Stolen Tongues
Page 25
I spent a long time debating whether it was unethical to write a horror story centered on a creature inspired by Native American lore. In graduate school, while training to become a history teacher, I worked with an Indigenous professor and had the rare privilege of hearing from this person’s own mouth the many plights of Natives inside and outside academia. I studied the ways in which the Western paradigm of knowledge production (ethnographies, archaeological digs, research trips, interviews, etc.) conflicted with Indigenous conceptions of knowledge (which is often sacred, private, powerful, and therefore worth protecting from outsiders). Today, there is an effort among historians to “decolonize Native studies” – meaning to critically examining the ways Indigenous histories and cultures are taught, who is teaching them, why this information is being taught, and what effects this education has on the relationships between Native and non-Native populations. The premises of this movement are that:
Most of the knowledge we (non-Natives) have of Indigenous people was gathered in ways that might have injured the communities it was extracted from;
There are very, very few Natives actually teaching this knowledge to the public. It is instead being taught by non-Natives and is therefore more susceptible to misinterpretation and misrepresentation; and,
Natives are limited in their ability to combat these problems in our education system or to mitigate the potential negative effects this style of education might have on their communities.
This is a hot-button subject. There are strong opinions on all sides of the debate.
I went about making this decision carefully. I asked a few colleagues of mine, and their hesitation about including Native characters in this book was unanimous. Some of them were concerned that I would do a poor job in my portrayals. Others were simply fearful that I would offend somebody, regardless of the quality and accuracy of the writing. After all, we grad students operate at the physical epicenter of this debate: on university campuses, where social justice and its occasionally conflicting interpretations are on the lips of every student.
After much deliberation, I decided to write the characters I wanted to write. It is, after all, impossible to satisfy every person’s expectations when it comes to representing a group, or even describing a single member of one, and there seems to be a great diversity of opinion on whether fiction authors should channel the sociopolitical zeitgeist. Thus, I have little doubt that someone will be upset by the inclusion of Natives in my story, and conversely I suspect that someone else would be outraged had I excluded Natives entirely for the purpose of political correctness.
Ultimately I decided to write about Natives simply as people, and tried to avoid the common stereotypes that harm their communities. First, I chose to fictionalize the names of the people groups that my Native characters belonged to, so as not to mischaracterize the beliefs, cultures, or histories of any real tribes. Second, I tried to texturize the characters such that they were not one-dimensional caricatures of real people. I did not want the Natives in my story to be expert advisers on all things spiritual. I did not want them to use mystical powers to ultimately banish an evil that only they understood. I did not want them to have all the answers. As a fan of horror, I’ve seen these caricatures before, and frankly they are boring, not to mention potentially harmful. Instead I wanted Tíwé and his family to struggle with their memories and heritage, and where those things fit in with their everyday experience of the world – something we all endure to varying degrees. I wanted their world and experiences to make them forget some things. Important things.
I also feared to head too far in the direction of the vanishing Indian. It would be remiss of me to articulate these characters as relics of a forgotten past, lost in a modern world they do not recognize as their own. They should not appear as a dying species of aliens on the precipice of extinction, ready to be consigned to the annals of history. In reality, Indigneous communities are suffering in manifold ways which deserve more than a brief mention at the end of a horror novel, but they are also thriving in other ways. Cultural and language preservation efforts, though hotly debated (and often managed by outsiders to those communities), often do help to ensure that precious elements of Native lifeways do not vanish forever. Too many have already, and most of us will never know about it. Indigenous rights and recognition movements, although constantly faced with structural opposition, racism, and the legacy of centuries of violent oppression, are experiencing moderate success in directing badly needed attention to policy issues that affect Natives across the United States. Native professors have constructed entire academic departments and authored award-winning books to introduce the many histories of Indigenous peoples to the public, and they do so with this “decolonization” in mind and practice.
The road will always be arduous and full of pitfalls for them, but my point is that Indians are hardly a single idle people waiting to disappear – or mystical spell-casters, or foolish alcoholics, for that matter – and should not be portrayed so flatly in fiction. They are many peoples, with many histories, many cultures, many languages, and many adversities and triumphs. And while I did not have the creative space to describe the disadvantages that likely plague Tíwé’s reservation, nor its probable efforts to overcome them, I tried at least to write what I think is a dignified and complex set of characters who offer something to the reader other than mere amusement.
I’m glad I made the choice I did. My first large audience, thousands of Redditors, were overwhelmingly receptive of Tíwé and the little bits of history he shared. It has been over a year since the release of the original story, and I still receive emails to this day from readers interested in learning more about the plights of Indigenous people groups. As a writer who believes that fiction can be educationally valuable, this is extremely heartening.
This digression is not to serve merely as a defense of my decision to write Indigenous characters. It should also serve as a think-piece to be grappled with by readers. I wanted to write about people, and I have done that. The people in this story are all colored by my experiences, my personal interests, my desires and perceptions, and do not represent anyone but themselves. They were, however, developed with the aforementioned problems and debates in mind. As a person who has trained for the past several years to be a teacher, I think we should be bringing attention to the experiences of Indigenous communities in a multitude of mediums – in the classroom, in the political forum, in the arts – instead of avoiding them and creating worlds of education and entertainment where Natives simply do not exist. My way of doing this, of writing horror, is not nearly the most effective way. But perhaps it will have some positive effect on someone, and perhaps that person will choose to read further on these issues. If you do find this subject engaging, I personally recommend the book Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith H. Basso, which is a short and moving ethnography on the Western Apache that has had great influence on me as an academic and as a member of the human race.
About the Author
Felix Blackwell emerged from the bowels of reddit during a botched summoning ritual. He writes novels and short stories in the horror and thriller genres, and draws most of his inspiration from his own nightmares.
For more creepy things to keep you awake, visit
www.felixblackwell.com
Connect with the author at
facebook.com/felixblackwellbooks