From the moment European settlers reached these shores, the American apocalypse began. But Native Americans did not vanish. Apocalypse did not fully destroy them, and it doesn't have to destroy us. Pandemics and war, social turmoil and corrupt governments, natural disasters and environmental collapse--it's hard not to watch the signs of the times and feel afraid. But we can journey through that fear to find hope. With the warnings of a prophet and the lively voice of a storyteller, Choctaw elder and author of Ladder to the Light Steven Charleston speaks to all who sense apocalyptic dread rising around and within. You'd be hard pressed to find an apocalypse more total than the one Native America has confronted for more than four hundred years. Yet Charleston's ancestors are a case study in the liberating and hopeful survival of a spiritual community. How did Indigenous communities achieve the miracle of their own survival and live to tell the tale? What strategies did America's Indigenous people rely on that may help us to endure an apocalypse--or perhaps even prevent one from happening? Charleston points to four Indigenous prophets who helped their people learn strategies for surviving catastrophe: Ganiodaiio of the Seneca, Tenskwatawa of the Shawnee, Smohalla of the Wanapams, and Wovoka of the Paiute. Through gestures such as turning the culture upside down, finding a fixed place on which to stand, listening to what the earth is saying, and dancing a ghostly vision into being, these prophets helped their people survive. Charleston looks, too, at the Hopi people of the American Southwest, whose sacred stories tell them they were created for a purpose. These ancestors' words reach across centuries to help us live through apocalypse today with courage and dignity.
Steven Charleston is a leading voice of justice for Indigenous peoples, the environment, and spiritual renewal. A member of the Choctaw Nation, Charleston has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, BBC World News, and other outlets. The author of more than a dozen books on theology and spirituality, including Ladder to the Light, Charleston has served as the Episcopal bishop of Alaska, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, and professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary. He served as the theologian in residence at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University. Charleston lives with his wife, Susan, in Oklahoma.
"Steven Charleston's We Survived the End of the World is a poignant, deeply moving account of the many lessons the world can learn from Native American responses to the apocalypse of settler colonialism. These lessons are ever more urgently necessary now that the entire planet faces the predicament of the Indigenous peoples whose worlds were destroyed by maelstroms of avarice and aggression." --Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement "Steven Charleston's voice is strong, clear, poetic, and possessed by great urgency. With this graceful and insightful weaving of history and activism, he reveals to his readers a reconfigured past, as well as the possibility of a brighter future if we can reclaim forgotten values and suppressed wisdom." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun "'The politics of fear drives us into bunkers.' In this reflection on the prophets and prophecies of Indigenous peoples, Steven Charleston invites us to imagine another way forward, invites us to emerge from these bunkers and face the uncertainties of apocalypse in communities built on relationship to each other and the other-than-human world around us." --Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin
