Soul of the Future: The Ghost Dance Future

a continuing series.  For previous posts, click on Soul of the Future label.

In the modern industrial and scientific society of England in the 1890s, H.G. Wells invented our notion of the future in his story about the year 802, 701, as experienced by his contemporary inventor of a technology to travel through time. 

 Meanwhile across the Atlantic in the 1890s, the United States was moving through the extraordinary moment of an ever-growing modern industrial society in roughly half the country, while in the other half the remnants of the indigenous cultures of the Americas were making what appeared to be their last stands.

 The cities and industries of the U.S. were in the Eastern half of the continent. There were three cities with over a million people: New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.  The largest city west of the Mississippi was San Francisco, with half the population of Boston.  The only other western city of any size was Denver, with some 100,000 people. 

New York City 1890s

 The country was still bedeviled by the racism that had literally torn it apart, Northeast to Southeast, and would continue to be. But this Eastern half was beginning to rival and even exceed the old European powers.  Immigrants from poorer parts of Europe were pouring into the ports of New York and Baltimore to mine coal and work in steel mills in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. Together with the raw materials from the Southeast, the eastern half of the U.S. already had the most productive economy in the world, with an industrial output twice that of the original power of industry, Great Britain.

 The established cities of Boston, Philadelphia and New York fostered art museums and concert halls to rival the European sources of their art.  This U.S. was becoming a leader in science and technology. Thomas Edison had his Menlo Park complex up and running in New Jersey, symbolizing the age of American mechanical invention. In 1890 American businessman and inventor Herman Hollerith patented a punch-card electric tabulating machine, a core beginning for what would become IBM.

 According to Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, 18^th American proponents of industrial development had countered objections to massive industry’s destruction of the nation’s natural bounty by re-defining nature as itself a machine.  Man-made machines were “improvements” on nature.  

Carnegie

This mechanical metaphor became the dominant and guiding assumption in the 19^th century. The logic of industrialism and how it was accomplished was increasingly seen as the natural order. The same Darwinian principle of change by natural selection that formed the basis of Wells’ view of the future was twisted into the near-religious doctrine of the rich called Social Darwinism, and there were no more enthusiastic adherents that the American titans of the Gilded Age. "The growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest," said John D. Rockerfeller. “We accept and welcome, therefore, great inequality of environment, to which we must accommodate ourselves," said Andrew Carnegie.

 This America had developed rapidly and rapaciously. The forests that had escaped being cleared for farms, towns and cities had been cut and sold for profit.  Timber was still one of the major U.S. industries in the 1890s. The titanic white pine forests of Pennsylvania were gone forever. So was the once abundant passenger pigeon.  The relentless destruction of the natural environment would soon be met with some alarm in Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era, which also addressed some of the human exploitation of corporate industry in The Gilded Age, with its immense gap between the richest and poorest, not to be matched again until the 21^st century.

  This rapacity was extended into the West, led by the railroads speeding mining interests and hungry settlers into lands considered empty. 

Meanwhile, the indigenous cultures that had flourished within the American natural environment for thousands of years had been almost entirely destroyed or removed from the East.  Some tribes moved West, or were driven there.  They were barriers to this inevitable progress. 

 The Ghost Dance

 For this clash was not only racial or national, it was profoundly cultural (which includes what we call religious.)  Native Americans lived in the world in entirely different ways. Some former Europeans found themselves attracted to these ways.  But most had such contrary beliefs and vested interests in maintaining their beliefs in the often vain hope they would enrich themselves, that Native peoples and cultures were demeaned, denied their humanity, overrun, exiled and all but obliterated.

heads of slaughtered bison

 It had taken more than a century to empty the East, but overrunning the West was much faster. It took little more than a decade after the mid-century Gold Rush for California Indians to be massacred, sequestered or enslaved.  In the early nineteenth century there were more Native people living in the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Missouri River than the populations of St. Louis or Washington, D.C.  But when Europeans and their descendants flooded west to the plains, they systematically wiped out the great buffalo herds that sustained Native cultures.

 Already reduced by disease and overwhelmed by numbers and mechanized warfare, only pockets and remnants of Native cultures were left as the 19^th century ended.  Cut off from their traditional sources of sustenance and meaning, they were forced into ever smaller and remote reservations and alien ways of life.  In the West the last free fragments of proud tribes were harried and harassed by the U.S. military. 

Arapaho ghost dance

It was then, in the last decades of the 19^th century, that a prophetic dance spread from tribe to tribe in the West.  The Ghost Dance, a solemn circle dance, was basically and originally a ritual to bring the dancers in contact with their ancestors and to foster the return of the world they knew, their land and its animals and plants, and their way of life embedded in that now scorched, invaded and vanishing America.

 Near the end of 1890, soldiers, apparently made nervous by the mysterious Ghost Dance, bungled an attempt to complete the peaceful and agreed upon disarming of men in a Lakota encampment near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Soldiers killed nearly 300 Lakota, mostly women and children. 

Frozen body of chief Big Foot at Wounded Knee

The Battle of Wounded Knee, as it was known to Easterners in the 1890s, especially when its officers received their Congressional Medals of Honor in Washington, has come down through history as the Wounded Knee Massacre.  It symbolizes the effective end of independent Indigenous cultures in America for most of a century.

 The 20^th century

 With Native peoples out of the way, the predominant European Americans were free to follow their culturally embedded instincts and philosophies.  To that time however, they had the rare opportunity to consult a different vision that had grown in the very soil of this continent for millennia.  But with Native cultures largely broken and Indigenous wisdom imprisoned and ignored, that opportunity was lost.

 America had been identified with the future itself since Shakespeare’s time, and now industrial America forged its future and the world’s throughout the 20^th century.  But for all its ideals and efficiencies, its heroic moments and titanic accomplishments, its astonishing technologies and abundance, there was something missing, an active flaw that threatened to be tragic.

It began with the heedless greed that felled the forests of the East, the tearing up of the Midwestern prairie, and the killing off of the buffalo in the West, an animal fitted to its environment, in favor of European cattle, never suited to survive on the plains (as no less an expert on the West than Larry McMurtry observed.)  Cattle grazing and attempts at European-style farming destroyed the prairie and the grasslands, leading to erosion, floods and the massive 1930s Dust Bowl.

 Green land turned to asphalt, coast to coast.  Throughout the century, poisoning of waters, soil and air by industrial waste and products became increasingly deadly and obvious.  Spurts of concern reversed some destruction—often temporarily—until attention moved elsewhere.  But the sense was growing that this oblivious destruction of the natural underpinnings of life could topple the future.

 The threats and perils of pollution and other environmental destruction were embedded in science fiction stories since the 1930s.  But ecology—the relationships within the environment as a whole—became a focus of both apocalyptic and utopian stories in the century’s seventh decade.

 Back to the 70s

 So from the 1890s, when our idea of the future began, we return again to the 1970s, when “the future” was emerging as a concern in itself, as a set of studies and a centering of political, economic, ecological and moral ideas.

 At the “Utopian Dreaming Conference” at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2015, author and keynote speaker Kim Stanley Robinson described the 1970s as a very different time, pervaded by “the feeling that anything could happen.”  The 1960s had opened the door to new ideas and possibilities that entered the mainstream academic and popular consciousness.

 Robinson cited some of the books that were widely read and discussed in the 1970s, many in paperback editions and some on Best Seller lists.  Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) led the parade of studies of the future mentioned here in a previous post.  But there were many others, also integrative, but with a different focus. 

 
Robinson listed The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, a 1975 best seller by physicist Fritjof Capra, and the pioneering work on cybernetics and systems thinking by Gregory Bateson, such as his Steps To An Ecology of Mind (1972).

  Be Here Now (1971) by Ram Dass was only one of many popular books on spiritual attitudes. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973) by economist E. F. Schumacher was a popular and influential book throughout the 70s.

Robinson also mentioned Charles Reich’s very popular 1970 book The Greening of America, Theodore Roszak’s Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (1979), as well as the work of John C. Lilly (best known for his work with dolphins and communication), Paolo Soleri (architect and designer of a model “arcology” as a self-contained human environment), economist Hazel Henderson, early clean energy advocate Amory Lovins, and Stewart Brand’s popular and influential Whole Earth Catalog. 

He might also have cited the persistent influence in the 1970s of Buckminster Fuller, the ramifications of second wave feminism and liberation movements, the ferment in education and the flood of other books following Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Postman and Weingartner, 1969), and the continuing deepening of work on ecology reflected in such books as Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold (1969), Turtle Island (1974) and The Old Ways (1977), and the two anthologies Paul Shepard edited (The Subversive Science in 1969, Environ/Mental: Essays on the Planet as Home in 1971) as well as his own strikingly original and seminal books, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973) and Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (1978.)

The 1970s were also the years that the first environmental legislation passed, and regulations and cleanups began.  The federal government established the Environmental Protection Agency, followed by similar state-level agencies. These became increasingly bureaucratic, spawning equally bureaucratic advocates, consultants and vendors.  Still, many cleanups proceeded, lands were saved, and ecological ideas continued to expand.

 Ecotopia

Kim Stanley Robinson experienced the 1970s as a young man in California, an active center of new lifestyles, and characterized this period as partly a consequence of the 1960s counterculture growing up and starting families, looking for the constituents and models of a future that follows from their ideals.  And it was from California that the most influential utopian novel of the 1970s emerged.

This swirl of ideas represented by these books and public figures became incorporated in several notable utopian novels all published within a few years of each other in the 1970s—something that probably hadn’t happened before in the 20^th century, and hasn’t happened since.

In order of their appearance they included: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974), Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975), The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975), Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) by Samuel R. Delany  and Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976).  (To these might be added a utopian society of women only: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; though published in an obscure periodical in 1916, it did not appear in book form until 1979.)

 Piercy was a young but well-regarded literary novelist.  Le Guin, Delany and Russ were considered science fiction writers, and their books were well received within the science fiction community.  Le Guin in particular, with much of her best-known work published in the 1970s (including several other fictions with utopian elements) was preeminent: Science Fiction Studies devoted a 1975 issue to her work.  Delany later said that he wrote his book partly in response to Le Guin’s.

But these four books did not find a large audience immediately, though they all are now considered important and perceptive works, perhaps classics (especially in the case of The Disposessed).  It was Callenbach’s Ecotopia, however, that became the best-selling utopia of the 1970s.  Callenbach’s novel and his subsequent Ecotopia Emerging were the focus of the 2015 Utopia Dreaming conference.

Not only was Ernest Callenbach living in the midst of all this 1970s ferment in its capital of California, he was a book editor for the University of California Press, and regularly saw manuscripts about innovations and speculations in the sciences, engineering, education and societal ideas.  He decided to combine versions of the best ideas he read about and knew from experience in California, and integrate them into a practical new society, within a fictional framework.   The result was Ecotopia.  

The story, as Kim Stanley Robinson noted, follows the traditional Utopian form of a stranger to the utopian community being shown around.  Initially skeptical, he becomes a convert by the end. 

The story’s premise is that in 1980, northern California had joined with Oregon and Washington in seceding from the United States, creating the nation of Ecotopia.  In 1999, New York writer William Weston is the first journalist from the U.S. permitted to visit. The novel consists of his reports plus his diary entries as well as other first person narration.

Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a recognizably post-1960s California vision, but it turns out to have anticipated many changes that have since occurred, from C-Span and on-demand printing, urban pedestrian malls and mixed use complexes, to holistic health, recycling and various uses of green energy and organic materials (including to make moldable plastic for housing.)  In fact, readers may wonder what is so radical about a lot of it, but as late as the real 1990s, editorial writers were still scoffing at the idea that Americans would ever routinely recycle waste. 

Though some other aspects of Ecotopia appear in communities here and there (and its assumed attitudes on gender and race are questionable), its larger institutional, economic and ethical underpinnings remain visionary. Callenbach’s visitor tries to describe the basic Ecotopian vision: “...mankind, the Ecotopians assumed, were not meant for production, as the 19^th and early 20^th centuries had believed.  Instead, humans were meant to take their modest place in a seamless, stable-state web of living organisms, disturbing that web as little as possible.  This would mean sacrifice of present consumption, but it would ensure future survival...People were to be happy not to the extent they dominated their fellow creatures on the earth, but to the extent they lived in balance with them.”  

It did not escape notice that this core idea was also central to the ancient Indigenous cultures of the world that still existed, including American Indians.

The Native Paradigm

There was a great deal more evidence developed in the decades after the 1970s that supported this vision (despite the continuing counter-revolution becoming powerful in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s), much of it the work of scientists. 

One result of these findings was a new understanding of evolution, and the crumbling of old assumptions that supposedly supported the Social Darwinism still implicit in global capitalism.  So even while scientists fought a rear guard action against fundamentalist attacks on the basic functional concepts of evolution, they were expanding and fundamentally changing their understanding of how evolution operates.

Lynn Margulis

New insights came from all over. Darwin derived his theory from careful study of plants and animals. But microbiologists like Lynn Margulis used 20^th century technologies to study organisms too small for Darwin’s microscopes.  She found new instances of symbiosis and other behavior that challenged the orthodoxy of the selfish gene.Organisms can self-organize and respond to environmental conditions by switching genes on or off, thus guiding their own evolution. Acquired information--knowledge and behavior--can be inherited.  Evolution is often co-evolution: creatures and their environment changing each other.

The old assumptions of how competition in nature really operates began to change, as well as the perceived role of cooperation.  Frans de Waal and other primatologists observed natural conflict resolution as well as altruism and empathetic behavior among primates.  Why hadn’t this been seen before?  Perhaps because scientists weren’t looking for it, and couldn’t see past their assumptions about aggression and dominance.

De Waal

Scientists were finding behavior in insects, birds and other animals that challenged old assumptions of what constitutes intelligence and consciousness, theorizing that both were much more widespread than previously acknowledged.  The borders defining sentience and life itself began to seem uncertain and permeable.

 They found that trees in a forest communicate, warn each other of danger and even help heal and cure each other, through their root systems and other chemical means. 

 The idea of what constitutes an independent, individual organism began to loosen. Even human beings were shown to be a complex of essential, interacting lifeforms, as dependent on the bacteria they carry as on the society and the natural world that nurtures them.  

The new physics inspired daring speculations on the nature and extent of consciousness in the universe. Despite a fundamentalist resurgence, even science and spirituality moved towards reconciliation and expanded understanding, partly through the Mind and Life series of conferences with notable scientists and Buddhist practitioners, with the participation of the Dalai Lama. These revealed analogous ideas and led to combined research projects.

Writers like William Irwin Thompson and Fritjof Capra in the 1990s began to synthesize and explain some of the ramifications of these systems of interdependence, complexity and connection.  Capra’s 1996 book, The Web of Life, opened with an influential chapter titled: “Deep Ecology: A New Paradigm.”  Christopher Peters, head of the Native organization Seventh Generation Fund, heard a Native speaker at a 1990s conference remark that maybe it ought to be called the Native Paradigm. 

For the new science was rediscovering by different means what Indigenous peoples had learned through close observation and interaction with their natural environs for many generations, and passed down through practice, tradition and story.  The anthropological record as well as the words of contemporary Indigenous leaders confirm this.

In the Native Paradigm, interdependence was both practical and sacred. Humans had responsibilities to the natural world that gave them the means of life. In the Native Paradigm, there is no contradiction between science and spirituality. 

"The basic principle of Delaware religion was that spirit was the prime reality," Paul A. W. Wallace writes in Indians in Pennsylvania. "All things had souls: not only man, but also animals, the air, water, trees, even rocks and stones." Another scholar observed that the Delaware "trod lightly through his natural environment, merging himself sympathetically into the world of living and non-living things." 

“Indians not only lived in nature but saw themselves as an integral part of it,” wrote Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser in The Natural World of the California Indians.  “In Native belief, animals had an intelligence equal to man’s...The animals were often seen as providers...Among the Pomo and many other California tribes, all plants, animals, and natural features (stones, springs) were believed to have thought and feeling. A Nomlaki Indian told one ethnographer, “Everything in the world talks, just as we are talking now—the trees, the rocks, everything.  But we cannot understand them, just as white people do not understand Indians.”

 This understanding of the world was perhaps the underlying despair and the underlying dream of the Ghost Dance.

Almanac of the Dead

Leslie Marmon Silko

The 1960s also saw a new Native American political activism, and the beginnings of widespread cultural revival.  This spirit, plus the Native writer N. Scott Momaday winning the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, propelled a new generation of Native writers. As 1992 approached-- the 500^th anniversary of Columbus discovering a beach in the Bahamas—this generation was claiming a higher profile and new readership.  It included novelists Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Gerald Vizenor.  Several published new books around 1992 (with Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit one of three finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer), helping to co-opt the anniversary and focus it on the cultural survival of Native America.

Prominent among these novels was Leslie Marmon Silko’s epic and apocalyptic Almanac of the Dead, published in 1991.  It begins in the contemporary American Southwest—principally southern Arizona and Mexico—ending with the near-future prospect of an apocalyptic war.  Exposing the generally unnoticed but ongoing and violent war between the largely nonwhite underclass and the police as agents of the rich, this novel also deals with rebellion and survival in the long context of Native peoples, their history and tradition. 

Towards the end of this novel of more than 750 pages, a Native leader talks to a mixed audience about the Ghost Dance, which he claims has never ended (which is factually true: among tribes here and there, it continued to be danced) and which did not fail in its goals.

“Have the spirits let us down?  Listen to the prophecies!  Next to thirty thousand years, five hundred years looks like nothing.  The buffalo are returning.  They roam off federal land in Montana and Wyoming.  Fences can’t hold them.  Irrigation water for the Great Plains is disappearing, and so are the farmers, and their plows.  Farmers’ children retreat to the cities.  Year by year the range of the buffalo grows a mile or two larger.”

This, too, is factual, and the trend has continued into the 21^st century.  Human settlement in America is contracting into sprawling cities, leaving vast lands across the West where animals are returning.  Spaces elsewhere on the continent abandoned by the heavy footprints of humans and their machines are being reclaimed by woodlands and other life.  The movement for habitat corridors in a number of states is made easier by the retrenchment of European American civilization from the land. 

Deb Haaland sworn in as Sec of Interior

Meanwhile many Native American tribes, more powerful and self-sustaining thanks partly to casino cash, are showing the way with ecologically sustainable development.  In a year that the Poet Laureate of the US is Native writer Joy Harjo, the US Secretary of Interior is Deb Haaland, enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, the same tribal affiliation as Leslie Marmon Silko.  One of her first initiatives was to join 50 other countries in pledging to preserve 30% of the world’s lands and waters in their natural state by 2030.

Applying the Native Paradigm in partnership with western and eastern civilization’s best insights and practices is becoming more crucial as it becomes clearer that the human future is facing its ultimate challenge.

For the same interdependence that was being found on smaller scales, has been shown to operate on the Earth itself.  The Gaia Hypothesis, suggesting that the delicate self-regulating interactions of life with is planetary environment is behavior of a single organism, was first proposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. 

Both controversial and inspirational, it set the context for examining the ways that the industrial age and heedless human impacts can threaten the balance that nurtures the current life of the planet.  By the 21^st century, these impacts were seen as so profound that scientists designated this geological epoch as the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant determining factor.

Lovelock’s research involved chemistry and physics, and Margulis focused on biology. Findings from all those fields and more for decades have proven that the interactions of the industrial age with Earth’s atmosphere have caused and continued to cause a huge shift in the planet’s climate, ultimately placing planetary life as we know it in peril, in the greatest challenge to the future humankind has yet faced.

The glib labels of the Greenhouse Effect, of global warming, climate change and even the Climate Crisis, are not equal to the dimensions of what humanity and all life on Earth are beginning to experience.  The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of the world’s climate scientists, has issued a series of accelerating warnings since the early 1990s.  Summarizing a draft of a 2021 report, the Agence France-Press (quoted by Rebecca Solnit in a Guardian article in July 2021) concludes:

 “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions...Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas” are among the dire phenomena that will become “painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.”

If those emissions cannot be stopped or rendered harmless in time, human civilization and nearly all life as we know it, will disappear in a future that may not even be measured in centuries.

Eventually the human species could dwindle drastically in number for a much longer time, perhaps spiraling down into an unrecognizable and very long Dark Age.  Within some meaning of the words, human civilization may reform in that forever changed world, perhaps after thousands of years.  That possibility leads us to two more utopian stories, both by Ursula K. Le Guin, including one based on the Native Paradigm.

The Dispossessed

Aspects of a utopian story inhabit several of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictions, but her 1974 novel The Dispossessed claims the theme in its subtitle, “An Ambiguous Utopia.”  There are some resemblances to Ecotopia: each reports the impressions of a male protagonist who is the first visitor to a place separated from his homeland years before, because one society revolted against the other. The principal female character in each book resemble each other. But Le Guin’s book is much richer, more complex and profound.

In The Dispossessed, Shevek is the restless physicist from the nearly barren moon Anarres, settled some 200 years before by rebels from the larger and more Earth-like planet Urras.  Against violent opposition, he accepts an invitation to visit Urras.  Chapters narrating Shevek’s visit to Urras alternate with chapters providing a chronology of his life previously on Anarres. 

This utopia is ambiguous in several senses.  For one thing, which planet is the utopian one?  Urras is the obvious candidate: with gleaming cities and carefully tended natural surroundings, apparently prosperous and obviously beautiful.

But interest in this book has turned to the moon Anarres as a utopia of unique qualities in utopian literature.  It is technically an anarchy with no central government, dependent on self-organizing “syndicates” and other local democratic institutions. Nevertheless, there is only one society, resolving conflicts without violence.

Theoretically, everyone can choose any profession or any job anywhere that’s posted on the global network, or they can choose to do nothing at all.  The society holds together and works through individual commitment to social responsibility and affiliation, or brotherhood. 

But how this utopia works in practice is itself ambiguous.  Because it is a planet of scarcity, urgent demands claim individuals who might otherwise make different choices.  Despite the lack of government, bureaucracies have developed, and shared values have shaded into social pressures to conform.  And while there is technically no buying and selling, and people have few possessions, there are still ways to express and inflict greed, envy, dishonesty and betrayal. It is the pressure to be like everybody else that unsettles Shevek and sends him on his journey.

Ursula K. Le Guin in the 1970s

 Shevek also finds a dark side to the apparent utopia on the mother planet of Urras, but that is a subject for the next—and last—post in this series.  For now, the utopian system of Anarres, its attractions and its flaws, assume additional interest because of the natural environment of Anarres.  In particular, the chapters depicting a serious drought have new relevance as the climate crisis accelerates on our Earth.  And while Earth will likely never be as barren as this moon (which has no animals or insects, and few plant species), ongoing extinctions of Earth species could rival those of the distant past with catastrophic and permanent effects.

Though their philosophy of “the means are the ends” is as much Taoist as political, the Anarres example of nonviolent anarchism (or anarcho-syndicalism) is an unusual if not unique system in utopian literature, especially applied to an environment of scarcity that resembles the usual post-apocalyptic landscape. 

The Anarres chapters of The Dispossessed could therefore suggest elements of a positive if not classically utopian response to the reduced circumstances of a society coping with one set of effects of a deformed climate.  But if global heating continues past predicted tipping points, even these conditions may get worse in the farther future.

A decade or so after publishing this novel, Le Guin provided a different model of what might be viewed as a post-apocalyptic utopia, relevant to a longer view of a climate crisis future. 

Always Coming Home

Adobe, blue clay, serpentine, obsidian:
floors and walls
of the houses of the town of earth.
Cloud, rain, wind, air:
windows and roofs
of the houses of the town of earth.
Under floorboards, under cellars,
above roofs, above chimneys,
to the left of the right hand,
to the right of the left hand,
north of the future, south of the past,
outside the walls:
the limitless,
the wilderness,
the mountains and rivers of being,
the valley of possibility.

by Stone Telling

Always Coming Home was first published in 1985 (with a mass market paperback available in 1987), though Le Guin continued to add to it, up to the last week of her life in 2018 for the expanded Library of America edition.  Some critics called it her defining work, and there’s some evidence that Le Guin agreed.

This is not a conventionally structured narrative, but more akin to “a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us,” as Le Guin writes of the novel form in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”

  The framework is a kind of anthropological or archaeological report by a character named Pandora, who in an unexplained paradox, is from the past—that is, roughly our present—who is unearthing a culture from the future.  This is a twist on what the author Le Guin is doing: imagining a future society in the present, but placing it firmly and deeply within the Earth.

But there is also a narrative voice from that future: Stone Telling, a woman of the Kesh people.  As in nearly all of Le Guin’s science fiction, there is a journey with dangers and adventures, and a return to home, though like Le Guin’s other protagonists, Stone Telling is changed by the journey. 

Much of the book however is comprised of songs, stories, poems and dramatic works by various individuals that together with Stone Telling’s descriptions, create a quiet, luminous and complex portrait of a place and a culture, with human depth and timelessness.

Though the culture of the Kesh clearly has resemblances to what is known about Native American cultures before European contact, the context is different.  Some technologies from pre-industrial and industrial times remain, though on a much smaller scale, and often in different ways. (There is a kind of railroad, but the tracks are wood.)  The Kesh have a strong oral tradition, but also read and write.

Le Guin displaying Always Coming Home

While Le Guin does not use specific stories or events from any Indigenous culture, the life of the Kesh is largely based on the values and relationship to the natural world that are integral to the Native Paradigm. And without belaboring the point, it’s clear they do so consciously, deliberately.

But the Kesh and other peoples of the region with similar cultures aren’t alone.  In one short, startling chapter, Le Guin reveals that on “eleven thousand sites all over the planet” there are “independent, self-contained, self-regulating communities of cybernetic devices or beings,” who also maintain outposts elsewhere in the solar system as well as probes into deep space.

They do not interfere with the human communities, or interact except to diffidently request information.  Their only apparent purpose is to gather and organize information from everywhere.  They provide computer terminals to communities that request them, with free access to all stored information.  But the Kesh rarely use them, except for weather and fire warnings and other practical information, and otherwise ignore them entirely.

The apocalypse that changed the planet occurred so far in the past that the Kesh aren’t sure what it was. But they know of the floods from sea level rise, and northern California has acquired an “inland sea.”  Some scientists and science fiction writers (notably Arthur C. Clarke) knew the causes and potential consequences of excessive CO2 emissions in the 1960s, and these would be more widely discussed in the last years of the 1980s, but pretty clearly this prospect was in Le Guin’s mind when she wrote this story. 

Could Always Coming Home be a story suggesting the actual post-Anthropocene human future?  Ursula Le Guin often warned against seeing such fictions as prophesy.  But if civilization does collapse due to the effects of a relentlessly deteriorating climate, something like this society of the Kesh after thousands of years might be the best possible utopia. 

It might not take place in northern California, however; at least not at first.  James Lovelock and others have speculated that intense global heating may force remnants of humanity to the polar regions, including the Arctic and Antarctic. 

Recently, scientists have begun taking more seriously the evidence that the Maori of New Zealand—descendants of the Polynesian seafarers who were also ancestors of Native Hawaiians—reached Antarctica a thousand years before European explorers.  There’s evidence as well that some Maori spent at least part of the year in the region, many generations before Europeans arrived.

Today, according to writer Sabrina Imbler, conservation biologists are looking to the Maori and other Indigenous peoples for guidance in managing Antarctica’s future, according to the Maori principle of kaitiakitanga, which environmentalists interpret as guardianship and stewardship.

There and elsewhere, this may be humanity’s main hope for a timeless future as well as a return, not to the medieval Dark Ages evil of many post-apocalyptic stories, but in a coming home to a version of the world envisioned in the Ghost Dance.

      BK photo: Wiyot Indian Island vigil 2014