Jodi prefaced their talk with saying that the work they are presenting today is a work in progress, which will hopefully result in a book! [Congrats Jodi!]. In being sensitive to that, we don’t want to give too much away, but some of the fascinating and important things that Jodi shared are included here. Jodi wanted to talk through some of the themes of the new work, entitled Indigenomicon, starting with HP Lovecraft, and how he was born in the same year as the massacre at Wounded Knee, the timing of which contributed to his macabre world-building of underworld creatures. They are described in The Necronomicon, the book within a book in the HP Lovecraft stories, whose name, created by Lovecraft, combines three Greek words necros, nomos, and icon – which he apparently brought together to mean ‘an image of the law of the dead’. Law and image for Jodi contribute to “base interdisciplinary concepts within cultural studies, critical race theory, video games studies and any field concerned with the representational and visual politics of indigeneity, race, gender and sexuality.” Byrd sees Lovecraft’s explorations through horror fiction of themes such as white supremacy as threatened by minorities, new technology, illegal border crossings, and land removals of Indigenous Peoples among others, as “an instructive foil for our contemporary moment”.
For us at the Institute, this is the second speaker we have had use Lovecraft as a touchpoint, as André Brock also referred to his work in his presentation on his book, Distributed Blackness. Byrd focuses on Lovecraft’s representations of Indigenous Peoples, which was often deeply disturbing as they are shown as manifestations of, as Byrd describes, “something much, much older and deeply malevolent beneath the American continent,” something that was clearly threatening to Lovecraft. This colonial and supremacist tendency is, disappointingly, not usually fully acknowledged by the many more recent authors, game designers, film-makers and others who refer to elements of his work, which gives credibility to Lovecraft and his disgusting positionality. Byrd wants to acknowledge these things, and bring them to the forefront in order to confront them, and use the moment as a way to think through what Ruha Benjamin refers to as the ‘new Jim code,’ the using of new technology that continues to perpetuate colonial discourses.
For Byrd, the role of the Indigenous as it plays out within the discourses of settler and colonialism focuses on the image of the law for their upcoming book, helps to “think productively about how sites and signs of indigeneity as well as its erasure and disavowal function within the vectors of racial capitalism, ongoing dispossession, and the structures of inequality, through which differential racializations occur in the current North American political, cultural, economic, literary, and now gaming, registers.” They referenced Patrick Wolf’s 2006 essay ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’ which was published in the Journal of Genocide Research. Byrd focuses on the discussion of the importance of land that Wolf refers to, that land is necessary for life, which captures for them some of the key tensions that are relevant to both Black and Indigenous studies. Who gets to decide what land is, and what life is, are key questions that thread through “the stories we tell and the games we play”. Linked to this, Rob Nichols’ book Theft is Property is a critical touchpoint, asking questions about proprietorship, possession and settler colonialism that has dispossessed, and exerted ownership over land that they did, and do, not have rights to. Therefore theft is the mechanism by which land has been acquired, and by trying to create solutions to the theft, those making the attempts to resolve only seek to resolve what was created within the same system, and do not seek solutions outside of it.
All of these tensions can be found within video games that engage with ideas of frontierism and dispossession; even Super Mario Bros has been read as a “conquistadorial travelogue” as posited by Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller. One point that Jodi put incredibly poignantly, is that video games should be a way of offering players new insights into their daily lives, and tools to critique their experiences, within a recognized anti-Black and anti-Indigenous framework. However, and disappointingly, they are more likely to use the ‘Columbus’-like trope, which does nothing to question its origins, and continues to reinforce the genre, as controversies like ‘Gamergate 2014’ showed. Recently, Rockstar Games’ ‘Red Dead’ series came under Jodi’s scrutiny – it shows a frontierland already cleansed of Indigenous Peoples and nations, conveniently avoiding any issues as to how that came to be, or how close the territories are. Here Jodi referred to the essay ‘On Colonial Unknowing’ by Juliana Hu Pegues, Manu Vimalassery and Alyosha Goldstein, which discusses ignorance of Indigenous presence and how current colonialism is perpetuated.
The final point that I want to note from Jodi’s talk, returns to the idea and concept of land, and water, and how being understood as “necessary for life” as per Patrick Wolf above doesn’t quite get to the same meaning that they are life, as original statements from Indigenous people read. Byrd referred to the protection of all of our relatives, including land, water, and rivers, that are themselves living, with needs and wants of their own, beyond the realm of human needs and wants. It has to be the maintenance of relations that is the key for understanding, and learning. In closing, I’ll use Jodi’s own words to describe how Indigenomicon “is a project that looks at videogames as sites of technology and cultural productions, but it is also a study of how Indigenous philosophies challenge and transform how we might understand land relationality responsibility and accountability in the brutal anti-Black settler colonial ‘nomicons’ that have produced our present and threaten our future.
Thank you so much to Jodi for being so generous with your project, and sharing the exciting, inspiring, challenging, provocative and necessary work that you are doing. We look forward to seeing how it progresses. I, as an English, white, settler in unceded, stolen lands in Canada am always trying to think of ways to appropriately appreciate, work, and live as such a person. By engaging with the topics that Jodi brought up in their presentation, I hope to improve my own position, and those of others by sharing, and encouraging people to learn for themselves. Read the work that Jodi referred to, and read Jodi’s work (!), and draw from it to critically examine your own positionality.