Chris O'Meara/AP/File

Anna Paulina Luna, Republican candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, waves before President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump speak at a campaign rally in Tampa, Florida, Oct. 29, 2020.

Like many Floridians, Anna Paulina Luna is from somewhere else – in her case, California. The Air Force vet and sometime swimsuit model turned politician used to be, in her words, an “avid” Obama supporter.

But now she’s a staunch, vocal conservative. So conservative, in fact, that she’s been endorsed by former President Donald Trump for her run at a congressional seat in the Tampa Bay area. She appears to be the frontrunner to win the Republican primary and face off against a Democrat for a seat that could go to either party in the fall. Florida is “setting the standard for what conservatism is,” says Ms. Luna, who changed her last name from Mayerhofer to a Hispanic family name to broaden her appeal and reflect her roots.

“This is a place where I can speak up for what I believe in,” she adds. “People here aren’t afraid to be punished and canceled.”

Is Anna Paulina Luna a symbol of where Florida politics is headed? Her personal transformations in many ways mirror what’s happened in the Sunshine State, as it’s moved in recent years from hotly contested national battleground to a possible model of modern Trumpist conservatism.

After all, former President Barack Obama won Florida twice. But following him, former President Trump won it twice, as well. Mr. Trump now lives here at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, a Republican gathering spot and neo-Versailles.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is both a Trump follower and possible Trump opponent, as he’s declined to say whether he’d face off against the former president for the 2024 GOP nomination. He’s pushed through a number of state bills that deal with hot button partisan issues, such as the recently enacted Parental Rights in Education, dubbed by critics the “don’t say gay” law, that bans school teaching of sexual topics deemed non-age-appropriate.

Octavio Jones/Reuters

A flag with a photo of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is where supporters of Florida's Republican-backed "Don't Say Gay" bill that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for many young students gather for a rally outside Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, April 16, 2022.

“A culture war edge”

Florida is “becoming redder all the time, and it has a very arch-conservative edge – a culture war edge,” says Orlando-based historian James Clark, author of “Hidden History of Florida.”

In some ways, Florida – the land of the hanging chads, the bits of paper that dangled from Florida ballots and were a centerpiece of the disputed 2000 presidential election – remains a tightly contested battleground state.  

Political scientists call Florida voters a “rootless electorate” whose preferences can switch back and forth relatively quickly. 

Yet as the nation’s third-most-populous state, its bare-knuckled rightward swing has been unmistakable, wobbling the nation’s political gyroscope. The best-known governor in the country may now be Mr. DeSantis, a Harvard and Yale grad who served as a judge advocate general at Guantánamo Bay. 

Already facing an uphill climb nationally in this year’s mid-terms, Democrats are reacting in alarm to the prospect of a DeSantis-led Republican Party locking down political power in the state. 

What some Democrats see as incipient authoritarianism, many Republicans see as a Governor DeSantis-led punch-back against liberal values that don’t represent how many Floridians live and think. 

Experts say that what’s happening in Florida is an aspect of a political phenomenon that’s deeply American: an ever-shifting balance of power between the state and the individual. It’s a dynamic that’s been supercharged in recent years by a life-changing pandemic and national clashes over race, class, and values.

“Is Florida a swing state, a competitive state, still? Yes, based on the evidence,” says Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. “But may it be trending Republican and not competitive in the near future? That is possible.”

In recent years, Democrats have been steadily losing ground here. That’s only been accelerated by the political reaction to pandemic restrictions.

In just over a decade, Republicans have experienced a net gain over Democrats of 750,000 voter registrations. By this measure the GOP is now the largest party in the state. Once safely blue areas such as Miami-Dade County are now in play. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Miami-Dade by 30 percentage points. By 2020, that margin had dwindled to a 7-point win for Joe Biden. In raw numbers, 300,000 county voters had swung to the right, many of them Hispanics deeply suspicious of leftist politics, says Matthew Isbell, a Democratic strategist.

“What do Democrats have left?”

The Republican narrative for Florida is that it is a “beacon of freedom,” in GOP state Sen. Joe Gruters’ words, that draws conservatives from around the country as residents.

That narrative contains both hyperbole and truth, says state Sen. Tina Polsky, a Democrat whose biggest concern is independent voters turning hard to the right.

“Republicans took this very slim margin of victory and decided that we are completely a red state,” says Ms. Polsky, who represents parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties. “There’s a lot of people who feel that way, but how many are there? Obviously a lot. And yeah they’re louder than us. That doesn’t mean there’s more of them.”

One changing dynamic, says Mr. Isbell, is that the traditional retiree flow from New England and New Jersey – more Democratic, heavily Jewish – has changed. In-migration to Florida is now full of people from more conservative corners of the Midwest, and other parts of the South.  

At the same time, as Hispanics have swung hard into the Republican column, white working-class areas like Volusia County – which includes Daytona – and Pasco County have turned from mildly conservative to deep red. 

Michael Snyder/Northwest Florida Daily News/AP

Republican U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz, of Florida, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, speak to supporters at a reelection campaign stop for Mr. Gaetz in Crestview, Florida, April 9, 2022.

In short, he says: Republicans now have the working class, Hispanic voters, and Republican retirees. They are also very strong in upper-income suburbs and strong with rural voters.

“So, the question is,” says Mr. Isbell, “what do Democrats have left?”

Central to the shift has been Governor DeSantis, a Trump acolyte whose single term can be divided into two acts, according to experts. 

In Act I, Governor DeSantis showed a streak of pragmatic discipline that political analysts say often eluded Mr. Trump. He took on Big Sugar, and pushed through a massive $800 million Everglades rehabilitation program. A medical marijuana referendum was bogged down in the legislature until Mr. DeSantis strong-armed it forward.

Yes, Florida passed a bill that limits abortions after 15 weeks, and appears patently unconstitutional under its own state constitution, which explicitly guarantees a right to privacy, as well as Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a federal right for women to choose. But the Supreme Court seems poised to limit or overturn Roe. Ninety-one percent of abortions take place within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, according to Planned Parenthood.

In Act II, after getting positive reviews from many conservatives on his pushback against pandemic restrictions, the governor has signed or proposed a slew of bills that appear aimed more at making points in national culture wars. They include the “Stop WOKE Act,” which prohibits teaching that could make students feel they bear responsibility for historic wrongs and businesses from using diversity training that could have the same result, a “de-platforming” bill that would fine social media companies for kicking a politician off their platform (currently stalled by lawsuits), an “anti-riot” bill that stiffens penalties for some protest activity, and “don’t say gay,” that bans school teaching of sexual and gender topics deemed non-age-appropriate.

Governor DeSantis has even wrestled with Florida’s most famous corporation – Disney – after the firm pushed back on the “don’t say gay” law. On Tuesday, he called a special session to remove “special districts” enacted before 1968, targeting Walt Disney World’s Reedy Creek Improvement District. While the legislation has been largely panned nationally, in Florida it is nearly as popular among Democrats as Republicans. 

“DeSantis is trying to take the Trump model within state government and Republicans have gone along with him on that,” says Mr. Isbell. 

The governor is “a smarter version of Trump, which for Democrats like me is terrifying,” Mr. Isbell says.

In the process, he has become the most powerful governor in modern Florida history, says Mr. Clark, the historian. 

This year the state legislature has even handed Governor DeSantis the authority to take the lead on redrawing the state’s 28 congressional districts, after he vetoed the GOP-controlled legislature’s own map in March. Mr. DeSantis has proposed a redistricting map that would give Republicans a 20-8 advantage and eliminate two districts now represented by Black Democrats.

“He is ideologically and preternaturally organized for power,” says Anthony Brunello, a political scientist at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. 

Carl Juste/Miami Herald/AP/File

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gives his opening remarks flanked by local state delegation members prior to signing legislation that seeks to punish social media platforms that remove conservative ideas from their sites, inside Florida International University's MARC building in Miami, May 24, 2021.

Pinellas County as case study

“We are in essence creating a state that is jam-packed with freedom and pushing back on liberal lunacy,” says Christian Ziegler, a Republican county commissioner in Sarasota County.

But there may be a darker side to the DeSantis agenda that exacerbates deep, historic divides in the U.S.

State Republicans may be taking advantage of the frustrations felt by many voters of a society painted by academics and the media as divided cleanly along racial lines, while ignoring the role of class and culture, says Nancy Isenberg, author of “White Trash,” a history of class in America.

But that, she says, can also be seen as a thinly-veiled nod to a Southern penchant for centralized power that preserves a white status quo.

“Think about all the hostility about no masks, no indoctrination in the schools, you can’t say gay, no woke, no CRT [critical race theory] – all of it comes from the 1950s. The Democrats are communists who are indoctrinating children, engaging in mind control, and creating a new generation of woke robots,” says Ms. Isenberg. 

“It’s loudocracy, throwing out words, claiming they want free speech except for when it’s something they don’t want to hear,” Ms. Isenberg says. 

Pinellas County is a study in how far the state’s transformation may go.

The sunny county seat of St. Petersburg was the home of the late U.S. Rep. Bill Cramer, a Republican who helped redefine the state party in the 1970s, laying the groundwork for its modern ascendancy.

But in a municipal election last year, St. Petersburg elected its first Black mayor, a Democratic Socialist city councilor – the state’s first – and for the first time had three Black members on the city council.

Rep. Charlie Crist, a Democrat who is challenging Gov. DeSantis, turned Florida’s 13th congressional district, which currently centers on St. Petersburg, blue in 2016. Mr. Trump won Pinellas by 2,000 votes in 2016; Joe Biden won it by 2,000 votes in 2020.

The county grows progressively redder as it moves north into the suburbs of Clearwater, New Port Richey, Tarpon Springs, and Safety Harbor. Further north, the transformation becomes complete. There, in working-class Citrus County, Mr. Obama won by a single point in 2012; Mr. Trump won it in 2016 by 20 points.

That puts the region on a sort of national dividing line, indicative if not definitive of changing political leanings.

“The biggest thing for the Republican Party to be cautious of is becoming too arrogant and comfortable,” says former St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman, a Democrat. “They’ve been in power so long [at the legislature] that they are getting to the point that there’s no collaboration, no willingness to even listen to and consider opposing viewpoints.”

“That’s when you start getting bad policy that ultimately does have a fiscal and financial impact on the economy,” says Mr. Kriseman. “Then the public is going to start feeling it more and asking: What’s causing this? And it’s going to be easy for Democrats to say, ‘These guys are the ones in charge.’”

Ms. Luna is running for the congressional seat that Democrat Mr. Crist is giving up to run for governor.

When it comes to Florida’s future, she says does not share Mr. Kriseman’s worries.

The Tampa Bay area, she says, is becoming an exile community for conservative social media personalities like herself.

Though she was an enthusiastic Obama supporter, she now says she is one of a growing number of converts to the conservative cause in a red-tinged state. She insists she is more than an opportunistic transplant.

“We’re less congested than Los Angeles, there’s affordable housing – well, at least up until recently – gas prices are lower, and policies here make it a heck of a lot easier with me having my business out of Florida,” says Ms. Luna.

Serhii Nuzhnenko/Reuters

A Ukrainian serviceman stands next to a Javelin anti-tank missile in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, April 18, 2022. With Ukraine facing an intensified Russian offensive in the east, Kyiv has asked the U.S. and its allies for more than just defensive weapons.

The decisive battle for the future of Ukraine is beginning. And how the United States and its European allies respond could prove crucial not just in determining the outcome, but the wider shape of world politics once it’s finally over.

Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on the strategically key eastern part of Ukraine poses a new scale of threat to Ukraine’s military and besieged civilians, it has set a new, high-stakes policy test for the Western allies.

After their unprecedentedly assertive use of soft-power levers against Russia’s initial invasion – diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions – U.S. President Joe Biden and his partners are facing an entirely different challenge.

They’re having to make hard choices about hard power.

Specifically, are they prepared to give Ukraine the military and technological hardware needed to ensure that Mr. Putin’s invasion ends, if not in outright defeat, at least in the kind of stalemate no one except Mr. Putin and his state media can credibly describe as victory?

The encouraging news for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is that the Biden administration and a number of allies ­have been coming around to answering “yes.” They’ve been expanding deliveries in recent weeks of a number of the kinds of weapons he’s argued will be essential to turning back Russia’s new offensive.

Virginia Mayo/AP

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, upon his arrival for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers to discuss bolstering their support for Ukraine, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, April 6, 2022.

He’s not been getting all that he’s asked for, however: There’s still no sign of a willingness to provide advanced fighter planes and tanks, for instance.

And to his added frustration, some allies like France and Germany appear to have broader reservations about whether increased outside military support might further reduce the prospects of an eventual negotiated end to the war.

The stark reality is that, for Ukraine, time is growing short. On Monday, Mr. Zelenskyy said the long buildup to the Russian offensive seemed to be over. Mr. Putin’s major assault on resource-rich eastern Ukraine and its Black Sea port city of Odesa was now underway. 

From Mr. Zelenskyy’s point of view, the “hard power” choice should be easy.

Mr. Putin’s initial aim, to topple the Zelenskyy government and triumphantly enter the capital city of Kyiv within days, was beaten back by a determined Ukrainian resistance that took not just the Russians but the U.S. and its allies by surprise. And that was accomplished with allied assistance explicitly limited to small-scale defensive weaponry.

Now, Mr. Putin is doubling down in the east. His apparent hope: a no-holds-barred assault allowing him to proclaim success in time for Victory Day, the May 9 national holiday marking the Soviet army’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

With the kind of military deliveries for which Mr. Zelenskyy has been pressing, he argues there’s every prospect of thwarting Mr. Putin’s renewed offensive. These include not just aircraft and tanks, but other weaponry which the U.S. and key allies have, in fact, been starting to provide: anti-tank, anti-air, and anti-missile defenses, mobile armored vehicles, high-capability attack drones, and anti-ship munitions to keep Russia’s Black Sea fleet from targeting Odesa.

And if Putin’s push in the east does fail, that could have important geopolitical implications. It would likely forestall future Russian attacks on other states. It could also affect the postwar calculus of the dozens of countries worldwide – including regional powers like India and Pakistan, Israel and the Arab Gulf states – that have so far been hedging their diplomatic bets on the eventual outcome.

So why are the hard-power choices so hard for the allies?

One reason still resonates even in Washington and other allied capitals broadly in favor of greater military backing for Kyiv.

It’s the fear of widening the war into a head-on contest between NATO and Russian forces.

Significantly, Mr. Putin himself has been moving to reinforce that concern. Last week, Russia delivered a warning to the U.S. and its NATO allies against providing “sensitive” weaponry to the Ukrainians. Such “irresponsible militarization of Ukraine,” the diplomatic note said, could mean “unpredictable consequences for regional and international security.”

Yet while that concern is still certain to rule out any direct participation by U.S. or NATO troops in Ukraine, or the provision of weapons with which Ukraine could attack Russia itself, the Americans have become increasingly persuaded of the need to consider a broad range of support short of those red lines. 

Mauricio Campino/U.S. Air Force/AP

Airmen and civilians from the 436th Aerial Port Squadron palletize ammunition, weapons, and other equipment bound for Ukraine during a foreign military sales mission at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Jan. 21, 2022.

Some allies, like Britain and Poland, are likely to be fully behind such a move.

But Washington will be aware that others, notably Germany and France, are apt to be far less enthusiastic.

It’s not that they differ with the U.S. and other NATO partners on the seriousness of the threat posed by Mr. Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. But they’re also focused on what they view as the need to look toward an eventual diplomatic settlement of the war, and they seem concerned that a prolonged and escalating conflict will make the search for a political offramp more difficult.

That doesn’t mean they will, or can, necessarily keep other allies from supplying Mr. Zelenskyy’s military.

Indeed, a kind of de facto inner alliance of NATO powers – America and Britain and Ukraine’s other immediate neighbors like Poland and the Baltic states – are increasingly likely to do so as Mr. Putin’s attack intensifies.

Yet the key question in the days ahead will be what kinds of weapons to provide – specifically whether to transfer higher-tech aircraft and other systems – in order to ensure Mr. Putin’s offensive doesn’t succeed.

What is clear, at least, is that the sense of urgency conveyed by Mr. Zelenskyy in recent weeks now resonates strongly in Western capitals.

The mood was best captured, perhaps, by former German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, now president of the European Commission, the 27-member European Union’s executive body.

In an interview Sunday, she urged all EU states to provide whatever weaponry they could. And “quickly, because only in that way can Ukraine survive in its acute defensive battle against Russia.”

She added that the initial distinction between defensive and offensive weaponry had become irrelevant. “Ukraine,” she argued, “has to get whatever it needs to defend itself.”

What causes a town to disappear without a trace?

In the case of a vanished Chinatown: hate.

On Saturday, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock apologized to descendants of early Chinese immigrants for the Colorado capital’s complicity in “nearly a century of violence and discrimination.” That included the dissolution of the city’s Chinatown, a decadeslong vanishing act after an anti-Chinese race riot.

Following similar contrition in at least four other cities in California, the apology comes amid raised awareness of pandemic-related aggression against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It also affirms the work of local advocates seeking to correct the record on an overlooked history.

“Let’s reconcile and let’s move forward. ... Let’s tell our story, and let’s make sure that it’s preserved for future generations,” Linda Lung tells the Monitor. Honored this past weekend with a commemorative coin, she’s a descendant of Chinese business owners who settled in Colorado in the early 1900s, after fleeing anti-Chinese violence in other Western states.

“While the city cannot erase past injustices” against Chinese immigrants and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said Mayor Hancock, “the city owes them a long-overdue apology.”

That’s 142 years overdue, for those counting back to the day a laundry worker was killed. 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

A plaque commemorating the "Hop Alley/Chinese Riot of 1880" hangs in downtown Denver. Advocates who object to what they call an offensive and incomplete history of the anti-Chinese race riot have wanted the plaque removed.

“Hop Alley”

Early Chinese immigration can be traced along the tracks of the transcontinental railroad, which was built by thousands of Chinese workers in the 1860s. Many had originally arrived in California to cash in on the gold rush and send remittances home.

As former Colorado state historian William Wei notes, the westward expansion era tolerated Chinese more as menial laborers than as settlers. Long before COVID-19-era Sinophobia, Chinese in the American West were considered bearers of disease – both literal and societal – by white counterparts who were often immigrants themselves.

In the 1870s, one of over 200 Chinatowns in the American West flourished in Denver. Today, this downtown area on and around Wazee Street is lined with offices, sleek cafes, and parking meters; back then it offered rest and recreation for a working-class ethnic enclave, bustling with laundries, Chinese eateries, and herbal medicine shops.

The Oct. 31, 1880, anti-Chinese riot likely began as a saloon altercation between Chinese and white laborers. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 locals swarmed Chinatown, damaging structures, assaulting residents, and killing one laundry worker, Look Young. An estimated $53,000 or more in damages to Chinese businesses and homes – roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars – was never compensated.

“Nevertheless, most people remained to rebuild the community, because it was their home,” says Dr. Wei, professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. However, discrimination and marginalization into menial jobs made it difficult to make a living. Some residents left for larger Chinatowns on the East and West coasts, where there was more work. 

Library of Congress

This 1880 wood engraving, depicting the anti-Chinese riot in Denver on Oct. 31 of that year, shows Chinese being beaten and property destroyed by a large mob.

Two years after the violence, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned the immigration of Chinese laborers. By World War II, the Chinatown population had dwindled; then the area underwent urban renewal. In 2020, Mayor Hancock declared Oct. 31 Denver’s Chinatown Commemoration Day.

There’s no trace of Chinatown now, besides a small plaque near the Coors Field baseball stadium that refers to the “Hop Alley/Chinese Riot of 1880” – “hop” being a slang reference to opium. Dr. Wei and others have contested the plaque as offensive and misleading, arguing the public should understand it as an anti-Chinese riot. He’s joined advocates involved in trying to develop alternative historical markers, The Colorado Sun has reported.

Beyond apology to action

Linda Jew is the great-granddaughter of Chinese pioneer Chin Lin Sou, a noted railroad foreman who later turned to mining. Ms. Jew recalls slurs hurled at her while growing up in the 1950s, and how she’d avoid playing in the front yard because other children would throw rocks at her.

“Every day we walked home from school, they would wait for us to harass us,” she says at her home in Parker, Colorado. During an interview, her petite white dog, Orion, checks up on her, his tags tinkling as he approaches. 

Courtesy of Colorado Asian Pacific United

Linda Lung (left) and Linda Jew received honorary gold coins from Mayor Michael Hancock in Denver on April 16, 2022, following an apology for Denver's past role in "nearly a century of violence and discrimination" against Chinese immigrants, of whom Ms. Lung and Ms. Jew are descendants.

Even as an adult, the dental hygienist, a proud American and fourth-generation Coloradan, says she’s been unnerved by the question “What are you?” She hopes the Denver apology will raise awareness of anti-Chinese discrimination.

Colorado Asian Pacific United, a local advocacy coalition, pushed for the apology and helped draft the language with the office of the mayor, which will continue to partner with the group. (Dr. Wei, a founding member, serves on the CAPU board of directors, and Ms. Lung is on a family history committee.) CAPU counts four cities in California – Antioch, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – that have apologized for the treatment and massacre of early Chinese immigrants. 

The census estimates the Asian population of majority-white Denver at around 4%. Following five years of no recorded incidents, Denver Police Department data shows three bias-motivated cases categorized as anti-Asian in 2020, followed by five in 2021. Several cities across the United States have reported upticks in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic.

The Denver government has pledged that actions will follow words. At the livestreamed event held at the University of Colorado Denver, the mayor announced his administration’s support for the development of an Asian Pacific historic district, sponsorship of public murals, creation of a public education program on Asian Pacific Coloradans, and establishment of an Asian Pacific American community museum, which would be “the first of its kind in the Rocky Mountain region,” he said to applause. 

“There is a racial reckoning that is going on across the country, which is long overdue. And this is a part of that,” says Derek Okubo, executive director of the Agency for Human Rights & Community Partnerships within the mayor’s office.

“We are focused on healing,” says Mr. Okubo, whose own family survived Japanese American detention during World War II. “In order to heal as a community ... you have to acknowledge the past.” 

There is nothing fast nor futuristic about moose hide tanning. 

For Dene artist Melaw Nakehk’o, who first learned the practice from her late grandmother, it’s a multiday affair of scraping, drying, stretching, and smoking. 

But when Ms. Nakehk’o featured that process in an exhibit in the fall in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, her intent was not to look back – but far into the future. 

One of her hides became part of the “Moose Skin Dome,” in which 40 hide frames hung suspended from the ceiling, with images and sound from a tanning camp projected across its domed surface. The installation ran alongside an exhibit Ms. Nakehk’o curated called “Indigenous Futures: Rooted and Ascending” at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre here in the Canadian provincial capital. It showcased the work of Indigenous artists blending technology and traditional techniques as they explored Indigenous futurism with a central question: “If colonial oppression did not exist, what would the future look like?” 

Indigenous futurism, which has been gaining attention in recent years across North America, is part of a social and cultural rights movement of self-determination among Indigenous creators and artists. In particular, it has reclaimed space in museums, libraries, and theaters that have so often been set on placing Indigenous culture in the past.  

“When I started hide tanning, everybody said, ‘Oh, it’s a dying art; isn’t it sad?’ There’s this mourning about our cultural practices just fading away and a sense there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Ms. Nakehk’o, during lunch at Birchwood Coffee Kǫ̀ in Yellowknife in September as the exhibit was underway. “But there’s people that are actually learning this – from someone who is very much alive.”

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

“[Indigenous futurism is] about who we are and how we represent ourselves in the world today and imagining where we want to be, where we want to go.” – Melaw Nakehk’o, Dene artist

Indigenous futurism means many things. It spans film and literature, visual arts, music, and comics. It incorporates science fiction or cosmology into its work but not always. Often it leans on traditional knowledge and storytelling using the most cutting-edge technologies available. What unifies the genre is work that projects Indigenous protagonists and culture in futuristic settings.

The term was first coined by Grace Dillon, an Indigenous studies professor at Portland State University who edited “Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction” and who has said she was loosely inspired by the Afrofuturism movement. Indigenous futurism didn’t exist until a decade ago, but artists have been working in the genre since at least the early 1980s, says Manuela Well-Off-Man, an art historian and the chief curator at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She points to work by Seneca artist Carson Waterman from that period.

But Indigenous futurism is certainly attracting more attention in recent years, she says. Her museum wrapped up an exhibit called “Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future” in January 2021.

Courtesy of MOCNA

The 2020-2021 exhibit “Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future” at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, featured works including “Fallen Star Destroyer” by Diné artist Ryan Singer.

The title nods at Indigenous knowledge and way of thinking that is not linear as it is in Western thought – a theme present throughout much of that exhibit. Many of the pieces grappled with questions of race and empowerment, she says. But artists are also pushing to decolonize fashion or cinema or science fiction, disciplines she says have left little space for Indigenous protagonists but also appropriated Indigenous culture without crediting it.

Mounting these exhibits also opens room for Indigenous creators who have been boxed-in historically. “We expect artists to look in the past, to build a beautiful traditional art form,” she says. “In other words, museums [and] the art world don’t allow Native artists to grow, and it’s very frustrating.”

The High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, has been trying to tackle a sense of “invisibility” faced by Indigenous communities by “indigenizing” its exhibits, says executive director Dana Whitelaw. Currently the museum is examining the idea of “intentional communities” – from ecological laboratories, such as Biosphere 2 in Arizona, to Oregon’s spiritual community Rajneeshpuram, in a 2022 offering called “Imagine a World.” A quarter of the exhibit is dedicated to “Indigenous Futurisms.” Dr. Whitelaw says the public has reacted with surprise – and curiosity. 

Courtesy of MOCNA

“Live Long & Prosper (Spock Was a Half Breed),” by Debra Yepa-Pappan (of Jemez Pueblo and Korean descent) is among the works included in the 2020-2021 “Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future” exhibit at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“It is completely shifting the typical narrative of putting Indigenous people in the past,” she says. “And this is so clearly creating a narrative and a path for us to see Indigenous people in the future.” 

She shows in a Zoom call from her office a painting she bought from one of the three participating artists, Frank Buffalo Hyde. It’s based on the original piece he created for the exhibit titled “Astra Sapiens NDN2K22,” depicting electric blue bison and astronauts on the moonscape.

In Canada, the exhibit in Yellowknife took visitors through a series of media, from a 3D animation called “Future Sweetgrass” by artist Casey Koyczan, in which the traditional braided plant was depicted in neon green pulsing on a screen, to beadwork outlining outer space called the “Milky Way Spiral Galaxy” by Margaret Nazon.

While traditional beadwork often depicts the natural world, here the bead artist interprets imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. There are Mad Max-like illustrations by Cody Fennell, created for a fantasy, sci-fi, and horror film festival, and prints by Robyn McLeod from Yukon who uses archival photographs of traditional activities like moose hide tanning and fishing set on other planets. 

The projections on the “Moose Skin Dome,” created in collaboration with Western Arctic Moving Pictures, feature educational work that Ms. Nakehk’o – an actor who appeared in the 2015 Leonardo DiCaprio film “The Revenant” – carries out for Dene Nahjo. That’s a nonprofit organization she helped found in the wake of the Idle No More protests in 2012, a trans-Canada Indigenous rights protest, in an effort to connect with the land and relearn Dene knowledge as a foundation for action.

In that sense the “Moose Skin Dome” – and the exhibits overall – are about acknowledging that the skills of her ancestors are just as important today as they have always been. “And it’s about taking that innovation in materials that we have and imagining how we want our community and our nations to be in the future,” she says. “It’s about who we are and how we represent ourselves in the world today and imagining where we want to be, where we want to go.”

This 3-mile stretch of sand and tide pools beneath a fortress of 80-foot bluffs is a California tourism poster if there ever was one. Nothing disturbs the pristine, sunny view, except – once you’re aware of them – the nurdles.

But you have to look close – on-your-hands-and-knees close – to see one. And once you do, you see another and another – so many that you may not think of this, or any beach, the same way again.

Mark McReynolds is trying to bring into focus these tiny preproduction plastic pellets that manufacturers melt down to mold everything from car bumpers to toothpaste caps. They’ve been escaping factories, container ships, trains, trucks – and public notice – for decades.

Dr. McReynolds is an environmental scientist with the Christian conservation nonprofit A Rocha International who’d never heard of nurdles three years ago. He’s now joined a global movement studying their trail into the environment. Some – like the Great Nurdle Hunt and the Nurdle Patrol – map nurdles through informal online reporting by citizen scientists around the globe.

“Knowledge opens your eyes. You don’t see plastic bags blowing around [on this beach] because people pick them up,” says Dr. McReynolds. “But, they’re not picking up the stuff that’s 3 millimeters [because] they don’t even know it’s there.”

Clara Germani/The Christian Science Monitor

Dr. Mark McReynolds sifts collected sand through a sieve that surfaces microplastics, such as the white nurdle seen on his fingertip.

The 2- to 3-millimeter, multicolored orbs are a subset of microplastics ­– plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in size. Nurdles accumulate where water inevitably takes them, and they’ve been found on shorelines of every continent.

Establishing a baseline count of the presence of nurdles – and, more broadly, any microplastics – is the focus of Dr. McReynolds’ scientific study here. Charting the count, noting tide, current, and weather conditions will show if amounts are increasing, and perhaps at what rate and why. That knowledge, he says, can inform solutions to plastic pollution such as regulation of their use.

Aided by citizen science volunteers – and his wife, Karen McReynolds, an associate professor of science at Hope International University who offers access to a lab and student help – he conducts a complex monthly microplastic sampling and a twice-annual nurdle hunt.  

Microplastics research and cleanups have “exploded” in the past decade due to new “understanding of the apparent health and ecosystem risks,” says Erica Cirino, whose book “Thicker than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis” is a tale of adventure chasing microplastics around the globe.  

In her travels she’s been struck by how unifying the plastic problem can be for people from diverse groups – from faith-based organizations to surfers and fishers, conservatives to liberals. They don’t all know what to do about it, she says, but “a very concrete thing like a [nurdle] hunt or getting your hands dirty is one of the best ways to get people involved.”

It’s science, not a trash pickup

“What are you doing? Picking up trash?” queries a steady stream of beach walkers whenever Dr. McReynolds’ crew trundles onto the beach and sets up gear.

Whether it’s a timed hunt, picking colorful nurdles out of the sand and vegetation during a 15-minute period, or a monthly microplastics collection, the scene suggests no ordinary beach pickup: It’s a colorful jumble of flags and measuring tape to create GPS-recorded 100-meter transects and buckets full of seawater lugged from the waves to sieve plastics out of collected sand.

These are teachable moments for Dr. McReynolds, whose passion for the environment involves faith in God’s earthly creation thoughtfully reconciled with the scientific method (he has a Ph.D. in environmental studies and a master’s degree in divinity). He explains the science of nurdles and microplastics to the curious while keeping an eye on volunteers troweling sand into 5-gallon buckets. Each bucket of sand can yield anywhere from no plastics to as much as 300 pieces to be analyzed in the lab. It sounds small, but the randomized samples can be extrapolated to the rest of the beach.

His state park research permit requires a public education element, and Dr. McReynolds displays laminated explainers with photos of piles of multicolored nurdles.  

One recent morning he told some beach walkers how nurdles are believed to absorb toxic chemicals, and – because they resemble fish eggs – are eaten by fish and birds and enter the food chain. Almost on cue, a bold seagull hopped up to a laminated photo of nurdles and hungrily pecked at it.

Clara Germani/The Christian Science Monitor

During a microplastics survey at Crystal Cove State Park, a tape measure is used to transect a 100-meter section of beach at the high-tide wrack line on Feb. 26, 2022.

A lonely devotion

A scarlet macaw expert by training, and an ordained Mennonite pastor who holds outdoor church services in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, Dr. McReynolds is an unpaid director of A Rocha’s Southern California operations – which means he’s as much a volunteer as his citizen scientist recruits.

And it can be a lonely devotion, says his wife Karen, who notes that he possesses “bulldog grab-it-and-do-not-let-go” tendencies to bridge science and faith. His A Rocha colleague, Bob Sluka, says it’s Mr. McReynolds’ “pastoral heart” that drives the Crystal Cove microplastics survey and its potential to spur people “to recognize things they are doing in their own life as consumers and change their behavior.”

Indeed, notes Grace Hadinata, a former environmental engineer who volunteers to analyze microplastics at the lab and gathering them at the beach. She has come to some deeper understanding. Picking through a jar of debris in the lab, sorting nurdles from Styrofoam-like crumbs and gardening perlite, she says the survey’s importance boils down to this: “People at the beach have no idea nurdles are there unless they’re reading one of our flyers, right? If we don’t do anything about [nurdles], they’re just going to accumulate.”   

Clara Germani/The Christian Science Monitor

Dr. Mark McReynolds and volunteer Bailey Caras examine nurdles at the Hope International University biology lab.

How bad is bad?

Dr. McReynolds holds a balanced view of ubiquitous plastics: “It’s a question that we’re going to be asking for a while. Because although there is some good [in plastics], there’s certainly some bad, and we don’t know how bad the bad is.”

Asked about nurdles and efforts like Dr. McReynolds’, George O’Connor, a spokesperson for the Plastics Industry Association, wrote: “The foundation of the plastics industry is scientific research, so we consider all types of scientific data to inform and improve our operations.”

Dr. McReynolds’ Crystal Cove study, now in its second year, is well on its way to showing that microplastics are present and collect here via local ocean current. It’s an incremental, but important, bit of baseline evidence in the early science on the subject.

Will it help save the world? Mr. McReynolds wags a finger at that idea: “I won’t ever use that word. ... I won’t save the world from this pollution problem. Preserve it, yes. We want to take care of it.” 

Even diverse strangers new to nurdles seem to recognize that motive.  

In the six months the Monitor has observed the beach surveys, the universal parting response from passersby is a variation of “Thank you for what you’re doing.”

Reuters

A displaced family who fled fighting in Ethiopia sit in a shelter in Afdera town.

Silence is golden? That may be the case in an untimely turn in American diplomacy aimed at one of Africa’s worst civil wars and a humanitarian crisis that calls out for global assistance.

Just three months after being appointed as the United States special envoy to the Horn of Africa, David Satterfield abruptly announced his departure last week. His decision came just weeks into a cease-fire in Ethiopia’s prolonged, ethnic-driven conflict. In that sense Mr. Satterfield’s timing could not be worse. Yet in offering no explanation for his quiet withdrawal, he may have shone a light of conscience at a fragile moment in a conflict that seems intractable.

Sometimes the clearest messages are unspoken. Just before his departure, Mr. Satterfield told Reuters that U.S. efforts in Ethiopia are “focused squarely” on getting aid into Ethiopia’s embattled region of Tigray as well as other war-struck areas. “What we do, what we say – all is focused upon achieving and maintaining that goal,” he said.

The civil war that began in late 2020 has stalemated with a government blockade of Tigray that effectively bars humanitarian aid and outside communications. According to various estimates, half a million people have been killed and more than 2.4 million displaced from their homes.

The cease-fire agreement was supposed to allow emergency aid convoys into Tigray. An estimated 90% of the Tigrayan population faces acute food shortages, according to the United Nations, requiring at least 100 aid trucks daily. Since the cease-fire only 67 have made it through.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been soundly criticized for the war’s conduct. In a rare rebuke earlier this year, the Nobel Committee, which awarded Mr. Abiy its Peace Prize in 2019 for ending a long military stalemate with neighboring Eritrea, said he bore “special responsibility” to end the conflict. But open criticism has done little to alter the course of the civil war in Ethiopia.

Mr. Satterfield’s departure in silence may be a subtle signal of U.S. concern but one that does not openly shame Mr. Abiy. It keeps the focus on action, not assigned guilt.

A good example of similar constructive silence in foreign policy was the approach that António Guterres followed early in his term as U.N. secretary-general. A 2017 speech he was due to give in Cairo included a strongly worded passage criticizing the government of Egypt over human rights. Mr. Guterres decided at the lectern to pass over those remarks. Observers criticized him for going soft, but the omission was calculated. Mr. Guterres “firmly believes that actions that will contribute to yielding positive results are more important than headlines for himself,” Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. chief’s spokesperson, told Foreign Policy after the incident.

Mr. Satterfield’s unexplained departure may yet bolster the resolve of Ethiopia’s warring parties to uphold their humanitarian commitments. In avoiding a parting shot of condemnation, he has demonstrated a stronger influence, one of eloquent silence that speaks truth into a troubled land.