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Reading Resurgence: Indigenous North American and Ghanaian Relationalities in Literature

Vanessa Evans

Abstract

Although Indigenous and postcolonial studies are often treated as distinct fields, this article argues for their interconnection through a focus on relational ways of being. By juxtaposing contemporary Indigenous North American and postcolonial Ghanaian novels, this essay explores the concept of relationality as a form of Indigenous resurgence. With Nanabush’s teaching of relationality as a framework, the study examines how characters in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000), Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper (2021), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers (1979) navigate and sustain reciprocal relationships with human and non-human kin. The article’s primary contribution is a cross-cultural comparative method called reading resurgence that highlights shared commitments to decolonial futures. By reading resurgence, this work illuminates some of the ways in which Indigenous and postcolonial literatures reject colonial separations and insist on interconnected, place-based ways of knowing. Illuminating what can only be seen in the context of relationships, these novels tell a wider story about the urgent importance of sharing place-based knowledges inter- and intragenerationally to strengthen reciprocal connections between humans and the land. Ultimately, this study affirms the value of cross-cultural literary analysis in understanding how Indigenous and postcolonial narratives contribute to broader global decolonial movements.

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Densu gazed up at the stars, away from the moon’s haze, till his eyes relaxed and instead of separate stars he saw only connected streams of light in the sky.
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers

1. Positioning Statement

1As a settler scholar of Indigenous literatures working and living on Cherokee and Catawba lands in what is currently Boone, North Carolina, I am enmeshed in multiple structures that center and sustain settler colonial knowledges and worldviews. Even though I am committed to being a good reader and listener, as an outsider to the stories and communities discussed in this work, there are limitations to my understanding. As such, I employ a specific attentiveness to Indigenous and postcolonial theoretical traditions and methodologies, ensuring that the voices I engage with are those of scholars who center and sustain decolonial knowledges.

2. Introduction

2In As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) tells the Nishnaabeg story of the first researcher and intellectual, Nanabush, who walked around the world twice—once on their own, and once with Ma’iingan (wolf). On their first journey, Nanabush worked to understand the Nishnaabeg’s place in the world by creating “face-to-face relationships with other nations and beings” that underscore how all of creation is linked in a global community (57). Undertaking the second journey with a companion meant that Nanabush and Ma’iingan forged new sets of relationships with everyone they met and thereby cultivated more comparative, relational perspectives.

  • 1 This relationality is situated within and taught through grounded normativity: a system of ethics w (...)

3These two journeys offer several teachings, one of which is central to the work done in this paper. Specifically, Nanabush’s story imparts an understanding of relationality: an “Indigenous conceptualization of solidarity and intercultural connection” (Ghanayem and Macklin 3). Relationality recognizes that for Indigenous Peoples, “being has always meant being-with, and relations with the environment, including all its creatures—human or not, alive or not, visible or not—are inextricable from the conception of the self” (Martínez-Falquina 4).1 Because relationality is central to Indigenous ways of being, settler colonialism is fundamentally invested in destroying Indigenous relationships with place. Despite this attempted destruction, Indigenous Peoples have found ways to sustain relationality under colonizing structures and ideologies imposed by settler nation states such as the US and Canada. This survival is supported by what Simpson calls Indigenous resurgence: the “set of practices through which the regeneration and reestablishment of Indigenous nations could be achieved” (As We Have Always Done 16). These practices include, for example, “story or theory, language learning, ceremony, hunting, fishing, ricing, sugar making, medicine making, politics, and governance” (19). Nanabush’s story teaches relationality and in so doing offers an important example of resurgence.

4Nanabush’s story is also a reminder that Indigenous Peoples have always been global. Their journeys therefore resist damaging narratives that assume Indigenous Peoples’ relationships with place are irreconcilable with global connectivity when their very rootedness is part of a wider set of international responsibilities and relationships (As We Have Always Done 61; Lyons 1). Embracing this logic, and in keeping with Nanabush’s teachings about the interrelation between distant contexts, my paper juxtaposes two Indigenous North American novels with a postcolonial Ghanaian novel. Indigenous North American and postcolonial Ghanaian contexts share not only an intimate understanding of the impacts of colonization and colonial ideology on land and people (Brígido-Corachán xii; Shanley 106), but also a wider commitment to relational epistemologies as African animist belief systems are also fundamentally relational (Bird-David; Garuba; Mbembe). These animisms understand the world “by focusing primarily on relatednesses, from a related point of view, within the shifting horizons of the related viewer” (Bird-David S69). The sense of motion and process implied here is also imparted through the constantly shifting perspectives asked of Nanabush and Ma’iingan on their travels. As with relationality’s focus on “being-with,” animism pays attention to the “‘we-ness,’ which absorbs differences, rather than to ‘otherness,’ which highlights differences and eclipses commonalities” (S78). With these connections in mind, this paper extends what Nanabush knew after creation: Indigenous Peoples and their stories do not exist in a vacuum and must consistently (re)position themselves in relation to and connection with other beings and stories in and beyond the Americas (Brígido-Corachán xii).

  • 2 Because the meaning of indigeneity is contextual, I invoke specificity wherever possible. I also ac (...)

5Focusing on representations of relationality as resurgence, this paper connects three novels: Eden Robinson’s (Haisla & Heiltsuk) Monkey Beach (2000), Diane Wilson’s (Dakota) The Seed Keeper (2021), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers (1979). Remaining cognizant of the diverse contexts gathered here means acknowledging key differences between Haisla, Dakota, and Ghanaian realities that ultimately impact the shape of resurgence. Robinson and Wilson are Indigenous women writing from Indigenous nations—the Haisla, Heiltsuk, and Dakota—currently colonized by the settler states of Canada and the US. Most Haisla People live in and around Kitamaat Village at the opening of the Douglas Channel while Heiltsuk People are spread across more than thirty-five-thousand square kilometers in what is currently Central Coastal British Columbia (“About the Haisla,” “About Heiltsuk Nation”). Differently, the Dakota People are composed of three tribes whose lands stretch across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, western Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas (Deloria 1). I refer to Robinson and Wilson as Indigenous people, and the Haisla and Dakota as Indigenous Peoples—terms privileged because of this work’s international context and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).2 Indigenous Peoples in a North American context, then, are those who belong to place and whose relationships with place predate the arrival of settler, enslaved, and indentured peoples.

  • 3 The UNDRIP avoids defining the term indigenous because of how such categorizations have been and ca (...)
  • 4 For example, “the ‘Pygmis’ of the African tropical forests, the San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern Africa (...)

6While most African people are indigenous to the African continent, Armah and his characters are not Indigenous as defined above. Armah is ethnically Ga and Fante. The latter are a non-Indigenous group that is part of the wider Akan people—a dominant West African-based cultural group with an imperial history of its own including the Ashanti Empire. Reflecting on indigeneity’s nuance through the UNDRIP, Andrew Eruiti clarifies how the concept of Indigenous Peoples in Africa is different from that in Australasia and the Americas (113).3 In Africa, the term is not synonymous with the concept of first inhabitants, where a different set of historical justifications apply given that African countries do not have the same past as nations like the US and Canada (113). Rather, Indigenous Peoples in Africa are those who have been “left behind”—e.g., nomadic pastoral communities, hunter-gatherer tribes—and who resultantly suffer discrimination and a lack of fundamental human rights based on cultural difference (114).4

7Having set up the global context of this paper, the next section provides synopses of each novel alongside their critical receptions and locates my primary contribution—a cross-cultural comparative method I call reading resurgence—within Indigenous and postcolonial studies. This method offers one means by which distant contexts can be placed in conversation without occluding place-based knowledges. Further, by centering what can only be seen in the context of relationships, this work considers what representations of resurgence can reveal about how different Indigenous and postcolonial literatures are building decolonial futures.

3. Synopses and Literature Reviews

8Robinson’s Monkey Beach is told from nineteen-year-old Lisa’s perspective after her brother Jimmy goes missing while on a fishing expedition. The narrative structure oscillates between present-day 1989 and Lisa’s memories of her youth and teen years in Kitaamat, tracing a history of intergenerational trauma caused by Canadian settler colonialism. Across the novel, Lisa learns from her Haisla Elders how to accept her special ability to communicate with non-human and spirit kin. The secondary literature on Monkey Beach is robust, but it does not deal with relationality. Early scholarly conversations locate the novel within the Canadian Gothic subgenre (Andrews, “Native Canadian Gothic Reconfigured”; Andrews, “Rethinking the Canadian Gothic”; Lane 163). Later conversations reflect on the relevance of non-Indigenous literary genre conventions to Indigenous novels and highlight how such genres are being indigenized (Beriault; Castricano; Gaertner; Lacombe; Sarkowsky).

9Differently, Wilson’s Seed Keeper is a multigenerational narrative about a family of Dakota women seed keepers in North Dakota and Nebraska. Each generation’s women face a series of traumatic events resulting from life under American settler colonialism—removal, residential schools, intergenerational trauma, foster care—while working to protect the seeds that could ensure the survival of their communities. Most of the novel follows protagonist Rosalie in 2002 as she returns to her ancestral land after the death of her husband—settler farmer John Meister. The narrative oscillates between Rosalie’s contemporary life and the lives of her seed keeper ancestors, tracing a matrilineal arc to her great-great grandmother Marie’s experiences during the US-Dakota War of 1862. Reconnecting with the land and her ancestors, Rosalie meets her great aunt Darlene who teachers her the family practice of seed keeping. Scholarly dialogue on Seed Keeper has thus far been limited to analysis of the entanglement between extractive and sexual violence (Mackenthun), and ecofeminist readings that draw attention to relationships between humans and the environment (Almaaroof, Hamdi and Hassoon).

10Finally, Armah’s Healers fictionalizes the defeat of the Ashanti Kingdom in the late-nineteenth century and its eventual incorporation into the British Colony of the Gold Coast in the early 1900s. When Appia, the heir to the Ashanti throne in fictional Esuano, is murdered, Densu, the novel’s protagonist, is falsely accused of the crime. Densu escapes Esuano to seek a different life with a community of traditional healers living in the Eastern Forest. Led by Damfo, the healers believe in the mending of divisions among African Peoples who might unite one day under the Black race. Although scholars have yet to place Healers in conversation with Indigenous novels from North America, they have examined how Armah’s narrative techniques enhance its revolutionary message (Lazarus; Ogede). Others have considered the novel’s theorizing of a “recuperative return” to African unity (Ashcroft 704), which involves “healing, re-creation, renascence, repossession, recall, and Sankofa (return)” (Asaah and Zou 40). The concept of Sankofa has also been interpreted as a means by which the healers mobilize an idealized past “as a pedestal for a restructured future” (Fubara 65). Chinyere Nwahunanya notes the importance of mending the disunity imposed by colonizers and their allies through a return to “the way”: connectedness and reciprocity for African people (“The Writer as Physician” 148; “A Vision of the Ideal” 559).

11Given the vast differences in these novels’ political and geographic terrains, it is unsurprising that the wider fields of Indigenous and postcolonial studies are rarely in conversation (Byrd xxxii; Macklin 31–32). Still, numerous scholars have considered the affordances of a closer relationship between these fields (King; Byrd; Byrd and Rothberg; Macklin; A. Simpson). Important for this paper is that both resist logics of colonialism that deny relationality, and both pursue colonial futurities.

12There is a need in Indigenous literary studies for new cross-cultural comparative approaches to colonialism’s global realities. Such approaches can, and should, work across diverse texts without eliding or occluding the important contexts from which they emerge. Addressing this need means understanding the ongoing debate between two core critical streams: Indigenous literary nationalism and global Indigenous literary study. Indigenous literary nationalists argue for the value of nation-specific criticism with particular attention to how Indigenous Peoples retain intellectual sovereignties through literature (Armstrong; Justice Our Fire; Myrtle Kelsey; Warrior Tribal Secrets; Weaver; Weaver et al.; Womack Red on Red; Womack Art as Performance). By engaging in nation-specific readings, literary nationalism works to reconnect Indigenous scholars and people with traditional knowledges and methods. Although literary nationalism sees Indigenous literatures as “separate and distinct” from other national literatures—American included—it is not invested in the siloing of Indigenous contexts and remains committed to the global nature of Indigenous nations (Weaver et al. 15).

  • 5 I do not establish this global turn in binary opposition to nationalism but as part of a larger cri (...)

13Offering an alternative to nationalist approaches, the global turn in Indigenous literary studies reimagines methods of literary analysis for the broader Indigenous world (Warrior, “Native American Scholarship” 126).5 For example, Mark Rifkin reads across Indigenous literatures from the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific, arguing that settler colonialism imposes a linear sense of time that erases Indigenous histories and futures while Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori) unsettles assumptions of disconnection between Māori and Oceania Peoples by re-remembering that Māori once were Pacific. Further, Chadwick Allen’s theorization of the trans-Indigenous offers a comparative method focused on the recovery and interpretation of a variety of Indigenous texts and contexts from Oceania, North America, and Hawaiʻi (xviii). Differently, in reading Indigenous women poets, Molly McGlennen (Anishinaabe) points to the sustained value of transnationalism, focusing on what unites them across “colonial, tribal, and hemispheric divides” (183). My paper responds to McGlennen’s call for scholars to broaden Native American literary criticism by embracing more “flexible and inclusive” frameworks within this global turn (37).

14Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) highlights the complementary potential of both national and global streams in creating new methods and new avenues for debate because of a shared focus on critiques of empire (“Currents of Trans/National Criticism” 338). Adopting this logic, I argue that global Indigenous approaches can be further complimented by postcolonial perspectives that offer additional ways to understand the relationality taught by Nanabush. These ways of knowing are also shared by African animist belief systems. In taking this position, I align this work with academic projects already crossing the disciplinary boundaries of Indigenous and postcolonial studies (Ghanayem and Macklin; Lowe; Mbembe; Macklin). For example, Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s theorization of Caribbean and Pacific literatures’ connectivity; Shona Jackson’s reading of the postcolonial Caribbean as a site wherein Creoles reimagine settler colonial power as “native”; and Jodi A. Byrd’s (Chickasaw) examination of how US imperialism operates through the ongoing displacement and erasure of Indigenous Peoples. More recently, Eman Ghanayem and Rebecca Macklin’s special issue of Transmotion gathered scholarship on the diverse ways Indigenous narratives circulate and exert global influence, broadening the dialogue around global histories and realities of colonialism. Importantly, Ghanayem and Macklin think that Allen’s work compliments Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s concept of globalectics: a mode of reading that centers connections between “disparate global and temporal spaces” in ways that give attention to the “global consciousness of our common humanity” (61). Elsewhere, Macklin has also considered how relationality disrupts separatist logics of coloniality in Native American and South African literatures. Extending these conversations, this paper theorizes a further interpretative bridge between Indigenous and postcolonial literary studies with relationality as an expression of Indigenous and postcolonial resurgences.

4. Reading Resurgence

15This section proposes a new method for reading across Indigenous and postcolonial literatures that is attentive to the ways Indigenous contexts have always been global and postcolonial contexts “inherently outward looking” (Thiong’o 49). As a method, reading resurgence links diverse (con)texts to reveal stories based in shared modes of resistance to colonialism. This is a three-part method that (i) focuses on resurgence, (ii) is structured on literary constellations of coresistance, and (iii) reads globalectically. To center on resurgence across these Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts, I argue that Simpson’s concept of resurgence—which is deeply invested in alliance building—can be broadened to account for Armah’s Akan context and the regenerative work taking place in Healers. The Akan word Sankofa—meaning “‘return’ or ‘go back for it’”—offers a bridge here (Asaah and Zou 40). In traditional Akan thought, recuperation is theorized through the image of the Sankofa bird flying toward the unknown, head turned backward as it carries a precious object or resource “from the past for the benefit of the future” (46). Both recuperation and Sankofa provide channels for reconnecting with and regenerating traditional knowledges to create better futures, and hence for resurgence, making it applicable to Armah’s novel.

16To structure my analysis, I rely on constellations of coresistance: alliances of resistance that develop when Indigenous nations and allied groups work together toward shared goals, becoming and achieving much more than they could separately (As We Have Always Done 9). These “allied groups” include “Black and brown individuals and communities on Turtle Island and beyond that are struggling in their own localities” against colonizing forces (228). I contend that a similar alliance building can be observed in literature when the novels of diverse communities impacted by colonization form literary constellations of coresistance. Reading such literary constellations globalectically involves placing texts in their specific temporal and spatial contexts prior to engaging them in dialogue with one another (Thiong’o 60). Such contextually focused reading preserves the specificity of the constellation’s individual parts while embracing the possibility of comparison across diverse contexts. In this way, globalectics “embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion” (8). In the following sections I read resurgence across a literary constellation of coresistance, gathering a story about what can be seen, and seen differently, when diverse Indigenous and postcolonial novels are considered globalectically.

5. Analysis

17The following reading focuses on how relationality, expressed between humans and the land, functions as an act of resurgence. Land encompasses non-human kin such as plants, animals, rivers, lakes, and trees, understood as animate, agentic beings who can and do communicate with human relations (Borrows 52). Although reading resurgence can proceed in many ways, I conduct it by moving across Monkey Beach, Seed Keeper, and Healers twice. Doing so enables me to tighten the interrelationship among the novels by gathering and carrying forward the stories they tell to sketch the constellation’s wider narrative. Additionally, this cyclical movement honors Nanabush’s two trips around the world during which they learned about relationality. As my reading will clarify, this constellation tells a story about the significance of inter- and intragenerational place-based knowledge transmission to the (re)unification of human and non-human relations. Such relationships are reciprocal and important for healing the enduring fractures caused by colonization. Understanding this relationality requires that human characters (re)learn and remember how to read the land and see the land as kin, so that the fractured relationships between human and non-human kin can begin to heal, along with relationships among humans.

6. Intergenerational Resurgence

18Multiple scenes in Monkey Beach depict intergenerational knowledge transmission as a young Lisa learns how to communicate with the land from her Elders during the Haisla oolichan harvest. Owing to Kitamaat’s location at the opening of the Douglas Channel, water has always been central to the lives and work of Haisla people (“About the Haisla Nation”). The communal process of oolichan fishing is a time for teaching and modeling Haisla relationships with both human and non-human kin (Kundoque 18). In this way, oolichan fishing imparts a relational understanding of each person’s role within the wider Haisla community (18). On their way to the Kitlope River, Lisa’s mother Gladys says to her, “‘be polite and introduce yourself to the water’” (112). Gladys “dip[s] her hand in the water, then washe[s] her face. After stubbing out his cigarette, [Uncle] Mick d[oes] the same” (112). Reading the land, Lisa sees the Kitlope acknowledge their introduction as “the closer you get ... the milkier the water becomes, until all around you the water is the colour of pale jade” (112). This reciprocal introduction demonstrates proper protocol for engaging with the river as kin. Gladys explains that Haisla people used to fear the Douglas Channel because a “great big monster” with a “huge mouth” and a “roaring cry” guarded its entrance (114). Discovering that the monster was a flock of seagulls who would “rise into the air” and “settle back on the water,” they learned that “[w]herever the oolichans go, the sea gulls follow” (114). This story teaches Lisa how to read the land and locate fish during future harvests, exemplifying the intergenerational dimensions of resurgence.

19The transmission of place-based knowledges is increasingly urgent given the pollution and ocean dragging that are devasting oolichan runs and discouraging spawning in traditional areas (Kundoque 19–20). Gladys recalls when “the runs used to be so thick, you could walk across the river and not touch water. You didn’t even need a net; you could just scoop them up with your hat” (92). Now, Lisa’s family often trade in oolichan grease when they cannot make the longer trip to the Kemano River. The loss of spawning grounds poses a threat not only to the knowledge imparted through the harvest, but also to Haisla resurgence more broadly. While they are waiting for news about Jimmy, Lisa notices that Gladys is worried about the wider implications of his disappearance because, she assumes, no one else in their family knows how to make oolichan grease (85). Although Gladys’s concerns are founded, Lisa demonstrates that she knows more than her mother thinks by describing how to cook oolichan, prepare grease and use it to combat colds, moisturize skin, and preserve food (85–87). Although limited, these details demonstrate Lisa’s dedication to protecting the knowledge that she carries from past harvests.

20As with the Haisla People in Monkey Beach, the relationship between the Dakota People and their lands in Seed Keeper is essential for understanding the knowledge protagonist Rosalie’s family has worked to protect. Dakota homelands house oral history and traditions, and seasonal migrations bring different stories that impart knowledge about how to live relationally with a given place at a given time (Westerman & White 14, 27). Juxtaposing Lisa’s and Rosalie’s childhoods reveals the urgent importance of sharing place-based knowledges intergenerationally to strengthen relational understanding. Remembering her time on the land as a child, Rosalie reflects: “[b]ack then plants stood tall when I approached, spreading their leaves and displaying their gifts. I talked with them and knew that they liked the sound of my voice, that the attention made them happy” (32). This understanding of relationality, learned from her father, fades when he suddenly dies, and Rosalie is placed in foster care with a white family. Herself a mother years later, Rosalie works to repair her family’s relationship with the land by teaching relationality to her son, Thomas. To illustrate intergenerational knowledge transmission, Rosalie recites a story about her father pointing to a chokecherry that “had dropped most of its leaves, while a young tree nearby was thriving. The mother tree had chosen to sacrifice its own health for its offspring, sending its share of nutrients to help the other tree battle a fungus” (187). Eventually, the young tree recovers, and the mother regrows its leaves (187). This example of place-based knowledge being passed from mother to son is mirrored in the chokecherry’s resource sharing that ensures a future for both generations. Thomas listens as Rosalie explains how humans and non-humans “depend on each other to survive,” each eventually giving their lives in a mutual exchange so others can live (182). Respecting this relationality means “[y]ou never take more than what you need” (182). Carrying this understanding to future generations enacts resurgence and makes ethical relationships between human and non-human kin possible.

21The urgency of this knowledge transmission is highlighted as Thomas’s ethical relationship with land is eroded by John’s lessons about non-Indigenous approaches to farming. To keep apace with advances in agriculture and keep the farm, John and Thomas decide to purchase patented GMO seeds from Mangenta—a fictionalized Monsanto. Warning him against these seeds, Rosalie reminds Thomas about the interconnectedness he once understood: “‘remember when ... we talked about how the corn feeds the little voles, who become food for the hawks? How the sandhill cranes eat the leftover seeds when they stop here to rest during their fall migration? Even the crows rely on field corn to survive. What happens to the birds when they eat these seeds? What happens to us?’” (236). Unfortunately, Thomas has become estranged from his understanding of relationality and is shocked when John dies from cancer caused by the chemicals used to sustain the GMO seeds. In reminding Thomas of relationality, Rosalie makes overt the ways in which place-based knowledges teach and enact care for all relations.

22By depicting the challenges Rosalie faces as she tries to share her knowledge, Seed Keeper illuminates a core problem in Healers. According to Samuel Awuah-Nyamekye, the Akan people of contemporary Ghana have forgotten “life is environment and environment is life” (251). This disconnection from the earth is the result of the (infra)structures imposed and perpetuated by (neo)colonialism. These (infra)structures appear in both the nineteenth century setting of Healers—where the African People are represented as fragmented entities already in need of (re)unification—and contemporary Ghana (Asaah and Zou 40; Awuah-Nyamekye 251). Protagonist Densu feels this disconnection acutely, noting its effects on his wellbeing as an “inner pain” and “loneliness” (Armah 60). This isolation motivates Densu to join a community of healers so he might (re)learn relationality, heal his relationship with place, and help others do the same.

  • 6 The Fante and Ashanti—seen in conflict in The Healers—are Akan tribes. Living primarily in the sout (...)

23Healers centers the traditions of the Akan, whose relationships with land focus on the conservation of nature because their religion and culture are eco-based (Awuah-Nyamekye 251).6 For example, bodies of water are considered sacred and clearly defined taboos exist to regulate their use and care. In this way, the Akan worldview attaches animate and spiritual dimensions to land that necessitate ethical engagement. Learning this ethical engagement requires intergenerational knowledge transmission that centers place-based knowledges. In Healers, this teaching takes place in the Eastern Forest between Densu and his healer-mentor Damfo.

24In an early conversation with Densu, Damfo explains what the work of a healer entails. Healing work is about “seeing. And hearing. Knowing” (Armah 94). Damfo describes how people walk through the forest and “see many things. But they see little. They hear many forest sounds. But they hear little” (94). People perceive the non-human as isolated “things,” rather than beings in relation. For healers, “it is as if the spirits of all the leaves of the forest were talking to the healer, telling him what it is they each contain, what it is each can do, and what they cannot do. The leaves, animals, even stones, say much, and they show much, to any prepared to see and hear” (94). Damfo imparts this place-based knowledge so Densu can learn to read the land around him. Damfo continues, “‘[t]he same tree that just stands there dumbly to everyone, to the healers its leaves have things to say’” (95). In traditional Akan society, forests are essential to human life. As such, they are protected by “local taboos, norms and belief systems” and safeguarded through sustainable practices (Awuah-Nyamekye 259). Healers can help the Akan understand their forest kin so they might “awake[n] to life” and reunify “the community of all black people” (Armah 99–100). The work of healing, then, can also repair the disconnection experienced between people that is rooted in separation from place-based knowledges. This intergenerational knowledge transmission is thus a healing force that cultivates relationality. To achieve this unity, characters must embrace a mode of seeing that focuses on connection rather than separation.

25Constellating Monkey Beach, Seed Keeper, and Healers illuminates the ways in which knowledge must be protected and transferred across generations. This intergenerational resurgence work resists the extractive infrastructures of colonialism that seek to obscure and sever Indigenous Peoples’ relationships with land across the globe. By placing these novels in conversation, shared understandings of relationality and acts of resurgence are more clearly observable. Part of this understanding manifests in the way characters like Lisa, Rosalie, and Densu (re)learn their role in reciprocal relationships between human and non-human kin—a relationality that, as the next section demonstrates, works toward healing fractured relationships among human kin as well.

7. Reading the Land

26Reading Monkey Beach exposes how intergenerational knowledge transmission relies upon and imparts an ability to read the land. This reading helps heal relationships between human and non-human kin—plants, rivers, lakes, trees—that can strengthen Lisa’s community. While berry picking, Lisa’s grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, teaches her to read the land so she can embrace a more relational perception of her surroundings. Ma-ma-oo points out berries and other plants: pipxs’m, “‘berries with mould on them’”; sya’k°nalh, “‘the real blueberry’”; mimayus, “‘pain in the ass’” berries that are hard to find (160); kolu’n, “sapling cottonwood” (213); and ci’x°a, “wild crabapples” (264). Lisa begins to read the land by understanding where each plant lives, when they are in season, how they impact one another, and how much is appropriate to take from each bush so it can flourish. When Ma-ma-oo cuts from an oxasuli bush, she warns Lisa that oxasuli is powerful medicine and very poisonous (151). Ma-ma-oo advises Lisa to burn oxasuli on the stove: “‘[i]t protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine’” (151). Taking two oxasuli plants, they decide they have “enough” (151). Before removing branches from a Cedar tree, Ma-ma-oo scatters tobacco at its base, explaining “‘[t]he tobacco is for the tree spirits. You take something, you give something’” (152). These exchanges underscore the mutually beneficial relationship between humans and land—the oxasuli and cedar protect their human kin who in turn offer tobacco to the plant spirits. The ethic of care taught in this exchange works to heal the relationships between Indigenous people and their non-human kin.

27While berry picking with Mick, Lisa applies Ma-ma-oo’s teachings to reading the land. She “scan[s] the ground for the serrated, broad leaves of thimbleberry and salmonberry shoots”; is “careful not to pick the ones higher than your knees, because once they were that tall the stalks became woody”; and notes the presence of qoalh’m indicating the “first taste of spring” (73). Lisa demonstrates that she is learning how to be a better relative to her plant kin by reading the land and enacting appropriate protocols. When the salmonberries arrive, Lisa picks “the red ones ... the sweetness depends on the colour of the berry, with red being the sweetest, orange less sweet, and yellow the mildest” (76). Recognizing that they have an abundance of berries, Lisa and Mick share their harvest with Ma-ma-oo who makes salmonberry stew—a dessert that mixes the berries with sugar and oolichan grease (77–78). This moment provides an example of how Lisa’s understanding of relationality extends from plant to human kin. By keeping only what she and Mick need, they are also able to care for their human relations.

28The way Lisa learns to read the land in Monkey Beach highlights the unifying connection with human and non-human kin that Rosalie experiences as she becomes a seed keeper. Returning to her family’s land after John’s death, Rosalie feels disconnected from place. She has “become a stranger to these woods; it would take time before this place knew [her] again” (20). Rosalie reunites with her Great-Aunt, Darlene, who teaches her about her family’s seed keepers so that she can begin to heal her relationship to place. Darlene narrates Rosalie’s great-great-grandmother Marie’s struggle to survive as her family is driven off their homelands during the US-Dakota War of 1862. Marie is given a basket and pouch of seeds to protect, a task intended to safeguard the future of her family and community (129). Marie’s mother teaches her how to sew rows of seeds into their clothes and blankets so they “keep safe enough seeds for planting. No matter the cost” (128). By stitching the seeds into her dress, Marie physically connects the seeds to her body and in so doing recognizes that they are two parts of a larger whole, dependent upon one another. This act of stitching underscores the vital responsibility of seed keeping by making evident how human and seed kin rely on one another to survive.

29Across generations, the seeds are passed down and protected despite colonial violence. When Rosalie disappears into the foster care system after her father dies, Darlene keeps the seeds safe until the women are reunited and the intergenerational practice of seed keeping can continue. Just as Damfo taught Densu in Healers and Ma-ma-oo taught Lisa in Monkey Beach, Darlene (along with Elders Wilma and Carlos) teaches Rosalie to read the land in Seed Keeper. Rosalie applies their teachings: “only by paying attention with all of my senses could I appreciate the cry of the hawk circling overhead, or see sunflowers turning toward the sun, or hear the hum of carpenter bees burrowing into rotted logs” (343). Rosalie hereby begins to (re)learn and remember the importance of relationality to understanding the world around her. Back on her land and planting the seeds, she thinks, “[t]he seeds reconnected me with my grandmothers, and even my mother ... I felt as if I belonged once again to my family, to my people” (342). The seeds act as connective tissue between Rosalie, her ancestors, and her people. Enacting relationality through seed keeping and planting, Rosalie “reclaim[s] a relationship with the earth, water, stars, and seeds that [i]s thousands of years old” (343). The seeds that have traveled so many generations and miles help Rosalie begin to find her own place in a wider network of unifying reciprocal relationships.

30By depicting resurgence through Rosalie’s reading of the land and seed keeping, this constellation highlights a key moment from Healers where protagonist Densu (re)connects with place-based knowledges and observes the interrelatedness of his own world. Healers begins with a description of two streams, Nsu Ber and Nsu Nyin, between which sits a strip of land kept available for the “rituals of remembrance,” a festival intended to cultivate unity (11). The disunity that pervades the novel has, however, altered these celebrations such that they are no longer rituals of wholeness but “ritual[s] of separation” (13). When Densu’s friend Anan takes him to Nsu Ber to sit on the bottom with makeshift bamboo snorkels, the latter asks Densu to focus on really seeing his surroundings: “Looking with the eyes only. Idiots can do that. If you look at things that way they’re always separate and you never really see any sense in what you see. It’s all right to look at things that way, separate. It’s relaxing. But after that I always want to see what brings them together so they make sense” (29). Here, Anan articulates the experience of being in relation; rather than experiencing separation from land with a passive act of staring, he encourages Densu to actively see himself in context—to read the land around him. Sitting at the bottom, Densu begins to observe his world through a relational perspective so that he feels “in direct contact with everything around him, with everything in existence” (32). No longer detached, Densu feels in touch with the universe, “its contact with him neither pressure nor suction, but changing from one to the other depending on how aware he was of the skin joining him to the world, and it did not seem anymore as if what was outside that skin was separate from the life within ... He did not feel his body as a hard, solid thing anymore. It too had become a fluid form” (32). It is no coincidence that Densu’s revelation takes place in a stream, as rivers and streams in the Akan worldview are symbols of “unity” (Nkansah 352). Concentrating on a relational perspective, Densu begins seeing rather than looking.

31This intragenerational transmission of knowledge suggests that while these young characters have much to learn, the work of resurgence can take place both intergenerationally (with Damfo) and intragenerationally (with Anan); the ability to read the land is available to those willing to “see and hear the world in a different way” (Borrows 52). This act of seeing is a meaningful ritual of remembrance whereby the friends enact resurgence by reading the land relationally. Sharing this experience of unity strengthens their friendship and, in so doing, suggests that relationships with place directly impact relationships with people.

32Constellating Monkey Beach, Seed Keeper, and Healers underscores the curative, unifying potential of learning to read the land. For Lisa, this reading strengthens the bonds that exist between her non-human and human kin. Placing Monkey Beach in conversation with Seed Keeper indicates how seed keeping is a practice of resurgence that can impart knowledge about how to read the land and understand one’s role in a wider network of relationships. In remembering her place within this network, Rosalie’s memories illuminate the importance of Densu’s recollection of relationality in Healers. Encouraged by Anan, Densu begins to understand the important role relationality plays in strengthening connections among all his relations. Taken together, these acts of resurgence help the characters recognize the importance of relationality to sustaining ethical ways of being in the world.

8. Conclusion

33This paper has constellated Monkey Beach, The Seed Keeper, and The Healers to read resurgence across three Indigenous and postcolonial novels that, while arguably related, have never been placed in conversation. Illuminating what can only be seen in the context of relationships, this constellation tells a story about the urgent importance of sharing place-based knowledges inter- and intragenerationally to strengthen reciprocal connections between humans and the land. Understanding these relationships requires that human characters (re)learn and remember how to read the land and see it as kin. In so doing, they also begin to heal the separation within themselves and with one another. Ultimately, reading resurgence contributes one possible means by which readers may better understand Nanabush’s original teaching about the ways distant contexts and people are connected and responsible to one another.

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Notes

1 This relationality is situated within and taught through grounded normativity: a system of ethics which houses “practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place” (Simpson and Coulthard 254).

2 Because the meaning of indigeneity is contextual, I invoke specificity wherever possible. I also acknowledge the elisions that umbrella terms (e.g., Indigenous Peoples) can cause when the people they describe are as varied in culture, language, and history, as the land upon which they reside. Terms this broad are controversial but at the same time they enable scholars to privilege inclusivity over the arbitration of colonial determinants of “authenticity” (Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter 8–9).

3 The UNDRIP avoids defining the term indigenous because of how such categorizations have been and can be weaponized by those in power (Pulitano 11). Instead of a definition, the UNDRIP offers a series of criteria (not all of which must be met): self-identification, historical continuity with pre-settler societies, special relationships with ancestral lands; distinctiveness, non-dominance, and perpetuation (the desire to maintain ways of life) (11).

4 For example, “the ‘Pygmis’ of the African tropical forests, the San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern Africa” (Eruiti 114).

5 I do not establish this global turn in binary opposition to nationalism but as part of a larger critical conversation. Entrenching a binary would risk furthering the “hierarchical distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ Native expression” (Weaver 35). Scholars must see nationalism—and literary nationalism—as “central to any mature understanding of globalism and the fluidity of borders” (Womack Art as Performance 88).

6 The Fante and Ashanti—seen in conflict in The Healers—are Akan tribes. Living primarily in the southern part of Ghana and south-eastern Cote d’Ivoire, the Akan comprise nearly fifty percent of Ghana’s population (Awuah-Nyamekye 253).

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References

Electronic reference

Vanessa Evans, Reading Resurgence: Indigenous North American and Ghanaian Relationalities in LiteratureEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-1 | 2025, Online since 01 April 2025, connection on 25 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/23514; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13qwl

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About the author

Vanessa Evans

Vanessa Evans is a settler scholar specializing in global Indigenous literatures and theory. In addition to her role as an assistant professor at Appalachian State University on Cherokee and Catawba lands, she is a co-managing editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies.

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Copyright

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