, Silko begins to explore the difficulties that arise around navigating the

connections between white supremacy, white people, and injustice more generally as a central

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challenge of coalition building through its exploration of the effects of settler colonialism and the

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race and gender-based violence it has naturalized. Tayo notes that the group of Native veterans

in the novel “never thought to blame white people” for the loss of their land or for anything else

because they want “white people for their friends,” a sense of connection the vets experience

during the war that then disappears once they’re no longer in uniform (43). The Native vets fail

to understand “it was the white people who gave them that feeling and…who took it away when

the war was over” (43). Ceremony challenges the false promise of liberal multiculturalism,

which never includes any actual justice, only the kind of “inclusion” we see killing the Native

characters in Ceremony who seek it. The novel refuses to turn away from the ways in which

racialization and colonization have structured our world and rejects assimilationist strategies for

“coming together,” as this always means submitting oneself to the control of capitalist logics.

Ceremony also begins to consider how parallel forms of oppression such as patriarchy

complicate any easy analysis along race-based lines. While Emo’s hatred of Tayo is ostensibly

based in Tayo’s father having been white, Emo’s war stories celebrate both the killing he has

done and his wartime sexual adventures with white women (57-59). Through Emo’s gendered

differentiation regarding what kinds of racial mixing are laudable and which are “disgraceful,”

Silko points to the hypocrisy Native men demonstrate when they shame Native women who

date non-Native men and valorize their own sexual encounters with white women, introducing a

critique of gendered violence alongside the novel’s critique of violence committed along racial

lines. This critique is also explored in the narrative trajectories of Tayo’s mother and Norma

Jean, two Native women characters who are destroyed by the sense that they can’t return home

as a result of the “disgrace” of having slept with white men and their attempts to escape that

feeling by drinking heavily. Like Tayo, they both try to run from the pain they feel, but, in

Ceremony, only Tayo gets the chance to heal and to follow a different path. Silko’s choice to

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make a young Laguna man the primary representative of the Destroyers in Ceremony both

echoes Betonie’s advice to Tayo: “Nothing is that simple…you don’t write off all the white

people, just like you don’t trust all the Indians” and exposes the way in which conceptual

apparatuses like white supremacy and culturally widespread misogyny affect all of us in our

ability to see each other clearly and become invested in collective survival (128). In Almanac, it

is the women characters who take center stage in the change to come, a shift that represents

Silko’s increasing desire to show that patriarchy is as inherent to colonial-capitalist ideologies as

white supremacy. Her increasing emphasis on the intersecting and various modes of

classificatory logics that provide the Destroyers with a blueprint for enacting violence is also at

the heart of her vision of coalition-building in the novel.

The War Against the Destroyers in Almanac

The yellow snake Tayo sees in Ceremony carries the message that “the earth is alive,” a

direct corrective to destroyer logics: “The world is a dead thing for them” (C 221, 135). In

Almanac, the stone snake that appears in the novel must necessarily be read as having (in part)

the same message, considering the symmetry that exists between the Destroyer mentality

regarding the earth and other living beings in Ceremony and in Almanac of the Dead. Echoing

the witch’s description of the Europeans in Ceremony, Lecha, one of the keepers of the old

almanacs, which are passed down to her and her sister Zeta by their grandmother, Yoeme, finds

that all the affluent white people who seek her out during her tenure as a psychic:

come to her with a deep sense that something had been lost. They had all given the loss

different names: the stock market crash, lost lottery tickets, worthless junk bonds or

lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss was their connection with the earth. (718)

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But Almanac goes further than Ceremony in narrating how the Destroyers “set” European whites

on a course of destruction in the Americas. As they have no ancestor spirits in the Americas and

the violence of the Spanish Inquisition and colonialism show them their God is dead, they arrive

in the New World in “precarious spiritual health” (A 313, 717, 718, 417). As they have been

created by the Destroyers, they are perfectly formed to lapse into Destroyer mentalities and

practices such as capitalism, a sickness which they spread into the Americas and beyond once

the “wind blow[s] them across the ocean” (C 136).

Angelita La Escapía, another of the novel’s powerful Native women characters,

observes a similar phenomenon in European consciousness, which she is shocked to find Marx

identify, since he is the only European she has heard speak the truth about capitalism, even if he

has misunderstood some other important things. La Escapía, who is fascinated by her readings

of Capital when attending the Marxist “Freedom School” in Cuba in order to secure weapons

and aid from the communists there for the purposes of retaking tribal land, asserts that Marx and

Engels, who “stole their ideas from the Native Americans” (310-11):

had not understood that the earth was mother to all beings, and they had not understood

anything about the spirit beings. But at least Engels and Marx had understood the earth

belongs to no one. No human, individuals, or corporations, no cartel of nations, could

‘own’ the earth; it was the earth who possessed the humans and it was the earth who

disposed of them. (749)42

Marx, at least, understands that land is a living presence to be respected, not divided as property.

In Almanac, Silko makes a clear distinction between the Destroyers, who see the land as

42 For detailed explorations of La Escapía’s engagements with Marx, see Deborah Horovitz, “Freud, Marx, and

Chiapas in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” Tamara M. Teale, “The Silko Road from Chiapas or Why

Native Americans Cannot be Marxists,” and Amanda Walker Johnson, “Silko’s Almanac: Engaging Marx and the

Critique of Capitalism.”

136

something inert to be exploited, and those who understand themselves as part of the land,

existing in reciprocal relationship with it.

Europeans, with their dangerous obsession for cutting up the land and defining it in ways

that fit their worldviews, suffer a kind of “blindness to the world” that the Yaqui smuggler

Calabazas, who works with Zeta, says “the elders used to argue…was one of the[ir] most

dangerous qualities” (224). The separation performed by Europeans when they identify

something as “outside” themselves through the vehicle of naming makes them “unable ever

again to recognize the thing itself” (224). Calabazas, who has many years of experience

navigating the deserts of the borderlands between Arizona and Sonora and who will never

abandon “what he called ‘the war that never ended,’ the war for the land” knows that each place

is “like a living organism with time running inside it like blood” and each rock has its own

unique being (178, 628, 202).43 Calabazas’ position presents a sharp contrast to the narrative

around Lecha and Zeta’s father, the geologist, who dies by simply drying up, having been

drained of spirit just as his study of “rocks” drains them of spirit (123). Calabazas’ lecture to

Root, that survival “depends on differences,” is also intimately linked in the novel to

racialization and other forms of categorization employed by the Destroyers to justify their

violence (202). Root, Lecha’s half-Mexican and half-white lover who divests from whiteness

after a near-fatal motorcycle crash, observes that “if you weren’t born white, you were forced to

see differences; or if you weren’t born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you

were left to explore the world of the different” (202-203).

43 Almanac has been often written about as a borderlands novel. See, for example, Francisco Delgado, “Trespassing

the U.S.-Mexico Border in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of

Orange, Bernie Harder, “The Power of Borders in Native American Literature: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of

the Dead,” and John Muthyala, “Almanac of the Dead: The Dream of the Fifth World in the Borderlands.”

137

Silko’s considerations of the way “difference” can be understood and deployed are

central to her ideas about coalition building in the novel. Europeans are “blind” to the actuality

of the world there in front of them. Having created “difference” in the form of division, through

what Silko refers to as “Cartesian dualities” in order to set other beings apart as objects without

life that can be destroyed for pleasure, they miss the actuality of difference, or the lively

uniqueness of each being (YW 31). This blindness, for one, makes them unable to see the value

in any being they place outside the position of the European white male subject. In her 1998

interview with Ellen Arnold, Silko says:

That’s what’s so special about the Americas and about the tribal ppl of the Americas—

that impulse to say, no, wait, we’ll keep what we can. The people who do that [argue for

exclusion] become like the Destroyers. Then you’ve become like them, starting to see

things just like them. And there are Native Americas out there who see things that way

too. And there are Anglo Americans. That’s why it’s not valid to use race or skin color,

and never has been. What matters about human beings, and that’s what the old folks

knew, what matters is how you feel and how you are and how you see things, and not

who you are on the outside…That’s why in Almanac the only hope for the retaking of

the Americas is that it’s done by people of like hearts and minds. (26)

In the sense that Audre Lorde famously pointed out that “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the

master’s house,” the Destroyers’ tools, according to Silko in this interview, cannot defeat the

Destroyers (Sister Outsider 74). Silko asserts that “including everybody” is “the only way that

the kind of peace and harmony that this earth of the Americas wants is going to happen” (Arnold

11). However, as she also points out in a 1993 interview with Laura Coltelli, not everyone will

be included because the Destroyers, and in particular the host of destroyer characters in Almanac,

“are ill and they revel in their sickness; they don’t ever want to get well. The enslaved ones seek

to break free before they sicken and die” (Conversations 132).

Importantly, however, just because the earth wants peace and harmony doesn’t mean the

end of capitalism will be peaceful and harmonious: in this sense, Almanac is a warning. Many of

138

the Native women characters in the novel are highly suspicious of the possibility of a peaceful

end to the Destroyers’ reign and are not afraid to fight their violence with violence. The same is

true of other characters who join the coalition against the Destroyers such as the “Green

Vengeance” eco-warriors and Awa Gee, the Korean hacker. These latter characters are seen as

useful tools even if their penchant for destruction and some of their other tendencies are

questionable at best, but the Native women militants are simply realists who will meet violence

with violence if absolutely necessary for the collective good.

For instance, Lecha stays for a time in a Yupik community in Alaska where she witnesses

an older woman generate static electricity on a TV while she summons “all the energy, all the

force of the spirit beings furious and vengeful” in order to crash planes that are flying over the

tundra to scout for resources (157).44 The Yupik woman’s claims are confirmed by an insurance

adjustor who is a fellow passenger on Lecha’s flight when she leaves, and Lecha incredulously

observes that the man “really believed there was no life on the tundra, nothing of value except

what might be under the crust of snow and earth” (158). The insurance man is just one of many

destroyer characters who see the earth as a dead thing; Leah Blue, the real estate tycoon who

wants to develop an enclave for the super rich outside of Tucson known as “Venice, Arizona,”

doesn’t “understand why the Indians or the environmentalists had bothered to sue even if her

deep wells did harm other wells or natural springs…what possible good was this desert anyway?

Full of poisonous snakes, sharp rocks, and cactus!” (750). Leah could care less that the salt

water the deep wells will pump into the city’s network of canals might “ruin the last of

Arizona’s

potable water” since she can simply “provide bottled water from the Colorado Rockies” (660).

139

44 A detailed reading of the scenes involving the old Yupik woman can be found in Eva Cherniavsky’s “Tribalism,

Globalism, and Eskimo Television in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.”

140

The Destroyer characters’ drive to work against the collective well-being in order to line their

pockets makes the act of combatting their violence with violence a potentially life-giving rather

than life-taking action (Moore 175).

The cast of Destroyers in Almanac is massive, incorporating eugenicist gay men who

murder babies and envision a world where reproduction can occur without women, whom they

despise and torture, corrupt and powerful men who generate and consume disgusting forms of

pornography that target the vulnerable, mafia men who can only experience pleasure by

orchestrating murder from the golf course, characters with visible indigenous heritage who strive

to be white through the accumulation of wealth and the denial of aspects of their history and self,

and so on and so forth.45 If we get a glimpse of the Destroyer mentality in the character of Emo

and the “story of witchery” in Ceremony, in Almanac Silko shows us how the Destroyers, who

inhabit all the positions of power in the novel, are able not only to indulge but to profit from

their perverse desires. Most of the destroyer characters are white men, because Silko’s novel is

at heart a realist novel. A few are white women. All are greedy capitalists.

Silko’s discussion of destroyer art in Almanac calls attention to the way in which

everything the Destroyers touch becomes mere commodity, art included. Silko’s novel itself

refuses the separations made between “art” and “life” and “story” and “history” in Eurocentric

thought, a strategy which helps to explain how her enspirited novel tends to “prophecy”

historical events to come. In Ceremony, the “sterility” of destroyer art is the primary place in

which the hidden effects of the Destroyers’ witchery on white people can most clearly be seen

45 Silko’s negative depiction of gay men in the novel, ostensibly deployed for the purposes of interrogating

misogyny and white supremacy, is one of the more upsetting aspects of the novel. See Dorothea Fischer-Hornung,

“‘Now We Know that Gay Men Are Just Men After All: Abject Sexualities in Silko’s Almanac,” Tara Prince-

Hughes, “Worlds in and Out of Balance: Alternative Genders and Gayness in Almanac of the Dead and The Beet

Queen,” and Janet St. Clair, “Cannibal Queers: The Problematics of Metaphor in Almanac of the Dead.”

141

(204). White art “feed[s] off the vitality of other cultures” and operates as “the dissolution of

their consciousness into dead objects…Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure” (204). In

Almanac, Silko most tellingly represents destroyer art in the story of Eric, who responds to a call

from his former lover David threatening suicide not by rushing to stop him, but by hurrying to

Eric’s apartment with lights and camera to photograph his dead body.46

The art market goes crazy for the photos; “art” as they understand it is simply another

vehicle to profit from others’ suffering, a point which Silko also drives home by cataloging the

other Destroyer characters’ production of and obsession with torture porn (107-109). As La

Escapía observes in her readings of Capital, Marx “understood what tribal people had always

known: the maker of a thing pressed part of herself or himself into each object made…the value

of anything came from the hands of the maker” (519). Marx’s refusal of the shifting of “value”

both away from people into objects and the notion of “art” as a series of dead objects alienated

from their makers pushes against what we see of destroyer “art” in Almanac: more fodder for the

investment playground the rich see everything outside themselves as. Silko’s conception of the

relationship between art and life acknowledges that the world we live in is in large part a product

of the stories we tell and that are told to or about us. That is, language makes, rather than

representing, the real.

Just as the Americas are filled with furious bitter spirits in Almanac of the Dead, so is the

novel itself. The novel—a living work of art—is as much a part of “history” as NAFTA, the

colonization of the Americas, or any other “real” event it engages or anticipates. Various critics,

as well as Silko herself, have been struck by the novel’s prediction of the Zapatistas’ declaration

46 For an extended analysis of Eric’s destroyer art, see Horovitz, “Freud, Marx, and Chiapas.”

142

of war on the Mexican government in 1994 through the La Escapía storyline. In her essay “An

Expression of Profound of Gratitude to the Maya Zapatistas, January 1, 1994,” Silko explains

that the Laguna elders she grew up with said “the stories are alive; the stories are our ancestors.

In the very telling of the stories, the spirits of our beloved ancestors become present with us”

(YW 150). The Destroyers are the enemies of the stories, telling the people the “old stories are

ended, the old stories don’t matter anymore (151). Addressing the Zapatistas, Silko says they

“very well know the story, the history that they are living as they rise up against the genocidal

policies of the Mexican government, tool of the greedy profiteers who violate Mother Earth and

poison her children” (151). The war they are fighting is “no new war; this war has a five hundred

year history; this is the same war of resistance that the indigenous people of the Americas have

never ceased to fight” (151-152).47

Most recently, the novel’s connection to history has been echoed again by the recent

violence committed by the Mexican police and U.S. military against the people of the migrant

caravan walking north from Guatemala toward the U.S. In Almanac, The militant women like La

Escapía go against the wishes of the caravan of the peaceful religious pilgrims led by the twin

brothers Wacah/Tacho and El Feo, amassing weapons and preparing to protect the people

because they are well aware the U.S. government may likely fire on them as they approach the

border.48 This event complicates earlier readings of the novel (supported by statements by Silko

regarding the desirability of not using destruction against the Destroyers) that see Almanac as

47 For interesting reflections on the connections between Silko and the Zapatista Army, see Kyle Bladow, “Timely

Objects and the Revolutionary Formerly Known as Marcos: Rereading Almanac of the Dead,” Horovitz, Romero,

and Rebecca Tillett, Otherwise, Revolution!

48 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/world/americas/caravan-mexico-guatemala.html,

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/agents-fire-tear-gas-asylum-seekers-mexico-border-

190102082249473.html

143

echoing Ceremony’s message that the best way to resist the Destroyers is the refusal of violence,

elevating the “radical patience” practiced by the religious pilgrims in Almanac (Moore 153).

Almanac already moves away from Ceremony in its complication of the significance of

violence by forcing the reader to consider the difference between the Destroyers’ “love of bloody

death” and Almanac’s “voices of righteous violence” (Moore 156, 175). In considering this

difference, David L. Moore sees the possibility for revolutionary violence to serve as a “making

sacred” (175). However, Moore sees both the continuities between Ceremony and Almanac

regarding the best way to defeat the Destroyers, as well as Silko’s own exit from law school, as

proof of conviction that “the only way to seek justice is through the power of the stories,” and

sees Silko’s statement as her choosing, unlike La Escapía, “the power of the word” over the

power of the sword “for very similar political purposes” (Moore 156).49 For Moore, who equates

story with nonviolence, Almanac suggests the radical patience displayed by the nonviolent

members of the resistance is “a slower but surer strategy” to defeat the Destroyers (156).

Silko potentially echoes this idea when she says the “[r]ain will not follow if La Escapía

is forced to use her hand-held rockets” but, like the militant women in the novel, Silko

forecloses neither the possibility that violence might be necessary nor denies that story and

violence can be as intimately linked as story and healing. The effects of the witch’s story in

Ceremony make this more than clear, and Almanac repeatedly insists on the connection between

story and the “angry spirits” of the Americas who “only listen when the bloodshed is royal from

the rich”: La Escapía pities Marx because he “did not understand the power of stories belonged

to the spirits of the

49 My examination of the passage from Yellow Woman Moore quotes to support his argument that Silko’s choice of

“power of the word” over the law leads me to understand that Silko’s departure from the law is about her sense that

the law always favors the Destroyers rather than about her dedication to nonviolence: “The Anglo-American legal

144

system was designed by and for the feudal lords; to this day, money and power deliver ‘justice’ only to the rich and

powerful, it cannot do otherwise” (14).

145

dead,” who, according to Clinton, the war veteran and leader of the “Army of the Homeless”

assembling in Tucson, are “nurtured on bitterness and blood spilled since the Europeans had

arrived” (592, 520, 418). Clinton may call his religion “ancestor spirits” to avoid any of the

negative associations that might accompany the word “Voodoo,” but Silko does not shy away

from the term, referring to Almanac as “a sort of voodoo spell” (Conversations 120).

As previously mentioned, Almanac warns us that the epoch of “Death-Eye Dog” can

come to an end in several different ways. If we are warriors in the fight against the Destroyers,

we must let go of “all things European” and listen to the spirits of the earth and ancestors who

will tell us when to rise up (710). Silko’s prophecy calls readers to join the novel’s revolutionary

characters, asking those who have been too weak or lazy to join the fight to begin their

preparations and warning the Destroyers that they will suffer violence and bloodshed at the

hands of vengeful earth and ancestor spirits fighting in conjunction with the warriors if they use

force and do not allow the people to retake their lands peacefully (723). The remedy for the

“story of witchery” in Ceremony, and for the witchery of global capitalism itself, is another story

found in the section of Almanac titled “Fragments From the Ancient Notebooks”: “One day a

story will arrive in your town…when you hear this story, you will know it is the signal for you

to prepare” (135). Almanac itself is this signal to readers. The story we hear is that “all things

European” will disappear, and the land stolen from Native Americans by the colonizers shall be

reclaimed by the dispossessed of the earth and “never again be held as private property, but as

lands belonging to the people to protect” (503, 532). How this will happen is yet to be

determined, but, in Silko’s words, “it has to be done with the help of everybody” (Arnold 10).

“Meeting in Room 1212”: Almanac’s Networks of Resistance

146

Despite the fact that Destroyer logics have separated people from each other, and people

from the earth, since colonization and slavery came to the Americas, Silko’s Almanac works to

show that coalition-building across these constructed forms of difference is the only way to stop

the Destroyers while simultaneously calling capitalism to account for its crimes against humanity

and the earth. That is, the novel does not stop at exposing the Destroyers’ horrible deeds or

offering a diagnosis of the ways in which the Destroyers have made us all sick, it also offers a

remedy based in indigenous ways of knowing and being-in-the-world to all those who want to be

healed. As Silko says in her 1993 interview with Laura Cottelli, “Tucson [where much of

Almanac is set] has harsh stories and harsh lessons but sometimes desperate conditions call for

harsh medicine” (Conversations 130). The stories Silko includes in Almanac are stories that, as

Mishuana Goeman says of indigenous narratives more generally, “teach us how to interact, how

not to act, how to survive, and our responsibilities to each other and the earth” (“Land” 83).

Almanac concludes with the coming together of many of the novel’s “warriors,” or those

who resist the destroyer “foes” in different ways (628, 561). This collective “squaring off” of

those who would destroy all life and those who respect the sanctity of life on earth is the conflict

at the center of the novel, and the characters’ building of resistance networks is meant to inspire

the reader to make their own. The coalition capable of taking down the Destroyers is made up of

“human” agents (including some whites, as Betonie advises Tayo in Ceremony), ancestor spirits

seeking justice that are summoned by the stories, earth spirits capable of setting landslides and

earthquakes into motion, lively objects like opals that show the future and bleed, sacred macaws,

and electricity (C 150).50 The human members of this coalition are far from perfect and anything

50 For in-depth analysis of the “lively objects” in Almanac, see Jane Olmstead, “The Uses of Blood in Leslie

Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.”

147

but idealized: some of them take a lot of hard drugs, some are bad parents, all have lessons to

learn throughout the course of the novel, but they all share the conviction that the earth belongs

to no one and that capitalism must end.

This conviction is not delimited by race. White and white-passing characters like

Calabazas’ employee Root; Seese, who seeks Lecha out in a coke-driven haze after one of the

novel’s cruelest characters steals her infant and ends up becoming the transcriber of the ancient

almanacs; and Roy, the homeless Vietman vet who teams up with Clinton, a black vet, to form

the Army of the Homeless also demonstrate the ability to divest from whiteness and European

values and to join in the fight against the Destroyers. As Silko notes in response to a frenzied

Time reviewer who believed Almanac advances the idea that the white race is a cancer on the

earth, “[t]he cancer is the secret Gunadeeyah clan…Almanac treats Marx and Jesus w/respect,

although it is harsh w/their inheritors” (Conversations 130). Almanac is simultaneously realistic

about how rare it is for those shaped by the Destroyers to abandon their values, but it is also

optimistic that there are those who want to get well, as evidenced by the many young white

people who flock to the International Holistic Healers Convention where many of the novel’s

bands of revolutionary characters come to meet each other (734).

Almanac is clear that the disappearance of “all things European” and the return of

indigenous land does not necessarily mean the expulsion of all settlers from the Americas;

rather, the stewardship of the land is returned to Native people, ceases to become private

property, and is held in common again (710). La Escapía even travels to the International

Holistic Healers Convention to deliver a message from the twin brothers who are walking North

with the people

from Mexico: all beings willing to live in harmony with the earth are welcome” to stay in the

148

Americas when the indigenous people reclaim their land (710).

149

The ancestors speak to the people in dreams, and those with the ability to listen to these

messages and perceive other important signs from more-than-human will know when it is time to

rise up: “All at once people who were waiting and watching would realize the presence of the

spirits…the spirits would assemble and then the people of these continents would rise up” (425).

Wacah, one of the twins who serves the sacred macaw spirits and who (along with his brother El

Feo) leads the pilgrimage north, says “the pilgrims would be protected by natural forces, forces

raised by the spirits. Among these forces would be human beings, warriors to defend the

religious pilgrims. These warriors were already waiting far to the north” (712). La Escapía, who

is one of these warriors, tells us that she hears from spirits too—“only her spirits were furious

and they told her to defend the people from attack” (712).

Silko’s understanding of the power of particular stories, and her positive portrayal of

militant women in the novel, already refuse the separation between “word and sword,” even

before La Escapía has been proven right. Stories can heal; they can enact unjustifiable violence;

and they can also enact justice. What a story does depends on who is telling it, and for what

purposes. The stories collected in the almanacs and in Almanac of the Dead itself are stories that

summon the souls of the sixty million Native Americans murdered by the colonizers, souls that

“howl for justice”—to retake the land (723). This force behind the stories collected in both

“almanacs” suggests that Silko is one of those “militant women” Moore dismisses as secondary

voices within the novel—a grave error, as the men in the meeting in Room 1212 where the

warriors assemble at the International Holistic Healers Convention quickly realize (740). As

Clinton notes, it’s the women he speaks to who aren’t afraid to die fighting the Destroyers:

“They’d rather burn down the city, take a police bullet, and die quick, because that way they died

fighting, they died warriors, not slaves…because if they didn't fight, they would be destroyed

150

and Mother Earth with them” (747). If the pacifist male characters in the novel prefer the

strategy of “radical patience” exemplified by Tayo, it is clear that the alliance of the furious

spirit and living warriors will have to be at the command of these militant women.51

In the fifteen years that passed between Silko’s writing of Ceremony and Almanac, it is

clear that Silko herself became open to violence if it is necessary to protect people from the

Destroyers and if might end their evil reign, even if humanity as a whole is wiped out by the

earth (A 718). The prophecy carried by the almanacs (both the ancient almanacs in the novel and

Almanac of the Dead itself) requires all who love the earth and their fellow beings to resist the

Destroyers in every way possible. Silko’s “tribal internationalism” articulates a global network

of resistance based in coalition building across different groups of dispossessed people

connected by enspirited forces summoned by storytelling (515). Almanac also destabilizes the

notion that

one’s tribe is determined entirely by blood, locating connection and affinity in shared

experiences that produce affection. The novel shows us both how colonial-capitalist logics can

be found in those who are oppressed by these logics, and how white settlers can divest from

white supremacy and join indigenous people in the Americas in their quest to retake the land.

Underlying this project is Silko’s insistence that Western colonial systems of classification—

racialization and the hatred of women that fuels patriarchy in particular—are central driving

forces behind capitalist logics, and that dismantling them is essential to revolutionary

possibility.

The characters in Almanac are more than characters, as story has the possibility to

instruct and to show us how to live rightly, and Silko’s project in the novel was to “give history a

character” (Conversations 108). The stories in Silko’s novel, like the stories in the title almanac,

151

51 For more on Almanac’s militant women, see Leslie A. Wootten, “‘We Want Our Mother the Land’: Female

Power in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.”

152

have the ability to help us shift into a new epoch in which the Destroyers no longer reign,

whatever form that shift may take. In addition to coalition building focused on interpersonal

relations, Silko also stresses that the great change to come will be driven by coalitions between

the human and the more-than-human. This mode of refusing the divisive logics of the

Destroyers, particularly the separation of “life” and “art,” means that Silko’s “possession by

narrative spirits” has created a novel that will surely prove itself to be part of history again and

again (Conversations 108).

153

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