HISTORY/TRIBAL WRITING SACRED TRADITIONS
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Man vs. Sea
rian Fagan was finishing the manuscript for his new book, The Attacking Ocean, when Superstorm Sandy slugged the East Coast. It was as if Mother Nature was proving his argument that the combination of rising sea levels and growing coastal metropolises will someday result in global disaster. Fagan, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California in Santa Barbara, has written extensively on archaeology and climatology. He has been especially prolific in penning books which explore the South Dakota Humanities Council’s 2013 thematic focus on water, including The Great Warming, Beyond the Blue Horizon and Elixir. The Attacking Ocean examines the interactions between humans and the seas over 9,000 years. For much of that time, oceanic fluctuations had little effect on humanity. But the earth’s population grew fivefold from the time of Christ to the Industrial Revolution, and the planet has steadily warmed since 1860. “I ended up with some scary scenarios, not so much from rising seas as from the vicious sea surges that come ashore in the wake of hurricanes, cyclones and other extreme
weather events,” Fagan says. “Future scenarios for places like Bangladesh are frightening, and a world that might involve millions of environmental refugees is something all of us, even as far away as South Dakota, will have to take seriously.” About 200 million people live in places less than 15 feet above sea level. There are protective measures, but Fagan wonders if they are enough — or even feasible. “One solution is to wall off the ocean, which is what the Netherlands have done for centuries, so far with success,” he says. “Few other countries can afford this. To wall off New York would be incredibly expensive, if it could be done. It would take a huge catastrophe for this to happen.” Other remedies include restoring coastal wetlands, restricting coastal development and slowing global warming. “We need global policies for dealing with the environmental refugee problem,” Fagan says. “The numbers of environmental refugees in Bangladesh could easily top 10 million. How do you resettle tropical subsistence farmers in places like South Dakota? This may seem like a far-fetched question, but it is not. It’s going to be a serious issue for our great-grandchildren.”
Few have compassion for a woman accused of murdering her children, as in the classic Greek myth of Medea, but Linda Hogan’s recent poem and performance piece, Indios, sympathetically updates the ancient tragedy. The Chickasaw poet, novelist and essayist explores the impact of the Americas’ colonization through the life story of one unjustly accused Native American woman. Revealing history, culture and ecology from the traditional Native American perspective is a hallmark of Hogan’s work. “Tradition comes largely from the world around us,” Hogan says. “It is not only what’s passed on, but it is even in the languages, the relationship with the land.” That love of the land often steers Hogan toward ecological issues. Her novel Power explored the endangered Florida Everglades. Solar Storms and an essay in the book Dwellings focus on our relationship with water. “Water is the most important issue many of us are facing right now. Here we have water with fecal matter in it. And our aquifers, the amazing underground oceans, are shrinking. The water must go somewhere and it becomes great storms,” Hogan says. “It is sacred to all people. And now corporations are wishing to own it.” 13