Authors: Aravinth S, Dr. J. Kiruba Sharmila
Abstract: Easterine Kire's Spirit Nights (2022) retells a Chang Naga story of sudden darkness as a crisis in the relations that hold a world together. This essay reads the novel through Indigenous ecospirituality, a term I use for worldviews in which land, animals, ancestors, and spirits are bound to human beings by obligations that are at once ethical, ecological, and sacred. I argue that the novel does not treat nature as a backdrop to a spiritual drama. Its environment acts, remembers, and demands a response, and so the failure of the sun registers as the failure of a moral ecology. Close attention to the cosmic tiger, spirit-stones and boundary markers, agricultural ritual, healing knowledge, and the presence of the dead shows how taboo, restraint, and reciprocity operate in the narrative as forms of environmental ethics. The essay also asks what it costs to read such an ethics too tidily, and it considers how Kire's decision to turn an oral story into a novel makes fiction itself a carrier of ecological memory. Placing Naga cosmology within current environmental humanities, the essay suggests that Spirit Nights offers less a program for sustainability than a different account of what counts as ecological knowledge.
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