ABSTRACT
Young adult fiction is evolving. Readers of best-selling dystopian novels such as Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth’s Divergent are by now familiar with the imaginary devastated post-apocalyptic landscapes of the United Kingdom, United States and other western nations and the radically ruptured societies of our imagined future. Yet a recent subset of this popular genre that one might label “ecological dystopias” has recently emerged from the margins of the Anglo-American publishing superstructure with ideologies rooted not in western environmentalism but in indigenous and animist belief systems. Canadian Métis author Catherine Knutsson’s Shadows Cast by Stars (2013) and Australian Aboriginal author Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) are two exemplary novels of this genre. Where Knutsson’s and Kwaymullina’s novels differ from western best-sellers is in their indigenous protagonists’ deep spiritual connection to their roots – roots that are culturally and ecologically entwined. The capacity of the novels’ teenage heroines to enter into an intersubjective relationship with the spirit world to achieve social and environmental change is an ontological recourse unavailable to Rosoff’s, Collins’ and Roth’s western heroines. More specifically, the protagonists’ explorations of their human relationships with the natural and supernatural world by means of an animist discourse that invests “spirit” in the more-than-human, provides a transformative response to environmental estrangement centering on poiesis, autopoiesis and ecopoiesis that may have significant implications for ecocriticism as it is currently practiced.
