Aboriginal
Places and Colonialist Interventions: Interrogating Spatial Politics in Linda
Hogan’s Mean Spirit
Khandakar Shahin Ahmed
Khandakar Shahin Ahmed is Assistant
Professor, Department of English, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh.
Abstract
Rootedness or attachment to a place can be
realised in very many ways, and the differences in spatial perceptions may lead
to conflict and clash between communities or group of people. Aboriginal
narratives vividly represent the difference in perception of a place that lies
between the aboriginal community and the non-native colonisers. This difference
can be comprehended in terms of the dichotomies of anthropocentrism as against
biocentrism. Whereas the aboriginal natural communities locate themselves in
their places with a biocentric faith of sustaining ecological balance of that
respective place, on the other hand the colonialist intervention as one of the
highest form of anthropocentric manifestations perceive the aboriginal place as
an unexplored geographical location ready to be exploited and ravaged in the
pretext of progress and development. This paper in taking note of this
conflicting worldviews regarding man’s role in living-in-a-place, will go on to
argue that the forces of ecological imperialism completely disrupted the
bioregion of the natives. The bioregional ethics which governs the natural
communities of the native people has been replaced by policies of ecological
imperialism to contribute to the economy of colonialist enterprise. This
practice results in the growth of towns and cities depending on the
consolidations bureaucratic and labour forces for specific agricultural farms
or mining enterprises. This paper, therefore, intends to argue that colonialist
interventions into the native bioregions of the aboriginal communities through
the forces of ecological imperialism ravage the aboriginal bioregional culture
of mutual responsibility for both human and non-human entities of an ecological
terrain, and in doing so it also takes note of how anthropocentrism and
biocentrism as two opposing worldviews determine man’s rootedness to a place.
This paper in taking note of this conflicting worldviews regarding man’s role
in living-in-a-place, will argue through a reading of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit.
Keywords: Ecological
Imperialism, Bioregionalism, Natural Community, Living-in-Place.
Aboriginal
writings emanating from different biogeographical locations of erstwhile
colonies disseminate aboriginal/indigenous communities’ strong sense of
rootedness to their place of origin which is quite antithetical to the spatial
perception of the European colonisers. The first contact of aboriginal
communities of America, Australia and New Zealand with the European colonisers
brings to the fore how different human communities affiliate and identify
themselves to a place. Rootedness or attachment to a place can be realised in
very many ways, and the differences in spatial perceptions may lead to conflict
and clash between communities or groups of people. Aboriginal narratives
vividly represent the difference in perception of a place that lies between the
aboriginal community and the non-native colonisers. This difference can be
comprehended in terms of the dichotomies of anthropocentrism as against
biocentrism. Whereas the aboriginal natural communities locate themselves in
their places with a biocentric faith of sustaining ecological balance of that
respective place, the colonialist intervention as one of the highest forms of
anthropocentric manifestation perceives the aboriginal place as an unexplored
geographical location ready to be exploited and ravaged in the pretext of
progress and development. This paper in taking note of this conflicting
worldviews regarding man’s role in living-in-a-place, will argue through a
reading of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1992) that the forces of ecological imperialism and commodity
frontier completely disrupted the bioregion of the natives.
Keywords:
Aboriginal writing, anthropocentric, biocentric, Linda Hogan.
Aboriginal writings emanating from
different biogeographical locations of erstwhile colonies disseminate aboriginal/indigenous
communities’ strong sense of rootedness to their place of origin which is quite
antithetical to the spatial perception of the European colonisers. The first
contact of aboriginal communities of America, Australia and New Zealand with the
European colonisers brings to the fore how different human communities
affiliate and identify themselves to a place. Rootedness or attachment to a
place can be realised in very many ways, and the differences in spatial
perceptions may lead to conflict and clash between communities or groups of
people. Aboriginal narratives vividly represent the difference in perception of
a place that lies between the aboriginal community and the non-native
colonisers. This difference can be comprehended in terms of the dichotomies of
anthropocentrism as against biocentrism. Whereas the aboriginal natural
communities locate themselves in their places with a biocentric faith of
sustaining ecological balance of that respective place, the colonialist
intervention as one of the highest forms of anthropocentric manifestation
perceives the aboriginal place as an unexplored geographical location ready to
be exploited and ravaged in the pretext of progress and development. This paper
in taking note of this conflicting worldviews regarding man’s role in
living-in-a-place, will argue through a reading of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1992) that the forces of ecological
imperialism and commodity frontier completely disrupted the bioregion of the
natives.
Hogan’s novel vividly demonstrates
that it is not only the successful migration of the non-native population to
the aboriginal place, but systematic and regimented importation of non-native
species of plants and animals that completely shattered the unique ecological
character of the native place. The bioregional ethics which governs the natural
communities of the native people has been replaced by policies of ecological
imperialism to contribute to the economy of colonialist enterprise. This
practice results in the growth of towns and cities depending on the
consolidation of bureaucratic and labour forces for specific agricultural farms
or mining enterprises. This paper, therefore, argues that colonialist
interventions into native bioregions of the aboriginal communities through the
forces of ecological imperialism ravage the aboriginal bioregional culture of
mutual responsibility for both human and non-human entities of an ecological
terrain, and in doing so it also takes note of how anthropocentrism and
biocentrism as two opposing worldviews determine relationship to a place.
A bioregional novel strongly
delineates in its narrative the aspect of threat initiated by colonial
modernity in the name of development and nation building to the unique
bioregional cultures of aboriginal/indigenous communities. As instances of
bioregional novel, the above-mentioned texts from Native American context deals
with this spatial politics to unravel the ways in which bioregional cultures
come under the process of erasure triggered by capitalist agencies and
totalising narratives of imperialism. The narrative of a bioregional novel
foregrounds the dichotomies between the natives and the European intruders in
their relation with a region. Jim Cheney in his essay "Postmodern
Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative” (1989) observes that a
bioregional narrative represents a region as a “storied residence”1
i.e. the narrative is embedded with stories growing from the natives’ deep
relationship with the physical environment and ecological entities of the
region. The region as a residence is not solely occupied in material terms, but
the process of shaping a community through immersion into the ecological system
of a region, reflected in the bioregional stories of indigenous people,
transforms the region into a life-place of ethical and spiritual fulfilment.
The storied residence, therefore, reflects on the stories generating from the
biocentric relation between human and non-human worlds that ensures ecological
health of the region and the human community. The stories generating from a
community’s identification with the ecology of a region transforms the region
from a tangible and physical territory to an inner and psychic realm of
defining human behaviour.
On
the other hand, the spatial politics of the European settlers involves
isolating human community from the physical environment in a process of
commodification of the ecological components. The notion of a ‘storied
residence’ is at stake as the totalising discourse of profit and progress
initiates a process of eradication of the contextualised discourse of a region
by means of perceiving the ecological entities in isolation from one another.
Since the environment is perceived as a store of commodities, trees, animals,
landscape, rivers and other forms of lives are conceived as objects of
profit-making, and this capital-based worldview, by undermining the mutually
sustaining relation among all forms of life, tacitly undermines the culture of
storied residence that is part of the biocentric relation. Systematic
separation of ecological entities from one another results in the collapse of
the local stories that define an aboriginal community in relation to a region.
A bioregional novel interrogates the colonialist spatial politics by
delineating the conflict between the totalising discourse of the colonisers and
the contextualised discourse of the indigenous people. This conflict finds its
narrative enunciation in ways in which the landscape becomes, on the one hand,
the metaphor of both profit and capital for the White settlers, and on the
other hand is shown to be a spiritually fulfilling ecological-human culture for
the aborigines. For instance, in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit the Oklahoma landscape constitutes an inner terrain of
consciousness of Osage community formation, while the same landscape with its
grasslands and fields is viewed as source of oil and pastures for livestock by
the European settlers. Hogan’s novel exemplifies the quintessential aspects of
bioregional narrative in its representation of the spatial politics of the
intruding forces in aboriginal places. Such spatial politics, demonstrated in
the bioregional novels, is depicted in the way meanings and cultural
connotations of the ecology and landscape have been re/misappropriated by the totalising
discourse of colonialist intervention to legitimise extraction from and
exploitation of the environment. The colonialist narrative of re-appropriation
of the environment aims at redefining the man and land relationship, and this
spatial politics involves obliteration of the stories of aboriginal people
through colonial takeover of the land that shapes their ‘storied residence’.
Colonialist
intervention in aboriginal places involves agencies and policies of
dispossessing the aboriginal communities from their places of origin thereby
disrupting a unique human culture that evolves from the potentials and limits
of natural environment of that place. European colonizers legitimize their
possession over the aboriginal places by means of projecting those territories
as empty lands. This politics of representing aboriginal place as empty
geographical location does not negate the presence of aboriginal human
population as dwellers. However, the negation seeks to invalidate aboriginal
populations as an organised human society devoid of any structured and
administrational social settlement. Having identified with the wilderness, as
Stephen Greenblatt in his Marvellous
Possessions (1991) states, the aboriginal human population and their way of
life have been described and associated with the element of marvel, a
marvellous phenomenon that has to be normalized and regimented. Corroborating
aboriginal way of life with the element of marvel marks the policy of not
acknowledging the natives of America as an organised and structured human
society having culture of rationality and progress. It is due to this politics
of denial that Columbus observes that he “was not contradicted” (Greenblatt 58)
by the natives. The preclusion of contradictions facilitates intrusion and
circulation discursive practices of documentations and institutionalised
regulations of European paradigm in order to normalize the aboriginal
population:
We
can demonstrate that, in the face of the unknown, Europeans used their
conventional intellectual and organizational structures, fashioned over
centuries of mediated contact with other cultures, and that these structures
greatly impeded a clear grasp of the radical otherness of the American lands
and peoples. (Greenblatt 54)
The “radical otherness” of Native
American land and people has been incorporated within the “organizational
structure” in order to dispossess the natives from their right over the place
on the one hand, and on the other hand it legitimizes European colonizers
possession over the place.
The
political takeover of aboriginal territories by means of European
“organizational structure” has been further accentuated by demographic takeover
of these places. In “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western
Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon” (1988) Alfred W. Crosby enunciates that
successful colonization of places like America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and countries belonging to temperate zones has not merely been attained by
European political and technological interventions, rather the agencies of
ecological imperialism outnumber the natives in their life-place and relegate
them to the fringes. To Crosby, ecological imperialism operates the how Western
Europe as a biological phenomenon marks its expansion in the aboriginal places
of America, Australia and elsewhere. This biological expansion of Europe,
according to Crosby, is facilitated by the Europe-like climate of temperate
zone lands, as against tropical zone lands, where not merely European
population grows rapidly but at the same time domesticated European animals
along with flora and fauna proliferated abundantly in these “Lands of
Demographic Takeover” (Crosby 104). The Europeans “have swarmed” (Crosby 106)
and outnumber the aboriginal population in their place of origin:
In the cooler lands, the colonies
of the Demographic Takeover, Europeans achieved very rapid population growth by
means of immigration, by increased life span, and by maintaining very high
birthrates. Rarely has population expanded more rapidly than it did in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in these lands. It is these lands,
especially the United States, the enabled Europeans and their overseas
offspring to expand from something like 18 percent of the human species in 1650
to well over 30percent in 1900. (Crosby
105)
The demographic takeover results in
“decimation and demoralization of the aboriginal populations” (Crosby 106) and
they are outnumbered in their own land. Along with the demographic takeover,
the physical environment of these places is taken over or rather tarnished by
the forces of ecological imperialism by means of “awesome success of European
agriculture” (Crosby 106).
The
triumph of European agriculture on the one hand destroys the local flora and
fauna, on the other hand it disrupts bioregional way of life of the aboriginal
population. Bioregional dwelling in a place involves a way of living-in-a-place
within potentials and natural limits to support the life-sustaining system of
that place for all biotic and abiotic entities of environment of that place.
Whereas European agricultural enterprise manipulates the environment of
aboriginal places, it is further accentuated by the intrusion of domesticated
European animals like horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and rabbits. European
domesticated animals take high toll on the local environment, at the same time
the livestock of imported animals serve as source of capital for the
settler-colonisers to triumph in their agricultural regimentation of the
environment. In the lands of temperate zones, parallel to rapid growth of
European human population, the livestock of imported animals marks a high
reproduction rate. Having demographically taken over the lands of temperate
zones, the proliferation of both human and non-human European communities also acts
as bearers of “pathogens or microorganisms that cause disease in human” (Crosby
107). It results in aboriginal population getting infected by alien diseases
causing large scale death. Europeans as biological phenomenon, having attained
ecological control, promulgate and put in circulation a culture of dwelling in
a place based on consumerist policies and accumulation of capital at the
expense of exploitation of the ecological components. Rapid growth of European
population, both human and non-human, promotes systematization of natural
resources and acceleration of production of food grains and life-embellishing
commodities. In relegating the aboriginal way of life as obsolete and
unscientific, the culture of demographic takeover ushers a way of living life
impinged on consumerism and mobility of capital.
It
is pertinent to note that bioregional culture of the aboriginal communities in
the erstwhile colonies does not perceive ecological components of environment
as resources, rather they situate themselves as one of the living entities of
that environment with shared responsibility for all biotic and abiotic dwellers
of the land. This state of dwelling in place on the part of aboriginal
population has been misconstrued as poverty by the European settlers. Having
misconstrued poverty of the natives as resultant of their irrational and
unscientific management of environment, the European settlers take it as cue to
view the aboriginal lands as zones of immense possibility and prosperity
guaranteed by abundance of natural resources and fertile landscape. William
Cronon in his book Changes in the Land:
Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) demonstrates that
the relationship of New England Indians to their environment is determined by
the cycle of seasons, and it is a relationship based on ecological ethics as
the natives hold less demand on the ecosystem of the place by changing their
habitat within the region as per natural abundance of seasons.
To
Cronon, whereas the ecological relationship of the natives with their place is
characterised by mobility, however, the European colonisers seek to establish a
relationship based on fixities. This is evident as the European settlers strive
to reproduce ecological relationship of European standard in the aboriginal
places by means of establishing monoculture of agricultural policies and
commodification of natural components. European fixity is further evident in
their intent of attaining complete control over the environment of the place by
compartmentalizing landscape for permanent human settlement, bureaucratic
establishment, agricultural fields, domesticated animals, recreational parks,
reserve forest and so on. The segmentation of natural landscape corroborates
the tacit imperial policy of regimenting and exploiting the environment of the
Non-European regions. Having attained the ecological knowledge of dwelling in
their place of origin, the mobility of the natives as requisites of wheels of
the season exhibits their shared responsibility for life-sustaining system of
the region, on the other hand the fixity of the European settlers manifests a
human intervention to reorganise the landscape and ecological properties of the
region with a motif of accumulation of capital and commercial enterprise:
But whereas Indian villages moved
from habitat to habitat to find maximum abundance through minimal work, and so
reduce their impact on the land, the English believed in and required permanent
settlements. Once a village was established, its improvements—cleared fields,
pastures, buildings, fences, and so on — were regarded as more or less fixed
features of the landscape. English fixity sought to replace Indian mobility;
here was the central conflict in the ways Indians and colonists interacted with
their environments. (Cronon 57)
The “central conflict” between the
natives and European colonisers, according to Cronon, can be comprehended by
the strife to “replace Indian mobility” with “English fixity”. The mobility in
dwelling the region on the part of the Indians involves their local knowledge
of “habits and ecology of other species” (37) on the one hand, and on the other
hand it exhibits the process of learning to live-in-a-place without affecting
the life-supporting system of the environment as the “Indians seek to obtain
their food wherever it was seasonally most concentrated in the New England
ecosystem” (37).
Indian
mobility is based on seasonal diversity and it shapes a way of living life in a
place holding less demand on the ecology. Whereas spring marks the abundance of
seasonally produced food items of different kinds, winter on the other hand
ushers the season of scarcity. Cronon observes, while the Indians feel it wise
to remain starved for days during winter with an assurance that spring will
again bring abundance, but for the European settlers it is rather beyond any
rational comprehension as to why the Indians prefer to remain starved when
there is enormous possibility of extracting the environment for human comfort.
In categorically terming the native way of life as irrational and unscientific,
the English fixity strives to attain complete control over the environment for
reproducing the European way of life characterised by structured and segmented
territorialisation of each and every component of ecology for human usage and
accumulation of capital. Having disrupted the bioregional culture of the native
aboriginal community, the overarching fixity of European settlers, according to
Cronon, quite obtrusively perceives the ecology and landscape as “merchantable
commodities” (20). The biological expansion of the West in the temperate lands
not only marks a demographic takeover of the aboriginal region, simultaneously
it standardises a culture of anthropocentric extraction and commodification of
ecological properties of a region.
The
difference between aboriginal communities and European settlers lies in the
antithetical ways both the human communities locate themselves in a place.
Whereas the natives of New England believe in the interdependence and
reciprocity among all the entities, human and non-human, biotic and abiotic,
that constitutes a life-supporting ecological system that can accommodate both
human and non-human communities engendering a human culture based on ecological
ethics, on the other hand controlled by “their tendency to view landscape in
terms of their own cultural concepts” (22), the European settlers perceive the
components of ecology in isolation from the ecological life-supporting system
that is operating within and around the region. Viewing the components of
ecology in isolation involves the process of commodification and mercantile
enterprise:
Seeing landscape in terms of
commodities meant something else as well: it treated members of an ecosystem as
isolated and extractable units. Explorers describing a new countryside with an
eye to its mercantile possibilities all too easily fell into this way of
looking at things, so that their descriptions often denigrated into little more
than lists. (21)
It is quite pertinent to assert
that in the temperate lands, whether in Australia or in America, demographic
takeover leads to ecological takeover of the aboriginal places. The biological
expansion of West, both in terms of population and regimentation of physical
environment, leads to relegation of the aboriginal population into fringes.
Demographic takeover corroborating merchantable commodification of ecological
components engenders a process of diminishing aboriginal way of
living-in-a-place ecologically as obsolete and unscientific on the one hand,
and in doing so, on the other hand it involves a restless and vicious process
of commercialising components of ecology for establishing a capital based way
of life. The entire process reflects on man’s relationship with land/region and
how that relationship facilitates a human culture that determines the
sustainability and longevity of that land or region’s life-supporting system.
It can be rightly said that while degree of human intervention in the ecology
of a place leads to the formulation of human culture, and simultaneously
consolidation and standardisation of that culture legitimise future human
interventions in ecosystem of that place.
Whereas
aboriginal way of life exhibits a bioregional culture of close and spiritual
proximity with ecology of their life-place as they hold less demand, both
biological and cultural, on the ecosystem of their region, the intrusion and
subsequent settlement of European settlers in the temperate lands radically
replaces the bioregional way of life of the aboriginals. The urgency of
reproducing a European way of life characterised by production of
life-embellishing commodities of life in abundance leads to regimentation of
environment for permanent human settlement, monocultural policies of
agriculture, pastures for animals, separate domain for domesticated animals,
and zones of extractable natural resources. Therefore, it can be said that
bioregional culture of aboriginal population is eradicated by European
commodity-laden consumerist way of life. Materiality of colonialist
interventions in aboriginal places can be felt in the decay of the aboriginal
local environment for the purpose progress and development and contiguously it
marks the emergence of a human culture that is blind to health of the earth. Colonialist
interventions in the temperate lands operate through dualistic forces of
ecological imperialism in corroborating demographic takeover with merchantable
commodification of ecology.
Linda
Hogan’s Mean Spirit tells place-based
stories of the Osage Native Americans located in the region of Oklahoma. As a
bioregional narrative the novel exhibits how the Osage stories of the region
enliven the landscape. The Osage landscape is not merely represented as a
geographical territory; rather the landscape acts as a metaphor of community
formation that connects the Osage inhabitants with the non-human dwellers and
all other entities of the region in a reciprocal relationship of values and
moral sense. Since bioregional narratives focus on contextualised discourses of
the locale, the landscape as a metaphor in the novel explicates the ways of
life that make the Osage native to their place. The symbolic relationship with
the land denoting the moral order corresponds to the actual act of sustainable
dwelling on the part of the Osage. Therefore, the narrative of the novel
sketches the Oklahoma landscape in its layered and dual manifestations – on the
one hand the outer, physical and tangible landscape, and on the other hand the
inner and the metaphysical landscape of Osage psyche. Both the outer and inner
landscapes, in the course of the narrative, correspond to one another, nourish
mutually, and thereby shaping a spiritually fulfilling human culture of
ecological ethics.
It
is, therefore, in the novel when characters like Michael Horse and Belle
Graycloud ruminate over the predicament of their ‘land’, they are symbolically
referring to the Osage ways of life. The word ‘land’ connotes to a cultural
landscape, which is both outer and inner that connects the natives with the
physical landscape, the eagle, the bat, the river and all other ecological
entities of the region in relationship definable ecologically sanctioned moral
order. In this connection Hogan depicts how the destruction of the land due to
the incessant drilling for oil symbolically corresponds to the physical ailment
and cultural eradication of the Osage. As a bioregional narrative the novel
recounts the Osage stories connecting the community with region both physically
and imaginatively. Whereas the ‘land’ stands for the community formation for
the natives, with the advent of the European settlers a process of redefining
the landscape starts. Hogan’s narrative ingenuity lies in her depiction of how
the words like ‘land’, ‘field’, ‘river’, ‘grass’, and ‘eagle’ are being
attributed with new connotations to legitimise extraction and exploitation of
natural resources. Appropriation of words and their connotations to fit into
the totalising discourse of progress initiates a process of erasing the
contextualised bioregional connotations of the words.
The
European settlers consider the land as resource for oil mining and nurturing
livestock animals, and in doing so it triggers a threat to the natives’
bioregional association with the region. While dealing with the issue of
invasion of the bioregions of aboriginal people by intruding forces,
bioregional literature in general does not merely note the material takeover of
the land; rather more specifically it interrogates the spatial politics that
eradicates the spiritual aura and imagination connecting natives to their
region. Once the words are appropriated to fit into the discursive formation of
the white settlers, it involves a tacit process of pushing the place-based
stories of the natives into oblivion. For the oil man Mr. Hale, the meaning of
Osage landscape stands for its oil deposit and pastureland for livestock
animals, and within this totalising framework of progress and profit the
metaphysical and imaginary Osage inner landscape of defining sustainable
relationship with the region has been suspended to a dysfunctional state. It is
in this context that Michael Horse’s diary bears the significance of
documenting the native stories as a way of preserving meanings and values with
which the Osage are connected to their land both physically and spiritually.
Hogan’s Mean Spirit as a bioregional
narrative explores the metaphorical and discursive implications of the term
‘land’ in interrogating the colonialist intervention in the aboriginal
territory of the Osage.
Linda
Hogan in Mean Spirit recounts the
invasion of the Osage region of north-eastern Oklahoma by the European
settlers. The title of the novel itself is indicative of the destruction caused by the European settlers in
dispossessing the aboriginal natives from their land through a process of
merchantable commodification of ecology. Donald Lee Fixico in his book The Invasion of Indian Country in the
Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (1998)
observes that “the history of the ‘reign of terror’ began in the early 1900s
when oil was discovered on Osage land” (Fixico 27), and Hogan’s novel vividly
depicts how the oil boom in Osage territory leads to large scale murder of
Osage inhabitants in order to take over their land. The novel revolves around
the murder of the Blanket and Graycloud family members by European settlers in
the process of quenching their insatiable desire for natural resources. Fixico
observes that whereas the Native Americans locate themselves within the
ecosystem of their region as participants, the European settlers place
themselves outside and above the system as owners and overseers who can utilize
the ecological components rationally and scientifically for a modern way of
life and capital gain:
The Anglo-American culture of the
twentieth century is driven by capitalistic ambitions to acquire wealth. By
contrast, American Indians are members of tribal nations whose philosophies
stress a kinship and interrelatedness with all creation. And the conflicting
dynamics of the two very different systems have yielded a history of anguishing
human and environmental exploitation. (Fixico xvi)
This “conflicting dynamics”
constitutes the core of Hogan’s novel in depicting how the Osage community is
pushed away from their land by the land grabbing policies of European settlers.
The large scale settlement of Europeans in the Osage territory results in the
formation of a commercial town, Watona, as a hub for trading of Osage natural
resources, and at the same time the landscape and vegetation of the region are
wounded irretrievably by oil mining and the granting of grazing leases. At the
start of the novel it is seen that most of the Osage Indians fail to withstand
the commodity frontier of the European settlers and in order to sustain their
bioregional culture they “left behind them everything they could not carry and
moved up into the hills and bluffs far above the town of Watona” (Hogan 5). The
intensity of exploitation of land ravages the ecology of the region, and
simultaneously, the proliferation of European population acts as carrier of new
diseases to Osage territory that results in infection and subsequent death of
natives. European settlers, therefore, expand as a biological phenomenon that
not only demographically reduces the Osage to minority, but at the same time it
dispossesses them ecologically of their right over land.
Hogan
commences the narrative of her novel from the temporal signpost of the 1890s
when the federal government of America gave the choice to native Indians to
occupy plots of land which had not already been occupied by white Americans:
Those pieces of land were called
allotments. They consisted of 160 acres a person to farm, sell, or use in any
way they desired. The act that offered allotment to the Indians, the Dawes Act,
seemed generous at the first glance so only a very few people realized how much
they were being tricked, since numerous tracts of unclaimed land became open
property for white settlers, homesteaders, and ranchers. (8)
The natives are “being tricked” as
the Osage community are already rooted to the Oklahoma region, and on top of
that instead of individual possession over land, the Osage as an aboriginal
community believed in their affiliation and rootedness to their land in terms
of belonging to a place as a community in general. For them their sense of
place originates from their awareness of the ecological order operating within
the region, and it shapes their aboriginal culture where the human community is
indivisible from land. Since the Osage, like other aboriginal tribes of
different parts of the globe, does not believe in individual ownership of land,
therefore, the allotment policy hardly makes any sense for the natives.
On
the other hand, for the European settlers individual ownership and private
enterprise are the prime requisites for prosperity, and in this regard Fixico
rightly observes that with the Euroamericans “individualism became a strong
characteristic of the American experience and American capitalism. This trait
soon became imbedded in the American character” (Fixico xvii). Individualism of
the European settlers can be contrasted with the sense of community of the
natives, and these contrasting positions indicate the ‘conflicting dynamics’
visible in how the natives and the settlers locate themselves in relation to
land and physical environment of their region of dwelling. In the novel the oil
mongering white settlers perceive the natives as a community who “were
unschooled, ignorant people who knew nothing about life or money” (Hogan 60),
and this perception leads to a reductive and prejudiced conclusion that
“Indians were a locked door to the house of progress” (Hogan 56). The
underground oil deposit in Osage territory becomes an anathema for the natives
as they are essentially dehumanized in that they are perceived on the same
plane with the natural resources of the region like oil deposit, grazing land
and other mineral deposits. Having considered the natives as “locked door to
the house of progress”, the white settlers realize very well that to excavate
the land and extract the natural resources the first requisite is to eliminate
the natives from the land. The natives and their land are essentially reduced to
exploitable commodities. It is evident when Joe Billy observes: “It’s more than
a race war. They are waging a war with earth. Our forests and cornfields are
burned by them” (Hogan 14).
In
Mean Spirit expansion of white
American population results in reducing the natural community of Osage into
Osage oil. Merchantable commodification of Osage land and ecology go hand in
hand with dehumanization of the Osage population as they are considered to be
the stumbling block on the way to organized European progress and development.
Having reduced the natives to unproductive and ineffectual material, the white
Americans wage an anthropocentric war against the biocentric culture of natives
on the pretext that the natives are not scientifically enlightened enough to manage
and regulate the land and ecology of their dwelling. Therefore, drilling and
dynamiting the land for oil conflates with shooting, poisoning and robbing the
Osage. Failing to comprehend the diabolic design behind the ravaging of land
and inhabitants, the Osage culture is pushed to the point of extinction.
Michael Horse, the village seer, in his diary laments the innocence of the
Osage who fail to understand the sinister design of the white Americans:
It was a fatal ignorance we had of
our place; we did not know the ends to which the others would go to destroy us.
We didn’t know how much they were moved by the presence of money. (Hogan 341)
The “fatal ignorance” is evident as
the natives are tricked to lease out their land to European settlers. Since the
life-supporting ecological system of the region is completely brought under the
umbrella of mining, the reciprocal man and nature relationship and the
bioregional culture that grows from it have been completely replaced by ‘the
presence of money’. Money as the pivotal force of life is rather new to the
Osage, and their struggle to acclimatize themselves with this new trope of
life-force leads them to a disarray material condition.
The
newly superimposed materiality on the Osage culture results in a situation
where the natives, despite knowing the irrelevance of money within their
cultural realm, have to participate in the game of accumulating money. Hogan in
her novel recreates the figure of “master criminal William K. Hale,
self-proclaimed ‘King of the Osage’” (Fixico 27), the sinister manifestation of
mean spirit who takes Osage land on lease and subsequently conspires to murder
the native leaser thereby grabbing the land. In the novel John Hale – “a lanky
white man …been a rancher in Indian Territory for a number of years before he
invested in the oil business” (Hogan 22) – whose character is created after
William K. Hale. As the natives are amateur in the management of money, in this
newly emerged capital-based consumerist culture they are always in “debt, owing
to stores, the court-assigned legal guardians” (54) and in such a situation
Hale is “always ready with quick offer and fast cash” (54). The natives are
entrapped, and the enormous possibility of making his fortune in oil leads Hale
to plot ceaseless murders of the natives to attain complete individual
ownership in Osage territory.
The
Osage are shot, poisoned and blown up and simultaneously the land and ecology
are tarnished and ravaged irrevocably: “the earth had turned oily black. Blue
flames rose up and roared like torches of burning gas. The earth bled oil”
(54). In the novel, Grace Blanket, Belle Grayclod’s niece, becomes Hale’s first
victim. She is shot in broad day light, and Hale murders her with the awareness
that Grace’s minor daughter Nola cannot inherit her land. The official
arrangement is such that only a white can be appointed as legal guardian of
natives, and since most of the natives are in debt the land is legally handed
over to the party who takes it on lease. Grace’s sister Sara is killed in an
explosion inside her house and Benoit who is accused of the act eventually
commits suicide in jail as a native is not entitled to hire an advocate. An old
native Walker is poisoned to death as his death will entitle Hale to become the
beneficiary of Walker’s insurance policy. Stacy Red Hawk, a native police
official who is appointed to investigate the murder of natives, to his utter
dismay and astonishment discovers that “the people he was up against here in
Indian Territory were the ones who did not love the earth and her creatures.
Much of what these people believed to be good, was not good” (205). Stacy’s is
disillusioned and resigns his position within the bureaucratic system of the
whites. Hale’s murderous conspiracy reflects the fact that the Osage are no
longer considered as a living cultural human community, but rather viewed in a
quantifiable manner as a bundle of commodities either to be discarded or
utilized. This is further evident as the European settlers not only excavate
the land to extract natural resources, but at the same time dig the native
graves to extract the deceased body and wealth buried with the body. Grave
robbing becomes a lucrative business because of the “money Indian bodies are
getting on the black market from museums and roadside zoos” (318). In life and
after death the natives are reduced to quantifiable material. In life they are
hunted for the underground reserves of oil and after death their bodies are
excavated as “the bodies of Indians were at a premium for displays across the
country and in Europe” (120). It is evident, therefore, that the settlement of
a large European population in the Osage land along with their organizational
structure of officialdom uproots the natives from their land and culture both demographically
and ecologically. The reproduction of a European way of life is marked by
repopulation of the Osage aboriginal land, and this shift is engendered by a
European notion of land ownership expanding and taking over land and ecology.
Colonialist
intervention affects the health of the Osage aboriginal land in more than one
way. Whereas rapid growth of the European population outnumbers the native
population, simultaneously proliferation of European species of animals hold
heavy toll on the physical environment. For the European settlers domesticated
animals to triumph in a new environment species of European grasses are
cultivated. The entire process ravages local flora and fauna on the one hand,
and more specifically it triggers a practice to perceive the Osage landscape as
a domain of capital investment. Overseas successful migration and settlement of
European human and non-human communities along with flora and fauna are
accompanied by intrusion of pathogens and microorganisms that infects the natives
with alien diseases. John Hale is not only an oilman in Osage territory; at the
same time “he was one of the first men to bring cattle to Indian Territory”
(Hogan 54). Having invested heavily in cattle, Hale discerns the necessity of
pastureland for the cattle, and for ensuring brisk growth of the cattle he
introduces new grasses later on labeled as “Hale Grass” (54). For clearing the
landscape for pastures, he tricks the natives with the prospect of profit, and
he along with the natives cut and burn the landscape for the cattle investment.
The new grass has not only “fattened cattle”, but at the same time, strong
roots of the grass have “spirited away the minerals and water from other trees
and plants, leaving tracts of land barren-looking” (54). Transforming the
environment into a viable variable of capital investment has been achieved
through the ways the Osage region is tamed, regimented and commodified by the
agencies of ecological imperialism.
Underground
disruption of the land caused by mining corresponds to a collateral damage of
the landscape as the new species of animals and plants adulterate and change
the local flora and fauna in an irrevocable way. Michael Horse rightly observes
that “the land is ravaged and covered with scars and so are the broken people”
(Hogan 341). Having scarred the land, the European intervention as a biological
phenomenon also brings in diseases alien to the natives. Ona Neck’s son John
Stink’s suffers from a special form of tuberculosis that spread from “coughing
settlers to the Indian population” (99), and the natives identify that “the
settlers’ pigs were instrumental in the spread of the disease” (100). The
visible symptoms of this tuberculosis are skin lesions and swollen glands, and
the disease is accompanied by a decaying smell. Stink contracts the disease in
his childhood but the unpleasant smell remains in him, which is why he is
renamed from Ho-Tah-Moie to John Stink by the white settlers. In the same way
Grace’s youngest sister Molene dies of a paralyzing illness “spread by white
men who worked on the railroad” (7). Sara is also infected by this illness that
forces her to remain in bed, motionless, for over a year. It is, therefore,
evident that agencies of ecological imperialism operate together to dispossess
the Osage from their land of origin. The relationship between man and land has
been completely shifted into a different dimension, and aboriginal bioregional
culture is replaced by a profit-laden anthropocentric culture. In dealing with the contact or encounter
between aboriginal culture and European colonists, Hogan’s novel brings into
focus how colonialist interventions operate through the agencies of ecological
imperialism and commodity frontier dispossess the natives from their land. It
involves an all pervasive process of eroding the ecological system of
aboriginal region, and at the same time in disrupting aboriginal’s relationship
with land it eradicates the bioregional culture of aboriginal way of life.
Endnotes
1 Jim
Cheney in his essay “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional
Narrative” (1989) demonstrates the idea of ‘storied residence’ in explaining
how bioregional narratives are based on the contextualised discourse by virtue
of the narrations of place-based stories, myths and legends that connect a
community with a place.
Works Cited
Cronon,
William. Changes in the Land: Indians,
Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill & Wang, 1983.
Print.
Cheney,
Jim. “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative” Environmental Ethics 11
(1989): 117–33. Print.
Crosby,
Alfred W. “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans
as a Biological Phenomenon.” The Ends of
the Earth: Perspective on Modern Environmental History. Ed. Donald Worster.
New York: Cambridge UP, 1988. 103-117. Print.
Durning,
Alan Thein. Guardians of the Land:
Indigenous Peoples and the Health of the Earth. Washington: Worldwatch Paper, 1992. Print.
Fixico, Donald Lee. The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American
Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources. Colorado: UP of Colorado, 1998.
Print.
Hogan,
Linda. Mean Spirit. New York: Ivy
Books, 1992. Print.
Greenblatt,
Stephen. Marvellous Possessions. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1991. Print.