Making slow violence legible: Environmental justice in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman

This article analyzes Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (2002) and Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020) through Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’. Slow violence refers to environmental harm, corrosive by nature, that unfolds gradually over time and space, making it hard to notice and narrate. By examining both works within the framework of environmental justice ecocriticism, the article contends that this form of violence must be made not just visible but also legible. The article treats Carson and Erdrich as complementary witnesses who render the various facets of slow violence legible. While Carson’s popular-science writing draws on narrative sources to render legible the chemical and ecological aspects of slow violence, Erdrich gives legibility to its legal-bureaucratic aspects through a novel grounded in documentary records of the 1950s federal termination policy. The article reframes this policy, rooted in a settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’, as a form of environmental injustice. By reading mainstream nonfiction environmental literature alongside contemporary Indigenous works, the article establishes a framework for analyzing how responsibility for diffuse, slow-moving environmental injustice can be ascertained.