In an essay that appears in the first issue of Expanded Horizons under the title “American Indians at the Final Frontiers of Imperial Sf”, I suggest that mainstream speculative fiction writing (hereafter sf), no matter how well intended, has an Indian problem. In this essay I explore how American Indian writers of sf deal with this problem in their novels and stories.

The problem, in short, is the colonialist (or imperialist) vision of the world, which identifies indigenous peoples like Native American Indians as “others,” as different-as alien. Their alienness needs to be tamed, and the aliens either need to be converted to the new (and always “superior”) way of seeing the world or they need to quietly fade away before it-unable, as aliens always must be, to deal with change.

Indians are a problem in this vision of the world and sf is too often dependent on this vision. But Native American writers of sf have an “Indian problem” as well: How do Native peoples write sf without writing their own oppression or, worse, without writing their own extinction? Is it possible to decolonize such a western form of expression and, if so, how would it look? The question is can sf be indigenized-made to speak from Indigenous perspectives?

The American mythology of Manifest Destiny, first articulated in the 1840s to justify the westward expansion of the United States, treats Native American peoples as aliens-obstacles to the divinely ordained spread of democracy and market capitalism that is the American way of life. The western frontier becomes the space where this drama unfolds.

That colonialism is part-and-parcel of this same movement is conveniently forgiven, in the mythology, by the Lord’s ordination of the righteousness of democracy (and capitalism). Colonialism is characterized as what the Crown did to the Americans, not what Americans did to the Native peoples of North America.

Colonialism, consecrated as Manifest Destiny, is transferred from the frontier, as time passes, to U.S. imperial adventures at the Cuban and Philippine frontiers, and later it moves to frontiers in Southeast Asia, Central America, and lately Iraq. Soldiers at the “frontier” in Iraq speak, unselfconsciously and in light of this legacy, of hot zones as “Indian country,” as an alien space, that needs to be “civilized.”

Given the depth of this colonialist vision in modern culture, it is not surprising that sf is quite often written from this point of view: space becomes the final frontier. Horse operas-westerns written as popular (melo)dramatizations of this colonial mythology-become space operas and Captain Kirk seeks to tame the wily and brutal Klingon just as the crew of Serenity will, nearly forty years later, go head to head with the “brutal and psychotic Reavers” (as Wikipedia identified them as of January 27, 2009).

The stories I examined in that previous essay (William Tenn’s “Eastward Ho!” and Paul Melko’s “The Teosinte Wars”) both propose that the Native peoples of North America will become colonialists once touched by advances in technology, as if there were no other way to use technology to engage the world. The next few thousand words will examine two novels and a story by Native sf writers to see how they speak back to the colonialist perspective, and how they engage with and challenge (what I call in that earlier essay) sf’s notions of universal imperialism. I will also point to how sf might be indigenized, even while retaining many of its conventions as a genre.

In On SF, critic and sf writer Thomas Disch notes, “Genre fiction may be distinguished from other kinds of writing in being shaped by the (presumed) demands of its audience rather than by the creative will of its writers. The writers accommodate their talents to the genre’s established formulae” (6). The “established formulae” are what readers expect and what writers move towards in their work. This puts Native sf writers in a difficult position: When writing sf how do you address the colonialism that has long sought the erasure of Native peoples-including your family and friends-and yet still reach Native and non-Native readers? How do you deal with colonialism from this position?

The two novels I look at here, Gerry William’s The Black Ship and Zainab Amadahy’s The Moons of Palmares, both present us with imperial (or colonial) space adventures that put a Native person in the command structure of the colonial military, and both explore the ways in which that Native protagonist comes to realize that colonialism may not be the only way to live in the world. They are novels that point to an awakening of political consciousness. In his short story, “Going After Old Man Alabama,” William Sanders also engages with the question of how Native people need to deal with the challenges of colonialism, but his protagonists remain outside the colonialist mindset. They have not assimilated to the social and political structures of the colonizing society and they are able to use Native ways of being in the world to challenge colonialist ways-even if they may not have the greatest success by the end of the story. All three works explore the relation of Native people to colonial/imperial history and futures-and all three come up with different ways of recognizing the consequences of those histories (and futures). There is no one way to indigenize sf.

Both William’s and Amadahy’s books deal explicitly with issues of galactic empires; their universes look a lot like the universes of Star Trek and Star Wars, with lots of space travel and conflict over which planets and regions of space belong to whom. The Black Ship focuses on an extraordinary young Native woman, Enid Blue Starbreaks, who is removed from her indigenous family and community in order to be raised by a “white” family who guide her development as a military officer so that her talents can be used to defeat her own people. Enid’s treatment reflects much of those lost generations of Native children removed from their families and either placed in boarding schools or adopted by majority culture families. In the book, as her military prowess develops, she also begins to have inklings of her indigenous heritage. By the end of the book, Enid has sympathy for the Repletian people (as the indigenous people in the book are known), but we are not sure what she will do. As the book is the first part of a proposed trilogy and the remaining parts have not been published, we may never know how Enid’s story turns out, though it definitely seems aimed at a rediscovery/recovery of Native identity. As we lack the concluding volumes of the story, we are left with a book that ends with Enid still at work for an expansionist, militarist regime bent on the destruction of the Repletians.

Amadahy’s novel The Moons of Palmares takes a Native character named Leith Eaglefeather, a major in the Terran military, who, like Enid, has been raised in a deracinated environment, without knowledge of his indigenous community. The novel also puts him in a situation similar to hers. That is, he works for the majority culture and, as a member of the military, he participates in its exploitation of the titular moons of the planet Palmares by his willingness to protect the Terran majority culture’s interests in those moons. The moons are being mined by Terrans for the benefits of Terrans, not the Palmarens, in the classic colonialist mode of extracting natural resources for the benefit of the home state (or planet in this case). The moons will shortly be so depleted that their destabilized orbits will threaten to destroy the planet.

The people of Palmares live in a peaceful, multicultural society, organized into quilombos. Historically, quilombos were the villages that runaway slaves in Brazil organized and have been remembered for the way they fused African and indigenous practices, and the residents of Palmares have adapted this attitude as well. (Palmares is the name of the most famous of the historical quilombos.) It is a society of amazing tolerance, it honors women and is largely peaceful, and once exposed to it Eaglefeather struggles between fulfilling his military duty and learning more about this peaceful way of life from people who have no reason to trust him (though tolerant of difference, the Palmarens are not stupid). The story resolves itself with the Palmarens successfully negotiating with the Terrans and protecting the planet and its moons.

Both William’s and Amadahy’s books deal with the relation of indigenous peoples to colonialism. William’s book struggles with a problem that Sharona Ben-Tov identified in her book The Artificial Paradise as part of a problem that feminist sf encounters. Ben-Tov observes that feminist sf raises the question of “whether science fiction could be, simultaneously, part of one mode of thinking and a force against that same mode’s inherent reactionary values” (2). William’s book arrives at a similar impasse. Its protagonist is deracinated (by the design of her handlers) and, as the captain of a starship, she is duty-bound to protect her crew. In protecting her crew, she may also be advancing the power of those who would see her indigenous relatives extinguished. It is an interesting quandary for a novel to explore and The Black Ship lays the groundwork for this exploration, but does not carry it out. At the end, the empire still stands, is hardly even destabilized. The only hope is that the mysterious, unidentified Black Ship of the title may be powerful enough to unite the imperial majority and indigenous cultures – which points us to the idea (also voiced in my earlier essay) that an external force, whether alien, android, or some greater unknown will serve to unite humans across racial lines in order to face down-all of us, together-those inhuman forces.

In Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space, DeWitt Kilgore explores the way the early space program nurtured a utopic vision of the possibilities of space travel and the good it would do for humanity. William’s book ends in the space familiar to the astrofuturists of the nineteen-fifties and -sixties: a homogeneous future (ideally, in those old days at least, a white future), where a universal notion of humanity will resolve knotty problems of race and imperial power. As Kilgore points out though, astrofuturists in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties break with the homogeneous vision of their forebears and instead use the space frontier “to provoke speculation about changes in the terrestrial status quo. To this end, [these writers] have pursued postmodern futures that grapple with the claims of peoples whose role as active participants in the advance of human knowledge has been routinely devalued or ignored” (226). These kinds of sf writers direct their work “to the creation of outer spaces that experiment with diversity and hybridity, and break with terrestrial powers that would fix human potential into bounded, governable forms. In these heterogeneous spaces, suppressed histories and talents can flower and the deferred dreams of aggrieved communities can be realized” (226).

Amadahy’s The Moons of Palmares reflects this heterogeneous notion of humanity, where the suppression of ethnic, racial, and cultural differences is rejected and “Political hope,” as Kilgore notes, “is expressed neither as monolithic galactic empires and federations, nor as racially pure, space-based bantustans whose distance from one another is supposed to guarantee the survival, peace, and prosperity of the species.” With a nod to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Kilgore suggests that “Hope exists in the invention of heterotopias, spaces that escape the simple oppositions maintained by our possessive investments” in socioeconomic and racialized status quos (226). The quilombos of Palmares are heterotopias and with them Amadahy privileges a way of living in space that is other than imperial and homogeneous, reflecting what Kilgore identifies as the potential of heterotopic thought. He writes, “In heterotopic spaces, thought experiments are run that suspend ordinary rules long enough to allow us to consider alternative ways of being” (227). Amadahy clearly poses her plot as such a thought experiment, with Eaglefeather as the experimental subject. He learns, as we do with him, to suspend the rules that seem to govern our lives and histories in order to find, as Kilgore puts it, “fresh potential” in heterotopian space.

While Amadahy’s book breaks with the racial homogenization typical of classic sf, the heterotopian paradigm the novel engages might be seen as more of a poststructuralist, multicultural paradigm than a Native one. It is a heterotopian work that includes Indian peoples as one part of a rich mosaic, but what might sf written on a Native literary paradigm look like?

I don’t mean for a Native literary paradigm to sound as if there are a group of Native writers toiling away at a row of desks in some dark room, elaborating stories that all adhere to the same shape and form, the way the Keebler elves’ cookies all conform to a set mold. Paradigm, for my purposes, refers to the assumptions about the source of power that informs the story and who has that power. For instance, democracy is a paradigm: it is the source of power in the United States and the people are said to have that power. In classic space opera, power is centered in a colonialist/imperialist paradigm (indebted, generally, to American notions of Manifest Destiny) and power is located in maverick space cowboys and aliens are “others”: Indians at the frontier who must be put down. In The Black Ship, William puts an astrofuturist paradigm inherited from classic space opera and the early U.S. space program at the center, while Amadahy puts the heterotopian paradigm at the center of her novel.

A Native literary paradigm, by contrast, is not indebted to colonialist, Western, or poststructuralist theories for its power. Instead, it places Native ideas about power-about medicine-at the center. Medicine in the Native paradigm is not necessarily about medical issues. Medicine is knowledge of the way things work and the ability to use them to effect change on people and in the world. It is like technology in the sense that it mediates between people and the world, but it is not necessarily technological (in the sense of fabulous gizmos). Tobacco and a drum or corn pollen and a song may achieve the desired effect, much as a lever might be used to shift a rock or a spacecraft might be used to obtain knowledge about a distant planet. (Which “tools” are utilized in varying situation may differ widely among the 560-some Native nations currently recognized in the United States. From where I write in Minnesota, tobacco is used widely, but in the desert Southwest, corn pollen is preferred.) This Native literary paradigm I invoke is then one that puts Native medicine at the center and is used to help Native people.

A number of stories by William Sanders express such a paradigm. In his best stories, Sanders is unconcerned with Foucault, heterotopian paradigms, and the technological wonders of the Modern West. Instead, he is concerned with solving problems in a speculative way (according to his website http://www.sff.net/people/sanders, Sanders is adamant in identifying his work as speculative, not science, fiction). In some of his sharpest stories, he deals with one of the classic problems in American Indian literature: what is the best way to undo the damage that colonialism has done to Native America?

Sanders addresses this question in “Going After Old Man Alabama.” In Sanders’s story, Old Man Alabama is a witchy backwoods medicine man, a displaced Alabama Indian, not quite trusted by anyone in the contemporary Oklahoma Cherokee community where he has made his home. Thomas Cornstalk and Charlie Badwater have gotten wind that Old Man Alabama is messing with some powerful medicine and they go to check on what he is doing. Cornstalk and Badwater are both medicine people and when they get there, Alabama is gone. Cornstalk’s medicine includes the ability to talk with animals and they learn from a bluejay that the Old Man has gone back in time. Their only clue as to where Alabama has gone is a picture of an old sailing ship from a history textbook. They recreate his medicine and follow his trail in time back to the ship in the picture, where they find no passengers or crew, though the tables are set and charts are laid out. There are only seagulls flying around the vessel and Old Man Alabama standing there. Turns out the seagulls are white people that the old man has turned into birds.

“But why [turn] a lot of poor damn sailors into sea birds?” Badwater asks, to which Alabama responds, “Not just any bunch of white people. This is where it all started, you dumb blanket-asses! And I’m the one who went back and fixed it!” (90). Alabama has gone back in time to stave off the European arrival in the Americas. “Yes!” he shouts. “It’s old Columbus’s ship! Now the white bastards won’t come at all” (90, emphasis in original). When asked where Columbus’s other two ships are, the Old Man says the Mayflower sailed alone. At which point, Badwater and Cornstalk realize that Old Man Alabama’s plan has a few holes in it, and a quick look around confirms that they aren’t on the Mayflower. The ship in the picture, the one that Old Man Alabama has depopulated is the Mary Celeste, a nineteenth century ship that was found adrift with its crew and passengers gone. As they ready themselves to leave the ship and return to their own time, Badwater says to Cornstalk, “You know the worst part? It was a hell of a great idea he had. Too bad it had to occur to such an idiot” (92).

In this brief story we get contemporary Indians, living with contemporary conveniences like pickup trucks, coffeemakers, and blue jeans, who have disputes with one another (it is not a homogeneous community), but who also retain and practice traditional knowledge, for good and bad. You also get a classic sf story-type, the story that explains something that has long been regarded as inexplicable (the mystery of the Mary Celeste in this case). It is also an sf story that places race and a none-too-subtle critique of European colonialism at its thematic center. It does not imagine a raceless future of unlimited tolerance where ethnic and cultural differences have been tamed. In fact, it identifies colonial expansion (which generally seeks to homogenize cultural difference by propagating dependence on market economics and coercive educational practices) as the problem. Old Man Alabama’s plan is not that of the Indians in Tenn’s “Eastward Ho!” as I examined in that earlier essay. Alabama has no designs on imperial expansion, he just wants white people to stay in Europe, he does not, as I read the story, want whites to stay in Europe because they are a threat to Indian imperialism (as Tenn’s story might be read). Charlie Badwater – who is the ethical center of the story – seems to think that a world where Europeans stay put and colonialist adventuring is undone before it begins would be a better one, especially for the indigenous peoples in the world. We can read all this in his concession that Old Man Alabama had “a hell of a great idea.”

What is interesting about Sanders’s story is the model it provides for how American Indians may write sf without falling prey to what Ben-Tov identified as the genre’s “inherent reactionary values,” as in those values that would homogenize place and race in order to transcend (or dispose) of the tricky problems through deference to a hopeful, yet dissatisfying universalism. Sanders’s story also ignores politically progressive, but nevertheless imported, values championed by poststructural and critical theorists. His Cherokee community is multiethnic – Old Man Alabama is an Alabama Indian living in a Cherokee community that regards him with suspicion, fear, and condescension. This Cherokee community is no heterotopia of mutually tolerant peoples living together in harmony. It is ethnocentric, only it is the Cherokees who stand at the center of meaning and understanding, not the universal (white) man. More critically, it engages some of the conventions of our generic definition of sf, but does so on its own terms. That all-important sense of wonder, that so many commentators argue is the central feature of sf in all its forms, is present in the story, only it comes from Native medicine, not from technological progress or scientific theorizing. These Native men go back in time with medicine, not machinery. The shock of dysrecognition that Philip K. Dick identified as intrinsic to good sf arrives here in a series of “what if?” questions (also a key feature of sf storytelling): What if Old Man Alabama was not such an idiot? What if he had prevented the development of European colonialism? What if American Indian peoples had been able to pursue their lives and societies without European colonialism? What would this world look like?

In that earlier essay, I examine “The Teosinte War,” in which Paul Melko speculates about such a world, but does so conservatively, from within the genre’s conventions concerning colonialism, Native peoples, and race-and portrays a world where colonialism always happens. Sanders approaches this question from a different direction, one that does not privilege the genre’s dependence on imperial imperatives and notions of a universal humanity. Rather, he privileges Native medicine, Native power, in order to engage the genre’s dependence on the legitimation of technological power and scientific rationality, and their roles in imperial expansion, to provide it another way of seeing. His Indians do not win in the end, anymore than Melko’s do, but in Sanders’s case they might and in that possibility he raises and addresses important questions about the relation of modern imperialism to race and American Indians. Sanders’s answer to the question does not accord with the universalist humanism typical of sf, though the form of the story (explaining an inexplicable event) does accord with genre expectations. He uses one of the genre’s conservative schemata in order to question other of its conservative elements. That is, he puts racial (American Indian) and ethnic (Cherokee and Alabama) identity at the center of the story, not to transcend them, but to recognize them as ways of seeing the world that are as viable as the imperialist gaze which too often dictates how Native peoples are seen in sf. Placing unapologetically Native characters at the center of the story, Sanders effects a double criticism of Western colonialism, first in a plot that seeks to destroy it and second in characters who are not deracinated into whiteness.

To return to one of the questions with which I opened this essay: Can sf be indigenized? The answer is yes, but in doing so it should, as Sanders does, surpass the colonial eye of sf, the one that sees race as a problem to be transcended, and put Native peoples, problems, and power at the center of wonder.