Sleeping Rivers and Speaking Forests

In her book, When the River Sleeps (2014), Easterine Kire portrays a world where people, nature, and spiritual beings are interdependent in an ethical and ecological way. The novel unfolds against the backdrop of a rich Northeast Indian cosmology, presenting an Indigenous worldview in opposition to the Western ecological worldviews based on hierarchy and rational control. The theoretical paradigm applied in the research is relational ontology, which serves as an approach to examine the ecological ethics found in Kire’s narrative through the principles of reciprocity, restraint, and reverence. The study uses qualitative descriptive approach and in-depth textual analysis to explore the sacred landscapes, spiritual experiences, and relation between human and nonhuman presented in the novel. The results suggest that Kire’s concept of sustainability is a relational activity based on moral responsibilities and common living. Placing Indigenous ecological thinking into the literary and ecological context of the research, the argument stresses the importance of the novel as a cultural object and the ethical framework of the Indigenous ecological knowledge.