jaye simpson's short story "The Ark of the Turtle's Back"

According to the bio in Love After the End, "jaye simpson is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer whose roots hail from the Sapotaweyak, Keeseekoose, and Skownan Cree Nations." 

jaye is the subject of a film called I'll Tell You When I'm Ready. The film is 14 minutes long and available to stream here, and here is an interview with jaye about the film. In the film, jaye processes the grief of being seperated from her late mother, the significance of publishing her first book, and what her drag personanna means to her. And jaye reflects on how being in Vancouver helps her to feel close to her mother. The film includes spoken poetry and is poignant and beautiful. 

jaye's book, a body more tolerable, can be found wherever fine books are sold. Their short story The Ark of a Turtle's Back can be found in Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction.  

Summary

The protagonist of this story is introduced as someone who is "iwkekaazo, pretending to be a woman." (simpson, 2020, p.63). Her sister helps her obtain hormones. She takes care of children with her partner. She is unsure about whether or not she ever can or should have a baby of her own, and so she acts as though she is unsure about her partner. 

Her sister arrives and says they all have to leave quickly. They are in danger if they do not leave the planet, and the sister has found a way for them to leave the planet as part of a mass exodus. If they leave the planet, the main character will be able to have surgery in order to be able to have children. But the energy required for the exodus to leave earth would cause its core to cool, turning it into "the new Mars." (p.69).

The main character is very upset when she hears this. 

"Our people wouldn't leave her, and you know it. We would stay until her last breath and go with her. We are the caretakers, and if she dies, we die too." (p.69)

They leave earth. The main character has her surgery and also goes through an intense grieving process for earth. And then she does a ceremony with her partner and they prepare for their new life. 

Reflection

While I was reading this, I felt a lot of gratitude for my cis-het privilege of being able to conceive without medical intervention. I imagine it would be very difficult to want to have a baby and not be able to have a baby. I'm glad that the main character was able to have her surgery. 

When I was doing my PhD, someone asked me whether or not I found it depressing to reading about Indigenous science fiction, and I think they meant specifically cli-fi. I do not find Indigenous cli-fi depressing. 

I find actual climate change depressing. I used to live in Lytton, and one year I had to move to Lillooet. We were under evacuation alert and we were trying to get the moving truck packed before it turned into an order. Then when we got to Lillooet, we had to hurry, because there was a fire there too and we didn't know whether or not it would shut down the road back to the town where I had rented the truck from. And then later that summer, we could not go to our family fishing camp because of fires. That was over fifteen years ago, and since that time, I have been mentally grappling with the reality of climate change. I was on the road coming home from Alexis Creek during the atmospheric storm in 2021, and that is when my brain really started to rewire itself. Things are not like they used to be. Things will never be like they used to be. Things I took for granted, like fishing camp and quick trips to the interior, are no longer always within easy reach. We are beyond the "is climate change real?" phase. We are in the adapt phase of climate change. 

I find Indigenous science fiction, including cli-fi, comforting. When the main character in this story expressed emotional concern for earth as one does for family, she was voicing something that I feel inside of me, and something that is missing in mainstream coverage of climate change. I grieve climate change, and it's not all one big grief, it's ongoing. I am pretty sure that all of humanity feels some grief, even if it is pushed down. But I think that Indigenous people experience it differently because of the connection to land which is present in many Indigenous cultures. So when I read Indigenous cli-fi, I feel less lonely about what we are collectively going through. 

I also think that these stories which involve earth becoming uninhabitable also in a way hopefully push us all in society towards conversations about mitigation. 

My attitude towards Indigenous cli-fi reflects my attitude about stories generally. Stories are important. Stories play an important role in helping us understand the world around us. Stories can incite transformation. And so yes, sometimes stories talk about serious things. 

Works Cited 

simpson, j. (2020). The ark of the turtle's back. In J. Whitehead (Ed.), Love after the end: An anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer speculative fiction (pp. 9-16). Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press.