The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles by Daniel Heath Justice (review)

Daniel Heath Justice’s The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles extends the decolonizing imperative of indigenous studies to the popular genre of fantasy fiction. The expanded omnibus edition from the University of New Mexico Press brings together in a single volume the trilogy originally published by Kegedonce Press as Kynship (2005), Wyrwood (2006), and Dreyd (2007). The sizeable edition, at more than six hundred pages with maps, illustrations, and an extensive glossary, may attract new audiences to Justice’s richly imagined universe of clans, warriors, and sundry nonhuman “Folk” whose homelands are threatened by encroaching human settlers. Justice’s novel plumbs the complex dynamics of colonization and forms of cultural endurance in a changing world. In doing so, The Way of Thorn and Thunder contests simplistic critical categories and expands the imaginative reach of contemporary indigenous literature.

Situated firmly within the fantasy genre, the novel employs a conventional structure in which new friends and long-standing allies face a series of hardships, battles, and betrayals in the fight against a corrupt and increasingly powerful order. The differences between the Folk and human realms are drawn starkly. In keeping with ancient traditions, the Kyn base their tree clans (or branches) on the Way of Deep Green and seek a peaceful coexistence with all inhabitants of the “wild and green” Everland (145). The Kyn experience a physical sensitivity to all beings and to the elemental wyr energy that pulses throughout the natural world. Despite internal divisions that strain kinship ties, the diverse communities of Everland continue to thrive. In contrast, the human territory of Eromar features a hierarchical society in which the necromancer Lojar Vald consolidates power by exploiting the fears of a laboring class and the self-interests of wealthy citizens and politicians. An industrial wasteland of pollution and depleted resources, Eromar is a community out of balance. By casting humans as the agents of colonization rather than the defenders or inheritors of a new world order, Justice radically revises key conventions of the fantasy genre, including the related tendency to present either a mystical, vanishing race or a band of less-than-human savages. The novel thus critiques the common move to exoticize and marginalize indigenous figures for a drama of otherworldly societies in conflict. Instead, The Way of Thorn and Thunder presents an ethic of reciprocity and care for the land as a viable, if tenuous, alternative to the human values of personal ambition and material gain.

The novel also resonates in powerful ways with Justice’s scholarship on Cherokee literary history, kinship networks, and queer indigenous studies. The forced relocation of the Kyn (the Expulsion) and the resulting adaptation to an unfamiliar land evoke key moments in Cherokee history. In loose parallel to the Ridge/Ross political division of the 1830s, a small Kyn faction signs an illegal removal treaty despite rigorous opposition from a broad interspecies confederacy. And whereas many Kyn citizens advocate teachings linked to the sacred Eternal Tree, the followers of the more recent Celestial Path doctrine reject such “old superstitions” in order to embrace “the best things that Men have to offer” (145). Justice thus presents colonial militarism and paternalism as dual forces that undermine what he elsewhere describes as “inclusive kinship in action.”¹ By reimagining indigenous history as fantasy, Justice is free to conjure a painful past, as with the untrustworthy “Friends of the Folk,” while also experimenting with alternate possibilities. The novel includes redemption—however fleeting—for the misguided Celestial Kyn, who comes to regret her role in assimilation and relocation to a remote western territory. In turn, the ultimate overthrow of Eromar reflects a narrative desire for “a past that could have been, choices that might have been unmade” (260).

With its attention to queer subjects, The Way of Thorn and Thunder also notably revamps a genre that usually features the heroism of men (and a few rare women). The...