Water, Air, Stone: Storying Elemental Kinship

Indigenous fiction and poetry about land and environment dwell at the nexus of ecological and postcolonial concerns, and recent work by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Louise Erdrich is no exception. Simpson’s “Big Water” and “to the oldest tree in the world” and Erdrich’s “The Stone” represent elements as sentient and responsive and depict them having vital and constituent roles within relationships. Developing a reading of human-element kinship, I argue that the remarkable bonds represented in these texts are central to thinking about land and environment. Daniel Heath Justice advocates Indigenous literary criticism that is grounded in relationality. Attending to kinship, which includes bonds and obligations to other humans and all creation, is a means of opposing “fragmenting Eurowestern priorities” (Justice, ‘Go Away, Water!’ Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Impulse. In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, eds. C. S. Womack, D. H. Justice, and C. B. Teuton, 148–168. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008; also Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018). In the storywork of Simpson and Erdrich, kinship foregrounds obligation over time, positioning the human in a horizontal relationship with the living world. Recognizing expressions of kinship in Indigenous land-based writing matters precisely because it is those bonds that were targeted for erasure by colonization. Developing awareness of the links among literature, land, and decolonization is important to help to shift conceptions of the environment from objective to relational and challenge the primacy of western (scientific) epistemologies.