Silko, Kimmerer, and Plantationocene Storytelling

Abstract

ABSTRACT: According to the Plantationocene narrative, human nature changed in or around the year 1610, when the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas may have caused a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide. While many environmental humanities scholars in the Global North have replaced the term "Anthropocene" with "Plantationocene" to highlight environmental inequities, they still impose a global historical narrative on many peoples who already have their own origin stories, modes of understanding history, and environmental relationships. Like the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene reinforces western narratives of a singular linear "fall" from an ecological paradise to a laborious agricultural system. The essay highlights parallels between the Plantationocene narrative and foundational western origin stories, including the fall of Adam and Eve and the descent from the Golden Age to the Iron Age in Greco-Roman mythology. Both narratives posit prehistorical Earth as a leisurely, pastoral space in which the land gave freely to humans. Both also include a fall, in which the land stops giving and humans must suddenly work and suffer in order to eat. Plantationocene scholars must center Global South environmental narratives, which seldom subscribe to a linear rendering of time, or risk recreating the universalizing Anthropocene. Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) do not cite the Columbian Exchange as the solitary event that forever marred their nations' environmental relations. Instead, in Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) and Ceremony (1977), they posit many environmental inflection points. Rather than reading the contemporary world as "fallen," they leave room for growth and wholeness even as they hold accountable the perpetrators of Indigenous genocide and environmental destruction. Rather than splitting history in two—a leisurely "before" and a laborious "after"—they imagine fulfilling agricultural work before European contact and environmental tragedy that postdates the seventeenth century.