Walking the Clouds - Grace Dillon

*Update - I noticed that the original version of this is riddled with typos. Blogger doesn't have spellcheck? Or maybe I turned it off somehow? Anyhow, fixed the glaring errors. 

When I encounter an author, I often look them up to see if they have any podcasts or lectures online. Then when I am reading, I can imagine their voice narrating it. Grace Dillon does have a number of lectures available online. She's a gregarious speaker with a delightful laugh. I recommend watching this video from the Future Imaginaries Symposium in Kelowna.

This post focuses on her introduction to the book she edited, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012). She actually has another collection, Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (2003). I just recieved it in the mail. Grace Dillon does not address Indigenous fiction in the introduction. But I haven't looked too closely so maybe I am wrong about that. 

In the introduction to Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), Grace Dillon opens with reference to a Drew Hayden Taylor play in which one of the characters is an Indigenous science fiction writer who resists their writing being limited to a mechanism to educate non-Indigenous Canada about Indigenous people, and instead just wants to follow their own creative impulses while also making a living (p.1). Reflecting on the concept of Indigenous self-expression through science fiction, Dillon asks the question "Does s[cience] f[iction] have the capacity to envision Native futures, Indigenous hopes, and dreams recovered by rethinking the past in a new framework?" (p.2). She says the anthology “weds s[cience] f[iction] theory and Native intellectualism, Indigenous scientific literacy, and western techno-cultural science, scientific possibilities enmeshed with Skin thinking." (p.2). 

She says, "The stories offered here are thought experiments that confront issues of 'Indianness'” (p.2) and also describes them as a "mindscape" (p.3). The parameters of the mindscape are described through the names of the sections in the book: “Native Slipstream; Contact; Indigenous Scientific Literacies and Environmental Sustainability; Native Apocalypse, Revolutions, and Futuristic Reconstructions of Sovereignties; and Biskaabiiyang, ‘Returning to Ourselves’: Beyond the Shadow-Worlds of Postmodernity and the (Post)Colonial." (p.3). Dillon engages with Indigenous scholars as she: invokes Gerald Vizenor's Suvivance (p.6); invokes Lawrence Gross's concepts of post-apocalyptic stress syndrome, aakozi (Anishinaabemowin for being out of balance), and returning to bimaadiziwin (being in a state of balance), (p.9); and invokes Linda Tuhiwai Smith's approach to decolonization, which Dillon describes as "changing rather than imitating Eurowestern concepts." (p.10). She says, "In the end, Walking the Clouds returns us to ourselves by encouraging Native writers to write about Native conditions in Native-centred worlds liberated by the imagination." (p.11).

Dillon, G.L. (2012). Imagining Indigenous Futurisms. In G.L. Dillon (Ed.) Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (p.1-12). Tuscon, Arizona: University of Arizona Press.

There are a few stories in the anthology that I thought were pretty good. The book is laid out as a scholarly reader, with academic introductions to each piece. 

The front matter of the book has a page that says "Volume 69" and lists the (very impressive) editorial board, which includes Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko. I saw that and I was like Volume 69 of what?!? so I went to the website website and found this description: 

Launched in 1971, Sun Tracks was one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. The series has included more than eighty volumes of poetry, prose, art, and photography by such distinguished artists as Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Luci Tapahonso.

I do love collections of things. So maybe some day I will look further into this Sun Tracks collection. But not today because I have some other things to do today. 

In 2016, Extrapolation, a scholarly journal on science fiction and fantasy, published an Indigenous Futurisms issue and Grace Dillon wrote the editorial.

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