“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Time in 2021 isn’t what it used to be. Our meridian rhythms were already interrupted with blue screens and caffeine, and now some of us don’t even leave the house to go to work regularly—capitalism’s enforced schedule is faltering. Many of us have lost our jobs, while others are working overtime, days blurring together in the way they only can when you start each of them at 4am. Meanwhile, the news sounds like 1968, 1935, 1921, 1918… historical resonances overlap and blur. But, perhaps, time has never been what it was, save for in a certain cultural space that has become increasingly less relevant. There is a way in which it is perhaps possible to view this change in perception as a useful re-orientation, rather than as a loss, by attending to (without appropriating) other perspectives.
The Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor has been writing in a different mode of time for forty years, bringing his concept of time to bear on the multiple and conflictual realities that have snagged together in Native history, presents, and futures. His term, “slipstream”, is most familiar from physics—referring to the way in which air or water behind a moving object moves closer to that object’s speed than does the surrounding substance. Vizenor uses it to negotiate the overlap of spaces and times, the accumulation of misery and resistance. In his 1978 short story “Custer On The Slipstream”, a reincarnated Custer dispenses rough injustice from his federal office. He is told an account of a member of the old “arrowstocracy”, someone who calls himself both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, making a speech at a Saul Alinsky talk. Sent into a memory of his first encounter with “a tribal person”, this Custer figure comes out of his recollection to find Crazy Horse standing in his office. Destabilized by this encounter, he turns to risky behavior that proves his downfall: “…tribal rumors held that his vision crossed coming around a curve at high speed on his motorcycle and he died in the wind space behind a grain truck…. slipping from grace in a slipstream.” (25) Here we see a literal slipstream brought to bear on a figure caught in a historical slipstream, dragged forward in time along with those he and his fellows have murdered, doubly a member of the bureaucracy that came to replace the Army’s work and the original devil himself.
Vizenor’s concept and its bearing on issues of time are taken up in the Indigenous science fiction anthology Walking the Clouds, edited by Grace. L. Dillon. The anthology recognizes many Native SF writers working with Vizenor’s slipstream concept to great effect–although Bruce Sterling, a non-Native person writing eleven years after Vizenor, is usually credited with its invention. Sterling was using it to describe speculative fiction, work that lies between fantasy and science fiction, if these terms are treated as opposite poles; he did not include any Native writers in his 1989 list, and only one (Louise Erdrich) in his updated list of 2007. Dillon observes that “readers must find intriguing the exclusion of Native authors [from Sterling’s list of slipstream writers], whose work remains even more other than other despite features that imply its status as an original slipstream literature.” (16) Here, Native writing is displaced all at once from the time of current futurisms, from the time of “originality”, and from the place of inclusion in writers to follow in a list made by an influential member of the field.
Dillon’s anthology works to open up “sf [science fiction] to reveal Native presence” (2), a framing that acts in contrast to reactionary takes on efforts within SF to include and recognize more works by people of color. Dillon defines “Native slipstream” as “a species of speculative fiction within the sf realm, [which] infuses stories with time travel, alternate realities and multiverses, and alternative histories. As its name implies, Native slipstream views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream.” (3) This is not intended as an avant-garde writing technique, but “models a cultural experience of reality”, one that is increasingly validated by quantum mechanics… making the term’s origin in physics infinitely appropriate. (4)
Applications of Vizenor’s slipstream concept are not limited to the realm of science fiction. In her recent book, Imagining the Future of Climate Change, Shelley Streeby sees a relationship between the slipstream and the anti-DAPL struggle. “In insisting on the significance of long histories and connections among different flashpoints in time, the New York City Stands with Standing Rock Collective organized its syllabus in ways that resonate with Native slipstream,” she argues. (51) The syllabus acts to resist efforts to frame #NoDAPL struggle as anomalous or ahistorical, locating it instead within an ongoing stream of struggle that includes many times and places.
We can imagine the slipstream as the experience of moving through a river, with many different currents that overlap or even snarl in places. However carefully one wades through time, one cannot stay in only one element of a fluid environment…and sometimes lateral journeys take place; we cannot always walk up-river. It will be interesting to see what relation the rich and elaborating field of Black-Native studies—which already tend to meet in the ocean—can make between “wake work”, the situating of Black studies in the wake of the slave ship, and Native slipstream. In 2020, one of the stranger eddies of time, such projects cannot remain submerged.
Sources
Dillon, Grace L. Walking the Clouds: an Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012.
NYC Stands for Standing Rock Committee. “#StandingRockSyllabus.” NYC Stands with Standing Rock Syllabus, 1 Dec. 2016, nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
Streeby, Shelly. Imagining the Future of Climate Change. University of California Press, 2018. Print.