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content disclosure: biological warfare, genocide

“They all got together for a contest / the way people have baseball tournaments nowadays / except this was a contest / in dark things….They were having a witches’ conference / that’s what it was”

—Leslie Marmon Silko, [Long Time Ago] from Ceremony

In the 18th and 19th centuries, during the European settlement of North America, indigenous communities were displaced, attacked, and in at least some cases, deliberately infected through distribution of blankets and other materials taken from smallpox hospitals. Although concrete proof for each outbreak is difficult to glean from a history largely written by the colonizers, documents exist that speak to the intent of settlers to wage biological warfare against indigenous peoples. Read more about smallpox disease and the history of this practice (from a European perspective) here at a source I trust.

Almost two decades ago, I went back to school to study infectious diseases. I met former Dean, D.A. Henderson, who led the World Health Organization’s successful campaign to eradicate smallpox. Considering smallpox–and the remaining laboratory repositories of the virus–led me back to Leslie Marmon Silko and the perspectives carried down via oral traditions in tribal communities. I’d read Ceremony, Storyteller and Yellow Woman in college. I touched the pages of Ceremony again, read [Long Time Ago] with different eyes and experience:

“But the witch just shook its head / at the others in their stinking animal skins, fur and feathers / It’s already turned loose. / It’s already coming. / It can’t be called back.”

(Pages 132-138 in my signed copy of Ceremony, Penguin Books, 1986)

Thus the draft of “A Contest in Dark Things” was born as I learned about the global burden of infectious diseases. As I wondered about the eventual fate of laboratory repositories. As I thought about power structures and health security. (The Blossom Project also was born during this time; use “read sample” for the Looking Landwards anthology if you’re curious.)

I came back to this seed of a poem after the pandemic, after years of public debate over the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis (largely debunked from a scientific perspective), after growing mis- and dis-information about infectious diseases has engendered distrust in public health.

Once trust is lost, it can’t be called back.

Read “A Contest in Dark Things,” available now at Stygian Lepus.

[Thanks to T.C. for the electron microscopy image of one of the strains of MRSA I was studying at the time.]

Epilogue: Lab leaks do occur, even at top-notch facilities (read about the Pirbright release of Foot-and-Mouth Disease here). Constant attention to biosecurity–resource investment in engineering, maintenance of safety protocols, attention to human factors, cultivation of expertise, and provision of appropriate local and international oversight–are critical to maintain on a global scale.