Book of the Month

Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia

Review by Dusty Hoesly

In Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia: Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, BC: Ronsdale Press, 2008), editor Douglas Todd and the volume’s contributors seek to pin down the secular spirituality which they claim pervades the region.  Bringing together a diverse group of writers—including historians, sociologists, theologians, and poets—Todd, a Canadian journalist who covers spirituality and ethics for the Vancouver Sun, insists that while Cascadia has some of the continent’s lowest religious affiliation rates, it remains very spiritual.  Todd defines spirituality broadly to mean “the way that humans create for themselves ultimate meaning, values, and purpose,” and he brings a flexible attitude even regarding committed secularists: “we assume that atheists, who live in record numbers in Cascadia, can and are making profound contributions to this region’s particular sense of spirituality and place” (4).  For nearly every contributor, Cascadian spirituality is characterized by sacred reverence for nature and utopian idealism.  While some authors worry whether Cascadian spirituality is too individualistic and too forward-thinking to sustain a robust social and moral community, Todd claims that Cascadia can serve as a “model for measured progressive transformation, especially regarding how people of the planet interact with nature” (11). 

For the purposes of this book, Todd limits Cascadia to Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, which he claims share a bioregional and cultural cohesiveness.  (Ernest Callenbach’s prescient novel Ecotopia charts a similar boundary, although it includes northern California.)  Prominent themes and similarities include connectedness to nature, sense of place, anti-institutionalism, individualism, idealism, liberalism, experimentalism, openness to contrasts, and a shared history as the last frontier.  In a more critical mood, several authors, from both American and Canadian perspectives, note that Cascadian spirituality can have a dark side too, leading to self-absorption, lack of roots and collective memory, imperialism, faddishness, and rural-urban bifurcation.

In the next few paragraphs, I will highlight some of the diverse approaches and conclusions presented by the book’s contributors. 

Patricia O’Connell Killen—echoing arguments she made in an earlier volume, which was reviewed previously on this blog—contends that the region’s lack of an established religion, low rate of affiliation with religious institutions, and imposing natural environment all shape its spiritual sensibilities.  Since the region had no established political order until the mid-nineteenth century and has never had a dominant religion, she argues, residents have had to actively construct their religious or spiritual identity, if any.  Moreover, due to high physical mobility rates, many residents experience loosening social ties.  The resulting individualism and anti-establishment mentality also indicate a liberal and libertarian moral worldview for the region, she claims. 

Sociologist Mark Shibley states that Cascadian spirituality reveres both self and nature in a “secular but spiritual” matrix.  He locates three prominent strands of this spirituality in apocalyptic millennialism, nature religion, and New Age and new spirituality.  “None of these spiritual practices is unique to Cascadia, but in the absence of a dominant religion, they define regional culture and identity more substantially than they do elsewhere,” he asserts (35). 

Andrew Grenville, a market researcher based in Toronto, observes that Cascadians exhibit privatized belief, skepticism, social liberalism, weak affiliation with institutions, and a DIY attitude—summing up their ethos as “live and let live” (59).  In this open religious environment, fluid spiritual identities flourish. 

Mike Carr, a regional planning professor, outlines the contours of the Cascadian bioregion before presenting his understanding of Cascadia’s “bioregional Earth-centered spirituality,” giving examples (particularly from native peoples) and arguing that this spiritual worldview can serve as a counterweight to the globalization and rapacious capitalism which threaten natural habitats (129).  Mark Wexler, a business ethics professor, examines Cascadian workplace spirituality and notices the tensions between Pacific Northwest environmentalism and utopianism, a paradox perhaps best illustrated by his image of organic farms with Wi-Fi connections. 

As these examples show, Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia articulates a shared cultural identity between Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and an anti-institutional, DIY spirituality that suffuses the region.  Nevertheless, critical omissions and challenges remain.  The work is largely representative of white, middle-class, urban, liberal perspectives.  It ignores the perspectives of Asians, Latinos, and conservative evangelicals, despite their significant presence in the Cascadian population.  Moreover, since much of this “elusive” spirituality takes its cues from indigenous and Asian traditions, this volume fails to analyze sufficiently issues of cultural appropriation or to give voice to members of those communities.

Aside from these omissions, I wonder how unique Cascadia’s landscape and spirituality are.  All of the volume’s authors agree that the “spirituality of place” that pervades the region is based upon its natural beauty and spectacular wilderness, and several claim that environmentalism is the region’s civil religion.  However, these authors do not explain why the landscape in Cascadia is more inspirational than in other regions, a project which would require a more comparative perspective that is missing from this volume.  The Great Basin region, for example, has produced several notable authors who describe its sacred geography, as have the Rocky Mountains.  Is the rugged landscape of the Pacific Northwest any more beautiful, imposing, or regionally-defining?  And now that New Hampshire and Vermont have eclipsed Oregon and Washington as the least religious states, what remains about Cascadia that is so unique from other regions?  In other words, how would the authors explain a Cascadia which is no longer as singular as they have described it?  

Embracing and Subverting Civil Religion in the American West: Japanese Americans during World War II

Part Two

By Anne Blankenship

Memorial Day offers a chance for me to conclude my reflections on the use of American mythology and civil religion by incarcerated Japanese and Japanese Americans in the 1940s. My entry today examines how incarcerees placed themselves within the narrative of pioneers taming the Western frontier. Identifying themselves as pioneers and pilgrims affirmed their role within American history, but Japanese methods of conquering land differed aesthetically from those of Euro-American pioneers. The construction of ornamental gardens and the use of alternative farming methods visually diversified the Western landscape and expanded the cultural and racial definitions of the Old West.

Steeped in the American mythology taught in public schools, the second generation of Japanese Americans readily identified parallels between their experiences and those of Euro-American pioneers and pilgrims. Named by incarcerees or white staff, several camp newspaper titles—the Granada Pioneer, the Rohwer Outpost and the Minidoka Irrigator—expressed this iconography. The inaugural edition of the Irrigator invoked the pioneer struggles of the Old West:

We can have but one resolve; to apply our combined energies and efforts to the grim task of conquering the elements and converting a wasteland into an inhabitable community…. Our goal is the creation of an oasis. Our great adventure is a ‘repetition of the frontier struggle of pioneers against the land and the elements.’ Our future will be what we make it, and there is no reason to despair.

A subsequent article promised that their pioneering experience would become legendary, emphasizing incarcerees’ responsibility to create an exemplary society. Japanese Americans would increase agricultural yields and erect democratic civilizations where there had been none before.

Camp staff and incarcerees both employed American narratives to motivate communities within the camps and raise morale. However, imprisonment and alienation ironically facilitated a claim to American land and an identity otherwise denied to them. Some incarcerees must have scorned this rhetoric, but such dissent has largely disappeared from the historical record. Japanese Christians extended these metaphors further. Hoping to do more than just conquer the wilderness, the Methodist minister Taro Gato urged incarcerees to make camp “a bit of [God]’s Kingdom on Earth” (Topaz Times, 17 Sept 1942). Poems invoked the ethnic community’s role in Christian America’s manifest destiny to occupy “the last frontiers” of the country. Japanese farmers concluded that their new environment was a “new agricultural frontier—one of the last land frontiers in the US” (El Joaquin, 28 Sept 1942). Developing land largely rejected by early settlers allowed Japanese Americans to close the final vestiges of the frontier and complete this chapter of America’s history.

The drawings, poems and essays of Japanese American children demonstrate a clear notion of being accomplished pioneers. Placing their lives within a pioneer narrative elevated their collective roles and responsibilities to those of American heroes. Two drawings by elementary students at Poston, a camp within the borders of an Arizona Indian reservation, portray the physical changes to the landscape. “Poston Before We Came” depicts a desert landscape void of people, cultivated fields and livestock.

"Poston Before We Came," Junior Red Cross Albums
Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, UC Berkeley

In contrast, an illustration to the essay “Poston Early Pioneers” shows workers clearing the land and building barracks. The young artist explained how their parents “worked hard to cooperate” and that the “boy and girl citizens” help “at home, in school and in [the] community . . . to make Poston a better place in which to live.” This rhetoric echoes can-do sentiments prominent during World War II, but the student then returned to their unique struggle: “Our pioneers have been here a year. We are proud of our progress on the desert.” Repeating notable agricultural achievements on the coast, their parents literally made the desert bloom during their incarceration.

"Clearing Up the Poston Desert," Junior Red Cross Albums
Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, UC Berkeley

But for many Japanese, conquering a new frontier through agricultural production and civic infrastructure was incomplete. The land had to be beautified as well. Japanese made their mark on the western landscape through the construction of ornamental Japanese gardens in and out of the camps. Japanese immigrants maintained a limited number of gardens on the Pacific Coast prior to the war (see Golden Gate Park’s Japanese tea garden), but greatly expanded their geographic range when forced into camps as far east as Arkansas. Creating, maintaining and enjoying camp gardens utilized creative expressions and provided mental therapy for the thousands of confined individuals. The gardens asserted Japanese cultural heritage and improved incarcerees’ living conditions.

Block 26 Garden and Pond, Minidoka Relocation Center
Bain Family Collection at www.densho.org

Highlighting their prominence in camps, gardens play a central role in the memorialization of the camps today Surveys conducted by the National Park Service identified gardens as one of the “most evocative, symbolic and identifiable features associated with the [camps’] story.” Such memorials demonstrate and commemorate the ways in which incarcerated Japanese Americans staked claims in and ultimately expanded the American West. Moving beyond the confines of the Pacific Coast—even through forced eviction—led to greater claims to America and exemplified the growing prominence of eastward migration within and beyond the West. Japanese Americans physically changed the landscape and, in doing so, changed the West.

Embracing and Subverting Civil Religion in the American West: Japanese Americans during World War II

by Anne Blankenship

In light of the 70^th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it seems fitting to reflect on the ways in which minorities sometimes re-imagine—or revise—a country’s civil religion in response to persecution or discrimination. Incarcerated Japanese and Japanese Americans reconciled their commitment to the United States with the nation’s betrayal in a number of ways, but given the time of year, I’ll focus on one: incarcerees used Christmas celebrations to simultaneously demonstrate patriotic loyalty and protest their current treatment.  

In 1942, war hysteria coupled with economic and political pressures led government officials to exile and incarcerate 115,000 Japanese nationals and their children (U.S. citizens) from the Pacific Coast.  A small minority repatriated, but the vast majority wanted to remain in their chosen nation.  

When I began exploring the religious life in Minidoka Relocation Center (a camp of 9,000 in southern Idaho), the quantity, quality and variety of material objects associated with Christmas jumped off the screen. (www.densho.org is an extraordinary resource for researching or teaching the incarceration.)  Photographs, oral histories and newspapers documented the annual decorating contests between housing blocks.  

Eager for a creative outlet, incarcerees assembled elaborate displays comparable to those found in department store windows.  Some shouted patriotic messages like this portrait of Uncle Sam with Santa Claus. 

Photograph courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration

Others juxtaposed incarcerees’ commitment to the American way of life with their current circumstances.  A two-part display called “Santa Remembers Minidoka” expressed this complexity succinctly.  The first scene, “Seattle 1941,” depicted a family-oriented Christmas scene in a typical American home, while “Minidoka 1942” contained a rough model of the camp set in front of a gloomy Idaho landscape painting.   

Minidoka Christmas Display resembling “Christmas 1941”

Photograph courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration

Minidoka Christmas Display, “Christmas 1942”

Photograph courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration

The display insinuated that the community would have continued celebrating Christmas in an American manner, but was forced to improvise in an impersonal, unpleasant institution.  When outsiders saw photographs of this exhibit in Portland newspapers, I wonder if they recognized the irony or saw what they expected and wanted to see—non-threatening minorities celebrating a quintessential American holiday. 

The Christmas displays were only one example of this phenomenon.  Similar modifications were visible in Christmas cards from Minidoka, one of which transformed a common image—snow covered houses—into a dark, haunting depiction of dilapidated barracks. Muddy paths surround the latter, not a forest floor or wide expanse covered in pristine, glistening snow.  The contrast of light and dark is enough to show observant viewers that this revision of a holiday staple contained a more complex message.

Courtesy of Shosuke Sasaki Collection, via densho.org

Minidoka Relocation Center

Christmas in America is not simply a religious occasion, and for the vast majority of Minidokans, the holiday was about doing something American, not doing something Christian.  At most, a quarter of the incarcerees were Christian.  During World War II, Christmas symbolized what the country was fighting for—hope and love, home and family, peace and goodwill toward men—and its observance became a patriotic act.  This sentiment was reflected in the patriotic or secular decorations and participants’ defensive insistence that Buddhists could “do” Christmas just as well as anyone else.  In fact, the men and women who first conceived of the decorating competition were Buddhist, not Christian. 

Readers might object that these displays and cards hardly constitute protest, but I disagree. The U.S. government characterized Japanese American incarcerees as submissive compatriots, but recent scholars argue that retaining cultural arts like ikebana and sumo was an act of resistance.  The Christmas celebrations were a more nuanced expression of resistance and Americanism.  However, I don’t argue that anti-incarceration sentiments were necessarily placed in displays or cards intentionally, but rather that these sentiments organically manifested themselves within creative works.  In Artifacts of Loss: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps, Jane Dusselier argued that artwork enabled incarcerees to “[reposition] themselves in hostile environments.”  Their adaptation of civil religious customs was personalized to match their experience in America.  Decades ago, James Scott urged scholars to look for hidden layers of meaning within the art and literature of oppressed people.  This is one such case.  

Editors' Note: Religion in the American West is happy to welcome our new contributor, Anne Blankenship. Anne is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina. She will continue her discussion of civil religion in internment camps on Memorial Day, where she will show how incarcerees engaged and transformed the American frontier myth.