A Pilgrim in Narnia

Today is National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, when we set aside some time to recognize and celebrate the history, heritage, resilience and diversity of First Nations, Inuit and Métis across Canada. Rather than enjoy the drumming and dancing and food downtown at Confederation Landing–the legendary wharf where Canada begins as a nation–I am off to Washington, DC. My mind is full of little details about the garden and packing and the week ahead, I wanted to take a moment and share with you, dear readers, why Mr. Dickieson Goes to Washington.

I am pleased to have been selected to give a paper at Mythmoot X in Leesburg, VA. I have spoken quite a bit about teaching with Signum University, an entirely online graduate program in imaginative literature and Germanic philology. Mythmoot began as an annual gathering of Signumites and Mythgardians to meet in person, eat together, share ideas, and celebrate a fan and friend culture of hospitality. I joined Signum in 2016 because it aligns with my vision as a public intellectual: to cultivate a digital space where we can study the things we enjoy and enjoy the things we study. I have attended Mythmoot digitally in its online and hybrid formats, and I am now going to meet so many folks I know so well.

Thus, I am off to the US capital–“Warshington” as we call it here on Prince Edward Island.

The theme of the conference is “Homeward Bound”–a theme with rich possibilities for a conference on literature and film of the adventure story variety. As the theme idea was working on me, I was reading Octavia E. Butler‘s Xenogenesis Trilogy, where a sophisticated alien species saves human survivors of nuclear holocaust, and then undertakes a eugenic breeding program as they re-seed Earth. At the time, I was also reading about my Scottish Canadian heritage, our story of fleeing the poverty of early 19th-century Scotland to make a new home in Prince Edward Island. I was also teaching students about Canada’s cruel and disheartening Indian Residential School history, and the way that the education systems in Canada continue to shape morality and culture with the assumption that our civic leaders know what’s best for us. I was reading of Lilith, the heroine of Xenogenesis, who makes herself complicit with her alien saviour-captors, and what she negotiates in that hybrid, occupied space. All these things were in my head, and I read the words:

“nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free.”

I decided I wanted to make my short paper at Mythmoot a reflection of my experience as a settler in Prince Edward Island–Epekwitk to the local Mi’kmaq folks, Abegweit in my dream childhood imagination growing up, the Land of the Red Soil, the Cradle in the Waves. This is my home. Although I am Scottish Canadian, when I walked the hills and lanes of Glasgow, I knew that lovely country was not my home. The beaches and fields and villages of Prince Edward Island are the places I know. I dig my fingers into the soil of my garden–where tomatoes and peas and peppers survived another cool Spring night–and I know that I am home.

Indeed, my ancestors lived as farmers on the land, cultivating the rich soil and learning to plant and harvest in the capricious rhythms of this North Atlantic ecosystem. My family fought for the land we lived upon, rising up against unjust systems and corrupt landholders. They won the land, built homes on the land, and died on the land. I have a tiny parcel of this land of my fathers next to where I watched my father, a young farmer, die in his own home.

And yet, the land my ancestors wrestled from the hands of abusers of power–this land I know and love–was not taken from people who won it honestly. PEI is the unceded territory of the ancestral and ongoing Mi’kmaq people. It was not purchased, given away in trade, or named as the spoils of battle. There was a lot of land to share in Epekwitk, local folks reckoned. Then various British lords carved the Island into rectangular plots, cutting off the Mi’kmaq seasonal movements, trapping lines, hunting trails, and meeting places. Little by little, the ancient folk of PEI discovered that they had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free.

For a lot of my life, I have been frustrated, ashamed, and even angry about Canada’s colonial history–all the while continuing to love my country, my heritage, and my homeland. I have tried to express this complexity in pieces like “An Unfinished Walking Song and Prince Edward Island’s Mi’kmaq on National Indigenous Peoples Day,” and in reflections on C.S. Lewis’ critique of European colonization of America (see here). After all, though I am the alien, I have nowhere to go. As another one of Butler’s complicit protagonists says of alien occupiers in the short story “Amnesty,” I can’t leave. There is no “back there” where I can go. This is my home.

Butler’s characters–especially the powerful and vulnerable women of colour who are the heroes of most of the novels–are always struggling to live with these kinds of complexity. You cannot escape the tension when reading Butler. She never intended for readers to wriggle free of the complex stories of shared space and hybrid peoples. Thus, I am using this moment in a suburb of the American capital–as a stranger in that land, far from my home–to reflect on my experience as a Settler in Epekwitk. Frustration, anger, and shame have their place in our spiritual journeys. However, Butler’s science fiction storytelling gives me an imaginative space to live in those tensions, to move past temptations to rage or to “just do something already.”

There is some irony in heading away from my home to a conference that is themed “Homeward Bound”–and doing so on National Indigenous Peoples Day. The purpose of my reflection is not to alienate me from my heritage or my land, but to deepen my love for my home. For, it seems, I am bound to my home. I think that is the complex reality of shared space.

Below is my abstract for the conference. No doubt you can still register for online attendance at Mythmoot here. My reflection is leaping off of Octavia Butler research by one of my Master’s students, Jens Hieber. You can see a video of our discussion here, or you can email me for a copy of his paper: junkola[at]gmail[dot]com. For those in Warshington, see you soon!

“Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free”: A Settler’s Reflections on Indigenous Spaces and “Negotiated Symbiosis” in Octavia Butler’s Literature

What happens when you cannot be homeward bound because there is no “home” to return to? What if you are bound to a new, shared home?

In Octavia E. Butler’s short story “Amnesty,” a decades-long global depression accompanies the occupation of Earth’s deserts by frighteningly intelligent and powerful beings radically different from humans. Local populations seethe, fueled by a generation of joblessness and stories of the “Communities’” human experiments. A human interpreter explains to resentful, desperate Americans why the “Weeds” cannot just leave: “They’re here to stay … There’s no ‘away’ for them” (Bloodchild 167). Similarly, in Butler’s postapocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, Lilith captures a haunting sentiment: There is “nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free” (Dawn III.3, “Nursery”).

Jens Hieber’s Signum Thesis analyzes what he calls “Negotiated Symbiosis” in Butler—the hybridized communities developed through forced interrelationships. I want to press in on the implications of Butler’s interspecies symbiosis by considering my own situation as a Canadian settler in Mi’kmaq territory. 203 years ago, my Scottish family began farming in beautiful Prince Edward Island—known earlier as Epekwitk, the “cradle on the waves.” While Canada’s First Nations had nowhere to be free, I have nowhere to go. I am bound to this homeland of the dispossessed.

Butler is profitably read as a Black American woman science fiction writer, but the question of settler-indigenous “negotiated symbiosis” remains unexplored. Butler’s postcolonial perspective provides a thoughtful and troubling speculative framework for reconsidering indigenous displacement, hybrid identity, and shared spaces—including the trans-Atlantic colonial project of using indigenous Africans to help displace the people who first called these lands home. Rather than a final solution to a social problem, with Butler, I offer reflections as an alien bound to this strange new land I have always called home.