SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide

by Soph Myers-Kelley

SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide is a force written by Cannupa Hanska Luger, a multidisciplinary artist who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation. He creates artistic poetry by altering the original texts of a field/survival guide from the 1970’s. Eden Pearlstein contributes through “redactive and lifted poetries,” with many pages of the original text mostly being blacked out.

In a world where the rich have largely abandoned earth via space travel, the remaining poor and largely BIPOC inhabitants must make a pathway for survival. Surviva provides text with new and old Indigenous lessons intermingled, while time is wonky and permeable, and the world must be rebirthed, or re-membered in a postcolonial way. This is a message from both our future and past ancestors. The thread is one and the same.

The colors used in the book are primarily black, red, and white. Page 160 of the of the original survival guide explains the symbolism behind these color choices:

Our bodies are painted red, black, and white

The colors are symbols of what is beneath our skin

 

Red is the muscle

Black is the sinew

White is the bone

 

Our bodies are painted muscle, sinew, and bone

The anatomy is a symbol of what’s beneath our skin

 

Muscle is the will

Sinew is the connection

Bone is the structure … [160]

SURVIVA reminds us of our interconnectedness, survival needs such as food, water, fire making, and travel needs, art as action, and the ever-difficult problem of how to heal a wound that is still being cut. How do we heal as the damage is currently being done by greater social institutions and wider, hostile thought systems? Luger and friends point readers towards the direction where healing takes place.

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Soph Myers-Kelley is a medical librarian living in North Carolina. They can be followed at https://www.instagram.com/thesofakingofficial/