Krista Collier-Jarvis

Research

TransAtlantic Fluidities: Lochs and Bogs” set out to respond to the overarching aim of the SGSAH Earth Scholarships programme, namely, to intervene in and address the climate emergency by engaging in what SGSAH calls, “new approaches to address[ing] the global challenge of climate crisis.” However, I wouldn’t call the approaches I draw on—traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge—as “new” per se, because these ways have always been; what is new is the increasingly formal recognition of traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge as valid and scientific and placing it in conversation with other research epistemologies on an international scale.

Spence Collier-Jarvis; footage taken of Loch Ness, 2024 (used with permission).

My intervention came to a pinnacle in the highlands where I went hunting for the Loch Ness monster. Well… kinda. I went hunting for stories of the Each Uisge, better known as the Loch Ness monster, nessie, the waterhorse, or the kelpie, with the goal of understanding how folkloric figures born of particular places embody shifting cultural anxieties about the environment. Ultimately, this research is rooted, so to speak, in the idea that climate change has always been—albeit, in the contemporary sense, functioning at a rate that the human species has not previously witnessed and cannot seem to adequately adapt, and thus resulting in higher rates of ecophobia and climate change anxiety. I argue that we don’t fear climate change so much as we fear the climate changing. What I mean by this is that we have constructed, through colonial binary thinking, the land as a fixed and stable space in opposition to water as a fluid and unstable space (Alder Through Oceans Darkly, 7). Indigenous thinking, in contrast, dispels this binary. Our inability to control, or, according to some discourses, “manage” the land as a place of unchanging stability results in a resistance to acknowledging and developing solutions to climate change, and so, we tend to displace anxieties resulting from our lack of anthropocentric superiority and control over the environment onto the land itself. In our stories, this often results in the manifestation of a monster—or what Jack Halberstam eloquently calls “the scraps of abject humanity” (143). According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “the monster’s body is a Cultural Body… an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place” (199). And through said embodiment, the monster answers Halberstam’s question regarding “who must be removed from the community at large?” (3). This is what happened to the Each Uisge of Loch Ness in such horror films as Beneath Loch Ness (2001), Loch Ness Terror (2008), and The Loch Ness Horror (1982; 2023). In turning Each Uisge into a monster and thus justifying hunting it, we seek to rid the Scottish landscape of a repressed past as well as a future changingness and recover some mythological form of environmental stability.

As I hunted for stories the Each Uisge, though, my attentions were drawn toward a different figure that we might also call Gothic, and in some cases, potentially monstrous. She is an embodiment of the land, the water, as well as the places in between, and even as she inspires fear, she ultimately dismantles these mythical ideas of environmental stability—I am, of course, talking about the Cailleach. She has many names, such as “hag,” “witch,” “goddess,” “veiled one,” (d’Este and Rankine 22) and “queen” (BBC Scotland), and there are many, many versions of her story. Sorita d’Este and David Rankine trace the oldest stories back to the fifth century B.C.E. along the Iberian Peninsula of Spain (15), first in Histories from the writings of the historian Herodotus, who chronicled Celtic oral tales, and then later, those of Strabo and Pliny (11). These stories migrated with the Celts to Ireland, then on to Scotland and the Isle of Man (d’Este and Rankine 12). d’Este and Rankine argue, “More than any other figure in Celtic or British myth, the Cailleach represents the cumulative power of time” (12). One such reason is that, over two thousand years later, we still tell her-stories, but also, because she is often represented as a crone figure associated with winter and time (d’Este and Rankine 12). The manner in which she traverses time collapses past, present, and future, so that the present is never held hostage at the expense of the past or the future. She is also often called “the mother of the herd” (Brideson) for her affiliation with deer, which she is tasked with protecting from hunters (d’Este and Rankine 12-13). And finally, she is a mover of the Earth; in many stories, she forms mountains and shapes the Scottish and Irish landscapes (d’Este and Rankine 25).

Krista Collier-Jarvis; a red stag encounter in Glencoe, 2024.

The Cailleach is abundant across Scotland, and while there are many stories about her, I want to focus specifically on two versions, which are tied to the places that I visited while in Scotland. The first was told by Michael Given during our time in Glencoe. This Cailleach is “the hag of the bog,” and she is an extension of that interstitial space. She follows those who traverse the bog and attempts to steal the cap off their head. If she succeeds, she rubs the cap between her palms, resulting in the cap’s owner growing weak and weary. Eventually, she rubs the cap into nothingness, and its owner collapses in the bog, dead.

Krista Collier-Jarvis; the SGSAH 2024 Earth Scholars listening to Michael Given telling stories about the Cailleach, 2024.

In theorising bog Gothic, Derek Gladwin refers to bogs as “marginalised landscapes […] untamed wastelands that resist incorporation into modernity and colonialism. Consequently, the Bog Gothic […] draws on, synthesizes, and expands the natural history of bogs and their enigmatic fusion between human and non-human elements” (40). When read in this context, the Cailleach represents a connection between humans and their non-human neighbours who inhabit the bog; she is simultaneously static and fluid, and marks a resistance to colonialism, its modernities, and Western conceptions of progress (after all, bog’s resist development). This Cailleach seems to be dangerous, Gothic, dare I say, a monster of Glencoe. Yet, one must only fear her under two conditions: the first is if they wear a cap, of course, but more importantly, the second is if one is disconnected from the land. For example, one’s demise at the hands of the hag of the bog is a slow, embodied process that only occurs when the victim is not paying attention to their bodily relationship to the bog space. In resisting this entanglement, the victim, ironically becomes part of the bog when they finally collapse into it. The Cailleach gives the bog a kind of agency and forces the trespasser to either entangle themselves willingly with the space or to succumb to it. The body, in its final demise, intervenes in the mythical distinctions between the fluid and the static as the bog is neither land nor waterway.

The second story chronicles how Loch Ness was formed by the Cailleach (d’Este and Rankine 34). In nearby Inverness, the Cailleach had two wells, which she would open every morning and cap every night (d’Este and Rankine 35). One day, the Cailleach left her duties to a maiden named Nessa, but Nessa came too late to cap one of the wells that evening. As the water spilled over, Nessa ran away, but the Cailleach, witnessing the events from atop a nearby mountain, cursed Nessa for neglecting her duties, and transformed her into the River Ness and Loch Ness (d’Este and Rankine 35). In this latter version, the Cailleach collapses distinctions between water and the body as Nessa goes from a seeming state of anthropogenic stability into environmental fluidity. Thomas M. Stuart would call this a “queer disruption” or “trans-fluidity” whereby the body transforms (223-5). Stuart claims that Gothic characters exhibiting “trans-fluidity,” whether it is of body, time, space, and so on, “sit on borders and boundaries, mocking taxonomic and evolutionary discourses” (223). In essence, these bodies disrupt Western and colonial constructs of a species hierarchy and a status quo. Stuart, building on the work of Lee Edelman, goes on to note that “these transtemporal, transgender entities ruptures [sic] reproductive futurity, the basic foundation of the contemporary social structure” (219). As such, fluidities are designed to open up the possibility of human extinction narratives by eschewing heteronormative reproductive futurity. In “Embracing Extinction,” Sarah E. McFarland argues that conventional Western narratives “are actually salvific operations that suppress the potential of human extinction and, instead, demonstrate the recuperation of individual sovereignty and endurance: the white male human individual as the site of survival, with a female character signaling the potential for heteronormative reproductive futurity” (839). But, fluidities allow for other kinds of futurities. In essence, to intervene in the climate emergency might just require accepting the unstable, the fluid, and the possibilities of extinction. All of which are part of accepting the climate changing, and here is where I would like to highlight how and why traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge can be a beneficial addition to this dialectic.

A 2019 Assessment Report created by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) claims that “lands managed by Indigenous Peoples tend to be healthier and more vibrant than other areas. […] over 1 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. Yet Indigenous territories sustain animals, plants, clean air and fresh waters that are in dangerous decline elsewhere” (“Healthy Lands”). The reasons noted for this contrast include “respectful management,” maintaining strong relationships between people and the land, and using traditional knowledge (“Healthy Lands”). In the Mi’kmaq context, for instance, our relationships with the land are based on the principles of Netukulimk. Similar to the traditional ways of the Quechua peoples that Charles Pigott shared during our time at Strathclyde, Netukulimk is premised on respect, responsibility, and reciprocity between humans, other-than-human species, and all non-living things with the goal of ensuring there will be enough for the next seven generations. In practice, Netukulimk would dictate that we resist hoarding, overharvesting the land, and privileging any species, including ourselves, over other species. It is a way of thinking and being that does not privilege past, present, or future; it does not privilege stability but claims that everything is fluid; it accepts the loss of certain species as part of life; and, it proposes an ethics of land stewardship instead of management.

Dan Shilling notes the irony in the fact that it has taken so long for non-Indigenous peoples “to consider the spiritual and ecological underpinnings that helped define Native peoples’ relationships to nature” given that “these relationships ‘sustained’ most tribal nations, and the land on which they lived, for thousands of years” (3-4). This is not to state that all Indigenous nations have done so successfully, of course, nor that many did not damage their own lands (Shilling 4). Ultimately, it comes down to the idea that Indigenous nations “sensed that their existence was linked to the environment’s wellbeing” (Shilling 8), and while this may sound easy enough, it requires a commitment to developing long-term relationships with the land that are reciprocal and based on allowing the land to change in the manner that it sees fit rather than the manner that we see fit. J. Baird Callicott believes that our relationship with the environment, above all things, cannot be based on what “use” the land has for humans (cited in Shilling 11). So, in the Scottish context, how might we learn from things that have long held relationships to the land? Well, stories of the Cailleach and how they have been altered across time might work.

McHardy refers to Cailleachs as “hags who were once goddesses” (60), pinpointing how the Church’s influence in Scotland recast the Cailleach as “malevolent hag and spinner of evil spells” (d’Este and Rankine 109). d’Este and Rankine argue that her “positive qualities have been demonized and she has become twisted into a malevolent or hideous figure of fear, a far cry from the benevolent land-shaping lady of the beasts, or priestess guarding the waters and the animals” (109). d’Este and Rankine go on to note how “the mindset which produced the witch trials emphasized a negative view of solitary women” (109), resulting in the Cailleach becoming the perfect scapegoat during the witch trials that occurred in Scotland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. She has thus transformed many times over the past two and a half thousand years, and as an embodiment of the environment, the land itself has borne the benefit and the brunt of said shifting ideologies. And yet, despite the influence of Christianity, the witch trials, and contemporary desires to create a scapegoat for our rising ecophobia, the Cailleach remains. Of the wealth of Scottish figures we may call Gothic or monstrous, the Cailleach stands the test of time, and evokes the unique “materialities and social practices,” as Emily Alder might term them, of the Scottish landscape.

Tom J. Hillard, speaking of “Gothicized representations of nature, [argues that] ecocritics stand to learn a great deal by looking seriously at the long history of unsettling and horrific depictions of the natural world” (691) while Simon C. Estok asserts that “the more we talk about representations of nature, the more it becomes clear that there is a need to talk about how contempt for the natural world is a definable and recognizable discourse (what we may call ‘ecophobia’)” (204). Hillard’s and Estok’s calls to action are precisely why I’m contextualizing these tales in the Gothic despite them not being explicitly discussed as such, and precisely why I believe traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge is necessary.

So, the ultimate question addressed by this research is whether we can leverage the fear produced and embodied by stories of the land, such as tales of the Cailleach, as methods for intervening in and addressing the climate emergency? To answer this, I turn to ideas of naturalistic horror as well as philosopher and environmentalist Val Plumwood, and her concept of “the eye of the crocodile” (Keetley; Plumwood 10). To be in the “eye of the crocodile” or perhaps the Cailleach or the Each Uisge, “is to be rendered inconsequential in a harsh and predatory universe” where, as Dawn Keetley states, “one goes from the center of the universe to meat, from being the origin of meaning to [that which is] absolute[ly] meaningless.” Perhaps, this is exactly what we need to become.

Works Cited

Alder, Emily. “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and Nautical Gothic.” Edinburgh Napier University.

BBC Scotland. “The Cailleach – ‘The Woman That Created Scotland’ | BBC The Social.” YouTube, uploaded by BBC Scotland, 18 Feb. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faX4qZ4Ipbk.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1996.

d’Este, Sorita and David Rankine. Visions of The Cailleach. Avalonia, 2009.

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Technology and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 2006.

“Healthy Lands.” Land Needs Guardians, n.d., https://landneedsguardians.ca/healthy-lands. Accessed 15 Aug. 2022.

Keetley, Dawn. “Shark Horror, Part 1: Naturalistic Horror.” Horror Homeroom, 6 July 2015, https://www.horrorhomeroom.com/shark-horror-part-1-naturalistic-horror/. Accessed 9 July 2024.

McFarland, Sarah E. “Embracing Extinction.” Women’s Studies, vol. 50, no. 8, 2021, pp. 837-42.

McHardy, Stuart. Tales of Loch Ness. Luath P, 2021.

Merritt, Henry. “’Dead Many Times’: “Cathleen ni Houlihan,’ Yeats, Two Old Women, and a Vampire.” Modern Language Review, vol. 93, no. 3, 2001, pp. 644-53.

Plumwood, Val. The Eye of the Crocodile. Australian National University, 2010.

Shilling, Dan. “Introduction: The Soul of Sustainability.” Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability, edited by K. Nelson and Dan Shilling. Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 3-14.

Stuart. “Out of Time”