by Carter Meland

Images of spaceships zooming beyond final frontiers, captained by compassionate but bullheaded leaders, with phasers, lasers, and light sabers near to hand might seem light years away from the movie image of a cowboy riding the range, but they aren’t really. The cherished “oaters” of American cinema, the horse operas that made John Wayne a star, cemented notions of a rugged, and masculine, American individualism as normative in American culture. Our cowboys lived at the edge of the known world, using their Winchester rifles and Colt .45s to protect tenderfooted settlers from the savage Indians that lived “out there” in the dark depths of the unknown. Indians stood between the nation and its Manifest Destiny and cowboys knew how to deal with Indians. That six-gun or that rifle was all those wily savages would ever understand.

The popularity of Westerns waned in the 1950s, but the story of American Manifest Destiny didn’t. It was transposed from the frontier of the wilderness onto the frontier of space. Horse operas became space operas and the wild Apache and Comanche that John Wayne slaughtered became alien races on alien worlds that threatened our humanity, aliens like the Klingons that Captain Kirk strived to pacify in the original Star Trek series. Though driven by notions of the positive changes we might imagine for the future, science fiction (hereafter, sf) too often replicates this American imperial past — that past of the white American’s Manifest Destiny to cross frontiers and colonize other peoples and other homelands, to make them ours — especially when it (sf) deals with Indians or issues that affect Indian peoples or Indian country. Land might be the big issue here: the dispossession of it through imperialist policy and science (that invented ways to quantify and prove Indian inferiority), but the ripple effects of imperialism on indigenous individuals and societies need also be acknowledged, not glossed over, or just accepted as an unfortunate by-product of human progress.

If any field of American popular culture should be open to imagining ways that American Indian peoples may throw off the shackles of the colonial past to help reimagine the American present and its possible futures, you would think it might be sf. The focus of sf on potential developments and the possibilities that should be available to humanity in the future makes me wonder why sf doesn’t handle American Indian issues better. I found it disappointing that the stories I wanted to read about the decolonization of the Americas, about how Indians might handle their encounters with alien races (which they’ve had over five hundred years experience with), and about what might have happened if Custer were kidnapped by the Lakota instead of killed at Little Bighorn were not available. I found virtually nothing like these kinds of stories and those that did approach such themes and issues were dissatisfying (for reasons I’ll explain below). Where were these stories and, more importantly, where were the Indians in these stories? I didn’t want cardboard clichés recycled from movies and books that were worn out even before they were written. I also didn’t want to see Indians just brought into the story as racial windowdressing, as in there’s a group of scientists and one happens to be Mohawk. I wanted substance from these stories, substantive engagement with American Indian characters who are Indian for a reason. And when American Indian issues are engaged, I wanted genuine reflection on it from the perspective that American Indians are living peoples (it’s always peoples too; there are 562 different federally recognized American Indian nations in the United States and at least 250 others seeking recognition), living peoples with living knowledge systems that are significant ways of making meaning in the world. Why is it so hard to find these Indians in sf?

A young Ojibwe man of my acquaintance said, “Maybe the problem is that word ’science.’ ” While he is certainly right in many ways — the “science fictions” of Social Darwinist phrenology and blood measurement have been, and in the case of blood quantum, are still used to question, and sometimes dispossess Native peoples of their identities and homelands — it is also a mistake to think that sf is always really about science.

The British sf writer and critic Brian Stableford asserts that there are two broad types of sf writers, those inspired by the rationalist H.G. Wells and those inspired by the French absurdist Alfred Jarry (author of Ubu Roi, an inspiration to the Surrealists among others). Writers like Wells are scientific, they pose a hypothesis in their stories and pursue its implications with the rigorous discipline of their white-coated counterparts in the lab. Such “hard” sf can be found in the works of writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Writers in the vein of the absurdist Jarry are unconcerned with the rigors of scientific discipline and aim instead to “disturb settled routines of thought” in Stableford’s words. Philip K. Dick, whose novels inspired movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, worked such a vein of disturbance. Dick claimed that the aim of sf was to create a “shock of dysrecognition” in the reader’s mind, to unsettle conventional habits of being and wake the reader’s mind to new possibilities of thought, possibilities that point to entirely new perspectives on culture, history, and technology. Dick even asserted that sf writers are in the business of imagining “new societies.”

So science should not be a problem for American Indians in sf. Sf is as much speculative fiction, as it is science fiction. Everyone can speculate, and I think most American Indian writers would like to see the creation of a new society, one free of racist cultural icons like the savage Indian from the Westerns and the bucktoothed grin of the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo. But this racism persists, even in the boundless potentialities that sf can imagine.

Racism is present in much classic American sf by its absence. There are no races in the imagined future and so no racism. Speaking broadly and generally, Earthers in such works have had to unite to face the Bug-Eyed Monsters from Beyond and under this external threat it is our shared humanity that is important, not our ethnicity. Race will be transcended in this future, as we all pull together to whip alien ass. (Think Independence Day; Will Smith is no Malcolm X.) The movement from Earth to space in such sf is a means of transcending the problems of race and racism.

The bridge of the Enterprise in the original Star Trek television series is emblematic of this inspiring future. It has a multiethnic, multiracial, and even multispecies crew all working together. But wait! Who guides them on their five-year mission into space? A white man of course, a man made of the same stern stuff as the cowboy, the compassionate but bullheaded James T. Kirk. The “T” stands for Tiberius (one of the Roman emperors) and a “kirk” is what people in Scotland and the north of England call a church. The Scottish connection in his name also point us to the practical rational humanism of that nation’s Enlightenment as part of his heritage. Captain Kirk’s ethnicity and name direct us explicitly towards the leadership of whiteness and enlightenment, empire and church, and what we learn from his name, and in this movement to space, is that imperial expansion will guide us away from the problems of earthly racism.

This raises another “but wait!” moment: Isn’t it imperial expansion on Earth that, in part, generates the racism that sf proposes the imperial expansion into space will solve? I mean whites couldn’t enslave African peoples without imperialism and they couldn’t dispossess Indian peoples without it either; likewise, the various forms of race-hatred (white of black, black of white, American Indian of white, white of American Indian, etc.) wouldn’t exist without the various forms of economic exploitation and extraction that imperialism depends on. I mean, if contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas (as well as other points on the globe) had proceeded as one group of equals meeting another group of equals, and had resulted in a series of mutually beneficial exchanges, where would racism be? I’m not such a Pollyanna as to believe everything ever was all harmony and handholding, but I’m also aware that imperialism is a historical trajectory, not a natural event. As dictated by gravity, an object dropped from the roof of my house falls toward the center of the earth, but no such natural force dictates the movement of history. Why project the author of our world’s gravest injustices onto our imaginations of the future or our imaginations of new societies? Why perpetuate this story of expansion and exploitation when, despite its economic successes for some, we know it is destructive to so many more? That it, in fact, disrupts the environments we live within faster than we can evolve to accept those changes as part of our internal chemistry. (I mean, eventually, humans may find a cloud of carbon dioxide invigorating, but right now it just makes us dead.)

Much American sf expresses these utopian dreams of de-raced imperial futures. In light of the imperialist thrust of so much American sf, it is important to consider the ways in which non-Indian sf writers engage with American Indian characters and American Indian matters. In other words, how are American Indians seen through the imperial eye of sf?

While there are multiples of ways American Indian peoples are seen in sf, one prominent way they are represented is as nascent imperialists. Not surprising in a field that embraces imperialism as full of utopian potential. Two stories will help me discuss my point.

William Tenn’s story “Eastward Ho!” appeared in the October 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (later reprinted in 1960 in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Ninth Series) and Paul Melko’s story “The Teosinte War” appeared in the 2006 sf anthology Futureshocks. Nearly fifty years separate these stories, yet both engage the fantasy of American Indians as imperialists.

Tenn’s story takes place in a United States that has suffered a complete economic, technological, and military collapse after, presumably, a nuclear war. The nation has fragmented into competing political territories, most of which are controlled by American Indian tribes, and the United States itself is limited to a few states north of New Jersey. According to the story, after the war the Indian nations were “the first to adjust to the new conditions… the Indians [now] had the granaries, the Indians had the oil lamps” (98-99). Indians have all the wealth and power that white Americans once had.

In the story, the U.S. government sends a young white man to see that the Indians honor their treaties (!) and “retire once more behind the banks of the Susquehanna River” (106). The Sioux Indians he meets with are sympathetic, but remind him that “weaker peoples always go to the wall” (107) and, in the end, inform the young white that there is no United States for him to return to — it has been taken over by the Ojibwe, Cree, and Montagnais. As he leaves, he is informed that there remains a remnant of the U.S. Navy, near the beach in Asbury Park. Once there he boards ship and along with other refugees sails “To the fabled lands of Europe. To a place where a white man can stand at last on his own two legs. Where he need not fear persecution” (112).

It is an amusing story, and meant to be amusing — though as it was first published in 1958 I suppose it is also cautionary for its American readers: if white Americans unleash a nuclear armageddon not only will they lose, they will lose absurdly, as the Indians will win and the whites will have to return to Europe. In the story the Indians don’t take over by being Indians, they do so by being imperialists: they are more successful in their exploitation of natural resources than other races and they need to expand into white territory to feed an expanding population. They are also white imperialists because they are not real Indians. Though they wear buffalo robes and meet in wigwams, these Indians have names like Chief Three Hydrogen Bombs and Makes Much Radiation, and they learn how to be Indian from Bright Book Jacket who teaches them from salvaged volumes like Robert Lowie’s The Crow Indians. It would be absurd enough at the height of the Cold War to lose the United States to Indians; it is even more absurd to lose it to Indians playing at being Indian. White imperialism can certainly find interesting ways to rationalize its insecurities about its genocidal past and nuclear present.

It is fairly easy to see this kind of imperial imperative imposed on Indians in a story from fifty years ago, but what happens to Indians in sf after the social and cultural leaps initiated by the civil rights movements and the cultural sensitivities they initiated? Paul Melko’s 2006 story of “The Teosinte War” is instructive here.

In the story, the historian Dr. Elk hires grad student Ryan Greene to be the Teaching Assistant for his course on Native American history. Both men are identified in the story as “Native American.” Though they have no specific tribal identity, they must be Indians — as one is an Elk and the other is Greene in a not-so-subtle allusion to Native people’s well-known environmentalism, or perhaps a not-so-subtle invocation of the romantic stereotype that Indians are instinctually “green.” Other than their names and their concern with the study of pre-Columbian America, nothing makes these characters Indian other than brief mentions of their dark complexions. Nothing in their work speaks of traditions alternative to those of the West’s and nothing suggests that either man even knows of such traditions. Neither man seems to have such a thing as kin, and kin in Native communities is the most important thing one can have.

Melko’s story has a more sophisticated notion of American Indian history than the one not shown in Tenn’s story. In fact, Dr. Elk’s research deals with the problems of European and American colonization and the genocide of American Indian peoples. Unlike other historians, who dig through archives and write up their findings, Elk has access to a Multi-Worlds Device. The Multi-Worlds Device depends on a key idea in some branches of theoretical physics, namely that we live in a multiverse, rather than a universe. The idea in the story is that multiple universes like ours exist and that with this device one can observe these other worlds and interact with them on a limited basis. With this device, Elk intends to do an experiment with history.

His thesis is familiar to readers of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Germs were the source of European “superiority” in its contact with Native America; germs from crowded living conditions that developed because of the Agricultural Revolution; germs that Europeans developed a resistance to, that Native Americans did not. Elk reasons that if indigenous Americans developed agricultural societies at the same time as the peoples in the Near East (instead of six millennia later), when Columbus and the other Europeans exploiters arrive the Indians will be on an equal footing with the people who would conquer them. Such a scenario would offer a fair fight.

With a gadget called a spyeye, Elk can observe this other Earth, as well as deliver a small payload of corn seed to it. His plan is to deliver the corn to a point ten thousand years in this earth’s past, an historical moment coinciding the development of agriculture in Eurasia. He selects three village sites to seed, which he names Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. (While these are all cities in Ohio, home to author Melko, we cannot help but note that for an Indian like Dr. Elk to provide the honorifics of Columbus and Cleveland — home to one of the most grossly stereotypical team mascots, the Indians — to these two ancient villages seems unlikely; any irony in these names intended by Melko seems likely to spin in the direction of offense for readers familiar with contemporary Native issues.) Agriculture takes off in Columbus and Cleveland and eventually the Indians there develop imperial ambitions. Then the Chinese invade and quash them and this Earth goes a completely different direction than ours and Elk has to start the project on another Earth. By the year 1000 on this second experimental Earth, the Native people of New England have achieved a fully integrated agricultural economy and technologically progressive civilization (including the printing press) and then they decide to sail the seas. As the characters in the story watch, the Indians set sail and discover England. There, they trade with the locals, re-provision their ship, and invite a few English people to join them on the return journey. “Translators,” Elk explains. “The first step toward understanding. This is most excellent” (218).

Upon returning to their home port in “pseudo-Boston,” half the crew of the ship has died from a “poxlike” disease” and the rest show the lesions of the disease. Switching from the spyeye in pseudo-Boston to one in England, they are “shocked to see the black smoke of funeral pyres clouding the sky” (219). It would seem that plague has struck both groups. Via the spyeyes, they zoom ahead a year. Both the Americas and Europe are nearly depopulated; European “crowd diseases” have infected the Native population and Native “crowd diseases” have done the same to the European. The narrator estimates 200 million dead. Elk disappears from the university and Greene is left undertake the task of “rebuilding Dr. Elk’s universe” by “helping the survivors and… making certain we do not play god again. Making certain we do not use entire universes as laboratories” (221).

It is an inventive story and addresses an issue closer to the heart of Indian country than the one Tenn addressed. Tenn’s story explores the ramifications of nuclear war on society and as nuclear war effects everyone, it is more of a universal theme. Melko’s story explores the morality of colonization and the consequences of contact, which we know devastated Native societies in the Americas. Melko’s story is more Indian-oriented thematically: Indians have a more unique claim on concern with issues of colonization and the consequences of contact; ostensibly, it is not so universal an issue as a nuclear armageddon might be. Still, though more of an Indian issue story, it is odd how Melko addresses this issue. Ryan Greene, the narrator of the story, is Native American, but always addresses Indians as “they” or “them;” he even cynically remarks that Dr. Elk’s funding for the project is “Casino money, probably” (203). I have already commented on the “ironies” in naming these Indian empires after Columbus and Cleveland. What both these elements in the story point to is not so much Ryan’s and Elk’s Indianness but rather their deracination. Un-raced, Ryan and Elk fit into that imagined raceless future that critics have identified as crucial to sf’s imagination of itself. Ryan never takes any pride in his ancestry or says anything about the experimental subjects on this other Earth that evinces any kind of emotional or intellectual fellow feeling. They are merely objects he observes. (Though by the story’s end he has debated the morality of the directions that Elk has spurred them in and written them up as his Ph.D. thesis, Ryan does not hint that what he has learned has driven him to reconsider his relation to his heritage.)

In Tenn’s story the future is raced, but in name only (as the Indians have to learn what Indian means from the works of white anthropologists), while in Melko’s story the main characters are Indians who refer to themselves in the third person. The issue of contact and conquest of Native America by disease — an historical fact of unimaginable devastation, the effects of which still live in Native communities — is in Melko’s story claimed, like nuclear armegeddon, to be a universal issue, as something that affects one and all, even if the historical evidence does not support such a conclusion. The story suggests that given agriculture the Indians of North America would develop a technological, imperial economy and society, a mirror image of what was taking place in Europe, and that as a result of their development on an even footing, they might unleash the diseases that would devastate a continent. Such a plot trajectory intimates what we might consider sf’s terminal dependence upon a manifest imperial destiny: everyone will always destroy others, even if that is not what they mean to do. In the light of this universal condition, the devastation that European and Euroamerican colonization unleashed on indigenous peoples is an inevitability and if on our Earth the Europeans are at fault, on other Earths the Indians are.

While it is too much to say, based on the evidence of these two stories, that sf deals with Indians in one way, I do think that the relationship of Indians to imperialism forwarded in these stories is instructive. If Indians are imperialists at heart and Europeans are imperialists at heart (and so are the Chinese who show up briefly in Melko’s story), then imperialism is a universal human condition (rather than an historical social-economic trajectory) that occurs with a near Marxian predictability in every society. Nowhere do Tenn or Melko say these things, but their stories point in this direction and so sf sounds the bell of a universal human condition, including imperial expansion, as one of its great generic (as in genre, not as in unremarkable) themes.

The question then becomes how do Indians who have written sf engage these themes of imperial expansion and righting what has been wronged. Decolonization, undoing colonial and imperial habits of thought, especially as they relate to indigenous people, is one of the central concerns of Native writers and scholars in general. Native sf writers are no different from their peers working in other genres and I will explore the ways they address these questions of imperial thought, sf, and indigenous characters in a forthcoming essay. For the moment, suffice it to say, that sf by Native writers concerning Native characters seeks to privilege Native power, to present Native ways of seeing and being as legitimate, and to explore the differing ways of perceiving the universe we all share.