Academic terms like interdisciplinary and intersectional suggest the existence of separate categories of study—ones of experience that can intersect but remain distinct from one another. The field of Indigenous literary studies has long troubled cloistered forms of research, urging readers to interpret texts, in their various artistic forms, through intertwined political, social, and scientific lenses. Songs, stories, and artwork, then, become sites of interaction, not only between reader, text, and creator, but between ideas, ways of thinking, fields of study, and the human and more-than-human. Given the importance of land and the natural world in various Indigenous traditions on Turtle Island and beyond (Note1), it is unsurprising that the fields of Indigenous literary studies and Ecocriticism are mutually informative, often coinciding and interacting in literary spaces. Haisla and Haíłzaqv (Note 2) author Eden Robinson describes herself as a “moody, grim writer,” who “like[s] moody, grim settings” (Robinson, “Eden Robinson”), but much of her writing illustrates the beauty of the landscape and more-than-human in Coast Salish territory (what is now called British Columbia). While her first novel, Monkey Beach, most overtly deals with human relationships with the land, place, and more-than-human, her recent Trickster trilogy does so in more underlying, nuanced ways. 

In both its form and content, Robinson’s Trickster trilogy explores the potential and risks inherent in bringing difference together. The trilogy follows Haíłzaqv protagonist Jared Martin, who finds out in the first book of the series that he is one of the magical sons of Trickster Wee’git. Navigating complicated relationships with his family, friends, alcohol, magic, and a new reality, Jared finds himself in the center of a battle between more-than-human beings. Throughout Jared’s plotline, Robinson intersperses italicized chapters narrated by the omniscient Trickster Wee’git, Jared’s father. These chapters are often seemingly disjointed from the central plotline, sardonic, and inundated with scientific jargon and enigmatic language. In an interview with PRISM Magazine’s Anita Bedell, Robinson describes the trilogy as her contribution to Haisla Trickster tales, in which the reader is meant to learn (often what not to do) vicariously through the Trickster’s course of action (“The Door”); Wee’git’s actions in the central plotline undoubtedly adhere to this tradition. However, I argue that these chapters narrated by Wee’git accomplish something similarly didactic but distinct from traditional Trickster tales. This paper examines the Trickster chapters in the trilogy’s second book, Trickster Drift, namely “Spook” and “Rupture.” By magnifying encounters that go undetected by humans on micro and macro scales, these chapters demonstrate the importance of—and Robinson’s principles of—the more-than-human contact zone. The more-than-human focus in these chapters, I argue, interrupts and balances the anthropocentric central plotline and provides a deeper understanding of human interaction in the text and beyond. Interwoven with Jared’s narrative, Wee’git’s chapters attempt to tell stories of the natural world, but inevitably also tell of—and can inform our understanding of—human interaction. 

Intercultural interaction has been examined heavily in and beyond the humanities. Mary Louise Pratt’s seminal theory of the contact zone provides the fundamental framework for this paper’s examination of Trickster Drift. In her 2008 book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Tranculturation, Pratt troubles the European travel writing tradition, exploring how adopting natural history as ideology inspired the development of European “planetary consciousness” and a hegemonic “reflex” in the West (15). Reflecting on her book recently, Pratt explains its purpose “was to move the study of empire from the imperial center to the site of imperial intervention, in effect to decenter Europe” because “[t]o grasp how imperial power worked and how it could be contested, it was essential to move the position of analysis…to the place where invasion, extraction, and colonization were carried out and lived—to the contact zone” (“Afterword” 799). Pratt defines contact zones as “spaces where cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (697) (Note 3). While she addresses geography, movement, and ideology in her “humanist project,” the environment and the role of the more-than-human remains unexplored. 

In their special issue of ENE: Nature and Space, Jenny R. Isaacs and Ariel Otruba address this gap in Pratt’s earlier work, which they argue serves as an entry point for more-than-human reformulations of the contact zone in the field of ecocriticism. However, in her response to these new applications of the contact zone, Pratt cautions against “read[ing the contaxt zone] as a solution, idealized as something to aspire to, imagined as an edenic, harmonious place where people (or creatures) separated by deep differences successfully collaborate and cooperate, each side responsive to the other’s needs and interests”; she explains how 

[t]his normative use of the concept is ideologically coherent but revokes its critical and analytical force… [and] the concept acquires its specificity as the solutions emerge to the problems that brought the concept into play. If the concept of contact zone emerges in connection with ‘‘pressing problems,’’ it is nevertheless not the name of any solution; it is an instrument in the search for solutions. (“Afterword” 800)

This paper seeks to reformulate the contact zone as Isaacs and Otruba do, but also to follow Pratt’s guidance, applying the contact zone as an instrument  in search of change, specifically in the way we read and understand human and more-than-human interaction. In addition to literary criticism, my analysis might also be appropriately located within more recent ecocritical scholarship that applies Pratt’s contact zones to the more-than-human (Note 4). As Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose explain, the conventionally sought after and imagined “inclusivity” in spaces of interaction like cities—“under banners like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’—is often “limited to human diversity in its many forms” (17). van Dooren and Rose assert that we can understand difference, that is, the “incommensurate, but also overlapping, adjacent, and entangled” multispecies stories that exist in a space, as complementary “by their very difference” (18). In a similar vein, Maan Barua also challenges anthropocentric theory, troubling 

cartographic ‘inversions’ that run deep within the colonial project: that building precedes dwelling, with only humans bearing the capacity to build or to ‘produce’ space; that humans and animals are not inhabitants but occupants of an already furnished world; that the ‘in here’ of society is separate and purified from the ‘out there’ of nature. (268)

These inversions, Barua explains, problematically “position the surface of the earth as terra nullius, disavowing the meaningful environments of animals and claims of those purportedly below Europeans in the hierarchy of beings.” Following theorists such as van Dooren, Rose, and Barua, this paper seeks to illustrate not only how encounters with “forces and powers that are not our own have immense potential analytical and practical purchase” (Barua 269) but also how examining more-than-human interaction can inform ethical human interaction. Moreover, I consider how in Trickster Drift, Eden Robinson’s demonstration of the “radical forms of multispecies storytelling” that Barua advocates for, urges readers to live, write, and read relationally.

Refraction in the Contact Zone

Isaacs and Otruba rightly identify Métis/otipemisiw thinker and scholar Zoe Todd as one of the emerging more-than-human reformulations of “contact” and “justice” that “extend[s] the reach of [Mary Louise] Pratt’s work into new registers and scales” (704). Like Pratt’s decentering project, Todd’s research on human-fish relations challenges the authority of human (Western) memory, history, and law, encouraging people to see fish as beyond food, specimens, and inputs in surveys and dry policy documents (“From fish eyes to fish law”). In much of her work, she examines how colonialism “obscures Indigenous legal orders and thinking in which humans, animals, water and land are integrated into nuanced and duty-full relationships with one another, replacing these legal-governance realities with ones that draw solely on anthropocentric French and English legal paradigms,” working to center the more-than-human in scholarly discussions on Indigenous self-determination, peoplehood, and governance in contemporary Canada (“From fish eyes to fish law”). This paper centers Todd’s thinking on refraction, a scientific phenomenon describing a bending of light, sound, or water waves that occurs between mediums like air and water, that is, in a contact zone. Todd metaphorizes refraction as a symbol for “the intellectual and affective labour that Indigenous people (and the more-than-human!) perform every day to bend, scatter, challenge and transform the ideologies and ethics that the State imposes regarding human-animal, human-environmental and legal-governance norms” (143). Notably, her thinking is intimately related to water—something fluid, mobile, and the essence of all living beings. She describes the colonial relations of recognition in Canada using water, “an ebb and flow” that “surges in moments of public remorse or defensive denial of Canada’s colonial history. And then it ebbs back into collective non-memory for those who are not viscerally impacted by the day-to-day legacies of Canada’s genocidal history” (132). Power to resist colonialism comes from the watery depths: “beneath the surface lurk creative, insistent and dynamic modes of resistance to ongoing colonial relations and storytelling in Canada. And these modes of resistance involve not only human, but also more-than-human, entities (132). I extend Todd’s argument “for the urgency and necessity of centering human-fish relations” to demonstrate the potential for nurturing relationships between the more-than-human and human more broadly; I also demonstrate how ethical relations can be learned from the more-than-human. Todd asserts that co-resistance and co-existence, between human and more-than-human beings, is necessary to battle the settler-colonial system that so devastates both. She urges people in Canada to live in a way that

does not deny difference, but rather seeks to more deeply understand how our different histories and experiences position us in relation to each other. This form of relationality is ethical because it does not overlook or invisibilize the particular historical, cultural, and social contexts from which a particular person understands and experiences living in the world. It puts these considerations at the forefront of engagements across frontiers of difference. (132)

Todd brings difference and the importance of interaction between distinct beings into conversations about decolonization that have long promoted the identification of similarities and erasure of difference as a step toward empathy and more meaningful relationships. However, by metaphorizing refraction, the interaction between water and air that fractures the way we see things, Todd shows how Mary Louise Pratt’s thinking on contact zones can apply to human and more-than-human encounters. Refraction, Todd explains, represents the labour of Indigenous worldviews—founded in ethics, good relations, and acknowledging our inherent interrelatedness—that resists and bends settler-colonial ideologies. 

Drifting and Water in Trickster Drift

Through its emphasis on water and its interactions, Robinson’s Trickster Drift epitomizes the kind of resistance Todd describes, refracting colonialism like the contact point between water and air. Water and interactions with water are central to Trickster Drift. In addition to Robinson’s use of water-based metaphors and expressions, especially in relation to emotions (for example, moments that describe “waves of warmth” [Robinson 146] or the feeling of floating [79]), there are a host of water-beings, and though all are coastal, this book, specifically, is set in Vancouver, a traditional gathering place for—among other Indigenous peoples—the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples because of its access to central waterways. Moreover, the book’s title, Trickster Drift, brings the focus to water and its power to control the characters’ direction, both literally, foreshadowing scenes such as  the one in a chapter titled “Rupture” that depicts human movement away from a tsunami, and figuratively, in characters’ seemingly serendipitous movement toward saturated and thus spiritual spaces like the beach and urban park Jared retreats to when in distress. Because “the Haíłzaqv are an ocean people” (“Sign the Petition”) with a “living symbiotic relationship to our ocean” (Brown), Robinson’s rainy, saturated setting plays a central role in Jared’s identity development and growth. This paper’s line of inquiry is partially animated by Jared’s relationship with water, specifically his intimate encounters with water and retreats to zones proximate to water such as beaches and urban parks in times of need. In the text’s antecedent action, Jared describes himself as “adrift in a lifeboat, dying of thirst surrounded by an ocean” (Robinson, Trickster 139); the second book in Robinson’s Trickster trilogy tracks Jared’s drifting between urban, rural, dry, and wet spaces, associating particularly wet spaces to his development of a Haíłzaqv identity. In Trickster Drift, it is Jared’s newfound relationship with water, that is, culture and community, that quenches his thirst. Although Jared’s navigation of wet, urban space and land deserves close scholarly attention, this paper is concerned not with the central plotline in Trickster Drift that follows Jared, but the depiction of water-based contact zones in Robinson’s hypertextual didactic chapters narrated by Wee’git. Set in or centered on water encounters, I argue these seemingly interruptive chapters are sites of literal and figurative refraction, theorizing and demonstrating ethical encounters between human and more-than-human beings. In addition to embodying Zoe Todd’s theory of refraction, I argue these hypertextual chapters also outline Robinson’s own principles for navigating the complexities of contact zones.

Principles of the Contact Zone: Refraction in the Micro and Macro

In Trickster Drift, Robinson’s depictions of encounters between distinct more-than-human beings such as water, light, plants, and landscape, demonstrate and embody properties of refraction. The more-than-human contact zones in which these encounters occur, both in the narratives and on the page, can inform human interaction as well. For example, in the chapter “Spook,” Wee’git asks the reader to “[c]onsider a leaf” that is at first glance, he reflects, “[n]ot a terribly exciting thing. Green, generally…can be pointy, like the needles on your average Christmas tree…or flat like paper [...;] you probably pressed some maple ones between wax paper to make art that you taped to your refrigerator” (Robinson, Trickster 160). Here, Robinson positions leaves relationally, describing them within a contact zone between the natural and the urban, displaced and relocated in a human-and-more-than-human contact zone. Removed from their home, Robinson tells of human traditions that forcibly place them between other more-than-human materials such as wax paper, tape, and the refrigerator. Robinson’s use of second-person narrative voice universalizes a fictionalized human-leaf relationship founded in sentimental, well-intentioned interaction that removes or denies agency, inhibiting the leaf’s ability to provide a contact zone and instead, making it an object within one.

Beyond its location in a contact zone, Wee’git describes, notably using Western academic diction, how leaves themselves are also a microcosm of contact through photosynthesis:

the process by which a leaf takes sunlight, water and a few minerals and makes the earth a habitable place for oxygen breathers. Your leaf captures light photons in its chlorophyll molecules…[l]ight hops through a forest of chlorophyll molecules straight to the cell’s reaction centre, where it is stored as potential energy. (Robinson, Trickster 160)

He explains further that “light, you see, doesn’t behave like a localized particle travelling along a single route…[it] behaves quantum mechanically, like a spread-out wave that samples all possible routes at once to find the quickest path” (160). The leaf has always been a contact zone for light, soil, and water, and its propensity for holding “potential energy” implies an eventual use of its potential, that is, in a manifestation of kinetic energy. This micro-level contact zone is, in its most basic form, nourishment; through the process of photosynthesis and the growth it incites, the leaf provides sustenance for itself as well as others.  The leaf is also highly relational through its place in food webs, which allows it to support a variety of life. This process of self and communal sustenance can inform a more macro-level kind of growth and nourishment possible in other contact zones. Wee’git emphasizes interrelatedness between beings, explaining that “things are not so neat” in relationships in the contact zone (Robinson, Trickster 161). On the leaf, for example, there is a “qualit[y] of entanglement” in which the interaction of protons produces a change: “[a]fter they’ve touched…[w]hen one changes, the other instantaneously changes to the opposite frequency, even if they are light years apart” (161). Here, Wee’git defines interrelatedness as mutual influence, something multidirectional and fluid. The contact zone on the leaf in “Spook” redefines the concept of contact, implying that the changing power is not in the contactor, but in the contact zone itself.  The power of the leaf, then, to nourish, create potential, and incite change, resides in its ability to bring different, related elements together.

Even within the composition of the chapter “Spook,” Eden Robinson demonstrates how these central principles of relationality and “entanglement” can outline an ethical and productive navigation of contact zones, specifically contact between Indigenous and Western knowledges. Although Wee’git’s narrative objective is overtly identified by Waterlily the beaver, these chapters are undoubtedly didactic, challenging the conventional Western separation of storytelling and education. Similarly, Wee’git’s diction, using Western scientific terminology when referring to photosynthesis, the metric system, biomechanical quantum mechanics, zones of subduction, and more, combines Western knowledge with Indigenous understandings of similar events. In “Spook,” for example, he begins with attention to the land, the leaf, and attends to what it might teach humans: “Such a simple thing, a leaf…you are far from simple. You are a little universe. You are the wet and pulsing distillation of stars, a house of light made bipedal and carbon-based, temporary and finite. You are also the void” (Robinson, Trickster 161). But Robinson also acknowledges the common experience of settler-colonial education (learning about its processes in biology class), its relationship to technology (solar panels), and, even in the above quotation, uses scientific jargon to teach relationality. She acknowledges the reality and existence of the big bang (161), but also the existence of “places beyond [our] own world,” something that seems to be a void yet is magic (161). In “Spook,” Western and Indigenous worldview and ways of understanding share space and demonstrate relationality, an “entanglement” with each other.

In a later chapter, “The Rupture,” Robinson details and demonstrates the importance of acknowledging and respecting boundaries in the navigation of contact zones, cautioning readers of the destructive, divisive potential of contact when distinctions between beings are blurred or covered. Wee’git begins the chapter by explaining how the tectonic plate under North America, “one of the great slabs of mantle and crust separating all living things from the earth’s molten core” moves slowly, “placid[ly]” (Robinson, Trickster 286; emphasis added). On a much larger scale than the leaf, he describes macro, planetary elements, whose contact is similarly imperceptible to humans because of its scale. Like in the leaf, this contact also contributes to a build-up of potential energy: the plates are “bulg[ing] like flood water piling up against a dam, ready to burst” (286). The space where plates “brush against each other as they travel in opposing directions” produces a seemingly benign distancing—in this instance,“the world shakes itself free” of the inter-being contact (286). Contrarily, when boundaries disappear because of layering, when “one plate slides under another…, the world shakes until it rips itself apart” (286). The potential energy stored in the contact zone is released destructively when this kind of layering or covering occurs. Describing her relationship to a friend and colleague, Lee Maracle (Stó:lō) explains the complexity of layering in terms of interaction: “the borders of our fabrics fit so neatly in our hearts,” but “layering both acknowledges borders and renders them irrelevant. Borders are silly and at the same time so powerful. Borders and your position within them teach respect, bind knowing to being, move you” (28-29). This understanding of layering as something that can acknowledge and also erase, evidently applies to the first half of “The Rupture” discussed above. While a potentially productive space of contact, the tectonic contact zone beneath the continent becomes divisive and destructive, bringing on a monumental earthquake and tsunami. This devastation is foreshadowed by Robinson’s use of contactor-contacted language, which implies a unidirectional kind of contact between the plates that mirrors Pratt’s cultural contact zone, which presumes a disparity in power or authority. In this macro-level contact zone, boundaries are more visibly important than on the leaf. Robinson’s symbol of the dam as a boundary and the holder of potential energy has a central role in helping navigate this contact zone. Through the image of layered tectonic plates, Robinson emphasizes the importance of spaces of contact, but also the acknowledgement of boundaries that uphold the integrity of the elements interacting in the contact zone (Note 5).

In the second half of the chapter, Wee’git provides an alternative explanation more grounded in Indigenous storytelling for the earthquake and tsunami. It begins, mid-chapter, narratively:

On a winter’s evening on the twenty-sixth of January in the year 1700, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook the northern Pacific coast of North America for five minutes and released a tsunami so powerful that when it reached Japan, the 600-mile-long wave churned the waters around the island of Honshu for eighteen hours. (Robinson, Trickster 287)

This second half attributes the world’s “shak[ing] until it rips itself apart” to an epic battle between Thunderbird and “a whale that had become a monster, killing other whales” (287). Wee’git narrates this clash’s traumatic effect on the land, water, and people, explaining how “[a]s Thunderbird pulled the whale out of the ocean, the water receded, and then, when he dropped the whale, the water came flooding back, flinging canoes into the trees. When they fought on land, it shook with the epic battle” (287). This story describes a turning away from one’s own community in the waters and an attempt to restore balance with violence. Moreover, it suggests not necessarily (or only) cause, but response; water responds to the battle by receding and flooding. An imbalance in water causes an imbalance in the various adjacent spaces and nations with which it is in contact, evident in how

The earth snapped, popped, and rippled as the shaking moved from west to east. Sand became so loose, people walking on the beach sank into it. Trees whipped, making a strange rattling noise. Longhouses up and down the coast collapsed. Landslides buried villages…Stands of cedars and firs near the shore died as salt water drowned their roots. (287)

This series of traumas, moving from one element to the next, suggests a relational “entanglement” between more-than-human beings that the Western historic narrative does not address. In this instance, the contact zones between beings within communities, beings from distinct communities, and even between different natural landscapes such as the ocean and the land, can result in great trauma without balance, loyalty, and an awareness of one’s surroundings.

Eden Robinson’s inclusion of both the Western and Coast Salish explanations of the 1700 earthquake and tsunami demonstrate a coming together of ways of understanding. Like “Spook,” the chapter borrows language from both the Coast Salish stories “unique to the Cascadia coast…from [what is now called] Vancouver Island to northern Oregon” (Ludwin et al. 144) as well as Western articles. However, unlike in the micro-level chapter, Robinson distinguishes more clearly between Western history and Indigenous story through a literary boundary: Wee’git’s formal narrative restart— “On a winter’s evening on the twenty-sixth of January…” (Robinson, Trickster 287). Although there is a defined first and second half in both tone and content, they are, importantly, included in the same chapter. This combination of voice and story makes the chapter a productive contact zone for both kinds of knowledges, demonstrating the principles of entanglement and relationality cultivated in “Spook.” Each story is given balanced page space and is similarly prioritized. Curiously, Robinson leads with the Western explanation. Whether this placement is to allow for the second story to fill in the gaps in the first, to reject the need for settler stories to “confirm” Indigenous knowledge, or simply because one must be written on the page first and the other read last, Robinson’s balanced treatment with a clear acknowledgement of boundaries demonstrates how stories and knowledges might productively interact, that is, exist in contact zones, to more thoroughly explain the world around us. While these chapters inherently tie the story to the natural world on micro and macro scales, the leaf’s relocation to “your” kitchen and the plate’s expansive reach bring the outdoors in and the bedrock to the surface.

These italicized contact-zone chapters from Wee’git’s perspective affirm the transformative, refractive potential of these (intangible narrative) spaces. The image and character of Raven abound in various Indigenous storytelling traditions. In Haisla culture, Robinson explains, he shows “the consequences of bad behaviour without [the reader/listener] actually having to do them,” but also holds more formal roles (Robinson, “The Door”). In Trickster Drift, Wee’git’s role seems twofold, both as informal and formal teacher, as evident in Jared’s plotline and the italicized chapters, respectively. In Wee’git’s chapters, his tone is undoubtedly more reflexive, didactic, and what Susan Lanser calls “exra-representational,” that is, narrating “beyond the fiction,” often using direct addresses or alluding to other writers, texts, and in this case, teachings (17). His tone makes evident what Lee Maracle elucidates about Raven in Memory Serves: “Raven has become a metaphor for cataclysmic social change. She has brought us from a simple fishing and gathering village life to the computer age. Raven has done so as a paramount engineer of social transformation” (74). Wee’git, then, is a very fitting narrator for the italicized hypertextual chapters which both describe natural-found contact zones and apply their principles through storying.

Raven is also central in the study of culture and story, specifically cultural “collision,” Maracle asserts, “articulat[ing] our losses as a positive” (73). Maracle’s chapter “Understanding Raven” explains Robinson’s use of Western and Indigenous knowledges, entangled and relational, but distinct. Robinson’s Trickster Series complicates conventional Indigenous-settler dichotomies that place concepts like story, traditional knowledge, land, and tricksters opposite science, history, and academics, demonstrating how they might interact more meaningfully and ethically. Maracle probes these concerns with Indigenous-settler “collision” and what might be gained from it, maintaining “difference is valuable,” and that

[e]ach culture has something unique and specific to offer. The complexity of culture from which I arise is made manifest by the complexity of character and being in my family. Whether it is a result of cultural collision with others, or whether it is a result of our history or all the foregoing matters little. I imagine original story from my current and historical being. I glean lessons from it and turn them into reality. (72)

Maracle’s critical and creative work on raven—such as in her novel Ravensong and her essay “Raven Understood”–points to the importance and generative potential of thoughtful, critical responses to collision and catastrophe: “Humans call it catastrophe. Just birth, Raven crowed” (Ravensong 14). I read Robinson’s trickster chapters as Maracle’s works on raven have often been read, that is, as a call for a politics of coalition, a demonstration of “building [relationships] across chasms of violent displacement, dispossession, and colonization” (Tibbits-Lamirande 221) and a depiction of the “simultaneous process of individuation, collectivity, and resistance” (MacFarlane 111). Wee’git brings together Indigenous and settler ways of knowing with an attention to entanglement, boundaries, and balance, challenging western hierarchies that have, for decades, sought to only supplement Western knowledge with Indigenous ways of being. Like Maracle’s early works, Robinson illustrates how the need to study culture intentionally and bring together Indigenous and settler ways of knowing ethically, counterhegemonically, has remained ignored.

The principles of “entanglement,” acknowledgement of boundaries, care, and awareness that I have drawn from “Spook” and “The Rupture” provide direction for the cultivation of productive and ethical contemporary intercultural contact zones. By doing so, they embody Zoe Todd’s theory of refraction and extend her philosophy of relational living to the creation of—and engagement with—story. The italicized chapters in Trickster Drift exemplify Barua’s proposition, refracting traditions of storytelling by expanding conventional human-centered writing and limited Western narratives. Refraction is occurring not only literally, in the intra-textual more-than-human contact zones, but at the formal extratextual level, urging readers to tell stories (and live) more relationally.

Conclusion

Throughout Trickster Drift, Eden Robinson theorizes and demonstrates principles of ethical encounter. In her hypertextual Trickster chapters, she demonstrates the complex, multifaceted nature of navigating zones of contact; for Robinson, ethical and productive encounter requires an acknowledgement of these many aspects—our entanglement, boundaries, balance, care, and attention to one’s surroundings. As much as Robinson’s text embodies Zoe Todd’s theory of refraction, that is, an act of bending, fragmenting, and scattering, she also gathers and unifies these particles, each a distinct and enriching piece, to outline an ethical way forward. Through Wee’git’s detailing and demonstrations of these principles, Robinson confirms the potential that abounds in contact zones, as well as the refractive potential of stories that engage intimately with them. Robinson’s careful navigation of Coast Salish and European knowledges confirm Donna Haraway’s assertion that “most of the transformative things in life happen in contact zones […;] contact zones are where the action is, and current interactions change interactions to follow...Contact zones change the subject—all the subjects—in surprising ways” (219). In Trickster Drift, teacher and Trickster Wee’git illuminates the mutually informative potential of the more-than-human and human as well as science, that is, studying the world around us, and literature. what we might learn about the refractive nature of social interaction, boundaries, and contact zones that are inherent in both the natural world as well as in story.

Notes

1. Among many, many others, see, for example: Jeanette Armstrong (Okanagan); Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene); Jo-Ann Episkenew (Métis); Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation); Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation); Lee Maracle (Stó:lō) and Naxaxalhts’i (Sonny McHalsie)(Stó:lō); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (Anishinaabe) As We Have Always Done; Eve Tuck (Unangax̂).

2. Also seen written as Heiltsuk.

3. Various Indigenous scholars have further theorized sites of contemporary social human interaction. See, for example, Gerald McMaster’s (Plains Cree, Siksika Nation) similarly spatial metaphor of borderzones that emphasizes liminality and spaces of “ambiguity and indeterminacy [that] create such interesting ‘playful’ possibilities” (80). See also Chris Andersen (Métis) for his survey of McMaster and Renya Ramirez’s theory of hubs as well as his own thinking on how urban Indigenous society “must be understood as a distinctive engine of cultural and political power” (163).

4. For more on ecocritical applications of the contact zone, see Isaacs and Otruba.

5. For more on interaction between ideas and beings that uphold their individual integrity, see Robert Warrior’s (Osage Nation) metaphor of intellectual trade routes.