Wapke: Indigenous Science Fiction Stories Selected by Michel Jean
Wapke
Edited by Michel Jean, translation by Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo
EXILE Editions, 2022; 159 pages; $24.95
Reviewed by Alban Goulden
“I yearn to know a better life.”
— the narrator in “uapuch-unaikan”
***First, a disclosure: I’m a Canadian of 3rd generation Caucasian settler stock. So I’m reading and writing my review — respectfully, I hope — from the outside-in.
Just so we’re clear.
Wapke (meaning “tomorrow” in the Atikamekw language) is advertised as “Quebec’s first collection of science fiction short stories by Indigenous writers.” However, these stories are like no other sci-fi collection most readers will have encountered. Written by Innu and southern Quebec First Nations writers, the narratives break with the reader’s traditional expectations in several key ways: the subject matter of each story is, essentially, the same; there is little extrapolation of present technological or scientific tropes (neither “hard” nor “soft” science sub-genres here); there is little conventional action employed in forwarding the plot; individual character psychology is only minimally developed (the characters instead arise out of a collective or tribal first cause); and the future imagined is really about a return to the pre-colonial (or an escape from that colonial) past.
In every story, the central issue is the genocidal anti-nature effects of colonialism.
Which is understandable.
However, at times, this approach reaches a dogmatic, pedestrian level. In “pakan” (meaning “differently”), by Cyndy Wylde, the omnipotent narrator depicts the main character Kanena in the following way: “Whether it was to denounce the traumatizing and intergenerational effects of Indian residential schools and to address the situation, to help counter one of the government’s outrageous legal remedies for dealing with the system for protecting First Nations children, to confirm and condemn recourse to the forced sterilization of Indigenous women, to demand that multinationals stop inserting their gas and oil pipelines into Mother Earth, or always, always to educate the people, Kanena had been a tireless activist her entire life.” It has often been observed about sci-fi that the future imagined is really about the present. This is doubly so in this collection.
Those who read the English version must also be aware that they’re receiving these stories via three filters: a) Indigenous people b) writing in French c) now translated into English. Because of this, I often felt a disjunctive undercurrent present that was hard to analyze, a sense that more was going on in these stories than was apprehensible to me.
Part of the difficulty here may be that at times the writing appears “unsophisticated” to non-Indigenous minds. As mentioned previously, there is an almost complete lack of psychological development in the characters. Intention and effect is generated in the outside, non-Indigenous world, and victimizes the characters, whose main desire is to return to their tribal roots. The main character, Anahite, in “uapuch-unaikan” exemplifies this clearly: “. . . Anahite thought she was receiving the only thing she deserved: contempt for having spent her whole life believing her government’s lies.”
These difficulties, however, need to be approached with an open mind. The fascinating aspect for me is that these stories depict a universe radically different in many ways from conventional science fiction where at least we think we know who the aliens and the humans are. One might think here of Pogo and paraphrase his famous statement: we have encountered the aliens, and they are us. Perhaps the closest settler writer to date who dealt with the concerns written about in Wapke is Ursula K. LeGuin because, in much of her work, the dysfunction of our dominant contemporary society is the problem. We have lost our way and perhaps the solution is that the future should consist of a return to some fundamental non-conquest elements of the past.
On this point, every writer contributing to Wapke would agree. »