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.