“Remember that you have many relatives, human and nonhuman”

How to Survive Apocalypse, Part Two

This is the second in a series of three essays adapted from a paper I recently wrote. The first post is here.

To recap briefly from the first essay:

In his essay How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse, Julian Brave NoiseCat begins by sharing, first in his native language Secwepemctsín and then in English, “who I am in relation to my kin, to my community, and to the places I come from, because those things matter—not just to Indians, but to all people.” In the midst of the apocalypse of pandemic and climate catastrophe, he exhorts us with a simple message that can help us to at least begin to frame a response to our fears about how to survive these times:

So my message to you is simple: Remember who you are. Remember that you have many relatives, human and nonhuman. And remember that we all come from somewhere, and that those places, and the place called Earth, need us to fight for them.¹

In this series of essays here on The Spiral Lab, I am making an attempt to accept NoiseCat’s invitation to remember these things, and to connect my own remembrances to the wisdom of three Native American prophets as described by Steven Charleston, a Native American elder, retired Episcopal bishop of Alaska, and author of We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. Gandiodaiio, Tenskwatawa, and Smohalla.

“Remember that you have many relatives, human and nonhuman”

Being dehumanized naturally pushed us to identify with the realms of existence that Western culture (especially according to Christianity) has mythologized as subordinate to humans—or even as monstrous.

~ So and Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd

Just as we have learned from Gandiodaiio [the Native American prophet I wrote about in the first essay] that a turn from rugged individualism to the communal is integral to surviving apocalypse², I too have had to learn, in the face of my own personal apocalypse, to resist the temptation to completely indulge my natural inclination to being a hermit. The early days of my post-personal-apocalypse coincided with the pandemic shutdowns, which I suppose helped heal the trauma of having largely lost my previous life’s community—it’s not as though I would have been able to spend time with them anyway. Hunkered down in my new home with my new partner and our pets, I was able to lick my wounds and reconceive community, my “relatives, human and nonhuman.” I don’t know if it’s true, or just part of my imagined memory of that Spring, but the air seemed cleaner, certainly quieter, and people’s gardens more beautiful and more vibrant than I had ever remembered them. On long walks with our dogs over the course of a year, I fell in love with many new “friends”—the lilac bush on Pulaski street that blooms in lavender glory and smells fresh like spring,

The ancient Ginkgo tree’s fan-shaped leaves that I noticed for the first time in my new heightened awareness and state of wonder, and that turn a flaming yellow in the fall.

The Japanese maple on Seymour that explodes each autumn in a blaze of orange-red and takes my breath away in the sunshine.

The Sycamore in front of my own house whose branches cast dancing shadows on my bed each sunny afternoon.

In addition to these more-than-human friends, perhaps my most blessed community that emerged from that time is a small online community of neurodivergent creatives I conjured into being called Divergent Design Studios. We are freaks and misfits, young and old, trans and queer, disabled and disenfranchised—but also mystics and makers, artists and activists, seers and healers. For almost three years now, we have been meeting multiple times a week to create together and for peer support sessions that feel very much like Quaker worship. Together we have created a “space” where time operates differently, where the monstrous and dysfunctional become the norm, where gentle loving patience disrupts shame, and where I have learned that my longing for a sense of rootedness can also be rhizomic, spreading laterally far and wide, and that “online friendships” are every bit as “real” as “brick and mortar” ones. My DDS community spreads from Australia to India to Africa to Europe to the British Isles and Ireland and to every time zone across the United States and Canada. 

Charleston shares the story of another Native American Prophet, Tenskwatawa, who was told in a vision that in order for Native peoples to hold onto their faith, to reform and return to their traditional ways, and thus to survive, they needed a place, a holy village, a city on a hill that could offer a spatial manifestation of a spiritual reality. Together with his brother, Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa built a succession of such villages, each of which fell in successive battles with white settlers.. The last of these holy gathering places was called Prophetstown, which is now a state park just a few miles from where I grew up in Indiana. Prophetstown became a place of pilgrimage, not just for the two brother’s people, the Shoshone, but for “[t]housands of Native people [who] made the pilgrimage to listen to the prophet and return to their people with his message of reform and resistance. They abstained from alcohol, returned to the traditional values of communal life, and put aside old histories of conflict between Native cultures to embrace a new vision of Native American identity.” Prophetstown became a “center of spiritual gravity” (Charleston 69).

It too was destroyed by white American settlers. Ultimately the dream of Prophetstown the village died. But as Steven Charleston insists, what he offers in his retelling of the stories and wisdom of these Native American prophets, is not a history or a biography, but “an analysis of apocalypse—a case study for those of us who want to know how Native American spirituality rose from those ashes and survived. What is the revelation we can discover from this historic experience?” he asks. His answer: “I would look to the city on the hill” (Charleston 72).

For many, too many, the “city on the hill” has become a survivalist bunker, either in reality or in the popular imagination, including on the left. I will admit that I have long had dreams of a sort of socialist commune dedicated to the physical and spiritual survival of those I love. But more and more I am realizing that “the apocalypse” is not something to survive over and against others who are less prepared, but rather something to move through with vision, with hope, and with others, some of whom have been traveling this road for a long time. 

This is precisely the sort of diffuse, virtual commune I am coming to believe my online community is. And interestingly, Charleston points to something very similar in his own life as a contemporary example of Prophetstown. “Tenskwatawa demonstrated the resilience of his apocalyptic vision by showing his followers a very visible spiritual lesson: … As long as the people believed in community, that community could go anywhere. Every village could become a city on the hill” (76). Charleston goes on to describe an online community he created by writing small daily spiritual messages and meditations. “My location was not beside a river in Ohio but beside a global information river online…. I set up my meeting house on the high hill of the internet, where everyone could see it, and I invited others to join me in a new community where we could live in peace and with integrity” (81). 

This is what my community has become. In weekly Zoom meetings, we speak from our hearts and souls, share our creative lives, confess our cringiest shames and fears, and we are fed and healed and made whole. We become, from across the whole world yet side-by-side, a community that can walk together through the apocalypse, and at the same time envision a new sort of world.

1. Noisecat, Julian Brave. “How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse.” Emergence Magazine, November 23, 2021. https://emergencemagazine.org/op_ed/how-indigenous-peoples-are-fighting-the-apocalypse/

2. I discuss what I mean by apocalypse in the first essay.