What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.
Part of Against Doomerism from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
In the dead of winter of late 2020 in the city of Shikaakwa, on the frozen shores of Ininwewi-gichigami, there is no pandemic. The high-rise buildings downtown are vertical forests, with balconies and rooftops designed as an outgrowth of nature. The Anishinaabe people bustle through a city of their own design. They watch the championship game of baagaadowewin in sports bars on high-definition flat-screens. They speak Anishinaabemowin into their smartphones on crowded public transportation, drink coffee, debate politics, argue with their families, and gather around communal fires in the middle of the downtown area.
Shikaakwa doesn’t exist. I made it up. It’s the setting of my first novel, The Peacekeeper, an alternate history in which the Americas were never colonized. Shikaakwa is in the place of the city now most often called Chicago. Ininwewi-gichigami now appears on maps as Lake Michigan. Anishinaabe is what my people, the Ojibwe/Chippewa, and my tribe, the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, call ourselves. The Anishinaabemowin language, also known as Ojibwe, was suppressed and, in many cases, illegal to speak until the 1970s. The sport of baagaadowewin was eventually appropriated into lacrosse.
Shikaakwa as I imagined it could never exist — I created it from my 21st-century perspective, which is inescapably shaped by the trajectory the world actually took. Native societies experienced centuries of forced removal and genocide, and much of what we once had is lost and can’t be re-created.
Lately, the news has felt particularly doomy, dominated by fears of a looming apocalypse due to climate change or nuclear war or artificial intelligence. This is understandable — any of these existential threats could irrevocably change the world, and what would lie beyond is unknowable. Native people know a thing or two about that; the world as we knew it ended long ago, and it continued to end again and again and again. Yet we also know that there’s a future even after the apocalypse has come and gone. Rather than conceptualizing time as a linear march toward calamity (or, for optimists, toward the dream of utopia), it can be viewed as a wheel that we cycle through repeatedly, from creation to destruction to recreation.
The Indigenous experience embodies this cycle, providing evidence of a future after disaster. We’re still here, after all, even if the context we live in would be just as unimaginable to our pre-colonial ancestors as a city on the present-day Great Lakes truly untouched by colonial history is to me.
The world we know today will eventually be destroyed, too, whether by our changing climate or some other world-altering force we can’t predict or imagine. But the problem with the doomerist streak that’s taken hold of so much of our zeitgeist is that it just stops there, creating a moral hazard that lets us stop imagining the future. Something new will always be rebuilt on top of what’s destroyed, and we can never abandon our obligation to keep creating it.
The medicine wheel, an Anishinaabe model of time
There’s a stereotype that Native people are stoic and steeped in wisdom. I am no authority and certainly no expert, and I don’t purport to have any wisdom to share. I’m an urban Anishinaabekwe from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who’s lived most of her life in California. I cannot speak for every Anishinaabe person, let alone every Native person. Our experiences and perspectives are as varied as any other group of people.
In Anishinaabe tradition, as well as in many other Native cultures, the medicine wheel represents the ever-churning cycle of life. Broken into four equal segments of yellow, black, red, and white, it starts on the right-hand side, reflecting the east as the source of the rising sun and beginning of all things. The four segments represent, among other things, the four directions, the four seasons, the four sacred medicines (tobacco, cedar, sage, and sweetgrass), and the four stages of life (birth, youth, adulthood, and elder).
The medicine wheel can also represent the repeating cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation that has defined all of human history but has particular resonance for Indigenous communities. This cycle is reflected in the Anishinaabe creation story: The world was created by Kiche Manitou (the Great Spirit), then destroyed in a great flood, and then re-created by the Sky Woman, who fell from the sky while pregnant, clutching a handful of seeds. Seeking refuge on the back of a turtle, she created Turtle Island, the Earth anew.
Our histories have been one never-ending turn of this wheel: We create, they destroy, and we create something new out of the ashes of what was left behind, saving what we can, and creating new things from the memories of the old. What’s re-created isn’t necessarily superior or inferior to what was destroyed. It is simply different.
In hindsight, the Americas’ pre-colonial past can be imagined as a generative period of creation. For centuries, we were a continent of self-governing tribes that responsibly managed and lived in concert with the land. We built cities, trade networks that stretched from the Arctic to the Andes, and a system of governance so sophisticated that it eventually influenced American democracy. There was no reason to believe we wouldn’t live this way forever.
Anishinaabe tradition teaches that when you create something, you’re not just creating for the moment — you’re creating for the future as well. We learn to make decisions from a seventh-generation perspective, which you may recognize as a green marketing slogan, but, like so many aspects of American culture, it was our idea first. It’s taught a couple of ways: One is to consider how each decision you make will impact others and the Earth seven generations in the future. We’re also taught to consider the impact of decisions in the context of the three generations that came before you, your own generation, and the three generations ahead of you: Will it honor your past and lay the foundation for a good future?
In either case, you are taught to look beyond the horizon of what you can see and consider the kind of world your decisions will create. But we also recognize that the present is like smoke: visible and real, but ephemeral and impossible to hold on to. What we create lingers until either something replaces it or it is destroyed.
Colonialism brought destruction, but also re-creation, to Indigenous America
It’s easy to feel as though the world is in a unique period of destruction. Housing, health care, and education are increasingly unaffordable; hard-won civil rights are being stripped away; democracy is under threat each day by a major American political party; climate change will have devastating global impacts, however much we do now to mitigate it.
These things aren’t exactly comparable to Indigenous history, but they do share a feeling of senseless and irrecoverable loss. Over the centuries, my people have been the victims of a coordinated effort to destroy us culturally, ethnically, and biologically. The dispossession of Indigenous people did not end with the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, though that’s usually when US schools stop teaching Native history because it is generally regarded as the end of the Native armed resistance against the American government. In the early 20th century, two of my great-grandmother’s cousins were sent to an Indian boarding school, where they were forcibly sterilized. In 1953, less than a decade after my Anishinaabe grandfather and his brother fought in World War II, the US government began a formal program of tribal termination, with the goal of eliminating Native nations’ independence and requiring Natives on reservations to move to urban areas and assimilate into American life and culture. This practice continued until well into the Vietnam War era and did not officially end until it was repealed by Congress in 1988.
The United States has tried to breed us out of existence through blood quantum laws, which classify people as Native only if a certain percentage of their ancestors were “full-blood” Native Americans, whatever that means. If you fell below the required threshold, you were no longer legally Native. After a few generations of intermarriage, that’s pretty easy to do.
The blood quantum system still exists, both officially and informally. If you want to get a tuition waiver as a tribe member in Michigan, you must be at least one-quarter Native. I don’t look the way most people expect an Anishinaabekwe to look; whatever you’re picturing, I’m probably not it. When I share my affiliation and heritage, the first question I am often asked is what percentage I am. As the old saying goes, only dogs, horses, and Indians are classified this way.
Indigenous sovereignty continues to be attacked and contested, like just last year, when the US Supreme Court partially walked back a ruling that held that most of Oklahoma was Indian land. It will be like this as long as our persistence as independent nations is seen as in conflict with the United States. Rates of violence against Indigenous women are appallingly high and under-covered compared to white victims. The name of the sports teams at my mother’s high school in Marquette, Michigan, is still the Redmen, despite decades of debate and requests for change.
You could say, and many people do, that the past five centuries have constituted one long period of destruction. It absolutely has been. Entire nations, cultures, and languages have been lost, and so much has been lost even among those of us whose traditions and cultures survived. At the same time, you might also see it as part of a cycle of destruction and re-creation, of Native people re-creating and facing the destruction of what we’d rebuilt, only to rebuild it again and again and again. The US government did everything it could to destroy us, yet we are still here.
More than 100 years ago, pursuant to the Dawes Act, which converted the Native American system of communal land ownership into a private property system, the US government came to the Anishinaabeg across Michigan, including to my family in the Upper Peninsula. They offered a deal: My family could stay on the land that had been theirs for at least the past 5,000 years, but they had to stop communal farming and parcel out the land in individual 160-acre allotments for each nuclear family. If they wanted to stay, they would have to forget who they were and start living like white people. After each family got their 160 acres, the remaining land was taken by the government and made available for purchase by white settlers. While it had been US policy since the time of George Washington to “assimilate” and “civilize” Native peoples by forcing them to give up collective life and farming, this attempted to enforce it once and for all.
My family took the deal. Because of that difficult choice, my great-great-grandparents, great-grandparents, grandparents, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, and their children lived on and continue to live on the land. Their allotments have been bought, sold, and traded over the last century, and our ideas of culture, identity, and self have been both destroyed and rebuilt over that same period. Yet we are still fishing the same lakes and streams, still hunting in the same woods, still sitting around fires telling stories long into the night. You can even hear Anishinaabemowin spoken, though it’s often learned far later in life. My father didn’t learn to speak it until he was in his 60s.
White people bought the land that remained after it was parceled out, farmed it, paved over it, built landfills and factories and power plants, and hollowed out what was inside with pipelines and mines, belching smog and carbon and CFCs into the sky. The same thing was done to the Odawaa, the Haudenosaunee, the Neshnabé, the Hocągara, the Diné, the Myaamia, the Mamaceqtaw, the Maskoutench, the Meshkwahkihaki, the Othâkîwa, the Giiwigaabaw, the Shawanwaki, the Wyandot, the Lakota, and the more than 500 other nations living on land now under US jurisdiction.
This has happened on a wide scale — Native perseverance and reinvention alongside ongoing colonialism that threatens to swallow up what we have left. Native Americans have integrated into settler colonial society, too. We obtain college degrees, work in offices and hospitals and government and retail shops, fly in airplanes, drive cars, write novels, direct movies and television, talk on cellphones, paint portraits and landscapes, compete in the Olympics, and walk in space. I’m a lawyer and a published author, and I’m also Native. As a percentage of both professions, the share of Native Americans rounds to zero. This means that, statistically speaking, I don’t exist, yet obviously I do.
Perhaps it’s colonial society’s drive to destroy and replace that makes it inclined to see today’s global challenges as apocalyptic. For us, though, extinction was never an option. Because Native people maintained and continue to fight for self-determination, we still have a future.
Indigenous futurism re-creates a Native-centered world
I’m often asked how, in the world of The Peacekeeper, colonization was avoided; it’s never directly addressed in the book. To my mind, so many things had to go wrong for it to happen that any number of small differences in the course of history could have led to vastly different outcomes, and therefore any and all theories can be true. Thinking through these contingencies is important, but I find it more valuable to see the alternatives that could’ve existed. Colonialism wasn’t inevitable. The horrors of the past 500 years did not have to happen. The potential calamities of the next 500 years can likewise be avoided.
Indigenous futurism is a movement in art and literature, particularly through speculative and science fiction, that explores the present and future through an Indigenous-centered lens. This is what I aimed to do in creating Shikaakwa, considering what Indigenous communities might look like today if the historical fact of colonialism had gone differently, the benefits and limits of a Native restorative justice system, and how our relationship to the earth would drive urban development.
Some Indigenous futurist literature explicitly responds to the idea of apocalypse, and of Indigenous people having lived through one. I wanted to write a story in which the apocalypse was more or less inconceivable, where Indigenous people engage with one another and with their own value systems rather than with colonial invaders. Creating the world in The Peacekeeper was an act of re-creation like in the medicine wheel; it imagines a world radically unlike our own; at the same time, it’s a re-creation of what still might be.
Earth is a resilient planet that knows how to re-create out of destruction. Over 4 billion years ago, it collided with the planet Theia and created the moon. Volcanic eruptions eventually yield flower-covered meadows. We humans are a clever species; we eventually walked on that same moon born of destruction. One day we, with all of our conflicts here on earth, will be gone, too.
Viewing the universe through cycles of creation, destruction, and re-creation gives a wider, more expansive sense of time in which an individual life is a tiny part of a greater whole. Even human existence is just one blip in this greater scheme. Rather than viewing this as something tragic, there is some comfort in being able to see our impermanence and insignificance in the history of the world.
There’s no way of knowing where we are on the turn of the wheel; it’s too big for us to see at any given moment. But it will turn again — and we have the power, and the obligation, to give the best options to humanity and to all creation.
B.L. Blanchard is an author, lawyer, and enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Her debut novel, The Peacekeeper, was named a 2023 Michigan Notable Book.
The Netflix dating show’s contestants are not okay.
Like a golden ticket from eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka to “visit” his factory, the fourth season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind is not what it pretends to be. It’s not an “experiment,” it’s not about love, and — like the international moppets who got sucked into Wonka’s chocolate pipes or exploded into something huge and blue — it’s only an opportunity to experience humiliation, destruction, and dashed dreams.
To be fair, little has changed.
This year, as the show has done for the past three seasons, contestants — men and women separated by sex but united by their search for love — still enter “pods,” small rooms with a Wayfair-looking sofa and a shared wall. There, they talk to their prospective matches, every interaction filmed, in the hope that they’ll find love through conversation.
“Positano is my favorite place,” one of the female contestants this season yells in her windowless couch room. She hopes that the person on the other side of the wall also shares a favorable view of the luxurious Italian beach town on the Amalfi coast.
I’m not entirely sure what she’s worried about. No one on the show has ever said, “I hate Positano,” or, “I love to vacation among sewer rats.” But she is worried, making sure a man she can’t see finds her acceptable.
The ultimate goal for the Positano-lover and her cohort is to find love (sight unseen), and then advance out of the pods and see their match. But to do so, contestants must first get engaged. After that engagement, they have a mini vacation to test physical attraction, and four weeks to decide if they’re going to get married. The first season yielded two couples that are still married to this day, proving that, in certain cases, love can be blind.
But as time has gone on, the show has pivoted away from its initial questions about whether it’s possible to find true connection under these unusual circumstances and whether that’s preferable to the current real-world dating economy. Not unlike Wonka’s factory, Love Is Blind has morphed into something fearsome and self-contained: a look at just how dysfunctional relationships created under these extremely unrealistic pressures can be. Season four, full of villains, backstabbing, and multiple addenda to the initial rules, is perhaps the most cynical yet. Obviously, I cannot stop watching.
Love Is Blind is leaning into its villain era
Unlike seasons past, the fourth season of Love is Blind goes into the depths of what life is like for contestants in the pod stage of the show. Not only in the pods, where cast members do things like draw or listen to music or play games with each other through the wall (if you consider a version of beer pong a game), but also in their segregated living quarters.
While watching a man and woman color together in the pods isn’t particularly romantic or stimulating, there’s plenty to see in their common living space, which effectively amounts to a college dorm.
In the women’s area, everyone lounges around at all hours, faux fur throws wrapped around their shoulders or waists. It seems that women who aren’t currently in a pod talking to a man are encouraged to hang around talking about what just happened in said pod with one or two of the other dozen female strangers they’re living with. There’s barely any kind of Bechdel test-passing conversation between the women, no talk about personal hobbies or what the FTC’s duties are or what day of the week it is — only the men have those conversations.
This familiarity with one another — and one another’s love lives — creates tension because, in many cases, multiple women are going after the same guy (and vice versa). More than we’ve seen in any other installment of the show, cliques are formed. The sharpest division on the women’s side is between the women who dislike a contestant named Irina and the two who like Irina, one of whom is Irina herself.
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Courtesy of Netflix
“I think I’m a bombshell, but when I was younger I had really, really bad acne,” Irina says in her introductory confessional. The show identifies her as “25” and a “business owner” but does not elaborate on what kind of business Irina runs. (In my heart, I believe it’s soup-based.)
“Like, really, really bad acne. And I would always be like, ‘Guys don’t wanna date me because I have really bad acne.’” she continues. While Irina goes on to say that it’s who she is on the inside that counts, all the audience knows about who Irina is on the inside is someone still preoccupied with how she had, like, really, really bad acne.
The other women in the house do not dislike Irina because of her past acne but because she is constantly gossiping with her bestie Micah. At one point, the two find out one of their castmates has been rejected. Irina cackles, then sneaks up closer to hear the woman detail the gory bits of her dumping. That gives us something else we know about Irina: She deeply enjoys other women’s failures.
Irina’s psychological warfare escalates when she tells Zach, her No. 1 match, that Bliss, her rival for his affections, is treating Irina poorly. Zach isn’t privy to what’s going on at the Love Is Blind women’s residence hall; he hasn’t seen Irina bully and gossip. She paints herself as the victim and Zach takes her side.
The show has had problematic contestants before — women who wanted the same man, couples with palpable incompatibility, men who deserve to be single — but a villain who is actively sabotaging her fellow contestants is a first.
I found myself rooting against Irina for all her sneakiness but slowly realized that that implies there’s actually some kind of prize to be won on Love Is Blind. The show is much more cynical than that. Given what we’ve seen over previous seasons — emotional terrorism, divorce, constant miscommunication, a man with flies in his toilet, a woman who forced her fiancé to wear a full-body corn costume — there are no winners on Love Is Blind. Even if Irina “wins,” she still loses.
How Love Is Blind abandoned its gimmick
The word that comes up in Love Is Blind over and over, no matter the episode or season, is “experiment.” It’s a convenient way of making the television show sound more scientific and less exploitative than it is. Over the course of the four seasons, however, that experiment has shifted somewhat as the results produced other findings.
The possibility of “finding true love sight unseen,” it turns out, makes for less addictive television than some of the other hypothetical outcomes of gathering together a bunch of people who want to be on TV and letting them know they need to fall in love if they want camera time. It’s possible to find couples that will get married and stay together, but it’s also possible that much more chaotic dynamics will form. In the case of first-season cast member Jessica, her unrequited feelings for an already-engaged co-star and her determination to stay on the show despite all good sense eclipsed the show’s happy endings. Sure, co-stars Cam and Lauren seem like actual soulmates, but during a bout of sadness, Jessica fed her dog wine. That’s what we all remember.
The messiness continued in season two with a love triangle between Shaina, Shayne, and Natalie. Shayne chose to marry Natalie instead of Shaina even though Shaina and Shayne talked about her crop tops a lot. Similar disaster ensued in season three when Cole chose Zanab over Colleen, but verbally told Colleen, the woman he explicitly did not choose, that he was more attracted to her.
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Courtesy of Netflix
Off the top of my head, I couldn’t name the happy couples from those seasons. But I could easily name all the unhappy people and their damage. I don’t think I’m alone.
Producers figured out that it was easy to manipulate these contestants’ feelings and expectations into spiky melodrama. In each season, the powers that be pulled levers, like increasing the amount of time the cast would hang out with one another or doing away with the unspoken assumption that contestants wouldn’t be in contact with their exes from the pods.
Seeing someone outside of the pods, being attracted to them, and then making a move on them theoretically defeats the entire purpose of the show. But man, it’s good TV.
Given the psychological drama, it’s not a surprise that none of season two’s couples survived and only two of season three’s couples are still standing (for now). The third season also featured the first time a couple — Raven and SK — didn’t get married at the altar, got back together after the show stopped filming, and then broke up because of a cheating scandal. Since producers amped up the emotional chaos and the number and type of interactions on the show, cast member animus and fantastically rancid relationships have also increased.
The fourth season follows suit, continually bringing together the couples in the hope of sparking unrequited attraction-fueled clashes. The show also, for the first time, allows someone to break their engagement and ask their second choice to marry them. That’s not how it’s supposed to go! You can’t just have do-overs! The title of this show isn’t Love Is Blind, But Whoa Did You Get a Look at Her?!
These wrinkles complicate the already-existing, extremely complicated relationships, stirring up the potential for even more drama and sabotage. Aside from one pair, everyone seems much better off single. I suppose there’s relief in failure because, if the gimmicks of Love Is Blind efficiently worked, then viewers at home would have to ask ourselves questions about our own ideas of relationships and romance.
This isn’t to say that the emotional terrorism of season four isn’t entertaining, because it extremely is — much more so than watching people gush about Positano to each other. But the experiment in season four isn’t about whether love is blind anymore. It’s about what people will endure to be on this show.
How much power do workers really have now?
The pandemic sent American workers on a roller coaster ride, one that’s upended the state of worker power. A worker’s power has always been linked to their ability to demand change — change in pay, in benefits, in working conditions — at their job. Three years after lockdowns swept across the United States, people are no longer quitting at record levels, and some bosses are forcing workers back to the office. Yet workers still have more power than they did before the pandemic. And that’s not likely to disappear anytime soon.
How we got here — and even where “here” is — is complicated. At the start of the pandemic, companies laid off workers en masse, causing unemployment to jump to its highest rate since the Great Depression and leaving workers with few options and little leverage. Then, thanks in part to government stimulus, the economy came roaring back, and employers couldn’t find enough workers to staff their operations. That ushered in an era of worker power dubbed the Great Resignation, in which workers were readily able to quit their jobs in exchange for better offers, driving up wages and prompting employers to propose all sorts of perks. Extended unemployment benefits came and went, but worker power remained.
Beginning last year, however, fears of an economic recession caused many to speculate that that era is over. The economy shrank for two consecutive quarters, which is typically an indication of a recession, and in an attempt to stifle runaway inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, which presumably would have slowed the economy and job growth. But the country kept adding jobs, and the labor market has generally been considered very good. That’s not what you’d expect of an economy in the doldrums.
Then things got weirder still. The jobs market isn’t as tight now as it was last year, and some of the nation’s biggest companies, especially tech companies, are laying off tens of thousands of workers. Yet nationwide, unemployment remains near 50-year lows, and people are still more likely to quit their jobs — and less likely to be laid off — than they were before the pandemic.
It’s a confusing time, to say the least. And just how much power workers currently have is an open question that both employees and employers are grappling with. Some people say the bosses are back in charge. Of course, many of the people saying this are executives who want a return to the way things were, or have a stake in commercial real estate, which has taken a hit from the rise of remote work. But while the fundamental power dynamic between an employee and an employer inherently favors the latter, the last three years have represented a rapid rise in power — one that still exists today and is more than just a blip.
“The balance of power started drifting back a little bit toward employers, but broadly speaking, it’s still in the hands of workers,” Rand Ghayad, head of economics and global labor markets at LinkedIn, said.
We spoke to a dozen experts about the evolving state of worker power in the United States. They pointed to trends like continued wage growth and increased worker activism as evidence that worker power remains strong. There’s also the fact that, while many things have returned to their pre-pandemic “normal,” office occupancy has not.
What the future holds for American workers remains uncertain. An unpredictable economy, shifting conversations around the role of work in our lives, and a resurgent but challenged union movement could push worker power in one way or another.
The state of worker power
If the Great Resignation was emblematic of workers taking back their power, the extent to which workers are still willing to quit shows how enduring that power is. In January, nearly 4 million people quit their jobs — the monthly number was well over 4 million all last year — whereas the pre-pandemic baseline was closer to 3 million in a given month.
“There’s really strong demand for workers,” explained Nick Bunker, head of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “When there’s more competition for workers, that gives the person who’s selling their labor, the worker, more bargaining power than they would have otherwise.”
Correspondingly, rates of layoffs are lower than they were pre-pandemic, suggesting that employers are still having difficulty holding on to workers and are loath to lose the ones they already have. Even as headlines about downsizing surged at the beginning of the year, layoff rates were just 1.1 percent of all employment, matching the lowest rate in 2019, which already had abnormally low layoffs. There are still roughly two open jobs for every unemployed worker.
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