The End of Stories: Linda Hogan on Genesis

The creation narratives at the beginning of the book of Genesis are full of things people don't expect. For starters, most people don't expect to find two such narratives. We read only the first (1-2:3), trying to get a sense of the context of the "dominion clause" which Lynn White (in "The Historical Origins of Our Ecological Crisis") claimed was the seed of western Christian culture's unprecedented and lethal anthropocentrism. 

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (1:26-28, King James Version)

Read against the waves of divine creativity which culminate here it's not clear that humans are created for more than a care-taking role as stewards - everything created before them has already been deemed good as it stands. Yet the suggestion that only the human is made in the divine image makes us seem linked to the creator more than to the rest of creation - the fateful opening which allows human beings to wonder not only what their relation with the rest of creation is, but if they need or ultimately ought to have any relation with it at all. 

To consider a creation narrative which doesn't open such a gap we listened to the story of Skywoman eloquently recounted by Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer at the start of her Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2015). While the human arrives late in this story, too - SkyWoman falls through a hole in the sky - the earth has not yet been created, all is but water. Dry land emerges only as animals come together to break her fall - first a flock of geese, then a turtle. Others plumb the depths of the sea for mud, a modest muskrat giving its life to bring up the first handful. Placed on the turtle's back, spread by Skywoman's feet as she dances her gratitude and ultimately seeded with plants by a bundle she grasped on her fall, the earth emerges from the mutual care, sacrifice and gratitude of all species in council together. Given such an understanding of the collective work of maintaining a world, the question whether human beings have a relationship with the rest of creation is an absurdity (although the question of how to forge new relations as populations are forced apart by disruption of ecological worlds is ever urgent). But to our settler colonial ears, raised in a culture built and premised on the practice and theory of what Heather Davis and Zoe Todd call "the severing of relations," such a story sounds like a fairy tale, a depiction of the safety of the nursery, not the responsibilities of adulthood.

One source of this impatience with relationships (and existential rejection of interdependence with our fellow earth beings) is doubtless the "dominion clause," interpreted as empowering human beings to be creators of new worlds in accordance with ideals they bring to creation from outside of it.But another, perhaps deeper, source traces back to Genesis as well, though to a later moment. We saw how Chicaza poet Linda Hogan brings indigenous questions to the banishment of humans from the garden (and for seeking knowledge of how the world works, no less!) in Genesis 3.

Instead of learning their relationship to this world through the words of their creator, instead of the instructions that will keep a world alive, Adam and Eve are simply sent away. They are removed from the natural world, even from the divine by the simple act of seeking knowledge. Most of us know this story. In a way this is the story of the end of stories in this particular culture. After the shunning from the garden, what follows are stories of destruction and war, deception, betrayal and lies. ... It is as if that first sin was the ending. There is no longer a good garden, no forest. The people do not know the story of their land or world, or learn that they are one with the spine, heart and breath of all the rest. They are not a part of it. 

“Backbone: Holding up our future,” in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating knowledge, forging new constellations of practice, ed. Joni Adamson & Michael Davis (Routledge 2017) 

Salvation history will find the descendants of these first humans in the wastes to which they have been banished, forging and reforging a relationship with the divine, but the relationship between the human and the earthly non-human will never be organic again. There is no more a straight line from these estranged settlers, east of Eden, and the settler colonial practices which fund the Anthropocene than there is one from the dominion clause to western modernity's becoming a geological force. But it is useful to think about how creation narratives constrain the ways humans imagine their relationships with the rest of terrestrial life. From Hogan we might also learn to distinguish two kinds of stories - those based in conflict, which western literary theory understands as the only stories, and another kind. The story of the land, a story in the land and in all the beings who sustain it, is a story of a different order. Genesis seems to offer this latter kind of story before short-circuiting it. Even if biblical religion leaves us cold, we live in a culture profoundly shaped by it. We may need to wrestle our way back to Eden, or at least to the idea that we can be stewards of creation without being gods.

(ML)

Picture source: https://drwhitelitr.net/texts/Amerind/origins/AmindorsIroquois.htm