"Pink Eye Was All the Rage": Colonial Identity Sickness in Stephen Graham Jones's The Bird Is Gone:A Monograph Manifesto

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• "Pink Eye Was All the Rage"Colonial Identity Sickness in Stephen Graham Jones's The Bird Is Gone:A Monograph Manifesto
• Sara Spurgeon (bio)

In Stephen Graham Jones's 2003 novel—a surrealistic, postmodern Native alternate history—readers quickly come to understand that all is not well in the newly created sovereign Indian Territories. In a speculative future that sounds like it ought to be the setup for an Indigenous utopia, Jones (Piikani) imagines instead a world in which the psychic effects of settler colonialism and intergenerational trauma persist as a kind of infection carried into the Indian Territories by Natives themselves. Not even the establishment of legal sovereignty over much of the Great Plains cures the multiple forms of colonial disease hindering many of the older Native characters from developing a decolonized Indigenous Indian identity.

In her introduction to Walking the Clouds, Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) identifies The Bird Is Gone: A Monograph Manifesto as an example of Indigenous futurism. Dillon argues that "all forms of Indigenous futurisms are narratives of biskaabiiyang, an Anishaabemowin word connoting the process of 'returning to ourselves,' which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact" as part of a decolonizing effort (10). In line with Jones's fondness for horror, this novel casts the process of biskaabiiyang, concerned primarily with decolonizing identities, as a violent, blood-spattered struggle against the virulent infection of both colonially inflicted intergenerational trauma and the whole idea of utopia, which he also characterizes as a kind of infectious disease. Despite its deceptive appearance as a utopic future vision of legal Native sovereignty, The Bird Is Gone presents a possible future that has veered instead into what Dillon describes as a [End Page 303]

state of imbalance, often perpetuated by "terminal creeds," the ideologies Gerald Vizenor warns against in advocating survivance in the face of invisibility.

Imbalance further implies a state of extremes, but within those extremes lies a middle ground and the seeds of bimaadiziwin, the state of balance, one of difference and provisionality, a condition of resistance and survival. Native apocalyptic storytelling, then, shows the ruptures, the scars, and the trauma in its effort ultimately to provide healing and a return to bimaadiziwin. This is a path to a sovereignty embedded in self-determination.

(9)

Jones's novel implies that self-determination is perhaps the most difficult goal to achieve for Native characters raised in, and infected by, colonialism, even in a legally sovereign Native space.

Previous scholarship on the novel has generally focused on either the legal trickery utilized in the establishment of the Indian Territories (the unintended outcome of the passage of an obscure piece of environmental legislation known as the Conservation Act), or on the novel's refusal to slide comfortably into definitions of utopic/dystopic literatures.¹ This article, on the other hand, draws attention to Jones's rejection of those literary categories, especially the idea of utopias, which Jones addresses in an interview with Billy J. Stratton, focusing instead on the novel's insistence on the importance of constructing sovereign Indigenous identities, that is, identities based in Native ideas about what it means to be Indian, free of the toxic infection of colonialism. Such an act of identity transformation, Jones implies, is both the most necessary, and most difficult, component of Indigenous nation-building.

The Bird Is Gone, in other words, is less concerned with utopias or dystopias per se, but rather with how they may be birthed or murdered by the identities of those determined to create them. In this speculative fiction novel containing magic, time travel, and a malfunctioning robot Lone Ranger, and shaped by Jones's horror-inflected sensibilities, terminal creeds and intergenerational trauma are imagined as what might be called "colonial identity sickness." Suzanne Methot (Nehiyaw), writing on intergenerational trauma and PTSD, argues that neither is fully capacious enough to describe [End Page 304] the trauma experienced by Natives living under settler colonialism. She differentiates PTSD, for example, from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), which she argues results from ongoing colonization. CPTSD, she insists, is "the most accurate framework for understanding the challenges faced by Indigenous peoples...