Thanks to Stephen Betts for this stimulating post!

“The inability to conceive of its own devastation will tend to be the blind spot of any culture.”

                                                                                                —Jonathan Lear[1]

Chief Plenty Coups: Visions at the “End of History”

In the late 1920s, only a few years before his death, the great Crow chief Plenty Coups related his life’s history to his friend, the white ethnographer Frank Bird Linderman, who recorded that,

Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. ‘I have not told you half of what happened when I was young,’ he said, when urged to go on. ‘I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.’[2]

In his book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, philosopher Jonathan Lear considers what Plenty Coups might have meant by the words “after this nothing happened.” Lear argues that settler-colonialism didn’t just result in the decimation of the buffalo or the apportionment and dispossession of Crow land; it was a historical rupture that permanently affected the metaphysics of what it meant to be a Crow. By forcing the Crow onto the reservation, white settlers removed the possibility of living out the embodied practices of Crow warrior culture, including counting coup and planting the coup stick. For the Crow, argues Lear, even mundane tasks like cooking meals were oriented toward the Crows’ self-understanding as warriors inhabiting a “promised land” given them by God to their ancestor No Vitals. When Plenty Coups told Liederman that “nothing happened” after the buffalo went away, Lear reads this as attesting to a kind of “ghostlike existence that stands witness to the death of the subject.”[3] Lear draws our attention to the experience of Plenty Coups as a way of thinking through how people today might be able to face the cultural and perhaps even civilizational devastation that threatens their worldviews.

Of note, Plenty Coups was a visionary dreamer. As a nine-year-old boy, he received a dream from the spirits that foretold the destruction of the buffalo and the coming of white settlers. A spirit guide instructed him to imitate the Chickadee, who listened carefully for wisdom from those around him. Drawing on the strength of this dream, Plenty Coups led his people through times of great devastation, when, after witnessing the unimaginable disappearance of all they knew as being in the world, the survivors were left feeling as if in a time out of time.

Joseph Smith, The Gold Plates, and Cultural Devastation

Scholars of Mormonism sometimes distinguish between Joseph Smith’s “visionary” experiences and his “translation projects.” Probably not coincidentally, both attest to Smith’s ability to “see” what others could not. Like the young Plenty Coups, Smith saw something about the end of history that revealed the instability of apparently stable things. The Book of Mormon includes not only one nearly 600-page-long story of civilizational decline but several embedded examples as well. The book reads like a “dream” about modernity and what it might mean to live in it. As I noted in my last post, I advocate for “listening for the wisdom” of religious knowledge and praxis for what they can teach us about theory.

As a text produced in the 19^th century (whether by translation or other means), what might the Book of Mormon reveal about surviving “cultural devastation” or even catastrophic epistemic shifts (this, in Plenty Coups’ words—i.e., “after this, nothing happened”—indicates the time after which it would be  impossible to conceive of the world in the same way as before)   This leads me to wonder how we might examine Smith’s corpus in new ways, and perhaps for new ends?

Doing (Mormon) History in the Anthropocene[4]

Though many scholars of Mormonism do not face cultural oppression in the same way as Plenty Coups, it is worth considering how all scholars, all people, face the very real possibility of cultural and planetary devastation brought on by human actions (including settler-colonialism) that already challenge our most fundamental understandings of culture and being in the world. As we have all experienced during the pandemic, core societal institutions that appeared sound under better conditions have proven volatile. Ideas and modes of being in the world such as Liberalism and capitalism no longer seem as apt as resources for human and non-human relations. This brings us to the point of this post: Whence Mormon history, indeed history itself, in the Anthropocene?

Historical consciousness is often cited as one of the features of modern selfhood. What then are the implications for a postmodernity in which historical consciousness is potentially no longer a key feature because the future of the human species leaves in doubt whether there are still legacies to be had?

What is the labor of the historian at (or after) the “end of history”? If dire predictions about climate change hold true, what will constitute the historian’s identity—let alone the ethics of the historical craft in such embodied practices as traveling to archives and publishing physical books? More pressingly, how does or should the Anthropocene impinge on the practice of (Mormon) history now?

[1]    Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 83.

[2]    Lear, Radical Hope, 2.

[3]    Lear, Radical Hope, 50.

[4]    While many people rightly debate what “Anthropocene” describes, I’m using it here to describe the sense of threat to humanity posed by our exploitation-driven intervention in “geologic time” popularized by Roy Scranton in “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” and extensively explored by Bruno Latour in his Gifford Lectures (called “Facing Gaia”) under the concept of “the New Climatic Regime.”