Rock, Paper, Uniformitarianism

Morality in the bottom lands.

Uniformitarianism has been having a moment for awhile now. For those unfamiliar, uniformitarianism was the belief among geologists predominant throughout the nineteenth century and well into the middle of the twentieth that rocks don’t change fast. For landforms as large as rift valleys and ravines and canyons, the thinking went, change must take place on an equally magnificent timetable. Rocks, i.e. that which appears still, must always change slowly.

Today, however, we are so ready for the Big Change. We've studied Freytag's triangles¹ and rehearsed rising and falling action. We've had films upon novels upon stories that rehash floods, explosions, terrorist attacks, plagues, and slowburn devastation until all at once it wasn't slow anymore. We named a whole global climatic phenomenon with the moniker of change, fully expecting we'd know it when we saw it. If only someone could tell us what this change will be or when it would happen. We're not like those uniformitarians with their heads in the sand for decades, unable to see the marks on this country of how swiftly change can visit it. We are all catastrophists now.

Recently I finished reading Brandon Shimoda's The Afterlife is Letting Go, a book of mourning, remembering, and forgetting the incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. Among the many stories, both his and those of others (including responses to a questionnaire he sent to more than 250 descendants of those incarcerated), is the story of the removal of the memorial to James Hatsuaki Wakasa. Recountings of Wakasa's murder by the guards at Topaz concentration camp in the Utah desert is how Shimoda opens the book; whether Wakasa was attempting escape, as the guard presumed, or reaching for an “unusual flower” just outside the barbed wire when he was shot, is both the point and not the point. Upon his death, Wakasa's friends marked his grave as a site of remembrance with a 2,000 pound stone they erected on a concrete base on the spot of his murder. Before the memorial got the chance to memorialize, the government ordered the monument destroyed, and the Issei men buried it, though for a long time no one knew where it was as this had been done surreptitiously and went undocumented.²

The rediscovery of the rock by descendants, and its subsequent slapdash removal from the site of Wakasa's murder to the Topaz Museum—a private institution fifty miles away and helmed by a white director—reminded me of the removal of another large rock from a place where it was imbued with deep meaning and significance. The extraction of Tamanowas, a two-ton meteorite of cultural and spiritual importance to the Clackamas Chinook peoples, is the largest meteorite ever found in North America. According to Clackamas oral history, it came to the valley as a representative of the Sky People, and a union occurred between the sky, earth, and water when it rested in the ground and collected rainwater in its basins. This water became an important part of Clackamas ceremonies. In the early 1900s it was removed first to the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial fairgrounds as an attraction, and subsequently transported to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. Although the museum permits the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde to visit the meteorite for ceremonial purposes, it has said it cannot return Tamanowas to its ancestral homelands because the building’s foundation is built around it.

The artist Garrick Imatani has been thinking with and making work about Tamanowas in conjunction with the Chachalu Museum for many years now. He made a 3D scan of the meteorite which, with the museum's cooperation, he offered to the descendants of Tamanowas's dispossessed for ritual and healing. Shimoda’s book is another intercession on behalf of the rocks and the people. Gazing at Wakasa’s memorial stone in its new unimpressive resting place on a pallet after being hurriedly exhumed, he writes in language that could easily be applied to Tamanowas, too:

“I wondered what the stone was thinking and feeling. It seemed embarrassed, I thought, and very solemn in its embarrassment. But then I thought, no, not embarrassed, the stone’s injury and its shame cut much deeper than being embarrassed. The stone, resting, or attempting to rest, was being made to witness and endure something beyond its control. It was humiliated.”

White readers, I’m speaking directly to you now: there is a sickness inside us. One of forgetting and taking. It goes where we go. It has a direct throughline from the dispossession and genocide at the dawn of this country through to the ongoing dispossession and genocide of Palestinians. For us, we don’t know where we are and there is no return. It’s why we pick up rocks and squirrel them away in our homes. I know because I’ve done that for decades. I’ve walked rocky beaches on both coasts admiring and pocketing stones for how they feel or how they look; I bring them home and put them on my windowsill or my desk, and then I forget where they came from. General categories I might remember—the little basalt triangles with rounded points are from the Oregon coast; manqué rocks without their pyrite cubes came from the rocky beaches of Nova Scotia—but exact places or memories elude me. A rock can feel good in the hand or the pocket, can look good on a mantel, but it can’t tell me where I am and how I got here.

Am I leaping too fast from rocks and slow change and meteorites to taking and killing? I don’t think so. Archaeology and anthropology and geology have more to do with our stories than we think; sometimes I wonder why we separate them at all into distinct fields. What lies on the surface and what lies buried just underneath our narratives of change is a history of taking, a history of rapid, wholesale change already wrought on the land and the people who were here before. Nothing is the way it was, and it’s clear whose fault this is.

I finally watched First Cow, and the opening scene found me shouting at the screen. A young woman, played by Alia Shawkat in a cameo role, walks her dog along the Columbia River when the animal uncovers a human bone. Shawkat then spends several minutes unburying a shallow grave of two skeletons in an embrace. The whole time I’m shouting what, no, stop. You’re not supposed to do that, don’t give people the idea that that is okay. I found the scene incredibly disturbing, and not just from a forensic point of view. Those bodies end up being the protagonists of the subsequent flashback story, a white formerly indentured servant and a Chinese man who recently immigrated, but given the history of dispossession and massacre and sickness and death white people visited upon the indigenous peoples of this country, it is more likely that human remains have a tribe that is missing them. The Native American Heritage Commission of California has very clear and unambiguous instructions for what to do in this instance: stop and tell someone.

Upcoming

I’m delighted to be hosting a reading at Literary Arts on May 14, 2025, featuring several trans writers who have been involved with smoke and mold and/or who work in the vein of ecological queer and trans thought. Cavar will read from their fantastic experimental novel Failure to Comply, and we’ll be joined by Charlie J. Stephens (with potentially more guests TK!). I didn’t choose the title “Trans Nature Writing Extravaganza,” but you know what? I don’t hate it. If you’re local, I hope to see you there.

1. Incidentally, have you ever taken a peek at Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) of said triangle fame and his antisemitic novels that espoused the rights of the German nation to seize Polish land? You don’t have to dig very deep to expose the roots of the current rot of our stories.

2. Throughout the book, Shimoda intersperses four chapters documenting four separate visits to the Japanese American Historical Plaza in Portland, OR, each time confronting the ignorance, violence, and suffering that orbits that monument. One of the book’s strongest political statements comes on the heels of one of these meditations, and puts into words a sentiment I was trying to get at in No Queer Monuments:

“The task and the priority of any memorial to Japanese American incarceration must be the protection of the people who are at greatest risk of having their ‘civil liberties’ and ‘basic freedoms’ rejected, trodden upon and crushed, then and now. Which means that the only legitimate and the only honorable memorial to Japanese American incarceration is one in which no law enforcement, of any kind, would ever be permitted.”