On appropriation: we all learn from each otherr all the time & we forget that. Today at lunch about a presentation on Jaqaru/Kawki database we were reminiscing about how America (the original, before so named) feeds the world: potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash … . Potatoes of the Andes and their names as in our db was the take-off point. We all appropriate at all times. The real question is: do we respect? And how do we show that respect? ACH does, in my book, and I do teach this stuff. I say, let us learn from each other — and the *from each other* being the operative word; appropriation means stealing and claiming as one’s old. For some that may be a subtle difference, but it is a major one. learning from others can be seen as a high sign of respect; that I carried my babies on my back Andean style was so perceived, e.g., such that I was criticized when not doing in correctly (an involver verb tense, not a hierarchical one), and taught the proper way.

I didn’t get to sleep that night; I had to read straight through. I have given dozens of copies away, and I re-read the book every year.

I wish I could find my notes on the Portland, Oregon Westercon panel years ago, (I believe, if my memory serves, that Ursula LeGuin was on that panel.) That panel was my introduction to the ongoing discussion of writers and readers about the meme of “cultural appropriation”. I don’t need to add to that. I have a different idea.

I compare LeGuin’s book _Always Coming Home_ to Leslie Marmon Silko’s book _Ceremony_ . These are my scattered thoughts about those two books.

They are equally stories of a wounded, marginalized human being who takes a journey away from, and finally back home to, a place that feels like home: they do this by consciously turning away from using or supporting violence.

The meme that human beings can have choice, and what a mystery choice is, and the consequences of choosing nonviolence, is what the two books are about, in my opinion.

How different that story always is, and must be, for a woman! No other story compares to the way _Always Coming Home_ tells that story for a woman, just like no other story compares to the way _Ceremony_ tells it for a man, in my opinion.

“People who make the world into war fight it first with people of the other sex.” Has no one else noticed that the community that North Owl is born into makes judgements about her mother and father’s relationship? And that they do that in all different ways? And that her father’s culture also judges it, but only in one way?

Willow has a happy fantasy in her mind – her husband loves her, he’s just away for a while for his job, and he will be back someday to take up his position in her family and heyimas.

But Willow’s mother says, “They leave their own women to come and rape women they don’t even know!” That statement says a lot about what North Owl’s grandmother believes about what happened. Her saying so doesn’t hurt the grandfather, a big promoter for “the Warriors” who are training to fight the Condor… and becoming much like Condors.

However, North Owl sees her mother’s reaction to the remark, sees her face change, sees the pain that comes into it. Is it the pain of a memory of forced sex breaking through her fantasy, or is it the pain of the undercurrent of shame her heyimas makes her feel, because of the way she decided to find a lover and get pregnant by a man outside the Valley? Which do you think it was? Or was it something else? LeGuin never tells us.

LeGuin never shows us the central fact of the novel. We never learn exactly how North Owl was conceived, or whether or not Willow had a choice. Did anyone demand that she abort the fetus? Did she want a moon child, a child of one house, and did Condors sneak into Moon Dances? Did she get raped, did she fall into a casual relationship, or or did she fall head over heels in love with a beautiful man and choose to come inland with him and bear a child with him?

Since the idea “moon child” is already a choice in the Valley, the only thing that would explain why North Owl is called “hwikmas” by some other kids, and feels as though she is growing up “half-house”, is her own explanation: “Education and ceremony were disturbed in my childhood… “. Why? Because the meme of “militarism” was creeping into the Valley, from continued contact with the Condor People?

In _Ceremony_, the woman Tayo falls in love with explains to him about the necessity for the healing of the stories themselves. Rooted out must be the stories that “the witches” like: “The violence excites them, and the killing soothes them.” Tayo knows that Emo actually enjoys killing and destruction, and uses hatred of “whites” to justify it. Tayo refuses to think or live that way.

In the valley in North Owl’s youth, what was the guiding metaphor? Instead of the metaphor of “the house, and bringing in”, people were sometimes beginning to deal with each other using the metaphor of “war”. When your own people fight a war, they themselves become like the enemy. North Owl was the child of an enemy soldier. Such children are sometimes feared and hated.

This book is one of the most important books to have been written by LeGuin, in my opinion.

North Owl was trying to become a whole person. She decided to go with her father out of love, just like Tayo decided to join the army because the brother he loved, and wanted the love of, was joining: his brother Rocky was already assimilated to the goals and desires of the world that this book calls “white”.

But neither of the brothers were *witches*, who, in _Ceremony_, seem to me to be people of any and all races and cultures who choose to enjoy violence and the adrenaline rush of destruction. [This is not how I define "witches"; to me, we are healers. But for the purposes of reading _Ceremony_, I am happy to give up, for the moment, my definition of "witch", and let Silko talk to me in her own words.]

_Always Coming Home_, like _Ceremony_, is about a human being who is part of two different cultures, one based on the metaphor of “war” and the activity of violence, and one based on the metaphor of “home” and the activity of negotiation and bringing into the house (of culture?) exactly what one chooses to have there. North Owl lives for a while in each, and is trying to understand all this, and to understand how *she* can be a human being.

This idea is important for everybody to think about right here, right now, especially if we accept the idea that everyone and everything is related. This idea that we are all related does not belong to any one culture. It keeps showing up in human culture because it’s true, not only in the world that we make up (culture and memes, which live in the abstract world of our minds, and about which we make choices), but in the world that made us up (our biology and ecology, this planet where we are evolving and will live and die for real — and maybe we have some choice about how to do that).

That’s exactly what Tayo is trying to do in _Ceremony_. The peak of the book is an act of refusal. Tayo refuses to come out from his hiding place and kill the men who are torturing and killing his friend. He refuses to take part in *their* ceremony. It is the hardest thing for him to choose. But because he chooses not to kill, he later can come back to the old men in the kiva and tell them who he is. That’s who he is, Arrowboy, who acts against the violent witches by witnessing their game, and choosing not to play.

According to Silko, their “ckoyo” magic just won’t work if someone is watching them. If we can step away from violence far enough to watch what it does, it loses its hold on us. Tayo lives, to plant the seeds that his lover collects, to heal the story and use the healed story to heal all of them together as the land itself heals.

North Owl refuses to stay with the Condor; she sees them tearing themselves apart, executing “enemies of the state”. Her father also finally turns his back on his culture when he helps his daughter escape. She knows, and maybe he knows too, that having lived by the sword, he will soon die as he does. But North Owl makes the other choice. And she brings with her, back into her home, her womanhood as Woman Coming Home, her daughter, and her Condor sister.

The game of militarism is eating up the substance of our planet so badly that we are spending our children’s ecosystems on the adrenaline rush and the cult of “brave brothers dying” for the rest of us.

Unlike North Owl, we have no place to run home to. War is everywhere, eating up our planet, and we’ll take war with us when we start using up the other planets, unless we choose not to do that.

Unlike Tayo, not all of us have elders waiting for us in the kiva, to integrate us into peace. We have to do it ourselves. Part of the way we do it is through speculative fiction, in my opinion. Fiction helps us look at our own metaphors, step out into meta-culture, where we get to look at all of the stories that human beings have made, and think about our own particular life stories and choices.

Tayo must mend story itself, because the story must be inclusive of everything, so we can all heal together; there is no separate healing. We are all in the same ceremony.

Woman Coming Home goes on studying how to be human after she comes home; she is always coming home.

Koto FARMER
“Sevivhwa”.

The plays were absolutely my favourite parts of the book – but what struck me was that they seemed linked inextricably to ancient Greek plays.

I’ve got to say I don’t think I have the background understanding to properly “see” or recognise the issues of appropriation in the text, although it occured to me at times when I was reading the book, obviously, it feels a bit out of my grasp (as both Native American and general US culture are things I can only appreciate as an outsider).

Absolutely.

I have been told, though, and told often, given that I write slash stories ;-) that as a woman I can’t write men. In particular, they tell me, I can’t write gay men. I have been told by fanfic writers that they “can’t write Foreman” (or other black characters/characters of colour) because, they say, they can’t possibly understand how a person of colour will think/feel/react. And to me.

The situation is different when privilege writes about disprivilege, yes – because it becomes harder to achieve the state of humility before a culture you are not familiar with, and the necessary arrogance to continue to write. (To a certain extent, after all, no writer can be humble – you have to have a certain degree of self-willed arrogance to be able to get through anyway.)

Do men write women characters badly? Yes, often: they have a female stereotype in their heads and they write to that stereotype rather than thinking about real actual female human beings. Is that a reason for arguing that male writers shouldn’t try to write about women? Well, the books they frequently easier to read when they do avoid writing stereotype-cardboard characters… but I’d rather male writers did learn how to ignore that female stereotype in their heads and learn how to write like feminists… ;-)

Doesn’t this apply to other kinds of privilege writing about disprivilege? To straight writers shaking off the gay-stereotype or the presumption of universal heterosexuality and learning to write about LGBT characters who are just everywhere and human?

…and to white writers/of European descent learning how to write about characters of colour/cultures that are not derived from European tradition?

My guess is that there are other elements of the book that were drawn, at least broadly, from Native American cultures, but that’s just a guess. Without specific knowledge I don’t think I have grounds to say that Le Guin has done anything wrong, and I don’t think a generic “person of color” does either. Only a specific person whose culture has been appropriated (or someone with inside knowledge of same) has the authority to say that this is what has happened.

I consider all of this to be separate from the question of racism or orientalism (which is really racism in a slightly different outfit). You say that in Always Coming Home, Le Guin depicts the Kesh as living in a timeless state of noble savagism, and that she orientalizes her subjects. But in one of your previous comments you said you completely disagreed with this argument! Color me confused. Personally, I think Le Guin provided a lot of detail about misunderstandings, fights, feuds, dissatisfaction, etc. to avoid this very problem; the Kesh are not saintly tribal folk, they are only human, with clearly recognizable problems, hopes, and fears. The most important difference between them and us is that their environment is poisonous, and they can’t reproduce in large numbers. This is the science fictional underpinning of the book, and the cultures Le Guin writes about are her gedankenexperiment about what would follow from that premise, just as The Left Hand of Darkness was her exploration of what would happen if humans had no fixed gender and lived on a frozen planet. The people themselves haven’t changed emotionally or mentally or (mostly) physically — it’s the circumstances that are different. I think that’s pretty much the opposite of orientalism.

It’s exactly the *non*specificity, the use of native cultures as a resource for a land-based utopia without identifying them (and the fact that I learned about Coyote but thought Le Guin made her up) that are problematic. And it doesn’t detract from what one gains from the book to acknowledge that power, race and colonialism make writing about some kinds of others more politically difficult, nor does it deny that the issues are complicated.

I think writers have to figure out for themselves what they can and can’t write, and I think they/we need to bring humility and modesty to that. It’s something I’m struggling with in the thing I’m writing–one of the narrators is a biracial punk girl (why? well, I wanted to write a main character of color because SF novels need to, the character needed to be connected to anarchism but have a critical relationship to the anarchist community and one of my friends in school was a biracial punk girl so I feel like I’ve at least had some conversations about being biracial and punk rock…those are a weird and politically imperfect melange of reasons, but now that I’ve thought about them the character has taken shape for me and I’m starting to know how she thinks… )

Oddly, I’m lending Always Coming Home to two friends this week.

Rosa–the class is a physical one, meeting every other week at my house. Next we’re reading a Samuel Delany short story which I’m scanning and sending–on the 15th he’s speaking at the Walker, so that will be our class. After that we’re reading (or re-reading, as the case may be!) The Female Man…You can email me at jfranklin at yahoo dot com for further details, and of course it would be great to meet! someone! from! the! internet!