The interview was conducted by undergraduate research assistant Fyza Azam.
Fyza Azam: Could you tell me about a course you teach that addresses racialized ecologies?
Renae Watchman: The course I want to talk about is a grad course I developed for English and Cultural Studies called “Seed Stories of Indigenous and Black Survivance.” By the very nature of the discipline I’m in—Indigenous Studies—all my courses are inherently racialized. I was interested in teaching this course because I wanted to examine the intersections of Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous or Black Indigenous experiences in literature.
Fyza Azam: What do you most hope students will get from the course?
Renae Watchman: This course synthesizes seed stories of survivance by Indigenous and Black women writers, whose novels interweave homelands, histories, and temporalities, and embrace futurities of normalized Indigenous and Black presence. Students analyze the ways that Indigenous and Black authors, protagonists, and stories restore and uplift Indigenous and Black thrivance by challenging anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism.
It’s framed as a social justice course, and it also responds to criticisms within Indigenous studies that some of our courses and theoretical frameworks are anti-Black. Within the last 20 years, scholars who are Afro-Indigenous or Black Indigenous (depending on how they identify) have been actively pushing back against anti-Black racism in Indigenous Studies and how Black erasure by Indigenous authors has shaped how we think about Indigenous studies. That also can be reversed: in Black studies, there can also be an erasure of Indigenous presence. So, there tends to be a binary of either Indigenous presence or Black presence, but where is it both? This binary is where my course has students think about the interwovenness of creative works from both fields: to read, absorb, and think about foundational texts that look at futurisms, like Octavia Butler’s works, and then compare them with, or reading them alongside Indigenous works, such as an Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe, woman’s work, and see how they are thinking about similar themes.
Fyza Azam: That sounds very interesting. How have you organized this course? Is there a rhythm or narrative that shapes it?
Renae Watchman: “Survivance” is a term coined by Gerald Vizenor, who is an Anishinaabe thinker. Survivance grounds why Indigenous studies is the sole discipline whose mandate is for the improvement of Indigenous Peoples’ lives. This course is part of that mandate. We look at issues that impact Indigenous and Black communities, as they are found in literature, and how Indigenous and Black novels are loosely based on real life. There are always historical references that plague a protagonist’s present or future. There’s so much context that needs to be unpacked in all the courses I teach because there’s never a work that I’ve seen that is purely fictional and has no influence from legislation, history, culture, or politics.
So the rhythm or narrative of the course is about the context of literature and how writing is an active response toward the betterment of our lives. This rhythm is shaped through “Seed Stories.” These are stories about the literal seed, like planting seeds in the earth for growth, life, and nourishment, as well as the metaphorical. There are a few texts that view the seed as the seed of a child, the child being the future of whoever’s body holds them, and that future is usually generational. These texts look at how we can guarantee Indigenous and Black lives. Black and Indigenous authors such as Octavia Butler and Louise Erdrich are both looking at how birthing is either weaponized or controlled, and sometimes both. That is the narrative shaping the course: looking at seed stories from Indigenous and Black women authors and how they embody presence, survival, and resistance in their many forms.
Fyza Azam: Thank you. Could you tell me about some of the readings or other texts you assign? How have students responded to them?
Renae Watchman: The primary texts that were required for this class were Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980), Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God (2017), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (2000), and Tiya Miles’s Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (2015). Louise Erdrich is Anishinaabe, and Leslie Marmon Silko is Laguna Pueblo, and their protagonists are from very different times. Silko’s novel is set at the turn of the 20th century, and Erdrich’s protagonist is in the future. I don’t know when, but sometime in the future. Tiya Miles is a Black author based in the U.S., and she’s probably the most prominent scholar who bridges Afro and Indigenous issues. She’s not Indigenous herself, but her family is. She’s married to an Indigenous man, and they have children. She is a historian by training, and so her novel Cherokee Rose looks at how the Cherokee, a nation in the U.S., were removed from their homelands in the Southeast by foot, on what is known as the Trail of Tears, into what is now Oklahoma. I’m also Cherokee, and part of my Navajo language introduction tells you that I’m Bird Clan from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, but I primarily identify as Navajo. I’m enrolled with the Navajo Nation. Miles’s novel looks at how seeds were carried in the dresses and skirts of Cherokee women on the Trail of Tears. Many people died during the Long Walk, or the Trail of Tears, from the Southeast to the middle of the country, but those who survived later planted those seeds. The author shows how, after forced removal, survivors establish a homestead in Oklahoma, carrying with them agricultural knowledge rooted in plantation histories. In the present-day storyline, young Afro-Indigenous characters visit the land and see the literal results of that history in the trees, plants, and harvests that remain. The novel helps students understand the Trail of Tears by connecting its history to a contemporary moment.
I’m also a film scholar, so we looked at Navajo filmmaker Nanobah Becker’s work, called The Sixth World: An Origin Story, which is about how our ancient corn and its cobs actually save humanity to survive on Mars. In the film, a Navajo astronaut goes on a spacecraft, and two ears of ancient corn are smuggled on board, wrapped in the Navajo Nation flag. Once they land on Mars, she harvests the corn seeds, and the short film ends with fields of corn thriving on the now-colonized Mars.
I also recommend a 1991 film by African American filmmaker Julie Dash called Daughters of the Dust. There is a key connection between Daughters of the Dust and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Garden in the Dunes. In Silko’s book, the protagonist is a young girl named Indigo, and in Daughters of the Dust, the motif of indigo-stained hands on older characters symbolizes the lasting impact of slavery, as the Peazant family, Gullah descendants of enslaved Africans, decide whether to leave their South Carolina Sea Island home in 1902. So, I have students think about the process of how the indigo seed came over. We also discuss the term diaspora, which literally means the spreading of seeds, and consider how that idea connects to Garden in the Dunes. The dunes refer to the deserts of Arizona, and the novel follows this young girl, Indigo, as she travels away and then back to the dunes. It is interesting how her name becomes part of the story. I wanted students to watch the film because they could make some connections between Garden in the Dunes and Daughters of the Dust.
I always require that students understand the terms they use and where they come from. So, we read a text called Aesthetics of Survivance by Gerald Vizenor, who coined the term survivance. Otherwise, I think terms get thrown around without comprehending what they mean. Because we’re looking at two sci-fi novels, I have them read works by the authors that coined Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism. Before the first day of class, I have students come prepared. They should read from Tiya Miles’s historical text called “Eating Out of the Same Pot,” which is from her book Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Indian Country is the term we use for native land in the U.S. They also read another canonical Indigenous scholar, Robert Warrior’s “Lone Wolf and DuBois for a New Century: Intersections in Native American and African American Literatures.” This is the foundational work that helps students understand the charges against the discipline as being either anti-Indigenous or anti-Black. The third text I have them read is a co-authored text called “At the Crossroads of Red/Black Literature.” Students should also understand that I teach the course from an Indigenous Studies perspective as an Indigenous woman. So, they have to know a book by Gregory Younging called Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. This book helps students learn how to write about Indigenous Peoples, teaching them when to capitalize certain terms, like the word Indigenous, which is always capitalized, or other words we value, versus words that some people might not know are problematic and should not be capitalized.
I always try to give students thematic supplemental work that will help them understand how to theorize the works or develop their own interpretations. For example, I assigned works by Indigenous Studies scholars who’ve written about the texts, such as Kanaka Maoli scholar Hōkūlani K. Aikau’s article “Unsettling the Settler Colonial Triptych: Visioning AlterNative Futures with Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed.” Providing these works can help students consider how other Indigenous Studies scholars might be using our own theories and methods to analyze a text that wouldn’t normally be slotted into an Indigenous Studies course. The supplementary reading for the final week is an article by Alex Trimble Young called “Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: Decolonization and Democracy in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.” Because we’re talking about diaspora in many ways, the idea of Indigenous Peoples being cosmopolitan at the turn of the 20th century is a relatively niche area to study, and students often tell me they learn so much because it’s all new.
Fyza Azam: What types of assignments do you have?
Renae Watchman: I had four assignments: two “position papers,” each worth 10%. Then they had a conference paper proposal with an annotated bibliography and an outline, which accounted for 20%. Then they had a final conference-length paper, which was 40% of the course.
The “position papers” were due at different times for different students, and as part of their assessment, they had to prepare and read their papers so we could use them as discussion points. I think I’ve had a really good experience with this class because people were interested in looking at these intersections. It was a small graduate class; I want to say maybe 8 to 12 students. I think if it were any larger, I might have to rethink how I would assess them. Usually when you have only 8 people, they’re all committed, and they’re always prepared; they know that the prize at the end of the tunnel is a class that they long remember.
Fyza Azam: Thank you so much for your time.
More about Dr. Renae Watchman.