<em>Beasts of the Southern Wild</em> and Indigenous Communities in the Age of the Sixth Extinction

Abstract

Beasts of the Southern Wild and Indigenous Communities in the Age of the Sixth Extinction Brianna Burke (bio) Sometimes you can break something so bad that it can't get put back together. —Beasts of the Southern Wild Island Road in Louisiana seems to lead to nowhere. An hour and forty minutes southwest of New Orleans, deep in the bayou, Island Road was built on marshlands in 1953, but in the sixty years since, those have melted into the sea. Now hemmed in by water on both sides, for portions of the year Island Road is flooded and impassable, and it dead-ends into the Gulf of Mexico; not much to see and no reason to go out there, or so some folks might think. In fact, many think it is "irresponsible" to live in such a place, threatened by sea-level rise and intensifying storms. But Island Road leads to Isle de Jean Charles, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and is the road that begins and ends our journey as viewers in Beasts of the Southern Wild. A syncretic, messy, and aesthetically gorgeous film that director Behn Zeitlin calls "an epic folktale,"1 Beasts of the Southern Wild is narrated by a young girl called Hushpuppy as "the fabric of the universe unravels," threatening the survival of her community.2 For Hushpuppy and her neighbors, the slow disintegration of community, home, and environment is both deeply personal and political, linked by a careful layering of shots and purposeful cuts to the effects of corporate exploitation and to climate change through a parallel narrative about the aurochs, a species driven to extinction in 1627.3 Through linking the multiple narratives of community, exploitation, and extinction, Beasts eulogizes the loss of an entire cosmos—with its attendant emplacement, culture, and [End Page 61] lifeways—as the people of Jean Charles have always known it and asks viewers to attempt to understand a loss so profound that it is beyond mere words; instead, it must be witnessed. But the political project of Beasts of the Southern Wild does not end by asking us to bear witness. The film reflects on the position of many indigenous communities in the United States and around the world by intertwining dueling definitions of "beast." On one hand, the film illuminates a dangerous reality in our modern era: as storms grow more powerful, as sea levels rise, as resources become increasingly scarce, more people are positioned as disposable, as nothing more than mere beasts—particularly communities who live lives deeply connected to and dependent on their local ecosystems. In other words, Beasts shows how speciesism can be used by environmental racism to portray specific groups of human beings as animals, so radically different that they aren't homo sapiens but an entirely different species, and thus, as animal bodies, they lose rights, become mere flesh for consumption or experimentation, or vulnerable to extinction, like any other animal species unable to adapt to a rapidly changing planet in the age of the sixth mass extinction.4 On the other hand, Beasts flips this rhetoric by proclaiming a curiously indigenous belief for a nonindigenous film: we are all beasts living at the mercy of the ecological systems—now fracturing and breaking down—that have sustained life on this planet. Put differently, it espouses a cosmopolitics that ruptures the human/nature or human/animal binary and therefore rejects a form of racism that invokes species difference to justify victimization. Primarily, I am interested in how Beasts of the Southern Wild creates an environmental justice folktale unique to the twenty-first century as it connects the effects of corporate exploitation directly to climate change and shows how both will affect not only humans, but equally many other species on this planet. However, "species" has not been part of the environmental justice matrix, which illustrates how environmental burdens are distributed among human bodies unequally, following the well-worn ideologies of racism, classism, and sexism. As a field, environmental justice argues that environments are always both constructed and natural (even so-called "wild" places) and views the human body as situated within and inhabited by the chemical, cultural, political, and ecological networks...