H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale “There’s going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done.” (Hogan 108) Summary Climate change, by now widely accepted as an anthropogenic phenomenon, is currently the most central concern in global environmental discourse. Erratic weather events, like freak storms or inundations, and long-term alterations of climatic conditions, such as sustained droughts or uncommon amounts of precipitation, negatively affect an increasingly growing number of communities on earth. Engaging with the cultural perception and responses to these events, the humanities - in particular the field commonly labeled as ecocriticism - have augmented their involvement in research on climate change. Recent ecocritical work has shown that climate change and its possible effects need to be mediated and staged by way of narratives which make this vast and diverse phenomenon “more easily perceptible, intelligible, and concrete” (Mayer 23). Fictional literature can be ascribed a central role in this mediation process. In her essay “Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation,” Sylvia Mayer suggests that there are two types of fictional narratives that are used in response to climate change and its possible long-term effects: the “narrative of catastrophe” and the “narrative of anticipation” (24). While these two categories possibly match most of the contemporary cli-fi novels produced in the US, my contribution to the present volume looks at a novel that cannot easily fit into either of these two definitions. I argue that Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008) is a novel that addresses and mediates climate change risks without imagining a catastrophic future or through anticipating a catastrophe to come: Hogan’s novel tells the story of a Native American community which has already been immediately affected by a disastrous climatic event. Foregrounding the influence of human actions on ecological and meteorological processes, Hogan’s novel can be read as an allegorical story about the adverse effects of exploitative behavior with respect to natural resources. By embedding its criticism within a narrative that draws connections between H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 274 colonialism, neo-colonialism and capitalist exploitation, People of the Whale makes a strong environmental justice argument that emphasizes the interconnection of social and environmental concerns and proposes a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. Literature as Mediator of Anthropogenic Climate Change One of the biggest hurdles to communicate climate change and its effects on ecosystems and people is what Rob Nixon has called “the drama deficit of climate change” (Nixon, Slow 264). Climate change per se is such a vast, diverse and complex phenomenon manifesting itself in a variety of individual and collective experiences that its scope is difficult to grasp. In addition, many effects only show gradually and over a long period of time, which makes their causal relationship with alterations in the global climate even more abstract. This abstractness is a problem for the mediation of climate change. Scientific climate change research first and foremost provides computerized and abstract data that inhibit an intimate engagement with the problem. In this context, several literary scholars, among them Ursula Heise (“Toxins,” Sense, “Cultures”), Sylvia Mayer, Rob Nixon (Slow, “Great”), Adam Trexler or Michael Zizer and Julie Sze, have made a strong point about the role of fictional literature in the mediation of global climate change. A recent publication arguing in this vein is the essay collection The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (2014), edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. The contributions in this collection adopt the currently prominent trajectory for literary and cultural studies to engage with climate change by looking at it through the lens of risk theory. Understanding climate change as a risk discourse, Mayer argues in her individual article “Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation” that fictional literature and films contribute strongly to discourses of climate change and the perception of its risks by “introduc[ing] the issue to a much wider audience than the one reached by scientific accounts” (Mayer 23). Mayer builds upon previous work by Ursula Heise, one of the first literary scholars to engage risk theory. Heise emphasizes the necessity of risk being mediated, including environmental risks. Enlisting “the literary myths of Dr. Faustus and Dr. Frankenstein,” she stresses the role of fictional literature in the process of culturally filtering scientific information about the dangers of modern technology (Heise, “Cultures” 18). Heise further argues that: [L]ess obviously but no less crucially, narrative templates such as that of pastoral or apocalypse, and narrative choices about the relation of the narrator to the narrative material, about protagonists and antagonists, and beginnings and endings Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 275 shape the way in which risks are perceived and communicated, as do particular metaphors and visual icons. (ibid.) Heise’s concluding contention is that narratives “provide important cultural tools for organizing information about risks into intelligible and meaningful stories” (Heise, Sense 138). This way, they also participate in environmental risk communication. In contrast to scientific texts, Mayer adds, fictional texts can “explore the complexity of individual risk experiences - their cultural, social, political, economic, or psychological dimensions - and they engage their readers imaginatively, intellectually, and emotionally through storytelling” (Mayer and Weik von Mossner 12). Fiction, with its “essentially infinitive imaginative and formal range,” thus, makes the various factors that shape specific experiences of climate change “more easily perceptible, intelligible, and concrete” (Mayer 23). The mainstream climate change novel, according to Mayer, can be categorized into two kinds of “risk narratives”: the dystopian “narrative of catastrophe” in which the future climate catastrophe has already happened on the one hand, and the “narrative of anticipation” which provides a story world in which the threat of climate collapse is perceived but can still be averted (24). While rightly observing that “risk perception relies on worldviews and cultural biases emerging from specific social contexts” (Mayer and Weik von Mossner 11), the proclamation of the “genre-defining distinction” into these two narrative forms (13) seems to particularly fit white, US-American novels. Looking at an ethnic American novel, Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale, I want to make the case for a fictional text that fits neither one nor the other category neatly but nevertheless succeeds in mediating the phenomenon of climate change and makes its risks very concretely perceptible. In addition, Hogan’s text presents the reader with an alternative vision of relating to the natural environment; a vision that is grounded in indigenous cosmology and perceives the human as intricately interconnected with the non-human. What is promoted in the text is an ethical stance to the non-human world that posits responsibility towards it as constitutive of cultural and individual health. The Drought Like most contemporary environmentally oriented literature, People of the Whale has a straightforward environmentalist message that is conveyed mainly by way of its story. This warrants the engagement with the novel’s storyline before taking a closer look at its plot structure and narrative technique. For large parts, Hogan’s novel is set in Dark River, a small coastal town located in the northwest region of the United States. Dark River is home to the A’atsika, a fictional Native American tribe that has lived off the ocean for H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 276 centuries. The inhabitants of Dark River are plunged into an existential crisis when a prolonged drought hits the reservation. The drought destroys the livelihoods of many people, including the protagonist Ruth’s, who is a fisherwoman and relies on the seasonal salmon run for income. Initially, the drought is not perceived as such by the people of Dark River. It only manifests itself slowly in small, successive weather changes: “the clouds abandoned the sky [...] the coastal rains ended [...] the ocean tides slowed and then the winds of the world decided not to blow [...] the moon no longer pulls water back and forth” (Hogan 124). The omniscient narrator’s accumulation of individual phenomena on her list mirrors how the accumulation of climatic changes produces a number of aggregate effects, such as the warming of coastal waters, which, in turn, leads to a decline in fish. In the diegesis, two possible explanations for the drought are given: National and regional news reporters fall back on meteorological computations and the explanation of scientists who contend that the drought and the rise in water temperature are “a cyclical event” (126) that is “part of the natural rhythms of the earth and sea, part of the weather cycle” (135). The people of Dark River, in contrast, reject these techno-scientific explanations. The narrator states that for Ruth and her friends the official account disseminated by mainstream media “is not true” (126). For them, meteorological cycles and long-term calculations provide a means neither to explain nor to apprehend the absence of rain. Instead, they find an explanation for the drought when turning to indigenous cosmology. The local fisher-men interpret the drought as a “curse” (126) and the result of a wrongful action. Ruth’s mother observes: “It’s like the silence after a death out there” (124). Indeed, the novel’s diegesis reveals that there is a causal connection between the drought and a controversial whale hunt that had turned into a bloody spectacle. The whale hunt is the narrative’s central event around which the plot revolves. People of the Whale, in fact, tells the story of Thomas, a Vietnam War veteran, who returns to Dark River in order to participate in a gray whale hunt. His former friends, Dwight and other veterans, set up the event after secretly concluding a deal with a Japanese company to sell the whale meat for good profit. In order to circumvent international whaling legislation, Dwight uses the rhetoric of environmental and indigenous justice, calling upon treaty rights and A’atsika traditions. He argues that killing a whale promises the community a return to tribal customs and authentic spirituality: “Whale-hunting [...] will bring us back to ourselves. [...] [Whale meat is] our traditional food. We need it. We are starved for it” (69). Thomas and the other men are ensnared by Dwight’s argument and believe that the whale hunt offers them a means to reconnect with their traditional heritage from which they feel painfully separated. It appears as a way to “fill their hearts and souls with the wealth of something they wrongly believed had been lost and Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 277 wanted back. Tradition, they called it” (Hogan 68). Especially Thomas, the grandson of the community’s greatest whaler, hopes that killing a whale will “save himself from one history and return to another” (70) and thus redeem him from the traumatic experience of fighting and killing in Vietnam and from abandoning his family - Ruth and their teenage son, Marco. The hunt, which becomes a national media spectacle, eventually turns into a catastrophic event. As a result of the fact that the A’atsika had ceased hunting whales decades earlier and the knowledge about the customary practices had not been retained, the men embark on the hunt insufficiently prepared and inexperienced with respect to the task at hand. They kill a whale that is too young to be killed according to tribal customs, disregarding traditional rules that are meant to guarantee a sustainable relationship with the marine life that sustains them. When Marco tries to prevent the men from slaughtering the young whale, thereby jeopardizing Dwight’s monetary prospects, the latter drowns the boy in the confusion that unfolds during the whale’s death struggle. In the eyes of the tribe’s more traditional members, the conjoined deaths of Marco and the young whale cause the drought. One of the community’s elders prophesizes: “Mark my words. There’s going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done. Maybe more than one wrong thing. There will be a drought” (108). Interpreting the drought as the result of the untimely and unjustified deaths of Marco and the whale frames the extreme weather conditions in terms of an indigenous animist cosmology in which the human and the nonhuman are not only physically connected by sharing a common ecosystem but also metaphysically by sharing spiritual bonds. The relationship between cetaceans and humans plays a particularly important role in the tribe’s cosmology: According to the A’atsika origin myth, humans are born from whales and therefore trace their genealogy back to these sea creatures (Hogan 267, 278, 283). The wrongful killings of Marco and the whale mark a breach in the relationship with the more-than-human world, which unsettles the presumed equilibrium that governs A’atsika cosmology. This breach derails not only the daily lives of the novel’s characters but also larger ecological processes. The narrator contends that the drought shows that the world has “been thrown off course” (128). In the diegesis, the drought is the symptom of a larger disruption in the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. The Motif of the Drought Droughts are a recurrent motif in Native American literature. Commonly, the absence of life-giving rain signifies a man-made disturbance of the cosmological order. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), for example, H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 278 such a disruption is brought about by European settler colonialism, mineral resource exploitation in the American Southwest, the evolution of the US into a nuclear super power and the protagonist’s traumatic experience of fighting in WWII, and it manifests itself in prolonged dry periods: “The drought years had returned again, as they had after the First World War […]. They said it had been that way for the past six years” (Silko 10-11). Silko’s text explicitly traces back the origins of the cosmological disruption from the atomic age, to WWII and WWI, to the occupation of Native American lands by the “white skin people” (132). These are described as a people ethically and spiritually severed from the non-human world, a people who “grow away from the earth [and] from the sun” and for whom “the world is a dead thing” (135-136, emphasis original). Silko’s narrator concludes that such a relationship towards the earth and its resources results in exploitative extractive behavior, which influences the biosphere to the extent that it ultimately endangers the human species as a whole (246). 1 Similarly to Silko’s classic text, People of the Whale also addresses the cumulative, adverse effects that white settler colonialism, industrialization, and the extraction of natural resources had and still have on Native American communities. In addition, Hogan’s novel raises the question of environmental justice even more poignantly by drawing a connection between the economic and political marginalization of her protagonists and environmental exploitation in the name of capitalism. Consequently, the drought of Dark River can be read as pointing to a variety of interconnected instances of injustice and violence whereby it gains allegorical meaning. Life of the A’atsika is circumscribed by poverty, unemployment and alcoholism - dire conditions that frequently shape the reality of Native communities across the United States. 2 Most of the veterans in Hogan’s novel have not found a job, let alone a well-paying one. Consequently, the biggest incentive the men have to go on the whale hunt, apart from Thomas and Marco who are not privy to the deal with the Japanese company, is the money they are promised by Dwight. Killing a whale and selling its meat presents itself as an easy way to increase their income. 1 The narrator in Ceremony stresses that the uranium mines from which the ore used in the United States’ first atomic bomb at Alamogordo has been taken are located on land that originally belonged to the Laguna people. The extraction of uranium ore on Laguna land endangers not only the survival of the Laguna people, but facilitates the development of a destructive power that threatens populations across the world. The super power status of the US, acquired at the end of WWII and cemented throughout the Cold War, hence rests on the occupation of Native lands and the dispossession of Native peoples. 2 Particularly for the Makah people, on whose story Hogan modeled her fictional intervention into the whale hunting debate of the late 1990s, these problems are well documented by Gaard (5). Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 279 Native American Studies scholars argue that the economic problems with which many Native communities struggle are direct consequences of the exclusionary and oppressive regime of settler colonialism (Allen 29-31; Singh and Schmidt 6). 3 Geographically separated in reservations and excluded from mainstream American life, Native peoples have been systemically marginalized in the United States. As Native American customary ways of life cannot compete with the modern capitalist lifestyle that constitutes the US mainstream, scholars distinguish the concomitant alienation from tribal traditions as another severe problem for Native communities. Customary practices as well as the knowledge connected to these get lost when Native communities are forcefully (semi-)integrated into modern society; and community members might feel alienated from their tribal roots and heritage. It is in this context that the drought signifies more than just the absence of rain: The drought in People of the Whale also designates a spiritual drought - the absence of a way of life that is guided by traditional values and tribal knowledge. People of the Whale places the notion of alienation and the separation from one’s traditions at the center of the story. The narrator explains that the men think that the whale hunt would “fill their hearts and souls with the wealth of […] [t]radition,” a tradition that they believe is “lost and [they] wanted back” (Hogan 68). The omniscient voice presents the fact that many of the characters feel estranged and alienated from their tribal identities because they had lost “the old way of being in the world” by being “soldier[s] and businessm[e]n” as the main reason for the hunt (69). However, the lack of traditional knowledge also has a bearing on the novel’s central event, the whale hunt. As none of the men are accustomed to the old hunting practices or strong enough to actually paddle out in canoes, overpower the whale, and bring it back in, they use speedboats, guns, and other modern equipment to ensure their hunting success; a deviation of old practices that contributes to the “wrong thing[s]” that have been done and ultimately effect the drought. The erratic weather event, then, provides a motif that encapsulates a conglomerate of historical injustices and their cultural and collective as well as individual ramifications. Colonization, neo-colonialist ventures such as the Vietnam War (and the experience of being drawn into it by being an American citizen), and the exploitation of natural resources - all instances of violence and from an A’atsika perspective signs of a deep hostility against other living beings - hence contribute to the derailment of the world. 3 Scholars, such as Arnold Krupat, one of the most prolific Native American Studies scholars, further argue that colonial practices remain operative today and colonialism still is a contemporary experience. Krupat elaborates: “[T]here is not yet a ‘post-’ to the colonial status of Native Americans. [...] a considerable number of Native people exist in conditions of politically sustained subalternity” (Krupat 73). H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 280 Emplotment and Narrative Structure If Heise suggests that narratives provide important cultural tools to mediate environmental risks, it is important to add that different cultures produce different kinds of narratives. In accordance with this observation, one can assume that a climate change narrative written by a Native American author, such as Hogan’s People of the Whale, might take a different form or might at least be influenced by a different literary tradition and different cultural beliefs than narratives created by white American authors. In People of the Whale, Hogan creates a fictional ethnic cultural heritage that frames the characters’ relationship with the more-than-human world. In addition, she draws on icons (whales) and narrative templates (apocalypse) common to mainstream environmentalist narratives while at the same time problematizing them. Such a combination of dominant narrative templates and indigenous literary traditions is a phenomenon that has been described for other environmentally oriented ethnic literature as well. Patrick D. Murphy observes in his monograph Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature that contemporary ethnic writers in particular draw on their ethnic cultural heritage for the “intellectual, emphatic, and sensory engagement with the uncultured dimensions of the world” (73-74). Hogan realizes an emphatic engagement with the more than human world by way of characters that have “supernatural” abilities (Hogan 141) who transgress the boundaries between human and non-human. The drought prompts Ruth to turn to the A’atsika elders with the request to call upon the Rain Priest, “one of the immortals” with the capability to bring back the water (133). Soon afterwards, a stranger appears in Dark River; first the room he stays in starts to leak and later the rains return to the village. The Rain Priest is a shape-shifter who recurrently appears throughout the narrative in the form of an octopus that walks on land or climbs onto boats. In his human form, the man allows Ruth to feel “compassion for him” the way she knows that he feels compassion for her (149). This reciprocal recognition and emotional connection signifies a relationship between humans and the morethan-human world that is essential for the well-being of both and that is a prerequisite for the Rain Priest to “restore” the balance that had been lost in Dark River (149). The Rain Priest episodes as well as other moments in the text, such as the spiritual connection between Marco and the whales and Marco’s transformation into a whale after his death, the supernatural ability of old Witka to stay under water for minutes on end or of the “old woman from the north” who extinguishes fires by just lying in their way (140), the story about Ruth being born with gills, and last but not least the drought itself as a direct reaction of the cosmos to wrongful human behavior have contributed to the novel being labeled magic realism. While Murphy concedes that literary works Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 281 by indigenous writers that “tap into historical cultural formations that give greater credence to forms of human perception other than the rationally conscious” cannot be described in terms of an “Anglo-American Enlightenment realism” (Murphy 73-74), he rejects magic realism as an adequate designation. Instead, Murphy suggests using the term “situated realism” with respect to Native American literature. Situated realism according to Murphy “relies on the consensual reality of a given people in a given locale, but that is not presented as a universal truth” (31-32). The interpretation of the drought as a result of human interference with a natural order presents such a consensual reality for the traditional members of the A’atsika and conforms to their animist worldview. Hence, the realism of Hogan’s novel can indeed be described in terms of a situated realism rather than of magic realism. Despite the fact that the majority of Hogan’s readers does not share such an indigenous cosmovision - and, indeed, cannot share a fictional tribe’s worldview - the narrative nevertheless speaks to a non-indigenous readership by establishing referentiality to the outer textual world. Its allegorical quality, as I show below, derives from the story’s emplotment. Critics go so far as to claim that realist narrative structures are inadequate for representing the large scale and complex phenomenon of climate change (Zizer and Sze 385). Timothy Clark for example notes: With its multiple scales, more or less invisibility, global scope, unpredictability and alarming menace, climate change seems more germane to modes of representation that involve unfamiliar non human agencies, multiple and perhaps elliptical plots. The situation invites a writing that might be a form of secularised magic realism, in which seemingly rational procedures and modes of thought and representation interact with bizarre and counter-intuitive non-human agencies, kinds of action-at-a-distance, with plural conventions of characterisation, symbolisation and plotting. (144) People of the Whale includes such non-human agencies, embodied for example in the character of the Rain Priest or expressed in the motif of the drought, and gives them key roles in the story. In addition, the novel is organized along the lines of a non-linear plot. By interweaving two narrative strands, one set in Dark River and the other one recounting Thomas’s Vietnam War experiences, the text connects past injustices with those of the present and also exposes how climate change is an issue that can only be understood as composed of multiple, disparate, and (ostensibly) unrelated human actions and decisions across the world. Thomas’s traumatic war experiences are recounted in the form of flashbacks that disrupt the narrative’s chronology. Importantly, it is only after the whale hunt - that is during the drought - that these flashbacks set in. The narrative void created by the drought, thus, formally provides the space for an engagement with Thomas’s traumatic memories. The absence of rain in the H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 282 main narrative sets off a series of Thomas’s reminiscences of Vietnam’s torrential rains. There, “[t]he rain was dangerous” (Hogan 171). The monsoon downpours are described as having a “disintegrating” quality, wearing out the men. Thomas notes that “[i]n the jungle weather it all comes apart” (119). Parallel to the disintegrating rains of Vietnam, the cataclysmic drought of Dark River forces the community to contemplate how everything has come apart for them. Thus, the tropical rains and the drought are presented as equally disruptive - both signifying the abundance and absence of an element, each the symptom of an imbalance. In the drought’s “hard light,” Ruth notes, “everything is seen,” the people’s “pain,” their “hearts and souls” (133). The drought, hence, is a symptom of the complex interplay of issues that had and continue to have negative effects on the A’atsika lifestyle. It encapsulates the loss of tribal bonds, the lack of spiritual guidance, the traumatic wartime experiences abroad and the disruptive experience of colonial occupation at home. The motif of the drought and its mirror motif of torrential rains functions as a link between the experiences of the Native peoples in the US to that of the indigenous population of mainland Southeast Asia. By paralleling the colonial history of the A’atsika to the hardships the tribal people in Vietnam and Cambodia suffer during the war (218, 255), the novel extrapolates the drought’s reach to a larger meteorological scale: it comes to signify an imbalance that affects not only Dark River and the “small islands on the other side of the ocean” but the whole world (128). As the narrator expands the significance of the drought (and its causes) to apply to the whole world, the novel becomes a climate change allegory. Moreover, Hogan’s text functions as an allegory because of its moral; it promotes a straightforward ethical message. In his essay “‘Trees are what everyone needs: ’ The Lorax, Anthropocentrism, and the problem of Mimesis,” Hannes Bergthaller argues that the “ethical force of a text arises not from the facts it may be said to represent” but rather from “the way it picks up and transforms the narratives circulating in a culture” (155). Bergthaller contests the idea that environmentalist texts need to be referential to the outer-textual world in a strictly mimetic sense in order to have an ethical impetus. 4 Instead, he argues, the ethical force of a text emerges from its “emplotment,” that is to say from the way it is structured into a coherent narrative to which the reader can relate (Bergthaller 166). Despite its non-realist elements, which rationally 4 Bergthaller’s essay contributes to the lively debate about the role of mimesis in environmental literature. While the one side, with its most prominent proponent Lawrence Buell, argues for outer mimesis as a prerequisite for a text to be truly an environmental text (Buell, Environmental), the other side contends that a text needs not to be mimetic of the material world to be considered an environmental text (Phillips). (See also Bergthaller; Buell, Future; Bartosch.) Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 283 thwart mimetic representation, Hogan’s novel facilitates a referentiality which allows the reader to extrapolate from the narrative to her material reality. The text achieves this through the use of two popular narrative tropes: first, the whales as ‘charismatic megafauna’ which are widely used as an icon for the destructiveness of exploitative resource extraction; and second, the narrative template of apocalypse. For environmental activists, whales have long become iconic animals. They belong to those large mammalian species with great popular appeal (alongside the panda bear, the polar bear, the tiger or the orangutan) and therefore have been used widely in conservationist campaigns. Although People of the Whale has an environmentalist message and argues for a less exploitative relationship with the non-human world, the narrator also problematizes the way in which conservationist ideology constructs cetaceans as a universally endangered species and how this problematically clashes with indigenous reality. In the novel, a heated and at times violent controversy arises around the gray whale hunt. In the eyes of the animal activists, environmentalists and “protesters from San Francisco and thereabouts” (Hogan 87), the A’atsika hunters endanger international whaling regulations (69) by killing innocent members of an infraorder of marine mammals that has become the symbol for international wildlife preservation efforts. Without taking into account the population density of gray whales and the limited number that could be hunted by a small tribe like the A’atsika, these conservationists demonize the tribe and construct Hogan’s whalers as opponents to a global conservationist mission. Neither the non- Native environmentalists nor the more liberal reporters who concede that the A’atsika should be allowed to enact their treaty rights take into account the economic reality the community faces. Some journalists support the A’atsika’s fight for a whaling license, as the narrator relates. However, only at the cost of severe stereotyping: Some of these reporters, especially white men, thought the tribal hunters were men of mystery and spirit, foreign enough to their own America to be right. Yes, to return to their ways would be the right thing. After all America had done to them, they should be given that. (Hogan 68) The paternalistic defense of indigenous rights mythologizes the Indians and their idiosyncratic “ways” to which they presumably can “return” as mysterious, spiritual and ‘other.’ While conceding the injustice of colonialism, the news coverage simultaneously invokes nostalgia for a pre-colonial lifestyle and thereby continues the colonial othering and exclusion that the A’atsika try to controvert. By drawing out the complexity of the debate, the narration not only dismantles the unreflecting use of certain popular species in mainstream conservationist arguments but also points to the perseverance and H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 284 misuse of the stereotype of the “ecological Indian”; a stereotype that has long took root in environmentalist discourse. The ecological Indian stereotype represents “American Indians as environmentalists, as keepers of the land, or as worshippers of a Mother Earth goddess” (Schweninger 16). As a result, American Indians are transformed into a “symbol of a more ecological past” (Ray 90, 92) and are considered as ‘closer to nature,’ practicing an environmentally sustainable and ecologically conscious lifestyle. Sarah J. Ray argues that the stereotype of the ecological Indian is recurrently instrumentalized by mainstream environmentalism for its own ends, ignoring historical and contemporary realities and instead imposing an imagined identity on indigenous peoples. When Native Americans behave contrarily to the ideal of the ecological Indian - and in the novel the A’atsika do so because they hunt and kill whales - they betray non-native environmental sensibilities and also non-native expectations of an ecologically superior Native American identity. This frequently “puts Native Americans in an impossible position - to support modern environmentalist agendas or be seen as not authentically Native American” (Ray 86). By dismantling the othering tendencies of mainstream environmentalism, the novel criticizes how these practices ignore contemporary indigenous realities and continue colonial othering mechanisms, limiting indigenous agency. It is in this context, that the novel enables the reader to see beyond the iconographic imagery, to question the instrumentalization of certain icons (animal or human), and query larger historical, economic and ecological coherences. The second element of emplotment that facilitates reading the novel as an environmental allegory is Hogan’s use of the narrative template of apocalypse. Apocalypse has become a master-metaphor in environmentalist discourse (Buell, Environmental 285). What commends apocalypse for an environmentalist agenda is its double function of warning against a threat and simultaneously calling for change in order to prevent it. In contrast to the biblical apocalypse, secular forms of apocalypse suggest that the end of the world can be prevented if humanity decides on taking the right measures (Garrard 99). The practices that threaten the world can be altered and its occurrence forestalled. While the catastrophe in form of the drought is already underway in Dark River, it does not yet spell the end, as it would in much other dystopian “narratives of catastrophe” as Mayer’s categorization would have it (Mayer 24). Instead, the drought plays a cathartic role in Hogan’s novel and marks the waypoint from where the A’atsika need to rethink their situation. It initiates a spiritual process as it forces the community to contemplate their actions and evaluate the disintegration of tribal bonds and the detachment from traditional values: “With everything suspended, they are given time to think, [...] They think about the whale and what they’ve done, who they have be- Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 285 come in time” (Hogan 128). As much as the drought is a symptom of a cosmological imbalance, it is also a chance for renewal and resilience. What is problematic about the apocalyptic mode, however, is that it often implies an “ideal socioecological countermodel - often a pastoral one,” which perpetuates outmoded and romanticizing “ideals of naturally selfregenerating ecosystems and holistic communities in harmony with their surroundings” (Heise, Sense 141). While People of the Whale indeed tries to distance itself from romanticizing models, such as that of the ecological Indian for example, it nevertheless promotes the notion of a holistic lifestyle and ties it back to ancient A’atsika traditions and practices. However, I agree with Jonathan Steinwand that such a subscription to a romantic representation of indigenous life must be interpreted in terms of a “‘strategic exoticism’ aimed at subverting that representation and reclaiming some agency that has been misplaced when outsiders have infringed on the local scene” (195). From this perspective, one suggestion of the novel is that the solution to contemporary crises and catastrophes is a re-evaluation of indigenous knowledge and the associated lifestyle - albeit necessarily adapted to the contemporary state of affairs. Towards a Nonanthropocentric Environmental Ethic Despite its superficial tendency to romanticize an indigenous, animist and, thus, presumably holistic lifestyle, the strength of Hogan’s text lies exactly in its promotion of forms of knowledge about and engagement with the morethan-human world that are not governed by scientific rationalism. By juxtaposing the official meteorological accounts of the drought in news reports with the explanation provided by the A’atsika, the novel puts techno-science alongside indigenous knowledge. Even though the A’atsika do not find scientific explanations helpful to account for the phenomenon, neither of the two explanatory attempts is rejected in the diegesis. Rather, the novel makes explicit how large-scale weather alterations always manifest themselves in concrete and localized experiences of an individual or a community and that these concrete manifestations need to be interpreted by those affected. Such an interpretation makes it easier to mediate and apprehend individual effects and approximate the scope of climate change as a whole. In addition, People of the Whale shows that meteorological knowledge and the cultural practices that produce it are also highly localized and specific. By framing the drought in terms of A’atsika cosmology, the novel creates awareness for the fact that the dominant, techno-managerial science of ‘meteorology’ is not the only epistemological approach to weather phenomena and does not meaningfully apply in some cultural contexts. In the diegesis, “the sky that isn’t European” (Hogan 256) cannot be read by using a rational- H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 286 scientific procedure of European Enlightenment provenance. Instead, the A’atsika’s knowledge about the weather, like much other indigenous ecological knowledge, emerges from a way of knowing that differs from Western hegemonic epistemology and, thus, can be described as a form of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 583). In the case of People of the Whale, this situated knowledge emerges from a cosmology that considers the human and the non-human realm as mutually responsive and reacting to each other. “For every action,” the narrator notes, “there is a reaction. It’s true especially in the ocean” (Hogan 105-106) - and, one could add, by extension this seems also to be true for the weather. Weather, hence, is not something that can be understood uncoupled from human agency. Rather, it is directly influenced by human actions and vice versa. This assumption invests the A’atsika’s environmental perspective with an ethical relevance that reaches beyond the human and includes the non-human; and it reaches beyond the confines of Dark River as well. Hogan’s novel contributes to contemporary environmental discourse by calling to attention that there exist long traditions of nonanthropocentric environmental ethics, which also need to be considered in mainstream environmentalist debates. While these traditions might reject the results of environmental sciences as a basis for ethical behavior or action, they place emphasis on the kinship and interdependence of all living beings. Consistent with the stance promoted in Hogan’s People of the Whale, this means that human action shapes and is shaped by meteorological phenomena. Meteorological and ecological stability are dependent on sustainable and nonexploitative human cultural practices. While the novel refrains from claiming that its Native characters are not complicit in destructive environmental behavior, it nevertheless presents an ethical alternative relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. Conclusion Linda Hogan’s novel People of the Whale presents an argument of global environmental relevance. It criticizes the effects of a global modernity which manifests in environmental destruction, militarization, and capitalist resource exploitation and argues for taking into account in mainstream environmental debates a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic as well as the environmental knowledge of the people who live along the lines of such an ethic. By embedding the A’atsika community within not only a local or national framework but also within a global economic network (as the deal with the Japanese illustrates) and a trans-continental political and historical context (referring to the Vietnam War and the history of Euro-American colonization), the extreme drought the community faces transforms into an Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 287 allegory for the disastrous repercussions of the environmental exploitation and degradation that mark the Anthropocene. The novel expands its ethical concerns beyond the circumscribed setting of the A’atsika reservation when the uncommon weather change of this one locality stands in for the global risk of climate change. Thus, linking local nature and global responsibility, the narrative promotes ethical and environmental interconnectedness on a global scale. By way of its metonymic gesture which includes the whole world, the novel also addresses and challenges the reader to think about her individual relationship with the more-than-human world. Thereby, Hogan’s novel provides what Steinwand calls a “localized challenge to environmentalist universalism” (195) in that it problematizes the use of certain icons and romanticizing or sentimentalizing stereotypes that lack a deeper consideration of historical, material and cultural conditions of those communities that are directly affected by the repercussions of meteorological deviations and profound alterations of our global climate. Fictional texts such as Hogan’s, hence, must be understood as important contributions to environmental discourse and environmental ethics as well as to the corpus of cultural artifacts that help mediate the large-scale phenomenon of climate change. “In a world drowning in data, stories can play a vital role,” as Rob Nixon formulates this observation (Nixon, “Great,” n. pag.). Particularly fictional literature can make accessible the complexity of meteorological phenomena in a specific way and visualize the interconnectedness of disparate weather events at remote places of the earth as well as create attention and awareness with respect to the precarious state of our global climate and the environmental justice issues that come with it by telling stories of individual and collective experiences of climate change. Works Cited Allen, Chadwick. Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. 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