Imaginary Worlds - Prologue to Ursula K. le Guin

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

In the 1960s, Ursula K. le Guin represented a changing of the guard in science fiction literature. She was part of a generation of novelists who questioned the colonist mindset which had influenced American sci-fi for most of the 20th century. Le Guin came to this understanding not just as a moral stance or an intellectual exercise. Issues of racism and colonialism were personal to her. This episode, originally titled “The Word For Man Is Ishi,” comes from the podcast The Last Archive from Pushkin Industries hosted by Jill Lepore and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy New Year, everybody. We'll be back with new episodes of Imaginary Worlds in two weeks, which is good timing because, as you can hear, I caught a cold over the holidays. So this week, I'm going to play an episode from the podcast The Last Archive. The Last Archive is a show about the history of knowledge. They look at how conventional wisdom is built up and how it can be dismantled. And they did this really interesting episode about the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. In the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin's books were

groundbreaking. For a long time, American science fiction was very influenced by colonialism, with heroic conquering spacemen and aliens taking the place of indigenous people. Le Guin questioned and critiqued that narrative in her stories. But most of this episode is not about science fiction. It's actually the backstory to how Le Guin came to that understanding and why these issues of racism and colonialism were personal for her. Here is the host of The Last Archive, Ben Nanafafuri. When I was a kid,

there were a few books and movies that we watched all the time because my dad taught them every year. He's a professor of business ethics, just not the way you'd think. Instead of case studies about business, he teaches stories about everything. In our house, a story was never just about what you thought it was about. It was about something else entirely.

For instance, if you ask most people to describe the film Blade Runner, nine times out of ten, they're going to tell you it's a movie about Harrison Ford hunting robots. They might mention he's struggling with the possibility that he is also a robot. But if you ask my dad, he'd say no. What we have here is a film about the unethical Tyrell Corporation, the company that makes the robots. Same goes for Riding Giants, a film some might say is about surfing

without realizing it's actually about leadership. And don't get me started about the country bunny and the little gold shoes. You thought that was a children's book? Oh no. The problem with my dad, though, is he's usually right, even when he sounds totally wrong. This is particularly annoying to my mom, but eventually you get used to it. One of the big stories in the dad canon, for as long as I can remember,

is a science fiction story called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. It's by Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer. With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the festival of summer came to the city Omelas, bright towered by the sea. This story always struck me as a rare one for my dad, because it seems pretty straightforward about what you think it's about, a utopia. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children, though their children were in fact happy. But I wish I could describe it better.

Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy biz. In the story, Le Guin asks you to imagine the best place you can, this beautiful city by the sea, golden in the light, on a feast day in summer. Whatever sounds best to you, there it is. But of course, things aren't what they seem. Let me describe one more thing. In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there's a room.

It has one locked door and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In the room, a child is sitting. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the door is locked and nobody will come. The door is always locked and nobody ever comes.

Except that sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens and a person or several people are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. This is the dark secret of Omelas, the child in the basement. All the happiness in Omelas rests on that kid's suffering. It's a thought experiment. Would it be worth it? They all know it's there, all the people of Omelas.

They all know that it has to be there. They would like to do something for the child. But if it were done, in that day and hour, all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. It's a very famous story, taught in classrooms around the world half a century after its publication, including my dad's. Which, again, was weird to me, because if ever there was a story that's just about what you think it's about, the ones who walk away from Omalas is it. Now

there's a story that's just about ethics, right and wrong, your basic meat and potato stuff. A pure thought experiment. Or that's what I thought. Until I realized it wasn't a thought experiment at all. Welcome to The Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately like we don't know anything at all anymore. I'm Ben Natafafri. This episode is about the story behind that thought experiment.

And that story starts a little over a century ago in a small gold rush town in California on August 28th, 1911, at sundown. starts a little over a century ago, in a small gold rush town in California, on August 28, 1911, at sundown. That night, at dusk, at a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town, a man named Ad Kessler was changing out of his work clothes. Now, I'll try to tell you, as I remember it, it's pretty clear in my mind.

There was a young boy who hung around Kessler's crew while they worked. That evening, the kid was out in the corral. And then, he saw something. He was frightened, and he yelled to me, and he says, there's a man here. Kessler grabbed a meat hook and ran outside in his long johns and riding boots. He thought maybe there was a thief, but when he got to the corral, he saw a part clothed, barefoot man, weakened and tired, leaning against the fence. He tried to speak to the man, but got no answer.

At that time I could talk pretty good Spanish, and I talked a bit Spanish, but to no response. I used a little profanity. He didn't understand that either. Kessler was puzzled, so he called the sheriff. And I told him, I said, John, I've got something out here, the slaughterhouse. I think you should come out and investigate. The sheriff came, they handcuffed the man, and they headed to the jail. They put him in a padded cell. There he was, all alone. He didn't have the least idea of what was going to happen to him.

Closed the door, turned the key in it, and he stood right behind them bars and looked. In the morning, the jailer was out sweeping off the steps. And I asked him, I says, Bert, what happened to my boy last night? He says he never slept a wink. This tape is from a talk Ad Kessler gave

to a high school class in 1973. Big guy with a crew cut talking to a bunch of bored teens, telling his big story, the one that's been punching his meal ticket for 62 years. Because that moment of encounter set in motion a whole series of events that forever changed California.

It's a story that's been told in a lot of ways by a lot of different people. But Kessler is pretty ornery about his version. And his story matches the newspaper record. There is a book wrote by a lady, but it's not correct. What I've just told you is the facts, as it were. Word got out quick about the stranger who didn't speak any language anyone recognized. There were sensational

stories in newspapers across the state. They'd figured out the man was probably an American Indian. The most plausible theory was that he was the only survivor of a people who had been wiped out by white settlers during and after the gold rush. Killed by a genocide. Though the word didn't yet exist, and if it had, they wouldn't have used it. But there is no other word for it. There had been hundreds of thousands of American Indians in the land we now know as California before the gold rush. There were only about 20,000 by the turn of the century. And this man's people were gone, all of them gone, save, apparently, for one. Him. People had been looking for his group, his community, for some time.

People knew that there were some indigenous people in the woods, in that general area, who they speculated were Yahis. Andrew Garrett is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and directs the California Language Archive there. Because California, before Spanish, Mexican, and American settlement, was full of languages, about 90 different ones, vastly different from each other. I met Garrett in his office on campus one day. There was a mountain of fresh midterms on the table and bits and pieces of a language on the whiteboard. So there was this sense that they were out there somewhere, those people.

Garrett works on how languages change over time. So he's often in the archives using notes produced by the earliest anthropologists in California. And he often refers back to one in particular, Alfred Kroeber, who founded the Anthropology Department at Berkeley. In 1911, Kroeber was working with a colleague to document the languages and cultures of indigenous people in California, especially those cultures which they believed to be vanishing. The community of people who spoke a language Kroeber called Yahi, after its word for person, had lived near Oroville, but the townspeople hadn't seen them for years. If the stranger in the jail was the last member of the Yahi people, the anthropologists felt they needed to reach him. So Kroeber telegrammed ahead, and his colleague got on a train north to the Oroville jail, where the man had been held for two days.

By the time he arrived, the jail was a scene. This was the biggest thing that happened to Oroville since the gold rush. People had been sending in food and clothes, crowding around trying to get a look at the man. The anthropologist made his way through the crowd and up to the cell. He sat down opposite the man and pulled out a vocabulary book full of Janna words, a related language to the one he thought the Yahi might speak. One by one, he read the words off the list. Nothing.

And more nothing. Until he reached the Janna word for yellow pine. He said it and touched the pine bed frame in the cell. The man's face lit up. A match. Then more matches. The man asked the anthropologist if he was a Yahi. It was the community Kroeber had been looking for. In 1911, American Indians weren't legally U.S. citizens. They were treated like wards of the state. So Kroeber asked what later became known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs for permission to take the man into custody.

It came within days. The anthropologist, a Yana interpreter named Batwi, and the man boarded a train to Oakland. From there, they took the ferry to San Francisco, and then the trolley to the Museum of Anthropology. They got there just before midnight. This was September 1911. They were kind of preparing to open the Anthropology Museum to the public. Indian people who came to visit often stayed there for some period of time. There were always staff members who lived there. There were apartments in the museum, and the Yahi man slept there.

The next morning, Alfred Kroeber came to meet him. Kroeber was in his 30s, quiet, strong chin, full beard. People came to call him the Dean of American Anthropology. He was a cultural relativist who stood against the mainstream of anthropology, which had this kind of racialized evolutionary theory that thought cultures progressed from what they considered to be more primitive states to something that of course resembled European civilization. Kroeber believed other cultures were valid in their own right, but he was also trying to make a name for his department and his new museum.

In Kroeber's view, every person was a product of their culture, like a codex. So I think that meeting this man was to him like finding the Rosetta Stone. Except for one sticky fact. The man was a person, not an artifact. That's the challenge of all anthropology. Studying someone without betraying their humanity. Kroeber needed a name to call the man by, but the man wouldn't share his name with people he just met. So Kroeber called him by a Yahi word. That meant man. Ishi. Kroeber, he was never actually seemingly interested in present-day cultures, but only in former cultures, because only the former cultures were uncontaminated by Europeans.

So there's a way in which like having only one person as a representative of a culture is not problematic because your goal is just to find the exemplar of the pure culture. And so I think from that perspective, the fantasy of Ishii is that he's this pure exemplar when actually, of course, he's just a person. Ishii moved into the museum and and soon after, the work of studying and preserving Yahi culture began. We'll be right back. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here.

Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. now. Over time, the anthropologist Alfred Kroger got to know Ishi's story. Even though Ishi didn't like to talk about his past, it depressed him, and for good reason. His hair was still burned

short in mourning for his mother and sister, who died some years before. He'd lived alone in the canyons ever since then, And now he was living in a museum in San Francisco. But he was asked, supposedly, multiple times by people, did he want to go back or did he want to go somewhere else? And supposedly he always said no. It's a kind of complicated question because they were, the people who are reporting this are all people who benefit from him being happy where he was. You know, and they were all, they were not neutral people. They were his white friends who, you know, the story is good if he wasn't a prisoner from their point of view.

Reportedly, Ishii told agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs through his Yana interpreter, quote, I will grow old here and die in this house. He worked part-time as a janitor at the museum. When it opened about a month after his arrival, he was at the opening night gala in a small back room. When people rehash this history now in a critical light, they say that Ishii was a living exhibit stuck in the museum because he soon began to do demonstrations of Yahi culture on Sundays. He was a major draw. The San Francisco Examiner called him, creepily,

its most interesting exhibit. He'd show crafts like making arrowheads, weaving baskets, starting fires. The things he made, the museum kept in its collection. Tens of thousands of people came to those demonstrations over the course of the next year, and that was more people in one place than Ishii had ever seen. Then there were all the ancestral remains the Museum of Anthropology kept. He'd lock his door each night. But he had some agency within a limited band. Gerald Visner, the writer, scholar, and member of the Chippewa tribe, has written a lot about how Ishii had an active role in shaping his situation.

Visner calls it his survivance. Survival and resistance. Because Ishii seems to have taken most everything in stride. He made some money, memorized the streetcars, and began to make his way around town. He liked to go to the movies and made friends around the city. Later, people would remember him fondly, like a little boy who said Ishii had made him a bow and arrow and taught him how to shoot lizards, made him a net for catching minnows, and rabbit-skin moccasins. The newspapers told Ishii's story as if he'd time-traveled from the Stone Age

to the modern world. Like when Ishii walked barefoot into a vaudeville show at the Orpheum Theater and supposedly called it Heaven for White People. Or the day Ishii saw a plane in the sky and asked in a kind of amused way if a white man were flying it. He is exactly 40,000 years behind the times,

one journalist wrote. Some writers were disappointed to see their romantic fantasy, the uncontaminated man who never told a lie, smoking cigars and wearing shoes. It was absurd. To me, it seems like he adapted unbelievably quickly. I mean, he had completely reinvented his life, and he was probably in his 50s. He was curious to try new things and willing to set limits. Once, a reporter asked him to put on animal skins for a photograph, and he said he wouldn't because he didn't see anyone else wearing them. He seems to land in this particular location with a kind of intelligence and consciousness

of the situation that people around him don't necessarily understand that he has. And that makes him, you know, crafty and intelligent and wily and smart and in all kinds of ways. That's Philip Deloria, a professor of history at Harvard. He specializes in Native American and American studies and is of Dakota descent. He wrote a book I love called Playing Indian, which is about how white Americans navigated national identity and their feelings about modernity through a kind of Indian cosplay. It's why the country was so fascinated by Ishii. That's why the country was so fascinated by Ishii. It's why he's such an astonishing figure. He's not an astonishing figure because, you know, he survives and comes out of the woods and ends up in a museum. I think he's an astonishing figure because of the ways in which he sees his situation and acts within it.

To most people, Ishii was just a symbol, a tragic fantasy. Not just the last Yahi, but the last wild Indian. To white Americans, it represented the triumph of European civilization over indigenous America. Inevitable. The kind of thing you wept over only once victory was assured. Anthropology was a kind of rearguard action, salvaging what could be salvaged, to use their term, in a sort of apologetic way. But some of what's complicated here is that the things they preserved were kept in institutions like Berkeley, which is on land that was taken from the Ohlone people. Berkeley anthropologists worked within that paradox, but they weren't given to ask questions about why these cultures were disappearing,

or what might be done to stop it. The idea that it was already too late, it was baked into the work. The field was a puzzle box, just like Kroeber. He thought eugenics was ridiculous, but he was also the head of a department that collected human remains from tribal gravesites. In one article, he calls Ishii a man in every sense, and then he compares him to a puppy. Kroeber and all the generations that surround him and that came after him, you know, they're all the heirs of this kind of, you know, this kind of doubled consciousness of the anthropologist of the time. You know, it feels like you're making a very, you know, progressive kind of move,

while at the same time, you're looking at them as objects of study. You've got a whole kind of primitivist veneer that's hard to get away from. So they couldn't help – these folks couldn't help but be contradictory in their consciousness about how they were viewing Native people as vestiges and remnants of these cultures of the past, and yet as opportunities for them to think in progressive and, you know, theoretically enlightened kinds of ways. Ishii was on stage during those demonstrations at the museum, but so was Kroeber. They were both performing something. Ishii was playing Indian. Kroeber was playing anthropologist. Ishii was making the most of a bad situation, but he barely spoke English,

and the anthropologist barely spoke Yahi. So this story, the way I at least can tell it, it's as much about the people around Ishii as it is about the man himself. And in the style of my own family, it's about the meaning behind the story they told about him, the ethics of their relationships, the choices they made, and the ones they were about to make. Kroeber and his crew were working with Ishii on setting down what they could of the Yahi culture.

They recorded him telling stories on wax cylinders, over 50 hours of Ishi telling Yahi tales. That's his voice, telling the story of the wood ducks, about a man who'd been turned into a wood duck, looking for a wife. Wax cylinder recordings were hard to make, but Ishii spent seven hours telling this story across over a hundred different cylinders. It was one of the first stories he told. And according to the anthropologist Oren Starn, who wrote a great book about this history, Wood Ducks was, at that point, the longest recorded performance of all time.

It took a huge amount of stamina. At one point, one of Kroeber's colleagues went to take a phone call. When he got back, Ishii told him it would be better if they kept working without breaks. He was preserving a body of knowledge he knew would be lost otherwise. But he also had things he wouldn't reveal, just as he never revealed his name. I think when you dig down into it,

it's exactly these kinds of things of like, I know what you're doing, right? The sort of sense where the indigenous person, you know, says, no, I know exactly what you're doing. And I'm going to act according to my own best rights and interests in relation to what we're doing, so that what you're doing becomes what we are doing together, right? So there's an insistence upon sort of active agency. It seems to me like there's a fair bit of evidence for the strategic

use of anthropologists. The anthropologists met with Ishii often. They worked hours and hours together. By this point, they'd figured out how to communicate to a degree, and they were by all accounts friendly and easy with each other. Ishii would come over for dinner at Kroeber's, and from everything I've read, it seems that he and Kroeber grew close. Ishii had a community of Berkeley acquaintances who claimed to think of him as a friend, including a man named Saxton Pope, a star surgeon at the University of California. He and Ishii hung out a lot. They'd go hunting with bows and arrows together, kind of

like a grown-up version for Pope of playing Indian. Ishii would visit Pope in the hospital. People thought he might have been a healer in his past life because he'd sit with sick patients and help the nurses clean their tools. But he disapproved of how the hospital handled its dead, cutting people open for autopsies. Ishii had a life in San Francisco, but in the summer of 1914, Kroeber, his anthropologist colleague, and Saxton Pope proposed a trip back to the land Ishii was from. They got back from the trip a little under a month later, and life in San Francisco resumed its regular rhythms for them all. Grover left on sabbatical, eventually landing in New York.

But somewhere in that time, Ishii became visibly ill. It was tuberculosis, a disease to which American Indians had no resistance. Five years after his arrest, Ishii was dying. Kroeber knew that when he did, there would be talk of an autopsy. That's what often happened when someone died at the hospital. But in Ishii's case, there would be people who were especially interested, who thought the final act of studying Yahi culture would be to look inside his body. Saxton Pope thought as much. So Kroeber wrote a letter to the director of the museum on March 24th, 1916, a furious and now famous message. He wrote, As to the disposal of the body, I must ask you as my personal representative to yield nothing at all

under any circumstances. If there is any talk of the interests of science, then say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends. Besides, I cannot believe that any scientific value is materially involved. We have hundreds of Indian skeletons that nobody ever comes to study. The day after Kroger sent that letter, Ishii died. And then, Pope had an autopsy performed. They cremated Ishii's body afterwards.

But before they did, they removed his brain, and they preserved it. When Kroeber returned from his sabbatical, it was waiting for him, like a sick taunt, the physical container of all that information he'd been trying to prize from Ishii. But it represented something else, too. Kroeber knew that Ishii hated the way anthropologists kept human remains in the museum. He now had the chance to cremate the last part of Ishii's body and reunite it with the rest of him, to do the last right thing in a bad situation.

But he didn't. He sent Ishi's brain to the Smithsonian. This is the thing about this story, right? This kind of final betrayal from Kroeber really changes the story up. You don't have to do what Kroeber did. You see the pictures of them, and they're doing these things, and it looks like a kind of partnership. It looks like a potential friendship. It looks like this kind of relationship. And you have to think, well, okay, it probably was at some level.

you have to think, well, okay, it probably was at some level. But if at the end of the day, you know, Kroeber is able to continue this kind of practice of dehumanization, you know, how does that, how can you look back at all of these sort of images of them together, sort of accounts of them together, you know, and see it in the same light? I just don't think you, you know, I just don't think you can. What's hard about this history is there is no reliable narrator. It's always more myth than fact. All the people setting down the accounts we have of Ishii in San Francisco were trying to see him as a record of his culture, to practice pure anthropology, even if they thought of him as a friend. That was how they told the story. A man and a culture preserved. But that story left a whole lot out.

That's why, I think, Kroeber's daughter retold it. She'd been born a Kroeber, but when she got married, she took her husband's last name and added it to the end of her own. Ursula Kroeber Le Guin. We'll be right back. Well, I want to start out with a serious question to you all, which is what on earth are we all doing here? Ursula Kerber was born 13 years after Ishii died. She was the fourth child, the youngest, and the only girl in the bunch. She grew up spunky in a loud, boisterous house of academics and academics-to-be.

She was very close to her mother, a whip-smart woman named Theodora, who seemed like she could see into her kids' souls. Her father, Alfred, looked outwards. Ursula thought of him as a kind of wizard. He'd tell her creation myths and legends, stories about other worlds. Every story could be told. Except one. A family one. The one about Ishii and her father. She always said that it wasn't brought up when she was a kid. Julie Phillips is a writer,

specifically the writer Ursula Le Guin handpicked to be her biographer. She grew up understanding the value of cultural relativism, of the notion that the culture that you're immersed in is not the only culture, and that there are always other ways of doing things. And she talks about how liberating that was for her to know that.

Anthropology was the backdrop to Le Guin's life. But as a kid, she wasn't reading textbooks. She was reading science fiction. In the 1930s and 40s, sci-fi was not exactly held in high regard. To her, though, it probably read like the best part of her dad's stories. Exotic, exciting,

especially to a kid who never quite fit in. She said, you know, in high school, I was in exile in the Siberia of adolescent social mores. In the library, I was home free. Le Guin always wanted to be a writer. After college, she was writing poems and realist novels. And it was around that time, in the late 1950s, that she first heard the story of Vichy. Her dad kept getting asked to write about it all, but he wouldn't.

Instead, her mom Theodora did. Her book was published in 1961, and it was called Ishi in Two Worlds, a biography of the last wild Indian in North America. Ursula Le Guin always hated that subtitle, because, she said, Ishi wasn't wild. He came out of a more deeply rooted culture than the one he went into. But the book became a big bestseller. It's been in print since the 60s. It's sold over a million copies and been translated into a slew of languages. And it added a whole new dimension to Ishii's story, the fact of genocide. It was, for its time

and author, revolutionary. But it was also an attempt to transform that pain into a healing narrative, a salve for white liberal guilt. Le Guin talked about learning that story, late in her life, in a documentary called The Worlds of Ursula Le Guin. My mother's book opened many people's eyes, including my own, to the appalling history of the white conquest of California. It's kind of hard to admit that your people did something awful. When I absorb something like that, the way I handle it is probably to put it into a novel. Le Guin was famously evasive about where her ideas came from, author's privilege.

But I think that the revelation of Ishi's story is at the foundation of her career. Because right before her mother's book on Ishi came out, her father died. And at that exact moment, she ditched her realist novels and she started to write sci-fi. Her mother began working on a young person's version of the Ishii story,

a lightly fictionalized account which a lot of fourth graders in California have probably had to read over the last half century. Le Guin read drafts and gave notes. And meanwhile, she'd begun to work on her own first published novel, a book called Rokannon's World. She's just had a baby, her first child, and she has really bad cabin fever. And I think that she just needed to get out of the house imaginatively. So Rokannon is her first anthropologist hero, and she sends him to explore a planet.

The anthropologist narrator was one of Le Guin's first major innovations in science fiction. It allowed her to smuggle a whole set of big ideas from academic anthropology into science fiction. Because science fiction has always been sort of anthropological in the worst way. Manifest destiny in outer space. Like Flash Gordon encountering aliens on the planet Mongo.

I can only account for them as being descendant from the original race, which thousands of years ago inhabited numerous planets on the solar system. They're primitive, all right. It was the exact same kind of story the white settlers in California told themselves in Oroville in 1849. The same story white American kids were learning from their favorite science fiction. Difference as threat.

Until people began to notice a changing guard in science fiction, including Le Guin's writing and her work as a public figure speaking at events all over the world, like AussieCon. Do you people realize, by the way, that to my three children,

science fiction is not a low form of literature written by little contemptible hacks? It's the kind of thing your own mother does? She was raising three kids, living in Oregon. When the kids were at school, she'd write. She'd start out in September with a premise, and finish a first draft by March to polish off before summer vacation began. She'd found a set of ideas. And in 1966, five years after her mom's book on Ishii came out,

the floodgates opened. A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and The Word for World is Forest are some of the most famous science fiction books of all time. And they were all written in the 10-year period that began in 1966. And I think all of them are dealing with those themes from anthropology, the things that were left out of the first telling of the Ishi story. I don't think it's a coincidence that during that same stretch, an American Indian civil rights movement was gaining steam. They were responding to a new federal

Indian policy in the 1950s known as termination. After World War II, the government had wanted to end its recognition of tribes, move them off reservations, and stop honoring its treaties to assimilate American Indians into the mainstream. Alfred Kroeber had worked with tribes on court cases early in those years. American Indians responded with what came to be known as the Red Power Movement. One of their most famous actions came in 1969, when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz, the island prison in the Bay Area. We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth. We know that $24 in trade goods is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold,

but we know that land values have risen over the years. The occupation lasted until 1971. Le Guin was watching as the script flipped on an entire history her family had borne direct witness to, and she was writing her most influential books at that exact moment. She said that a lot of my protagonists are alone of their kind among people of another kind. This is Ishi's situation, also the situation of a field

anthropologist, also the situation, or so it seems to me, of most adolescents, most intellectuals, most artists. I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made. most artists, I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made. Once you start looking for it, the traces of Ishi's story are everywhere in Le Guin's work. But the really clear one about her father and Ishi, as the anthropologist James Clifford has noted, is the word for world is forest. People think of it as a novel written in protest of the Vietnam War, also part of the basis for the film Avatar.

But it mirrors the concerns of the American Indian movement, and it's profoundly about one of the central tensions in anthropology, between being an objective observer or an active activist participant. And I suppose it's not too surprising in The Anthropologist's Daughter to talk about two cultures bumping up against each other that don't understand each other. In the book, Earth has run out of lumber, so they colonize a forest planet called Ethshi, populated by an alien race of gentle tree people

descended from humans. An anthropologist embeds with the colonizing force. He makes friends with one of the aliens. And together, they make a careful record of Aethcian culture and spend hours working on a dictionary of the native language together. But while the anthropologist is working on recording the culture, the colonizing force rapes, pillages, and burns the people and the planet. It would be better if I had never known you,

the alien tells the anthropologist. Le Guin writes, It was not in the anthropologist's nature to think, what can I do? Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other men's business. He preferred to be enlightened rather than to enlighten, to seek facts rather than the truth.

But even the most un-missionary soul, unless he pretends he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. What are they doing abruptly becomes, what are we doing? And then, what must I do? It seems to me that she was commenting on her father's situation, and it seems to me that she would not have admitted even to herself that she was commenting on that situation. It's so clear, though. It feels so direct. Yeah, I think it is. In the end of The Word for World is Forest, the anthropologist dies in an alien raid,

but his work saves the planet. It leads to the end of the colony and freedom for its indigenous people. But in reality, Le Guin must have known that the situation is never that easily resolved. And so I think it left the more interesting work for the year after the word for World is Forest. That year began with a group of American Indian movement and Naglala Lakota activists occupying Wounded Knee in a high-profile protest. And it was the year Le Guin published one of her most famous stories, another story about the dynamic between Ishii and her father. The really obvious story where she asks questions about her father's legacy is

the ones who walk away from Omelas. Omelas. The story my dad loves. About the utopia that depends on that kid in the basement. The one that's about what you think it's about. Except it's not. Omelas is us. Omelas is, you know, every culture everywhere in a lot of ways. But it is, you know, it maps quite well onto European cultures in California, which exist and thrive, you know, in the aftermath of genocide. in the aftermath of genocide. In Omelas, Le Guin tells you to imagine your own utopia, but she's also describing hers.

And I think she's describing the Bay Area. Here she is again, reading from it. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Far off to the north and west, the mountain stood up, half encircling Omelas on her bay.

The air of morning was so clear that the snow, still crowning the 18 peaks, burned with white gold fire across the miles of sunlit air under the dark blue of the sky. The person in the room in the public buildings of Omelas is she in the room in the San Francisco Museum of Anthropology. He was crafty and creative. He made a new life for himself, but he never should have had to. And the tens of thousands of people who saw him in the museum, they knew what his presence there meant, why he was there, what had been lost, the cost that had been paid

for all the remains of the cultures filling that building in the city by the bay. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two and then leaves home. These people go out into the street and walk down the street alone. They keep walking and they walk straight out of the city of Omelas through the beautiful gates. They go on. They leave Omelas, walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all.

It's possible that it doesn't exist. But they seem to know where they're going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. The two choices in the story are stay or walk away. But Le Guin didn't either. She kept coming back to the same place and talking about it as if it were another planet, talking about what was really going on there. I think in the hopes that if she made it strange enough, people would be able to see finally the world around them. It feels like every generation is trying to escape the generation before and the generation before that

and, you know, always unsuccessfully, right? I mean, always with partial success. Philip Deloria, again, historian of Native American and American history, but also the son of one of the leading figures in the Red Power movement, Vine Deloria Jr., the intellectual, lawyer, and member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who came up with the term Red Power, and famously thought very little of anthropologists. Here he is in 1972. They continued to act as if the only valid Indians were the first Indians that one of the anthropologists ran across. Le Guin was trying to escape her past without disowning it, to keep working it over and reworking it.

She did not do it perfectly, but she tried. Her fiction was one of the pathways the ideas of the Red Power movement traveled to reach the mainstream. She helped pave the way for reimagining the future. And she created new stories to hold in the back of your mind. And she created new stories to hold in the back of your mind. If you should ever find yourself in the corral at some slaughterhouse in the future, looking at a person you don't understand, trying to bridge the gap between two worlds.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin's writing changed science fiction, expanded the boundaries of what could be imagined, with huge moral imagination and empathy. But there have been new futures hidden inside her father's work that he didn't imagine either. Because Ishii was, of course, not the last American Indian, and tribal identity was more complex and overlapped and long-lasting than the turn-of-the-century anthropologists realized. And so a new generation of American Indians in California

are pulling the work their ancestors did with the anthropologists at Berkeley out from the archives and reclaiming that knowledge. Ishii's story had an unexpected future too. In the late 1990s, a Maidu man named Art Engel, the anthropologist Oren Starn, and historian Nancy Rockefeller went looking for Ishi's brain, even when it was said to be lost, destroyed. But they kept looking for years, until they found it, in a tank in an archive at the Smithsonian. They got Ishi's brain back and buried it with the rest of his remains on his ancestral land in an undisclosed place. on his ancestral land in an undisclosed place. It was a big story once again,

and it became a rallying cry for a movement to repatriate native remains from collections around the world. In 2021, in response to activism on campus, Berkeley took Kroeber's name off the building that houses the department he founded. But they have been slow to repatriate the many ancestral remains still in their collection. Meanwhile, 112 years after Ishii turned up at that slaughterhouse, no one's any closer to some essential truth about his story.

I asked Deloria about Le Guin's work telling and retelling, excavating that story's meaning. And you can see yourself trying to escape some of those things, which are negative possibilities, always unsuccessfully, you know. And yet, because you're conscious and you're aware of them, you're dealing with them, perhaps writing five page short stories, right? You know, I mean, so you're, you're trying to come to terms, never fully adequately, but you know, the fact that you're trying is actually probably worth something. You have to try, even if you can never escape the past.

Kind of like how you never quite escape your parents. Which is why, I guess, I've just told you a story that seems like it's about one thing, when really, it's about something else entirely. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you want to hear more about Ursula K. Le Guin, in 2018, I interviewed the filmmaker Arwen Curry,

who made a documentary about Le Guin.