Postcolonial Speculative Fiction

The Destruction of Indigenous Culture and Land by Oil Colonizers

          "An Athabasca Story" is a short story written by Warren Cariou about a Native American man (Elder Brother) who finds himself in the midst of an oil field surrounded by "enormous yellow contraptions" that haul piles of soil off to a building with plumes of smoke coming from the top. Elder Brother has stepped into an oil field after spending time outside of the modern world and has no idea what he is witnessing. When an angered construction worker tells him that "It's very special dirt…we dig it up and take it over to the big house…mix it around in there and after a while it's ready to burn," Elder Brother wants to take some of it for himself so he can stay warm. When he tries to grab an armful of the dirt, he gets stuck and cannot remove himself–the more he moves, the deeper he is pulled into the dirt. Eventually, he is buried in the soil so deeply that he is never found and eventually dumped into a pile of soil in one of the "enormous yellow contraptions." The story ends with an eerie anecdote: "sometimes when you're driving your car and you press hard on the accelerator, you might hear a knocking, rattling sound down deep in the bowels of the machine. That's Elder Brother, trying to get your attention, begging you to let him out." 

Warren Cariou & the Importance of Indigenous Culture Preservation

            In an interview with First Comics News, Warren Cariou talks about why he thinks folklore, especially indigenous folklore is an important part of the modern world: "I think we all live our lives according to stories, whether we know it or not. Folklore is one way of categorizing those stories. I feel that the traditional stories of many cultures…contain incredibly important teachings that we really need to remember and learn from in our contemporary world." Indigenous folklore is so valuable to the preservation of history and values, and can teach all readers about the importance of certain aspects of native people's culture like respect for nature. "The Athabasca Story" focuses on the impact of our carbon footprint through the idea that Elder Brother will never die, while also showing how modern oil extraction is destroying places of the earth that are highly valued to native people.
 
            By creating Elder Brother to be an immortal indigenous man, Cariou shows that Native Americans have been in these areas for longer than non-Natives can imagine and therefore have a different relationship to the land. In the same interview mentioned previously, Cariou talks about how tar was precious to the Athabasca people in many ways. To see it being capitalized on by colonizers points at the idea that in the process of destroying the natives' land through the extraction process, the tar is also a stolen resource. Elder Brother knows nothing outside of the ways of his people, so to see this process is other-worldly and proves how greatly oil colonizers are destroying the planet and the ancient cultures that populate it.
 

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  1. This has been going on since white people came to the Americas. First, we pushed the first people further and further away from the coast as we expanded our settlements and clear cut forests to make farms. Then there was the extinction of the buffalo because white people wanted their furs and tongues. then there were the gold mines in the Black Hills. We can't take any of it back or undo it, but we can take care not to continue repeating the mistakes of yesteryear.

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