Haunted by her failure, she makes her way to Tse Bonito to consult with Grandpa Tah, a medicine man and old friend. Maggie takes the job - albeit reluctantly - and tracks unnamed monster into the mountains and slays it but is unable to save the girl. When one of these monsters kidnaps a young girl from the small town of Lukachukai, the residents summon Maggie as their last resort. Dinétah is lucky, having survived the initial Big Water event, but now legendary heroes, gods and strange monsters are roaming the land once more. Third, she is the survivor of the Big Water, the hybrid climate change/seismic catastrophe that drowned two-thirds of the North American continent, forming a new coastline that stretched from San Antonio in Texas up to Sioux Falls in South Dakota. Second, she lives in the New Mexico Navajo Reservation or Dinétah. She has clan powers that manifest to make her a gifted and efficient berserker-like killer, which - along with her abrasive personality - makes people fear her. First, she is a monster hunter and former protégé of the immortal Neizghání. We learn three things when we meet Maggie Hoskie in the opening of Trail of Lightning. “When I was fourteen, before the Big Water, when TVs still worked and the melting of polar ice was generating reports of record storms from Florida to Main, and the flooding along the Eastern Seaboard made Hurricane Sandy look like the female rain of a light summer shower, Coyote came to me.” p.88 Rebecca Roanhorse’s award-winning Trail of Lightning - an indigenous climate-fantasy novel - does just that.Ĭover Photo for Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse So, since September is Amerindian Heritage Month here in Guyana, I wanted to examine a book by an Indigenous person which centres climate change and climate disasters.
Indigenous peoples from around the world have been on the frontlines of climate and environmental activism, from the Sioux at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests to our very own wardens and trackers working in Iwokrama, to indigenous activists in Brazil doing their best to preserve the Amazon forests. This review of current climate literature is a sobering warning for our future if we do nothing to mitigate this ongoing disaster by holding the culpable corporations responsible for the ways they have polluted the globe. In early August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) released an updated report on scientists’ current understanding of the state of global warming and its implications for our present and future.
Originally published on Septemin the Stabroek News
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