Image: “Three Wishes” by Dominik Mayer
Dystopia and apocalypse play an energetic role in the public imagination, as sites of horror but also as sites of possibility and disruption. Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” imagines the explosion of the credit card companies freeing a generation from debt slavery, and a return to a simpler de-urbanized nomadic life. Many television shows imagine the vistas of a destroyed world, and the possibility for people to become heroic amidst it. Apocalypse in the popular imagination is often tinged as much with opportunity and hopefulness for a clean slate as it is with tragedy and loss. There are a few imaginings of the post-apocalyptic world which attempt to drive home the misery and horror of such an existence, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” notable among them, along with “The Parable Of The Sower” by Octavia Butler and also some of the novels in her Patternist series.
Butler in particular, who’s work focuses on power dynamics, drills into the fact that in a world without laws, power goes to the most ruthless, shameless and predatory, and everything that that means. This leads us to the question, who’s apocalypse is this anyway? To paraphrase William Gibson “The apocalypse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”
Bad Salish Girl is a sqilxw indigenous anarchist focused on ecology restoration, land base survivalism and indigenous language revitalization. I enjoy her writing on Twitter which is alternately vulnerable, thoughtful and combative and offers a first person view of her experience as a young indigenous woman in the US. The point made in her tweet is I think an important one. For indigenous survivors of the US genocide, the apocalypse has already occurred, and they are living and surviving in the aftermath. This is almost certainly true for other post-colonial populations around the world for whom the arrival of white Europeans has meant devastation, ecological catastrophe, plague and trauma.
