Dreaming the World

A bright, seasonably cool day. The stiff breezes of the past few days have finally subsided somewhat. Wait! As soon as I wrote this the wind picked up and is moving the mostly bare tree branches vigorously.

I’ve been reading experimental essays by a host of Native American writers in ​Shapes of Native Nonfiction, edited by Elisa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. The volume explores the ways Natives (including non-enrolled folks like me) are attempting to bring a more Indigenous sense of structure to writing nonfiction.

Many of the essays address topics and experiences that are difficult to express: multi-generational trauma, sexual abuse, and the loss of species, cultures, languages, and homelands. Its not easy reading, being a grand tour of the ongoing catastrophe that is settler colonialism.

Living here in southern New England I have come face to face with the profound, largely unconscious, racism towards Natives that is discussed in many of the essays. “You don’t look native,” has popped up in numerous iterations, along with the ideas that real Indians live on reservations and that the genocide was over a long time ago. Even the “progressives” deride the reality that our country is founded on the greed, racism, and extractive practices of their forbearers.

Even as these folks rail against the brazen meanness of the present administration, most refuse to accept that a country built on resource extraction must destroy nature and minorities simply to survive. Settler colonialism has always been reliant upon disaster capitalism to drive the marketplace, and capitalism is continually creating disasters for some people while enriching others.

The Indigenous ethic is, not always successfully, to find balance so all beings can live and thrive. This goal is often parroted by settler colonial governments even as they continue to destroy communities, families, and the land. At least the present government is outspoken about its intentions to be as destructive as possible, as quickly as possible. As terrifying as it is, it is less crazy making.

I am fascinated by the administration’s ever growing list of words that can’t be used. One of those words is “trauma”. I am reminded that in the 1950’s the official government position was that child abuse was rare and that child sexual abuse occurred in about one in five hundred homes. (The rate was and is more like 2-3 out of five families.) The idea is simple: If a government or community refuses to acknowledge, or have words for, an experience, that event doesn’t exist.

Yet, whether traumas are acknowledged or not, the mind struggles to make sense of, to find structure for, experiences that are ultimately incomprehensible. While the mood of the moment seems to deny it, profound trauma is inherently fragmenting and depersonalizing, driving a sense there is no safe place and that no experience is real. These traumatic ways of organizing the world are passed intergenerationally and continue to self replicate.

The questions raised in ​Shapes of Native Nonfiction are these: How can one write about the experience of loss, trauma, violence, and betrayal when there are few truly useful words for sharing the impact of these events, existing words are often erased or insufficient, and the experiences in themselves fracture our sense of structure? How can one express the fragmentation of self, family, community, and landscape that accompanies extraction, and the trauma and ecosystem collapse that follow? How, or why, can one, as the elders encourage, focus on survival in a world that is mad?

These are topics that I am profoundly drawn to and I am sure there will be more discussion (and hopefully some experimentation) to come.