"A Return to Turtle Island: Ecocosmopolitics in American Indian Literature, 1880-1920"

In his prognosticating work Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge (2009), Daniel Wildcat advocates for what he terms “indigenous realism,” a way of knowing reality that “requires a respect for the... [ view full abstract ]

In his prognosticating work Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge (2009), Daniel Wildcat advocates for what he terms “indigenous realism,” a way of knowing reality that “requires a respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life” (9). This Indigenous ontology asks for humans to see more-than-human life as relatives, not solely resources. For Western worldviews, such a paradigmatic shift is not simply intellectual—it is epistemological and experiential—and it requires a deconstruction of the colonizing language that still significantly shapes the Western worldview.

One source of this deconstruction can be found in Indigenous texts of the late nineteenth century, many of which provide an integration of oral tradition and Indigenous knowledge in a discursive dismantling of colonizing language and practices. These authors provide a valuable perspective of the imperial worldviews that propelled the forced removal and assimilation eras of federal Indian policy. Many texts also describe the importance of what I call a “literacy of landscape,” a trans-generational understanding of, and appreciation for, the more-than-human life that creates the mesh in which humans are merely a part.

This essay connects epistemic threads among the works of Sarah Winnemucca, Charles Eastman, and Zitkala Ša while advocating, now, for a more inclusive environmental discourse that decenters the human from this anthropogenic epoch and embraces a transnational, interspecies dynamic.