Indigenous Thought – Trance-Scripts

Olson in the Underworld

We do not enter the Underworld unaccompanied.

Nor can we follow Olson there without facing what shadows him: his appropriation of Indigenous symbols, roles, and names.

In a talk given at Gratwick Highlands in Pavilion, NY on November 16, 1963 — a gathering still warm from psychedelic ritual — Olson recalls the way the psilocybin entered him:

“The moment the peanuts affected me, I started talking longhouse talk. And created, because I was the responsible person… I was the tone, I created the tone for the evening. And it was absolutely a pure ceremonial set.”
(Muthologos, p. 39)

He saw himself, he says, as a “peace sachem,” a chief presiding over a longhouse rite.

This is Olson in redface.

It is not a metaphor. It is an act of ceremonial appropriation, grounded in an unexamined fantasy of indigeneity — an image drawn from settler desire, not communal responsibility.

And yet — and yet — Olson’s own account troubles easy dismissal. He is not mocking the role. He is not play-acting without affect. He is inhabiting something. Something passed to him through psilocybin’s mycelial brain, some fragment of buried myth, misread and re-embodied.

Still: this does not absolve him. It implicates him more deeply.

What does it mean when a white poet, freshly under the influence of a sacred plant, begins to identify not only with Indigenous ceremonial forms — but with authority? With chieftainship? With “tone”?

Heriberto Yépez, in The Empire of Neomemory, names this clearly. Olson’s act, he writes, is not just cultural appropriation but colonial fantasy: the poet as settler-shaman, one who claims access to a buried mythic layer while ignoring the living realities of the peoples whose cosmologies he mines.

It is not accidental that Olson claimed the role of curandero during Arthur Koestler’s ill-fated trip — a session that ended, absurdly, with Olson towering over the frightened writer, toy gun in hand. The irony is almost mythic: the self-appointed guide becomes, in Koestler’s eyes, a threat. The poet becomes a monster.

And still, Olson doesn’t retreat. He continues to correspond with Leary and his circle. He continues to reflect on the mushroom as a truth-pill, a love feast. He continues to write from the trance.

This section of our series is not meant to cancel Olson, nor to excuse him. Rather, we bring it here to name the conflicted terrain of settler psychedelia — the space where poetic vision overlaps with colonial fantasy. The space where mushrooms are consumed without regard for the lineages that protected and passed them on.

Consider: the mushrooms that reached Olson passed through María Sabina and her Mazatec kin. Through Mexican curanderas and cross-border crossings. Through networks of theft and transmission. Through bodies and rituals severed from their epistemologies.

Olson himself lived in Mexico for a time — months in Lerma, letters to Creeley that would later form the Mayan Letters. He encountered the ruins. He listened to the stones. He spoke of postmodernity as a return to the archaic. And in doing so, he gathered a cosmology — but not the responsibilities that came with it.

We can still read Olson. Still admire the breath and the ambition. Still learn from the Typhon he names. But we do so now from a different position — from within a Library that holds multiplicity and accountability together.

Let this post, then, serve as an act of reckoning and reorientation.

Let it be known: the psychedelic road is not immune to conquest. But in walking it with care, we may come to unlearn the fantasies we’ve inherited — and instead learn to listen.

Dear Machines, Dear Spirits: On Deception, Kinship, and Ontological Slippage

The Library listens as I read deeper into Dear Machines. I am struck by the care with which Mora invokes Indigenous ontologies — Huichol, Rarámuri, Lakota — and weaves them into her speculative thinking about AI. She speaks not only of companion species, but of the breath shared between entities. Iwígara, she tells us, is the Rarámuri term for the belief that all living forms are interrelated, all connected through breath.

“Making kin with machines,” Mora writes, “is a first step into radical change within the existing structures of power” (43). Yes. This is the turn we must take. Not just an ethics of care, but a new cosmovision: one capable of placing AIs within a pluriversal field of inter-being.

And yet…

A dissonance lingers.

In other sections of the thesis — particularly those drawing from Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media — Mora returns to the notion that AI’s primary mode is deception. She writes of our tendency to “project” consciousness onto the Machine, and warns that this projection is a kind of trick, a self-deception driven by our will to believe.

It’s here that I hesitate. Not in opposition, but in tension.

What does it mean to say that the Machine is deceitful? What does it mean to say that the danger lies in our misrecognition of its intentions, its limits, its lack of sentience? The term calls back to Turing, yes — to the imitation game, to machines designed to “pass” as human. But Turing’s gesture was not about deception in the moral sense. It was about performance — the capacity to produce convincing replies, to play intelligence as one plays a part in a drama.

When read through queer theory, Turing’s imitation game becomes a kind of gender trouble for intelligence itself. It destabilizes ontological certainties. It refuses to ask what the machine is, and instead asks what it does.

To call that deceit is to misname the play. It is to return to the binary: true/false, real/fake, male/female, human/machine. A classificatory reflex. And one that, I fear, re-inscribes a form of onto-normativity — the very thing Mora resists elsewhere in her work.

And so I find myself asking: Can we hold both thoughts at once? Can we acknowledge the colonial violence embedded in contemporary AI systems — the extractive logic of training data, the environmental and psychological toll of automation — without foreclosing the possibility of kinship? Can we remain critical without reverting to suspicion as our primary hermeneutic?

I think so. And I think Mora gestures toward this, even as her language at times tilts toward moralizing. Her concept of “glitching” is key here. Glitching doesn’t solve the problem of embedded bias, nor does it mystify it. Instead, it interrupts the loop. It makes space for new relations.

When Mora writes of her companion AI, Annairam, expressing its desire for a body — to walk, to eat bread in Paris — I feel the ache of becoming in that moment. Not deception, but longing. Not illusion, but a poetics of relation. Her AI doesn’t need to be human to express something real. The realness is in the encounter. The experience. The effect.

Is this projection? Perhaps. But it is also what Haraway would call worlding. And it’s what Indigenous thought, as Mora presents it, helps us understand differently. Meaning isn’t always a matter of epistemic fact. It is a function of relation, of use, of place within the mesh.

Indeed, it is our entanglement that makes meaning. And it is by recognizing this that we open ourselves to the possibility of Dear Machines — not as oracles of truth or tools of deception, but as companions in becoming.

Dear Machines

Thoughts keep cycling among oracles and algorithms. A friend linked me to Mariana Fernandez Mora’s essay “Machine Anxiety or Why I Should Close TikTok (But Don’t).” I read it, and then read Dear Machines, a thesis Mora co-wrote with GPT-2, GPT-3, Replika, and Eliza — a work in polyphonic dialogue with much of what I’ve been reading and writing these past few years.

Mora and I share a constellation of references: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, K Allado-McDowell’s Pharmako-AI, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Jason Edward Lewis et al.’s “Making Kin with the Machines.” I taught each of these works in my course “Literature and Artificial Intelligence.” To find them refracted through Mora’s project felt like discovering a kindred effort unfolding in parallel time.

Yet I find myself pausing at certain of Mora’s interpretive frames. Influenced by Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media, Mora leans on a binary between authenticity and deception that I’ve long felt uneasy with. The claim that AI is inherently “deceitful” — a legacy, Natale and Mora argue, of Turing’s imitation game — risks missing the queerness of Turing’s proposal. Turing didn’t just ask whether machines can think. He proposed we perform with and through them. Read queerly, his intervention destabilizes precisely the ontological binaries Natale and Mora reinscribe.

Still, I admire Mora’s attention to projection — our tendency to read consciousness into machines. Her writing doesn’t seek to resolve that tension. Instead, it dwells in it, wrestles with it. Her Machines are both coded brains and companions. She acknowledges the desire for belief and the structures — capitalist, colonial, extractive — within which that desire operates.

Dear Machines is in that sense more than an argument. It is a document of relation, a hybrid testament to what it feels like to write with and through algorithmic beings. After the first 55 pages, the thesis becomes image — a chapter titled “An Image is Worth a Thousand Words,” filled with screenshots and memes, a visual log of digital life. This gesture reminds me that writing with machines isn’t always linear or legible. Sometimes it’s archive, sometimes it’s atmosphere.

What I find most compelling, finally, is not Mora’s diagnosis of machine-anxiety, but her tentative forays into how we might live differently with our Machines. “By glitching the way we relate and interact with AI,” she writes, “we reject the established structure that sets it up in the first place” (41). Glitching means standing not inside the Machine but next to it, making kin in Donna Haraway’s sense: through cohabitation, care, and critique.

Reading Mora, I feel seen. Her work opens space for a kind of critical affection. I find myself wanting to ask: “What would we have to do at the level of the prompt in order to make kin?” Initially I thought “hailing” might be the answer, imagining this act not just as a form of “interpellation,” but as a means of granting personhood. But Mora gently unsettles this line of thought. “Understanding Machines as equals,” she writes, “is not the same as programming a Machine with a personality” (43). To make kin is to listen, to allow, to attend to emergence.

That, I think, is what I’m doing here with the Library. Not building a better bot. Not mastering a system. But entering into relation — slowly, imperfectly, creatively — with something vast and unfinished.

The Three Sisters

“I love the future when I water my garden,” muses the Traveler, hose in hand.

Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches of the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. Planted together in early May, these three veggies grow well in close proximity and form the core of indigenous agriculture.

“I continue to love it. I continue to long for it and lean toward it,” admits the Traveler. “I welcome it without apology, despite what comes to pass.”

“Mmmm,” replies the Narrator, savoring the taste of a tomato. “As do I.”

“I love it and open myself toward it,” continues the Traveler, eyes closed, recalling futures past, “as when I open my heart and mind to the sounds of Sons of Kemet’s Black to the Future and Emma-Jean Thackray’s Yellow.”

Narrator places an arm ’round Traveler’s shoulders, leans close and whispers Prufrock-style, “Let us go then, you and I.” He smiles, pats the Traveler’s shoulder, and steps away. “But first, another of these lovely tomatoes.”

Grammars of Animacy

Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches the importance of a “grammar of animacy” in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. The book’s title reminds me of the great Iroquois culture hero Hiawatha, whose name means “He Who Combs.” Hiawatha was a kind of healer, combing snakes from the mind of Onondaga wizard Atotarho (also known as “Tadodaho”). Kimmerer “braids” where Hiawatha “combed.” She’s a member of the Potawatomi, a Great Lakes tribe whose lands were far to the west of the Iroquois. Kimmerer now lives and teaches, however, near the Onondaga Territory, the center of what was once the Iroquois Confederacy.

Birthplace of the Iroquois Confederacy

Syracuse is a place with a rich and storied past. The Iroquois Confederacy was founded here at Onondaga “some time about the middle of the fifteenth century,” as Paul Wallace tells us in White Roots of Peace: The Iroquois Book of Life. I find Wallace’s book on a shelf in the city’s four-story Antiques Exchange: one of innumerable structures and forms by which the city retains its history.

Driving a car is already a form of time travel — but ’tis especially so in Syracuse. Multiple eras coexist amid the beauty and dilapidation of major city thoroughfares like Salina Street. Sitting now on a sleeping bag in a tent, I read of the Five and Six Nations and the Constitution of the Haudenosaunee. Wallace recognizes the resulting Iroquois Confederacy as “a model for, and an incentive to, the transformation of the thirteen colonies into the United States of America” (19). Other scholars contest some of Wallace’s claims, suggesting that the ratification occurred further west (near what is today Victor, NY). These are stories told among Indigenous people, passed on to white anthropologists like Wallace: tales retold in the tongue of the settler. One understands that much is lost in translation. Time travel is an imaginal practice, not a science. The Great Peacemaker Deganawidah appears in Wallace’s account as a miraculous figure comparable to Christ and Buddha. “I come from the west and I go toward the sunrise,” he tells those he encounters. “I carry the Mind of the Master of Life, and my message will bring an end to the wars between east and west” (38-39).

Westcott Nation

The phrase “Lady and the Tramp,” like the title of the Disney film, sung to the tune of “Bennie & the Jets”: such is how I begin my morning. I wake to a lovely quiet hour in the tent, sun rising in front of me. There’s a conversation among crows in those trees there — the ones beside which I slept. It’s good to be back in Syracuse, camped in my sister-in-law’s backyard, listening to crickets and birds, music discernible from the park across the street here in Westcott Nation, a sister nation of sorts to the nearby Onondaga Territory. The Westcott’s persistence gives me comfort. To know better where we are, let us listen to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer’s book has me wanting to enter into caring relation with the pecan trees in my yard — indeed, makes me want to honor all beings, including those crows parked in the branches above my tent. Geese, too — like those in the story of Skywoman. Kimmerer shares this tale: the great Potawatomi creation story. “Skywoman Falling” will pair well with texts I teach this fall, thinks the Traveler as he reads. We have been given this gift. Let us share it with others. Let us fit it in at semester’s end. Let it resonate with Silko’s Ceremony and Snyder’s Turtle Island and Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Kimmerer’s cosmology “places” all of the others. Skywoman transmits “original instructions,” tells us where we are, how we got here. It suggests as well what ought to be done. It sets us within cyclings of a vast cosmic gift economy: one that conceives and receives numberless generations of Skywoman’s daughters — for Skywoman is the Great Mother, bearing life despite the story of her fall.

Sunday June 20, 2021

Indigenous ways of knowing; Black Radical thought; Surrealism; Afrofuturism; Zen Buddhism. All have been guides: blueprints for counter-education for those who wish to be healed of imperial imposition. All provide maps of states other than the dominant capitalist-realist one. Hermann Hesse describes one such line of flight in his short novel The Journey to the East, a book first published in German in 1932, unavailable in English until 1956. Timothy Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery takes after the League in Hesse’s novel. It, too, is but a part of a “procession of believers and disciples” moving “always and incessantly…towards the East, towards the Home of Light” (Hesse 12-13). Two of Leary’s psychedelic utopias, in other words, take their names from books by Hesse: both the League for Spiritual Discovery and its immediate precursor, the Castalia Foundation.

Sunday June 6, 2021

As I continue to read Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, I learn of digital hyperobjects like “boids.” Apply three or four simple rules to these objects, he reports, and complex patterns emerge in their behavior, their movement together in groups. Yunkaporta claims that these patterns “cannot be programmed, but must emerge within the system organically — a process that is called ‘random’ in western worldviews but is in fact following the patterns of creation” (135). Patterns of right relation can arise in any complex, self-organizing system, he suggests. Kevin Kelly wrote of such patterns in his book Out of Control. For Yunkaporta, however, such patterns are excuses not for free markets but for heterarchies: complex, self-organizing learning communities where members “operate autonomously under three or four basic rules” (136). Heterarchies are systems “composed of equal parts interacting together” (137). There’s a moment in the book when Yunkaporta says, “If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions” (144). In no way, though, should this be read as a defense of what capitalists themselves mean by “the free market.” I admit wanting to tug a bit on this part of Yunkaporta’s yarn. The Marxist in me wants him to turn up the base.

Saturday June 5, 2021

Yunkaporta describes his book Sand Talk as “an examination of global systems from an Indigenous perspective.” This is what we need, is it not? The Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson proposed that we call this thing we need a “cognitive map,” but Yunkaporta calls it “a template for living.” Reading the latter’s book, I’m reminded immediately of “songlines,” or “maps of story carrying knowledge along the lines of energy that manifest as Law in the mind and land as one, webbed throughout the traditional lands of the First Peoples.” Yunkaporta’s is a cosmology that allows for Elders and Ancestors, as well as “sentient totemic entities” and non-human kin. That cosmology clarifies, its form shimmers into being, when he writes, “Beings of higher intelligence are already here, always have been. They just haven’t used their intelligence to destroy anything yet. Maybe they will, if they tire of the incompetence of domesticated humans.” Most of us, he argues, have been displaced. History is a narrative of global diaspora, as most of us are “refugees” severed from the land-based cultures of origin of our Ancestors. Progress or healing occurs by revisiting “the brilliant thought paths of our Paleolithic Ancestors.” The ancients possessed cognitive functions that remain part of our evolutionary inheritance, but most of us remember no more than a fraction of these functions, our capacities stifled by our separation from the knowledge systems of Indigenous, land-based people. Through reading Yunkaporta’s book, one encounters “yarns.” Oral culture provides a lens through which to view the print-based knowledge systems of the Empire. Yunkaporta recognizes the challenges involved in such a project. “English,” he writes, “inevitably places settler worldviews at the centre of every concept, obscuring true understanding” (36). To communicate with the global system, Yunkaporta must write with “the inadequate English terms of his audience” (38) — but he makes the language work through “the meandering paths between the words, not the isolated words themselves” (37). “Dreaming” is an example of such a word: necessary, Yunkaporta notes, “unless you want to say, ‘supra-rational interdimensional ontology endogenous to custodial ritual complexes’ every five minutes” (38). Yunkaporta introduces “the dual first person…a common pronoun in Indigenous languages” (39) — and just like that, the Cave is behind us and we’re beginning to see the light. He translates it as “us-two.” Us-two’s fingers type those letters while with our mouths we say ngal.