Abstract
This chapter will discuss the role of animals in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle (2014). Of particular importance is the relationship between human characters and animal actors involved in the development of events in the narrative. The coming together of a biotic community ultimately ameliorates the crises of the novel; this community actively works to alter devastating human impacts on the environment, while also ensuring the continuation of our species alongside that of symbiotic nonhumans.
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Notes
- 1.
While I will refer to both as SF in this chapter, there are differences. In terms of examples involving Indigenous peoples and animals, Jefferey Veregge’s (S’Klallam) “Sisters” (featuring a bioengineered clam) and Jon Proudstar’s (Yaqui/Mayan/Jewish/Latino) “Slave Killer” (featuring a corvid elder) involve science fiction and speculative fiction, respectively. But, sometimes, “speculative” transcends what is often a dubious “scientific” boundary, such as with the unclear situation in Richard Van Camp’s (Tłįchǫ) “On the Wings of this Prayer” (2013), where monstrous creatures stalk the north, eating up all fauna, but a “computer” is potentially a “way to undo all that’s been done.” Van Camp, “On the Wings of this Prayer,” 14.
- 2.
King claims Cherokee heritage on his father’s side.
- 3.
Ortiz, “Men,” 91.
- 4.
See my article “Changing Landscapes” for a further discussion of Johnson’s Raven, who is “more-than-animal” not only because he is the Trickster-figure, but also because this Trickster manifests itself to the human world as a “three meters tall” “Raven-wingsuit Organic Recreational Vehicle (ORV), which repurposes cellular level material for human entertainment.” Johnson, Corvus, 28; Scott, “Changing Landscapes,” 23.
- 5.
King, On the Back of the Turtle, 429–431, 487, 492–93. Hereafter, Turtle.
- 6.
As E. Richard Atleo (Nuu-chah-nulth) discusses, with the idea of tsawalk, his ancestors “assumed an interrelationship between all life forms—humans, plants, and animals. Relationships are. Accordingly, social, political, economic, constitutional, environmental, and philosophical issues can be addressed under the single theme of interrelationships …. [A]ll questions of existence, being, and knowing, regardless of seeming contradictions, are considered to be tsawalk—one and inseparable. They are interrelated and interconnected.” Atleo, Principles of Tsawalk, ix.
- 7.
Morrison, “Stories to Stop the Apocalypse,” 45.
- 8.
King, Turtle, 153, 333, 426. Crisp’s non-Indigeneity is established when he begins to tell the creation story of Sky Woman. King, Turtle, 222. See also Sean Rhoads’s summation of Crisp’s “analogue for several mythic figures.” Rhoads, “The Inestimable Nicholas Crisp,” 122. Crisp also attempts to guide and predict events from the start, though, in his eccentric way, he credits his companion “Master Dog,” saying, “There he be, as ye predicted” when the character Gabriel first “emerge[s] from the trees and [begins] the final descent to the beach.” King, Turtle, 2, 1.
- 9.
The character Mara recalls that, then, the government displaced the human survivors “to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, … far away from Samaritan Bay.” King. Turtle, 156.
- 10.
King, Turtle, 454; 408–409; 14.
- 11.
The CEO’s name echoes Oscar Wilde’s 1890 The Picture of Dorian Grey. Fittingly, Punyashree Panda calls Dorian “Gabriel’s foil.” Panda, “Indigenous Humor in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle,” 324.
- 12.
King, Turtle, 454.
- 13.
King, Turtle, 83.
- 14.
King, Turtle, 437.
- 15.
Rowe, “Thomas King,” 16.
- 16.
King, Turtle, 4. Crisp alternates between calling his companion “Master Dog” and “Soldier”; it is Sonny who later names the dog “Salvage.” King, Turtle, 479.
- 17.
Fraile-Marcos, “The Turn to Indigenization in Canadian Writing,” 133.
- 18.
Fraile-Marcos, “Precarity and the Stories We Tell,” 481.
- 19.
King, Turtle, 222.
- 20.
King, Turtle, 225, 227.
- 21.
King, Turtle, 398; 408; 393, 398.
- 22.
King, Turtle, 226.
- 23.
King, Turtle, 226.
- 24.
King, Turtle, 399.
- 25.
King, Turtle, 223, 224, 399, 409.
- 26.
King, Turtle, 225.
- 27.
King, Turtle, 159.
- 28.
SF literature, of course, resonates with the apocalyptic and dystopian overtones of the book. This is fitting because, as Kyle Powys Whyte and others indicate, that moment of change has already happened, and “some indigenous peoples already inhabit what [their] ancestors would have likely characterized as a dystopian future.” Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene,” 227; Whyte, “Indigenous Realism and Climate Change,” 78; Cariou and St-Amand, “Environmental Ethics Through Changing Landscapes,” 14; Scott, “(Indigenous) Place and Time as Formal Strategy,” 77; Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now,” 207. See also Grace Dillon’s categorization of “Native Apocalypse” in Dillon, “Introduction,” 8–10.
- 29.
King, Turtle, 324.
- 30.
King, Turtle, 42.
- 31.
King, Turtle, 408.
- 32.
King, Turtle, 408, 409.
- 33.
King, Turtle, 62, 454.
- 34.
King, Turtle, 513–15, 441, 515.
- 35.
Rowe, “Thomas King,” 16.
- 36.
King, Turtle, 320.
- 37.
Unlike GreenSweep’s complete swath of death, Agent Orange was only known to have produced severe health problems such as rare cancers, horrible as that is. “Veterans’ Diseases Associated with Agent Orange.”
- 38.
Holmes et al., “Effects of Klebsiella planticola SDF20 on Soil Biota and Wheat Growth in Sandy Soil”; King, Turtle, 42.
- 39.
King, Turtle, 492–93, 433, 498.
- 40.
King, Turtle, 492, 493.
- 41.
King, Turtle, 516.
- 42.
King, Turtle, 517; Haraway, “Anthropocene,” 160. King even carefully has Crisp’s nephew Sonny say, “Big Red has made it back to the ocean. Big Red has come home.” King, Turtle, 431.
- 43.
King, Turtle, 259.
- 44.
Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” 1.
- 45.
King, Turtle, 403–404, 406.
- 46.
Dillon, “Introduction,” 7.
- 47.
King, Turtle, 404.
- 48.
King, Turtle, 406.
- 49.
King, Turtle, 383–84.
- 50.
King, Turtle, 339, 341–42, 361, 405.
- 51.
King, Turtle, 405.
- 52.
King, Turtle, 341–42.
- 53.
King, Turtle, 405. Earlier, Gabriel resists going out on the land, even when his sister wants to go see the pelicans. He even lies, claiming that the birds are “[j]ust big pigeons” or “herons.” Notably, after leaving with his father, Gabriel misses the prairie sky and even “the wind” he had resented before. King, Turtle, 341, 342, 310, 338.
- 54.
King, Turtle, 502–503, 517.
- 55.
Fraile-Marcos, “Who’s going to look after the river?,” 66; King, Turtle, 386.
- 56.
King, Turtle, 516.
- 57.
King, Turtle, 25.
- 58.
Ganz, “Now I Am Become Death,” 10.
- 59.
King, Turtle, 497.
- 60.
Gabriel’s father is from the “Leech Lake [Indian Reservation],” and thus Anishinaabe. King, Turtle, 110.
- 61.
Sinclair, “Learning from the Water.”
- 62.
King, Turtle, 22; Scott, “Changing Landscapes,” 25–26.
- 63.
King, Turtle, 429, 487.
- 64.
King, Turtle, 487.
- 65.
Rhoads, “The Inestimable Nicholas Crisp,” 122.
- 66.
King, Turtle, 222.
- 67.
King, Turtle, 227.
- 68.
King, Turtle, 227.
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Acknowledgments
Some ideas presented in this chapter were originally drafted in my PhD dissertation, Here, at the End. I also briefly discuss Turtle in my “Changing Landscapes” article.
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Scott, C. (2024). To Build a World: The Return of Biota in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle. In: Castle, N., Champion, G. (eds) Animals and Science Fiction . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41695-8_15
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