STORIES TAKE A SCI-FI LOOK AT DESTRUCTION OF OUR PLANET
MITEWACIMOWINA: Indigenous Science Fiction and Speculative Storytelling
Edited by Neal McLeod, Theytus Books, $24.95
DUST-SHIP GLORY
By Elaine M. Will, Cuckoo’s Nest Press, $19.95
Multi-tasking writer and academic Neal McLeod, originally from the James Smith Reserve and currently hanging his hat in Kinistino, tells readers in the introduction to his new anthology that the Cree title Mitewacimowina comes from two main roots: mitew and acimowina. The first refers to someone who has spiritual power — to someone who “does things beyond the ordinary” — and the second means stories. Contained under this title, according to McLeod, are “extraordinary stories.”
So what might we expect from an anthology of Indigenous sci-fi and spec fiction? McLeod, in his introduction, says science fiction often explores “possible future achievements” of science.
His feeling is First Nations people have often felt the results of certain scientific endeavours in many forms of loss. Thus, we might see in such a collection as this not “so much a celebration of the possibilities of science, but rather a critique of science and how science and technology have been used to propagate colonialism.”
Indeed, a number of the stories here — Lee Maracle’s The Void, Cathy Smith’s Oienkwaon: we, Jesse Archibald-Barber’s Beneath the Starry Map, Damon Badger Heit’s The inheritors, to name a few — are post-apocalyptic imaginings of Earth after the ultimate environmental collapse.
Heit’s and Archibald-Barber’s stories take place on immense space ships reaching out into the galaxies after fleeing Earth. And it’s not hard to imagine a collapsed environment, considering the ongoing arguments here on Earth right now between the forces of big economic gain at minimal environmental cost and those who are willing to lie down in front of a pipeline or bulldozer.
In Tania Carter’s Blood, a woman named Marie scavenges the seared landscape after pollution and various bombs have rendered it habitable only by the extremely wealthy, those whose greed caused the problems and the wars in the first place.
In Rebecca Lafond’s What Happens When Stars Die, a dense, killing fog has enshrouded the people and one of the characters moans that this is “nature’s way of getting back at us for destroying her.”
In Smith’s story, a man who is helping with a re-colonizing process knows he is distrusted because he “comes from a planet that was annexed because of its leaders’ short-sighted ecological management.” That planet is Earth, now.
In a general observation that will be unsurprising to First Nations peoples, in many of these stories, after the apocalypse that ended life as we know it and when the space ships return to see what’s left, or aliens land and begin killing off the obvious leaders of society, or some major catastrophe sends people fleeing the cities, who is it that’s been stuck here all along, living on the fringes? Why, it’s First Nations people.
They didn’t get a seat on the big space ship that blasted away from the inferno. They were already way up north when panicked citizens fled in that general direction. As a character remarks in Trevor Greyeyes’ Gimiwan Last Nation, “We are just the backwater of this civilization. I bet you the only ones out there who think less of us than the aliens is our own government.”
That wry humour is evident in Harold Johnson’s Space Man, where two dope-smoking brothers argue physics in terms that would baffle many honours students, and in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Take Us To Your Chief, in which aliens land and offer, in return for human emissaries to return with them, “to construct sizable stone pyramids, or assist in the erection of enormous rock heads, or create giant stone circular calendars, as per your customs.”
You can count on science and speculative fiction to make you think in ways you hadn’t thought before, and Elaine Will’s DustShip Glory will help you see an odd Saskatchewan story in a way you hadn’t seen it before, mainly because it’s a graphic novel, and Will puts pictures to a story that’s long been known — or should be — here in the province.
In the so-called Dirty ’30s, a Finnish immigrant named Tom Sukanen began building a huge ship in the middle of the prairie. His neighbours, thinking him crazy, became either concerned or openly hostile to his project.
In 1976, Andreas Schroeder brought this story to readers in novel form with the same name, and in 1977 Ken Mitchell brought his play The Shipbuilder to the public, with a fictionalized Sukanen.
Now Will, with her dynamic illustrations, lays out for us, as best as people have been able to understand it, the story of a man’s descent into some kind of madness in response to the harsh economic and environmental challenges Saskatchewan was facing.
Will draws Sukanen as something of a giant, a huge muscular man who goes at his project with a doggedness that defies social mores, family, friendship, and even the man’s own bodily needs, working toward a goal that only he can envision.
But, as one angry townswoman says in response to his singlemindedness: “Like we’re the crazy ones, and he’s the only one making any sense.”
Considering the times, maybe she’s right, though her response is made in anger, a tone that seems to pervade Will’s entire story.
These were tough times, as are Will’s black and white illustrations, illuminating the mind of a man who was unknowable.