Excerpts from “What’s on the earth is in the stars; and what’s in the stars is on the earth”: Lakota Relationships with the Stars and American Relationships with the Apocalypse
by Suzanne Kite (https://www.c21uwm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Kite_Whats-on-earth-is-in-the-stars_2021.pdf):

The same logic that allows for the consumption of Indigenous spiritual practices allows for the possession and destruction of the land and nonhumans. That same logic sees nonhuman extraterrestrials as simultaneously futuristic and evolved or reptilian and nefarious. In this many-headed imagining of the alien colonization of Earth, the Euro-American becomes “indigenous” through the act of being attacked, a distorted metaphor and a move to innocence for the invasions that are promised during American wars: the attack of the Japanese and Nazis, the attack of Communists, and the ongoing promised attacks on “freedom” by immigrants, Asian Americans, Latinx laborers, BLM activists, antifascists, Muslims, and whoever else is designated an enemy by the United States. Only through violence and war are settler futures imagined.

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In examining the geography of a haunted space, one can imagine the American map like Borges’s Unconscionable Map laid over the land itself. The new map that has been laid over the continent is haunted by the land just beneath the surface. An American mythological past is created through the blending of the paranormal with the landscape, an attempt to embed a settler past to create a settler future. Revealing the bias of settler sciences requires examining settler desires and beliefs, which ultimately form new myths and new gods. Over the relatively short history of the American identity, American mythologies have been developed through song, costume, literature, policy, and media. The phenomenon of Tumblr witches or the post-1970 desire to invent American Indian ancestors speaks to the desperation of the American to create their indigeneity.

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In the Euro-American context, ghosts are defined by both Christian teachings and Spiritualist understandings, even thought of as possible results of time travelers, “humanoids,” and other paranormal theories about hauntings. Looking toward cultural phenomena such as the stories of Washington Irving, the adoption of Hallowe’en, the explosion of spiritualism in 1848, and the satanic panic in the 1990s, it is clear that much of the American paranormal landscape is a direct manifestation of European conceptualizations of the afterlife and borrowed mythologies that have been laid over on top of the Americas, resulting in a pantheon of phenomena which persist today. In contemporary paranormal media, hauntings often start in the late 1800s, coinciding with the era of American Spiritualists. During the Spiritualist movement in particular, Euro-Americans living on “American” land were holding séances, while Indians living on Indian land were being starving to death and actively murdered as a part of the genocidal project. The idea of a haunting on Turtle Island, or any location, implies layers of beliefs, layers of living and the dead cohabitating: Americans, Canadians, white settlers implanting their own ghosts, layering their own stories over the top of the map, an attempt to retroactively own that location.

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In a recent conversation, artist Scott Benesiinaabandan spoke about the popularity of paranormal media: “Most non-indigenous people’s interaction with the mystery is they want to provoke it. This is like talking ghost stories around a campfire, right? They want proof or they want the thrill. They want to put their finger in the dark well of the mystery, but they’re not really wanting to be in that whole lake of mystery.”

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In 1998, a group of Dene elders from Northwest Canada traveled to Hiroshima to meet with survivors and descendants of survivors of the atomic bomb dropped some fifty years earlier. Some of the uranium used to kill more than 200,000 people in Japan had been mined and transported by Dene men, many of whom died years later from radiation-related disease. The six Dene elders came from where the earth had been torn up to the place where earth and sky were ripped apart like never before. They came to Hiroshima to apologize and to recognize the shared radioactive reality between people touched by the detonation of the bomb and those who unwittingly touched the materials that would make such a weapon. Nobody from the Canadian government was present, none among those who had exploited the miner’s bodies and their homelands and willingly aided the construction of the atomic bomb ever made the journey.

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Stones, taken from Indigenous lands using Indigenous bodies, and transformed into radioactive materials, is the material result of the American fear of the unknown enfolded with fear of nuclear radiation and executed as warfare and violence. This will be the materials of further colonization into space.

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Rieder proposes that “the way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures, but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate on another.” The colonial sense of progress is indelibly fixed to an unrelenting linear timeline towards a settler future, where Indigenous peoples are the uncivilized past, American white-superiority the present, and Mars colonization and extraterrestrials the future.

Excerpts from Postmodernism Is Not Permission by Kite (https://forgeproject.com/forging/postmodernism-is-not-permission#num-1):

Indigenous practices were acutely attacked by settler governments to specifically erode our ontological values. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim Tallbear explains how “monogamy and marriage are also part of sustaining an animacy hierarchy in which some bodies are viewed as more animate, alive, and vibrant than others.”

Intimacy is political and centuries of colonial policies in North America have sought to destroy Indigenous political power. Citing Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson writes, “the murdering, disappearing, and erasing of Indigenous women is necessary for Canada to secure and legitimize its sovereignty because they house and reproduce Indigenous political orders. This isn’t true just for Indigenous women, but it is also true for queer bodies and children because these Indigenous bodies have always housed and acted out Indigenous power, political and otherwise.”

For Indigenous people intimacy and closeness of relationships with family and the spirit world are the core of political power. Simpson continues, “All of our political structures are plugged into the essence and real power of life that exists across time and space as worlds of nonhuman beings, some of which are spiritual beings and some of which are our Ancestors.” Destruction of kinship with kin—material and immaterial—is the destruction of the whole.

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Artmaking and creation with Lakȟóta epistemologies is one way I approach the reorientation of my relationship with materials. Lakȟóta intimacies with the nonhuman allow for the potential manipulation of time and space into active cosmic vortexes, beyond the settler map. These Kapemni or twisting vortexes are created through ceremony that takes place with and through the nonhuman, in the deepest intertwinement and intra-actions, intimacies where we as mere humans cannot fabricate or ignore or manipulate the nonhuman agency necessary to make immense transformations of bodies and spirits and objects. “The distinction between natural and supernatural, so basic to European thought, was meaningless in Lakȟóta culture,” writes David C. Posthumus. “Humans are not superior” in Lakȟóta ontology, they are “pitiful and helpless” younger siblings of the animal world.

All pulled from “WRITING THE INVISIBLE: ARIANA REINES’S OCCULT POETICS” by David Ehmcke:

“Poetry’s not made of words”
—Ariana Reines, Mercury

“Something is saying itself through me”
—Ariana Reines

“That which is not of the body is not of the universe”
—Tantric maxim

When asked about A Sand Book, Reines explained, “Sand is the most obvious metaphor for time that we have—it’s so obvious that it’s invisible.…But it’s also a book about desertification and climate change and acquiring experiences of the divine through things we buy.”

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“In my late teens and twenties I felt so brutalized by the ‘you’ of advertising and politics,” Reines said in an interview with SSENSE. She continues, “I am not the ‘you’ you think I am…I am not the ‘you’ you’re looking for.”

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In “The Global Occult,” Niles Green writes, “The occult…emerged at the auspicious conjunction of colonialism, technology, consumerism, and globalization.” The entrance of religions designated occult— along with their practices, texts, and knowledges—into Western commerce and culture was “predicated on the movement and exchange of books and bodies, ideas and practices, all made possible by the steam travel, telegraphy, and world postal system that their impresarios would put to such effective use.”

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As metaphors of sand recur in A Sand Book, it becomes clear that poetry allows Reines to make connections that exist constantly in the “background of everything,” connections that are otherwise occluded amid the “noise”…that overwhelms digital platforms of communication…It is then that the reader can realize that as they continue their passive consumption on new media platforms, they participate in a desertification of language while the literal desertification of Earth’s land mass progresses too.

Poetry, for Reines, offers the possibility for occluded metaphors, connections, and forces that otherwise exist constantly in the “background of everything” to suddenly come to the foreground by way of Reines’s poetic staging of them. Her staging of what is occluded then stands as a criticism to understandings of and attitudes toward the world that otherwise occupy the foreground of consciousness in non-poetic thought. The stagings and connections that emerge from Reines’s poetic practice provide for her what she has identified as an “ecstasy of meaning,” which re-imbues language and the world with the meaning she had previously found ground to “sediment.”

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“I think so-called progressives and innovators need to think carefully about how their ideologies of experimentation, innovation, newness, progress, and improvement remap or offer support to these ideologies of capitalist, corporate, historical, patrilinear time.” It is important to consider in both McSweeney’s and Reines’s work how atemporality or cross-historicity figure as responses to linear “capitalist” time.

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Devin Johnston writes in Precipitations, “[O]ccultism can assist poetry in defamiliarizing the modern world and thus critiquing its pretensions to rational systemization.”

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Weber asserts that the organizing principle of rationalism is the belief that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces…one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” He concludes, “This means that the world is disenchanted.”…Later in “Science as a Vocation,” Weber asks, “Who…still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?”

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“Another trick that can be found in every religious tradition—it’s a trick, but it’s a good trick: every single thing that happens to you, that befalls you, is a treasure. A jewel in your hand.”

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Reines, too, has been critical of the disembodying effects of new media. She suggests, “I think the Internet as we now experience it very much reflects the people who built it, their concerns, their ideas about what the person is. Even if you go back to some of the founders of the Internet…these men were very exhilarated by the idea of getting rid of the body.” Indeed, one of these very founders, John Perry Barlow, wrote in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”