Organized by the Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities Forum, this proposed panel addresses Indigenous environmental histories and futures across the Pacific Rim and Americas. A comparative and transnational session, the three presenters connect comparative Indigenous literary and visual cultures to political struggles for decolonization and to the ecological and cultural consequences of war, industrialism, and biodiversity loss. The session aims to spark conversation and future work across the environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, and transnational literary and cultural studies.
Individual presentations
1. Jocelyn Frelier, Nuclear Testing, Colonial Footholds and Polynesian Aesthetics."
In July of 2021, French president Emmanuel Macron visited French Polynesia to assert French geopolitical presence in the Pacific. Many Polynesians watched and waited to see how Macron would address France’s history of nuclear testing on Polynesian atolls, which is largely regarded as a product of racist colonial attitudes that devalued islander lives. The visit prompted an uptick in media coverage of the defunct French atomic testing sites, producing headlines like “In French Polynesia, Macron tackles nuclear test legacy, China dominance” and “Macron: France owes ‘debt’ to Polynesians over nuclear tests.” This paper analyzes author Chantal Spitz’s first novel, L’île des rêves écrasés (1991), translated as Island of Shattered Dreams (2007), to argue that the nuclear testing sites, which were operational between 1966 and 1996, inspired a Polynesian aesthetic of rage. Spitz’s prose highlights Polynesian anger not only about the destruction and contamination of the archipelagic environment but also about the resulting public health crisis that ultimately led to protests under banners like “Chirac Assassin.” Rage, which may lie dormant at the moment, remains palpable in Polynesian aesthetics, shaped by France’s continued investment in French Polynesia for its strategic and extraction-oriented value.
2. Alyssa Hunziker “Ocean Archives, Non-Human ‘Indians,’ and the American War in Viet Nam in Linda Hogan's People of the Whale”
This talk focuses on Linda Hogan’s 2008 novel, People of the Whale, a text which engages with environmental devastation wrought to both Vietnamese and North American landscapes in the midst of the American War in Viet Nam. Taking place in both Native North America and Viet Nam, Hunziker argue that Hogan’s novel imagines not just networks of exchange across transnational spaces, but the literal creation of transpacific kin – both human and non-human. Hogan’s novel thus asks us to think across, within, and among the Pacific Ocean, reading the ways U.S. militarism and extraction have similarly impacted transpacific Indigenous territories and ecologies. The talk focuses in particular on the Pacific Ocean as a site of exchange between different Indigenous groups which re-writes the violence of imperial travel. Within this reading of the Pacific Ocean, it argues that the novel frames the Pacific as an archive, which “contains memory” (216). The oceanic archive repeatedly gives up artifacts from past colonial encounters. Hogan’s oceanic archive allows for other forms of historical memory which contest U.S. narratives about the War in Viet Nam, pointing instead to the global impacts of the war on Indigenous peoples and ecologies across the Pacific.
3. Cristina E. Pardo Porto, Indigenous Cosmovisions: Sustainable Practices of Photography in the Climate Crisis Era
With the arrival of photosensitive chemistries to the Americas by the end of the nineteenth century, the European experience of photography turned out to be just an “exotic” experience in the so-called “new world.” The mere reproduction of natural environments and Indigenous communities was privileged in the context of rapid modernization. Nevertheless, this use of photographic technologies perpetuated the exploitative, exoticizing, and discriminatory regimes of vision of the imperial system. Moreover, the current environmental crisis has demonstrated the need for methodologies that could provide other ways of “seeing” the course of history. This presentation considers the works of contemporary Indigenous activists-photographers that utilize sustainable darkroom practices that are less detrimental to natural environments and therefore question the current ecological crisis, while exploring the relationships between Indigenous animism and futurity. Specifically, it will analyze the work of Cinthya Santos-Briones (US Mexico). She promotes the use of cyanotype (a technique used in 19th-century colonial botany) in Herbolario Migrante, a collaborative, ongoing workshop held with Latin American-Indigenous migrant women based in New York City, and that results in a series of prints featuring Indigenous herbalism and handwritten stories in relation to the memory of ancestral healing wisdom.