Page 97 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

this presence felt to the reader without personifying it? Or romanticizing it? My narrator is

not a local although she has lived on the island for a long time. Her relation to the deeply

local remains that of a settler, always and forever an outsider, if one deeply familiar with

the place. Her father, an Arctic climate scientist, teaches her to be a wind noticer: he

gives her lessons in the winds. She grows attentive to them. The novel voices her

noticings and that of others. As the climate shifts, the winds, as people in the Arctic have

remarked, grow shiftier. The old winds become new in sometimes dangerous ways. I

want the subjectivity of the novel to enact this shifting awareness and presence without

overwhelming the reader with too much windiness.

I don’t want to argue that I’m doing anything new, only something that is new to me. In

The Spell of the Sensuous, philosopher and ecologist David Abram writes of how “many

indigenous peoples construe awareness, or ‘mind’ not as a power that resides inside

their heads but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with the other

animals and plants, the mountains and the clouds.” [pg. 227, Chapter 7, The Forgetting

and Remembering of the Air, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, Vintage

Books, New York, 1996; italics his.] In Navajo culture, he writes, “mind as Wind is a

property of the encompassing world, in which humans – like all other beings –

participate.” [Ibid, pg. 237]

We all have origins somewhere but many of us live displaced from ours. I spent my

childhood in Toronto as a first-generation immigrant, lacking any sense of land roots

while being hyper-attuned to the sentience of the natural world. I felt like an outsider

always. Any of us trying to connect the human and nonhuman in words must navigate a

relationship to indigeneity. Here in North America we write in the presence of cultures