Daniel Heath Justice: Indigenous literature and decolonial libraries (ep366)
“English embeds certain things just by virtue of its structure. It’s a very thing-ifying language; it’s very noun-heavy. Most of the Indigenous languages that I know of are very relational and verb-heavy. It’s a fundamentally different way of relating to the world and to community. If [the] Indigenous literature [you see] is all in English, then you’re missing a significant reality in terms of Indigenous forms of expression.”
In this episode, we welcome Daniel Heath Justice, a Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He works on Musqueam territory at the University of British Columbia, where he is Professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English and holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture. A literary scholar, fantasy novelist, and cultural historian, his critical and creative work considers Indigenous kinship, sexuality, speculative fiction, and other-than-human relations.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include the role of storytelling in shaping culture, the politics of what gets validated as literature, the power of speculative fiction in seeding imaginations for other ways of being, and more.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Forest Veil
Episode-inspired artwork by Subin Yang
Episode references:
X̱wi7x̱wa Library, an Indigenous library at the UBC
Red On Red: Native American Literary Separatism, a book by Craig S. Womack
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Daniel Heath Justice: I was raised in a little mining town in Colorado called Victor, Colorado. My dad was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. My mom was of mixed settler heritage. I'm the fourth generation of her family to be raised there. When I was younger, I was pretty restless about living there. We were the only Indigenous family that I know of in the area. I was raised outside of [our] community, so I didn't really have a lot of contacts. My dad was also raised outside of [our] community. My grandmother was the last member of my family who grew up within Cherokee Nation reservation boundaries.
So, it wasn't until I went to university that I started to really have a sense of the way our family history had informed and impacted who we were. Going into Indigenous studies was in part to reconnect with my dad's family, but [it was] also to understand the complicated nature of a lot of people's lives and upbringings. It started off as a way of understanding my immediate family, but then very much grew into a larger commitment to Cherokee concerns more broadly.
Kamea Chayne: From your teaching philosophy, you share:
"Whether we abandon the stories around us, fully embrace them, merely suffer their effects, or actively imagine other stories in their place, we must recognize their existence and power. When we do so, we have the opportunity to choose our response, rather than to surrender our intellectual and ethical sovereignty to circumstance."
What do you see as the value in being able to recognize the power and the non-neutral and non-objective nature of all of the stories that we are exposed to, intentionally or not? What would it mean to reclaim our intellectual and ethical sovereignty from circumstance?
Daniel Heath Justice: It's a big question. So much of my work is really just exploring all of that and the implications of that. But I think primarily, for me, it's to understand that...
We all are embedded in a constellation of meaning and that's often realized through story.
In a lot of cases, we just accept the stories we hear about who we are, who our family is, where we're from, what our community is, and what our country or nation or affinity group might be. It makes sense [how] we just accept that, because we're raised to see certain things as being normative.
But it's really important if we're going to have any role to play in our lives and in the world, to start to interrogate what those stories mean or to reach deeper, to actually have an active role in understanding how those stories came to be and how they work in the world. Some stories are really generous and generative, and they bring out the best of us. [But] some stories really limit our possibilities. Either we pull inward because what we know to be our existence isn't reflected in things that the people around us value, or the stories that we tell reflect uglier views of the world and other people in it.
I think it's really important that we start to be really mindful about the stories that we accept and to really challenge the stories. So that we have some understanding of their complexity, but also some understanding of our responsibility in the world and how we care for those stories going forward. It's not an easy thing, and it's especially hard when we start to question things that were given as inevitabilities, or that were given to us as an unquestioned good. But it's really important. Especially once we start to encounter other people who may have very different stories from ours, [and realize] that we live in very complicated relationships with one another, and [that] we're embedded in really complicated histories.
The biggest danger is to try to reduce those complexities to simple narratives because it's in the complexities that our humanity is most finely rendered. Once we start flattening that out, a lot of damage comes as a result.
Kamea Chayne: I know you often come across certain presumptions or misconceptions people have about Indigenous literature, and I'm sure we'll dive deeper into some of these more specifically later. But what are some of the most common misunderstandings or lack of understanding of Indigenous literature in public discourses that you found yourself having to push back on and unravel again and again?
Daniel Heath Justice: The biggest one is that a lot of people just don't believe there is such a thing, or [they believe] that it's only a contemporary literary form, rather than understanding that Indigenous literature has really deep, long, and diverse histories. It's not as common now, actually, especially here in Canada, but for a very long time I would meet strangers on the plane, [for example], and they [would] say, “What do you do for a living?” I say, “I teach Indigenous literature.” And they're like, “Do they even have literature?”
The biggest challenge has always been just this fundamental presumption of Indigenous erasure, not just in everyday life, but also in terms of our intellectual and artistic productions. Or the idea that it only started existing as a result of colonization, or as a result of the Native American Renaissance in the 1960s or whatever. Assumptions that we couldn't have had a literary archive of our own, that it could only come as a result of the imposition of Euro-Western culture.
We absolutely have a rich and vibrant literature that is in English, and that [does come] out of other types of literary movements, but [it] builds on an existing body of work that is very ancient and well pre-dates European colonization.
Kamea Chayne: And that Indigenous erasure, that presumption, I think is also reflective of the Indigenous erasure in the broader mainstream media landscape and education as well.
We have explored with various scholars and cultural critics here the political nature of education and media. And libraries, as you name it, an ideological structure, is also an extension of and tethered to both education and media.
Similar to how some people might initially think about these two worlds, there can be a naive perspective that libraries are neutral spaces, just providing resources and literature to the public, or whoever their intended audience is.
How would you invite us to think about the politics and organizational logic of this structure of knowledge and story curation tied to education, of course, and the larger cultural impacts that this could have had?
Daniel Heath Justice: I have a complicated relationship with all of these institutions. On the one hand, they're deeply colonial. No question. Any time you have sites where knowledge is supposed to be embedded, they're always going to be contested locations, and they're always going to privilege certain kinds of knowledge over others.
That said, I'm a huge book nerd and I'm a huge library booster. If I hadn't gone into academia, I very well may have been a librarian. Of course, my idea of being a librarian isn't necessarily what it is today. I was all about the books, not the other media.
I know so many other Indigenous people for whom that's the same thing: libraries were difficult places, but they were also places that offered a lot of imaginative freedom (even within very constrained circumstances). I'm not a believer in discarding these spaces, or in presuming that they are so they're so vexed that there are not important things there as well. But I do think we have to interrogate what they are and what they do.
Libraries are still one of the few places in our society that actually still have a commitment to providing access to information to a wide population.
We know some of that information is very limited, in terms of the knowledge that it shares. But I think they still do some important things and they have still been really important sites of imaginative liberation for a lot of folks. So, these are the complexities that we have to take up. [We have to ask] how we make these places more accessible in all the best ways, [while] also realizing that they are limited.
Not all important knowledge is going to be found at the library. And some libraries are still going to be very much wedded to a Dewey Decimal kind of taxonomy that is so rooted in colonialism and racism.
Whereas [other libraries] are really trying to push outside of that, and trying to bring other ways of understanding how knowledge can be shared, and also what our accountability is, and making sure that we're not extracting knowledge from people. Because not everything should be readily available.
We also know that some of the philosophies that have informed the creation of libraries are also [the same] philosophies that informed the creation of museums and archives: [based on an] idea that all knowledge was there for the taking, and [that] if people didn't want to give it up, [it could] be stolen. We always have to think about the history of knowledge extraction and the accountability that goes with knowledge.
I do have a lot of appreciation for what libraries do, even within their limited capability. But also, I [realize how much more] libraries can do when you have Indigenous and other marginalized peoples at the center of those decisions, rather than at the whim of other people's decision-making.
Kamea Chayne: I really appreciate you helping welcome us to lean into this complexity, this reminder that there's no simple narrative that we can fall on. It is important to complicate our understandings of libraries and of the world so that we can see it most clearly for what it is and all of its nuanced layers.
You also offer an invitation for people to see literature in a more expansive way, and for us to question what it even means, who gets to define this form of “high art,” and who that ultimately privileges or marginalizes.
Could you take us through your thought process here, including how you would blur and question the binary between orature and literature when it comes to understanding Indigenous stories and tradition?
Daniel Heath Justice: This is always a good topic of discussion.
The idea of literature is one that has a lot of cultural capital, but that cultural capital works with a lot of unstated presumptions — that certain types of writing are art and certain types of writing are trash.
People talk about their “guilty pleasures” in reading, which I don't understand. If you're reading something and enjoying it, why feel guilty about it?
I'm a literature professor. I've got my training in this work. But I think so much of what we see as Literature with a capital L, or however you want to define it, is really rooted in particular types of cultural supremacy, emerging out of particularly the Anglosphere, but other Western European contexts more broadly [too]. That, certainly historically, has erased the contributions of Indigenous peoples and others.
Our literature is what we say it is. It is the inscribed, narrated and embodied traditions that communicate our understanding of ourselves and the world we belong to, and the visions that we have about both. They are communicated in whatever forms are meaningful to us. That could be on paper, in books, in alphabetic texts, it could be in basketry, it could be in carved cedar poles, it could be in very transient sand paintings. What makes it literature, and what makes it meaningful, is what it does for us. If other people find meaning in that, that's fine. But it's actually about our meaning first, rather than always looking to the arbitrary conventions of imperial cultures and their gatekeepers.
In terms of the distinction between orature and literature, there are important things to keep in mind when we're talking about oral traditions and their performance contexts and the fact that they're most often presented in a community context, whereas, oftentimes, reading is a very individualistic practice.
Both do important things for us and for maintaining culture, language and histories. They do that in different, but complementary ways.
There's an idea that the oral precedes the literary and that the literary is somehow more sophisticated. Yet, anybody who has done any work with traditional storytellers knows that the sophistication of an orator is really mind-boggling, because it requires so much of people's memory, but also their ability to engage an audience in thoughtful ways and to compel the audience to be part of that experience and to also share in the creation of the story.
There's a dynamism there that's really important.
I'm always suspicious of a hard and fast division between the oral and the literary, because I think they're better understood as complementary rather than oppositional.
Kamea Chayne: We can't really talk about literature without also talking about the languages that it would be working through as the underlying tool of communication. To not presume that literacy in a particular language is deemed superior to some others, although it has arguably been made to feel that way based on which languages are more important for people to learn, to be able to communicate cross-culturally in this day, and to be able to conduct business that is “valuable” or “more valuable” to our global economic system.
But we know that alongside biodiversity loss, there has been an aligning trend of language diversity loss, particularly in place-based dialects and Indigenous languages. So, with your work in Indigenous literature, what comes to mind for you when you think about language loss and what that would mean for the impact of literature? I'm thinking, for example, about the limitations that that could impose because there are particular worldviews and ways of relating to the world that are embedded within different languages.
Daniel Heath Justice: You're absolutely right. That's one of the dangers, when we're talking about literature—what we're often talking about is literature in English.
English embeds certain things, just by virtue of its structure: it's a very thingy-fying language, it's very noun-heavy. Most of the Indigenous languages that I know of are very relational, they're very verb-heavy. It's just a fundamentally different way of relating to the world and to the community. If you're seeing that Indigenous literature is all in English, then I think you're missing a really significant reality in terms of Indigenous forms of expression.
The unfortunate thing is that because there has been so much erasure or erosion of Indigenous languages, most Indigenous writers today are writing in colonial languages.
A lot of us are language learners. I'm a baby language learner. I know a little bit of Cherokee and I'm not very good at that. That's a result of generations of educational violence against my paternal family. I'm the inheritor of that. I think we do have to not be too self-congratulatory in being [like] all these things are literature and yes, these things are all great, but not also take into account the fact that we cannot only be speaking of English or French or other colonial languages, and that the conventions in Indigenous language literature might be very different, and for good reasons. So it actually requires a lot more work from literary scholars to have a better understanding of Indigenous literature in Indigenous languages.
Since I started taking Cherokee language lessons, I have a much better appreciation for just how different Cherokee is from English in terms of the structures of thinking, the philosophical concerns, and the way you relate to the other-than-human world. It's just fundamentally different. It doesn't mean that there aren't ways to connect those, but it does mean that if we're spending all of our time on Indigenous literature in English, we're really doing a disservice to our nations, by not engaging our own literature, even if they're not [in the languages] we were raised with.
Kamea Chayne: To pivot into your fictional work, I know you're guided by a few inquiries, two of them being, "How might the world look different if we didn’t start with the corrosive and simplistic binary of savagism vs. civilization, and what would fantasy fiction look like with women, Indigenous peoples, queer folks, and other stereotyped or marginalized communities at the center rather than the margins?"
Because fiction stories are really entirely up to the boundless imaginations of their authors, perhaps it can be hard to critique any individual story as being wrong or problematic. But I do wonder about the additive and collective impact of the available fiction narratives out there and, especially their impacts on our younger generations that may be engaging more with these stories, that could potentially disproportionally perpetuate certain tropes and worldviews, such as this “savages” and “civilization” binary that I would love to hear you talk more about.
Daniel Heath Justice:
It's entirely fair to critique imaginative writing. I think any kind of story out there has an impact. It doesn't mean that you have to dismiss them and set them aside. But I think we have to bring a critical eye to all of these things because they do have impacts and limit people's horizons in a lot of ways — especially in forms of literature like fantasy fiction, which is not necessarily considered a high art form by a lot of people, but it's a very widely read art form and it's a very widely viewed art form.
What's interesting is so much fantasy that you read isn't really all that imaginative. The basic structures of power are pretty intact from the structures of power around us. They're just given a fantastical veneer rather than actually questioning anything.
Fantasy can challenge the world we live in. But very often it reinforces ways that a lot of people want to believe the world is. It's incumbent upon us to challenge fantasy, to be more imaginative, to imagine otherwise, and to give us different visions of possibility that don't presume Indigenous deficiency, that doesn’t presume queer exclusion, that doesn’t presume a rigid gender binary, and that doesn’t presume an inherited royalty as the inevitable form of governmental authority.
I think it's important because we can't live in different ways if we can't imagine different ways.
Kamea Chayne: I have to admit that I read a lot of fiction as a child growing up, and that's probably the case for most people—that we read a lot more fiction when we were younger. But [that] is also the time when our minds and worldviews are more fluid, which I think speaks to the power of fiction.
But then, I now have a hard time sitting down to read a full book cover to cover, all together. When I do read, I tend to gravitate towards non-fiction because I have this probably false presumption that when there are so many problems and urgent crises in the real world, engaging with non-fiction is how I can best learn about these things and see where our paths forward could lie.
I want you to push back on that and to speak to the power of fiction, more especially for adults, to help us feel and be able to envision alternate futures and the possibility of other ways of being.
Daniel Heath Justice: I would start by saying I'm not interested in anybody feeling somehow like they're doing something wrong, by not liking fiction. I think we're all drawn to different kinds of stories. Maybe fiction isn't your thing. Maybe you just haven't found the fiction that is your thing. So, I would encourage you to keep your mind open, but also not to feel bad if fiction isn't where you want to go. For a lot of us, it is something we love. Honestly, when I'm relaxing, I tend to read non-fiction because I get so invested in fiction. It's a little stressful for me.
But there is a role for fiction, just like there's a role for any stories that connect to us. I think a lot about what Octavia Butler, the Black fantasist, said long before she died because she was challenged on what good science fiction is to Black people. She had a really, really profound response. [I'm paraphrasing here, but the question was something like], what good is any form of literature for people? [And she said]: Well, it's to help people think of different ways of being in the world and to understand that there are different histories, too. It's a lot of good because it reminds us that we are more than the stories of violence and deficiency that were forced upon us.
For [Octavia Butler], science fiction wasn't just a compelling literary form. It was a literary form with a deep and profound purpose because it broke through an anti-Black story world that had been forced down on so many Black imaginations and insisted that there was only one way of existing and imagining in the world. She said no. There were a lot of other Black speculative fiction writers as well, some of them who were published, some of them who weren't. She wasn't the first, and she certainly wasn't the last.
I really return to her thoughts on this because I think it's really important.
There are lots of ways for us to exist in a very complicated and painful world. But we need to be reminded that there are different kinds of stories out there — stories that are ours, stories that are not determined by hetero-patriarchy, that are not determined by white supremacy, that are not determined by settler-colonialism, that are not determined by ecocide and capitalism.
Those were never inevitabilities. Those were systems that were imposed and violently inflicted. But there's always been contestation. There have always been contrary voices, and we need those contrary voices now more than ever.
Kamea Chayne: To bring this to your work more personally, I'm curious about your process of creative writing.
When you're beginning to dream up a new narrative or a wonderful work of speculative fiction, what do you hold front and center in your mind as what guides your creative process? What are some of the deeper shifts and messages that you hope to seed in your readers that may be the common denominators across your work?
Daniel Heath Justice: I wish I could say that I had a system, but I really don't. I'm a bit of a magpie in that story ideas catch my eye and catch my imagination, and then I grab them, and then they just sit there and they grow and they develop. I always want to bring the fullness of myself to my work. That includes all of the political concerns and commitments that I have.
But it's really important to me to tell a good story first. The good story will bring politics with it.
I don't believe there's any such thing as an apolitical story. I think it's always political.
But I don't start by wanting to teach a lesson because I also believe that you have to have faith in readers and you have to trust readers. If you're too directive at the start, you really lose the opportunity to tell a good story that could actually communicate important, complex issues. If you're trying too hard to teach a lesson, you're probably doing an injustice to the story. You're probably doing an injustice to the lesson, too.
Kamea Chayne: How would you like to invite our listeners to keep questioning our relationship with and conception of literature and Indigenous literature beyond this episode? I also wonder if you have specific decolonial and liberatory libraries you recommend people check out as inspirations that are attempting to break the norms of how libraries may be predominantly structured and organized…
Daniel Heath Justice: The first question: I would just say, my Ph.D. supervisor had a saying: “read promiscuously,” and I think that's probably the best thing you can do. Read. Read widely, and listen promiscuously as well. I mean, not all knowledge is going to be in written form. Be open to other people's stories. Be open to other ways of being in the world. Oftentimes, I think that will just spark the imagination and really pull you along.
One library I would encourage folks to look up is X̱wi7x̱wa Library at UBC, where I teach, which is a community-focused library at the university.
It's one of the very few Indigenous libraries on a university campus in North America, and it has a completely different classic story classification system. It's based on the Brian Deer classification system, not Dewey Decimal. So, it's very much engaged with and responsive to Indigenous ways of categorizing knowledge and it's adaptive to different cultural regions as well. I would just encourage folks, if you have a chance to come to UBC, to Muskingum territory, and check it out, or just to look it up online because there's important work happening and a lot of really awesome Indigenous librarians who are trying to do exactly that work. The more we can support them in their efforts, the better.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. We are now going into our closing questions. What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Daniel Heath Justice: Probably one of the most impactful things I've ever read—well, in a long time, certainly for my career—is a book called Red On Red: Native American Literary Separatism by Muscogee Creek writer and scholar Craig Womack, where he really grounds the idea that our nation-specific interpretations of our literary traditions are really important. That continues to inform and inspire me.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Daniel Heath Justice: “Imagine otherwise” is my personal motto. But my mom also said:
“Sometimes it's better to be kind than right.” I try to keep that firmly in mind, especially in these very ungenerous and unkind times.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Daniel Heath Justice: My family, and not just my husband and my dogs, but my extended family. They have stepped up on so many things and in so many ways that I didn't expect or anticipate, especially because I recently lost my mom. It actually brought me a lot closer to my family, and I actually thought it would take us farther apart. So, I think that right now, that's a source of a lot of inspiration and joy.
Kamea Chayne: Daniel, thank you so much for being here with us and so generously sharing your teachings and learnings. What final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?
Daniel Heath Justice: I would actually just say my mom's philosophy. Sometimes it's better to be kind than right.
I think we do a lot of harm in the world by trying to be right at the exclusion of understanding other people's struggles.
Sometimes kindness can actually get us to better places. [That] doesn't mean that we tolerate everything. It doesn't mean that we don't challenge violence and abuse and cruelty. But it does mean that sometimes kindness is the best way of doing that.
