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apart from the fact that I think it’s a silly-sounding word, the reason I don’t like Daniel Heath Justice’s “wonderworks” [concept] is that I think in an effort to recognize that Indigenous writers of speculative fiction are often beginning from a different set of ontological principles than settler specfic writers I think it ends up reifying the association of Indigenous ontologies with the speculative or fantastic — or “wondrous” — rather than the realist or just straight-up real, as opposed to actually challenging the underlying assumption that Indigenous ontologies are “merely” “cultural” while settler ontologies are “real” or “true”.
it seems to me that the goal should instead be to open up space for the “realist” ontological framework of reference (for both speculative fiction studies in particular and for literary criticism in general) to be something other than the dominant Western ontological and epistemological paradigm, and by so doing to push readers and critics to do the work to tease out what elements of, say Leanne Simpson’s “Big Water” are actually speculative and which only look speculative to a settler or non-Anishinaabe audience but are in fact realist when Anishinaabe ontology is the framework of reference.
the category of wonderworks as something that is “neither strictly ‘fantasy’ nor ‘realism,’ but maybe both at once, or something else entirely” imo just reproduces and naturalizes settler realism as the only possible “realism” as such.
Justice actually acknowledges this, sort of: “Many critics are quick to dismiss speculative literatures as escapist at best, reactionary at worst, and calling these stories wonderworks doesn’t change the rationalist bias that continues to dismiss Indigenous ways of knowing, spiritual and ceremonial traditions, and traditional concepts of other-than-human personhood as something other than ‘real’” (2018, 155).
— he just doesn’t then engage substantively with this problem and focuses instead on a defense of escapism and imagination (articulated ironically in very similar terms to Tolkien, but more open-ended — it’s the same approach I plan to take in my dissertation). but if (as [Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony’s characters, at least some of them some of the time, are) you’re already in another ontological paradigm, there’s no more escape or imagination in writing within those “ways of engaging with one another and our other-than-human relations” than there is in a conventional realist novel. it’s just realism starting from somewhere that’s not 19th-c Europe.
I’m taking my cue from Vanessa Watts here, too: the whole point of “Indigenous place-thoguht & agency amongst humans and non-humans” is to argue forcefully that “these […] events took place. They were not imagined or fantasized. This is not lore, myth or legend. These histories are not longer versions of ‘and the moral of the story is….’. This is what happened” (2013, 21).
the imaginative possibility in the stories in Walking the Clouds (e.g.) is precisely in their speculative elements — perhaps also in positing a world where Indigenous ontologies can operate without question or delegitimation, but really that strikes me as speculative only insofar as all fiction-writing is speculative. by the same token contemporary “realist” Gaelic fiction is speculative insofar as it posits worlds where Gaelic is the norm and English a marked deviation from it, if present at all — so, in other words, it’s fundamentally realist but with a kind of idealism or optimism in place of or alongside realism’s tendency towards cynicism.