Why English Departments Need an Apocalypse
A s an English major, one of the first things that comes to mind when talking about Indigenous studies is changing, or eradicating, literary canon. This a conversation that has been happening for a long time, and many other scholars have articulated the issues surrounding canon better than I could. But as an Indigenous student, it was immediately clear that the canon was severely lacking with the first English class I took.
For context: To fulfill my English degree, I took two British literature classes, two American literature classes, one Victorian era literature class, one Shakespeare class, and one pre-modern class with exclusively English and French literature.
On the other hand, I took one American Indigenous literature course and one ethnic literature course.
When you lay it all out, the gaps are huge and discouraging. Of course, there were some great conversations with faculty and students about social constructions of race, imperialism, colonialism, and Othering in my Anglo-literature classes, but these were always in the margins of the course. Even in my all-female identifying honors cohort (which is awesome) I was the only Indigenous, non-white student.
I have had great experiences in my department, but I am also white-passing and have assimilated into a white American society. For the most part, my education experience has groomed me into uplifting and centering my comprehension of Anglo-American literature over all others. My success in the program reflects my privilege in having knowledge about Anglo texts, and the lack of students of color in the program reflects the need for students to engage with literature that acknowledges their histories, their families, their losses, and their desires.
I fear that if I had not met certain faculty or students that did these things for me when they did, my well-being as a person and my success as a student would have greatly suffered. I was lucky. But I am certain this has happened for other students — students who come to college with a love for literature, texts, and stories, only to feel marginalized or that their identities are mere footnotes to the “greatness” of Anglo literature.
So I have to ask:
What happens when you get rid of the canon?
Will students be blind to the world of literature, histories, narratives, voices that have shaped cultures and movements?
Will their reading comprehension, analytical skills, or general knowledge suffer?
Will they be denied the knowledge needed to code-switch between cultural knowledge and academic?
From my experience, the canon already greatly limits us.
The canon already makes us ignorant of histories, of narratives, of voices. The canon already makes our idea of what “literature” is narrow, and therefore, limits our knowledge. Students are consequently taught that Black, Indigenous, and POC literature is always “contextualization,” an elective, a specialization rather than embedded within ALL literatures and texts. When we center Black, Indigenous, and POC literature from the very beginning — and not wait until students have “built their foundation” — we make students feel seen and open up dreams left untold by the White, Anglo narrative that has been unjustly uplifted and normalized.
I was given the opportunity to empower and lean into texts that center Indigeneity through my senior project. My project analyzed the literary themes of dystopia and futurity within three contemporary texts written by Indigenous authors, including: Thomas King’s fantastical trickster novel Green Grass, Running Water, (a multi-plot novel about a Blackfoot-Canadian community, tricksters saving the world, and the story of the beginning) Louise Erdrich’s apocalyptic novel Future Home of the Living God, (about a near future in which biology has begun to actually devolve) and Cherie Dimaline’s young adult dystopian novel The Marrow Thieves (where, in the future, society has collapsed, settlers lose the ability to literally dream and thus hunt Indigenous people’s bone marrow, where the ability to dream still lives).
Something that I focused on in this project is Indigenous futurisms in its varying forms. I realized that futurisms help us acknowledge both colonial pasts and presents and also empower us to imagine, and thus work toward, a decolonized world.
Futurity, not necessarily future, allows for the honoring of past traditions as well as the changes that come from a transforming world. The transformative possibilities of futurity come from its playfulness of time — the linear, progressive form of which is a tool of colonization — and its ability to envision a future in which Indigenous people are centered and alive.
Amidst a history and present of colonization, where the goal is to eradicate Indigenous people, imagining the livelihood of Indigenous lives and knowledges is a radical act.
Futurity crumples time like paper. There’s no up or down, left or right. It avoids hierarchy of past, present, and future; all knowledges are valued, especially that of ancestors and elders.
So: canonization of texts becomes what linearity is to time.
It creates hierarchy, it justifies erasure and violence, and creates limited narratives.
Our university programs can learn a thing or two from futurism: What if there was no such thing as the “greatest”? What if our canon changed every year? What if students were empowered to invest their work in their own communities, to uplift and protect ancestral knowledges rather than absorb the colonizers’? Can we Indigenize university programs by including more Indigenous writers and storytellers?
But out of this comes yet another lingering question: is Indigenizing the curriculum enough? Will Indigenization lead to decolonization, in the sense that we are to take decolonization as the effort to repatriate stolen land and reinstate Indigenous peoples as the rightful stewards of the land?
The authors in my project would say no. In each of my investigated novels, both Indigenous futurism and apocalypse existed simultaneously. This seems contradictory, but in the case of these novels, dystopia or apocalypse is not a universal event. Some argue that Indigenous groups have already endured apocalypse since settlers arrived in North America and stole traditions, land, and people. In this sense, what is often considered apocalyptic to settlers — collapsing governments, destroyed wealth, environmental destruction, and biological devolution — ultimately leads to the hope of future and liberation for the Indigenous groups in these stories.
In other words, the settler’s loss of property, wealth, and private knowledge leads to a revitalization of tradition, language, community, and expanded relations for the colonized groups. It’s not destruction. It’s undoing.
Universities, and other institutions, have to accept the fact that their programs — in their eye, at least — might have to endure an apocalypse in order to liberate and empower Indigenous knowledges.
Meeting some sort of diversity quota isn’t enough. The reason that many universities are able to exist is because they have been built on and benefit from land stolen from its Indigenous stewards. And so their programs must reflect, must center this history, and ask students to critically reflect what it means to be a student and obtain one of the highest educational privileges upon stolen land. They must also provide the resources and support for Indigenous students to revitalize, uplift, and explore the stories that they carry into the university.
But as to repeat and emphasize, Indigenizing curriculum is not enough. To draw from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s work, decolonization cannot be a metaphor, and to take it as an earnest reality, settlers must accept that they must offer resources, knowledge, wealth, and land in order for Indigenous people to become rightful overseers. Universities must accept that their resources can no longer fund individual wealth, but rather they must be invested in local communities.
This effort affects all students across all disciplines and challenges methodologies from humanities as well as the hard sciences. I might have read about and been entrenched in the literary imaginations of decolonization, but what is this dream without sharing knowledge about language revitalization with linguistic specialists? Or how can we write stories about climate change if not for environmental scientists?
We live in a colonized world, and though each of us has a different relationship to this colonization, we are all affected by it. So decolonization must take place in everything.
I’ve been speaking very broadly. And I hope that makes sense, because decolonization to me is a global issue in every sense. University institutions are a mechanism of a larger settler-colonialism and must acknowledge their place in this process before decolonization could ever happen.
In the spirit of speaking broadly, I’ll end with a little moment from Green Grass Running Water, where the mysterious narrator, named I, tells the trickster figure Coyote that there are “no truths” but “only stories.”
It’s small moment that speaks volumes: stories have the power to account for the truths that have been denied to people or used to limit their autonomy.
When we are liberated to tell our own stories — and hear others’ — we are much better equipped to both acknowledge history, dream wildly, and work toward a better future.
