Pacific Standard

Why Do Native Women Keep Disappearing? North America is still not safe for indigenous women—and we need all the support we can get.

Ever since humans became a spacefaring species, settling down on other planets has seemed an inevitability—even a necessity. Scientific titans including Stephan Hawking and Carl Sagan believed humans were “obliged” to leave Earth, if only to ensure our survival as a species. The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, as the space-industry axiom goes, and look where it got them.

It’s been wonderful to see Native writers in North America thriving in the mainstream, receiving recognition for work that challenges traditional literary forms as well as outdated narratives about Indigenous life and history. I can’t keep up with the notoriety my friend, the Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange, has received for his book There There, which won a Pen/Hemingway award and was also a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Literature.

By accident of Earth’s 23.5-degree tilt and the specific geography of our view of space, amateur astronomers and travelers who find themselves lost in the Northern hemisphere have long searched for Ursa Major, the great bear, whose torso is formed by the conspicuous Big Dipper. Amid the pandemonium of the night sky, the Dipper moonlights as outer space’s guide, revealing the locations of more obscure stars and constellations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pglE79xAGlA This PS Pick originally appeared in The Lede, the weekly Pacific Standard email newsletter for premium members. The Lede gives premium members greater access to Pacific Standard stories, staff, and contributors in their inbox every week. While helping to support journalism in the public interest, members also receive early access to feature stories, an ad-free version of PSmag.com, and other benefits.

To get from the Pacific Coast to the idyllic, mountain-surrounded town of Ojai, California, you drive by a series of working oil wells, clearly visible just off the side of the freeway. They serve as a reminder that Ventura is the third-biggest oil-producing county in California—a fact that did not go unmentioned last Thursday night, as the Ojai Playwrights Conference, an annual event that attracts world-class talent, kicked off with an evening centering around climate change.

On Mars, we’ll all farm underground. Our crops will grow in a greenhouse, where large, parabolic mirrors focus the sun’s weak rays and transmit them through fiber optic cables. We’ll harvest vegetables to eat—but also the purified water that evaporates from their leaves. We’ll all be vegan, because raising animals for food will be too expensive. And, most importantly, the plants will give us oxygen.

Oil-exporting countries generally have high rates of poverty, internal conflict, and corruption—a kind of chronic dysfunction known as the resource curse. Not Norway. Europe’s largest oil exporter and the world’s second-largest natural gas exporter has instead engineered a sort of resource blessing. Since oil was discovered there in 1969, Norway has continued to enjoy a healthy democracy and a corruption-free government—while taking its place among the world’s top 10 countries in per capita GDP.