Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T11:52:08.279Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 4 - Decolonial Eschatologies of Native American Literatures

from Part I - America as Apocalypse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2020

John Hay
Affiliation:
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Get access

Summary

The colonization of the Americas has long been described as an apocalyptic event that devastated indigenous peoples and lifeways. Yet since the time of Tenskwatawa and Wovoka, Native Americans have imagined a different kind of world-ending event, a counterapocalypse that would wipe out Euro-American society while simultaneously restoring tribal cultures to precolonial wholeness. This essay gives an overview of representations of such an anticolonial apocalypse from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how various forms of apocalypse are formulated, oftentimes in response to US Indian policy. Beginning with the pan-Indian utopianism of Martin Cruz Smith’s The Indians Won (1970), the essay goes on to show how Rebecca Roanhorse’s The Trail of Lightning (2018) draws on the emerging salience of specific tribal nationhood to imagine a possible decolonial future in the face of climatic crisis. The essay ends with a meditation on Stephen Graham Jones’s The Bird Is Gone (2006), which offers an ambivalent critique of decolonization itself as potentially apocalyptic for Native peoples.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×