Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

There was far more social unrest in the mills and mill towns than on the tribal plantations. Corporation executives ascribed it to the increase in the number of “uncontrolled” freedpersons, and many advocated closing the schools, destruction of the cities, and reinstitution of sealed compounds for all slaves. The Corporations’ city militia (gareots hired and brought from Werel, plus a police force of unarmed freedmen) increased to a considerable standing army, its gareot members heavily armed. Much of the unrest in the cities and attempts at protest centered on mills that used the assembly line. Workers who, feeling themselves part of an intelligible process, would tolerate very harsh conditions, found meaningless work intolerable, even though working conditions were in some ways improved.

The Liberation began, however, not in the cities, but in the compounds of the plantations.

The Uprising and the Liberation

The Uprising had its origin in organisations of tribal women in plantations of Great Continent, joining together to prevent ritual rape of girl-children and to demand tribal laws against sexual enslavement of bondswomen by bondsmen, gang rape, and the beating and murder of women, for none of which was there any penalty.

They acted first by educating women and children of both sexes, then by demanding proportional voice in the all-male tribal councils. Their organisations, called Woman Clubs, spread across both continents throughout the third century of the Colony. The Clubs spirited so many girls and women off the plantations into the cities that the chiefs’ and Bosses’ complaints began to be heard by the Corporations. Local tribesmen and Bosses were encouraged to “go into the cities and get their women back.”

These incursions, often led by plantation police and aided by the Corporation city militia, were often carried out with extreme brutality. City freedpeople, unused to the kind of violence normal on the plantations, reacted with outrage. City bondsmen were drawn to defend and fight with the women.

In 61 BP, in Eyu Province, in the town of Soyeso, the slaves’ successful resistance to a police raid from Nadami Plantation (APC) escalated into an attack on the plantation itself. The police barracks were stormed and burned. Some of the chiefs of Nadami joined the uprising, opening their compounds to the rebels. Others joined in the defense of their owners in the Plantation House. A slave woman unlocked the doors of the plantation armory to the insurrection—the first time in the history of Yeowe Colony that any large group of slaves had access to powerful weapons. A massacre of owners followed, but it was partially restrained: most of the children of the Plantation House, and twenty women and men, were spared and put on a train to the capital. No adult slave who had fought against the uprising was spared.

From Nadami the Uprising spread, by way of guns and ammunition, to three neighboring plantations. All the tribes joined, defeating Corporation forces in the quick, fierce Battle of Nadami. Slaves and freedpeople from neighboring provinces poured into Eyu. The chiefs, the grandmothers of the compounds, and the leaders of the insurrection met at Nadami and declared Eyu Province a free state.

Within ten days, Corporation bombing raids and land troops had smashed the insurrection. Captured rebels were tortured and executed. Particular revenge was taken on the town of Soyeso: all the people left there, mostly children and the old, were herded into the town squares and trucks and tread-wheeled ore-carriers ran over and over them. This was called “paving with dust.”

The Corporations’ victory had been quick and easy, but it was followed by a new insurrection at a different plantation, the murder of an owner’s family here, a strike of city freedworkers there, all over the world.

The unrest did not cease. Many attacks on plantation armories and militia barracks were successful; the insurrectionists now had weapons, and learned how to make bombs and mines. Hit-and-run warfare in the jungles and the great marshes gave the guerrilla’s advantage to the rebels. It became clear that the Corporations needed more armaments and more manpower. They imported mercenary soldiers from the poorer nations of Werel. Not all of these were loyal or effective troops. The Corporations soon persuaded the government of Voe Deo to safeguard its national interest by investing troops in the defense of the Owners of Yeowe. At first the commitment was reluctant, but 23 years after Nadami, Voe Deo decided to put down the unrest once and for all, sending 45,000 troops, all veots (members of the hereditary warrior caste) or owner-volunteers.

Seven years later, at the end of the war, 300,000 soldiers from Werel had been killed on Yeowe, most of them from Voe Deo, and most of them veots.

The Corporations began to take their people off Yeowe several years before the end of the war, and during the final year of fighting there were almost no civilian owners left on the planet.

Throughout the thirty years of the War of Liberation, some tribes and many individual slaves sided with the Corporations, which promised them safety and rewards and furnished them with weapons. Even during the Liberation there were battles between rival tribes. After the Corporations and the army pulled out, tribal wars smouldered and flared up all over Great Continent. No central government was able to establish itself until Abberkam’s World Party, defeating the Freedom Party in many local elections, seemed to be on the point of setting up the first World Council elections. In Year 2 of Liberation the World Party collapsed abruptly under accusation of cor­ruption. The Envoys of the Ekumen (invited to Yeowe by the Freedom Party during the final year of the war) supported the Freedom Party in activating their constitution and setting up elections. The First Election (Year 3 of the Liberation), managed by the Freedom Party, established the new Constitution on rather shaky ground; women were not allowed to vote, many tribal votes were cast by the chiefs alone, and some of the hierarchic tribal structures were retained and legalised. There were several more fierce tribal wars and years of unrest and protest while the society of free Yeowe constructed itself. Yeowe joined the Ekumen in Year 11 of the Liberation, 19 BP, and the First Ambassador was sent in that year. Major amendments to the Yeowan Constitution, assuring all people over 18 the vote by secret ballot and guaranteeing equal rights, were voted by free general election in Year 18 of the Liberation.

1929

Born in Berkeley, California, on St. Ursula’s Day, October 21, to Alfred Louis Kroeber and Theodora Covel Kracaw Brown Kroeber. (Father, born in 1876 in Hoboken, New Jersey, completed a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia College under Franz Boas in 1901 and moved to Berkeley to create a museum and department of anthropology at the University of California. In 1911, Ishi, a Yahi Indian and the last survivor of the Yana band, came to work with Kroeber and others at the Museum of Anthropology, where he remained until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1916. Mother, born in 1897 in Denver, Colorado, completed a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the University of California in 1920 and married Clifton Spencer Brown in July 1920; they had two children: Clifton Jr., born September 7, 1921, and Theodore “Ted,” born in May 1923. Brown died in October 1923, and mother began taking anthropology courses from Alfred Kroeber. They married in March 1926, and Kroeber adopted both sons. They bought a house designed by Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck at 1325 Arch Street on the north side of the university campus. Le Guin will later cite (in an essay in the journal Paradoxa ) the beauty and “integrity” of its design as an early influence. Parents took a field trip to Peru for eight months, shortly after marriage, living in a tent. Brother Karl Kroeber born in Berkeley on November 26, 1926.)