Atomic Histories and Elemental Futures across Indigenous Waters

Hiʻilei Julia Hobart

doi:10.1525/001c.21536

Abstract

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s 2018 collaborative video poem Rise is a trans-Indigenous call to action. Set along the watery edges of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the stark ice sheets of Greenland, the images that accompany their words train our eyes on water: a common, critical element of life as it shape-shifts across the globe. As climate change threatens the homeland of each poet through rapidly increasing glacial melt, the poem articulates how the Western world’s willful denial of irreversible damage performs a colonial violence with deep roots. This article contextualizes Rise by exploring nuclear histories of dispossession used to make way for the extension of normative American domestic life onto and into Indigenous territories cleared for Cold War projects. In doing so, I consider how Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna offer a particularly salient response to the militarized infrastructures so violently imposed upon their territories in order to trouble the spatial and conceptual cleaving of anthropogenic precarity between “remote” places and a culpable Western world.

Highlights

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s 2018 collaborative video poem Rise is a trans-Indigenous call to action
Poets Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna greet each other in their 2018 collaborative video poem Rise: From One Island to Another by calling upon the elements of their homes—ice, snow, ocean, sand—as both an introduction and an explanation of how they are related to each other as people of islands and waters (Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna 2019). These opening stanzas are accompanied by images of Jetñil-Kijiner in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and Niviâna in Greenland, the places that they are of, and as they traverse these spaces, the viewer glimpses the effects of climate change upon their homelands
The poets belong to a genealogy of Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists who identify climate change as a product of historical and ongoing colonial violence, produced through the paradigms of dispossession, nuclearization, and racial capitalism (Hogue and Maurer 2020)

Summary

Atomic Histories and Elemental Futures across Indigenous Waters

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s 2018 collaborative video poem Rise is a trans-Indigenous call to action. As climate change threatens the homeland of each poet through rapidly increasing glacial melt, the poem articulates how the Western world’s willful denial of irreversible damage performs a colonial violence with deep roots. This article contextualizes Rise by exploring nuclear histories of dispossession used to make way for the extension of normative American domestic life onto and into Indigenous territories cleared for Cold War projects. I consider how Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna offer a salient response to the militarized infrastructures so violently imposed upon their territories in order to trouble the spatial and conceptual cleaving of anthropogenic precarity between “remote” places and a culpable Western world

Sister of ocean and sand

Atomic Histories of Removal

Imperial Domesticities

Infrastructural Instability and Lessons in Permanence

Indigenous Kinships as Resistance