Sorry to re-retweet this but I’ve been thinking about it all morning. Le Guin’s perspective was informed by the fact that her parents were anthropologists who worked with Indigenous groups whose networks were destroyed by state policies deliberately designed to exterminate them. https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1289896321717960705

The anthropology practiced by Le Guin’s parents can only be understood in the contexts of the genocidal policies of the American government towards Indigenous peoples and of Western colonialism in general, _even if their work explicitly acknowledged and pushed back on them_

Similarly, it’s important to understand that her own works are both explicitly anti-colonial (Always Coming Home is not very subtle on this point) _and_ that they could not exist if they did not appropriate Indigenous stories and culture.

Acknowledging that Le Guin’s writing is beautiful and meaningful and deeply sensitive to the troubling foundations of 20th century American life cannot mean ignoring the way the she reproduced some of the exploitation she was working against.

For example, the Hainish books are ambivalent _at best_ about the process of colonialism; in the Dispossessed, at least, Hain is described as having saved the Earth-humans from themselves, a detail which has striking resonances with colonial epistemologies.

In order to understand Le Guin, her work, and her world in all of their fullness, we _must_ create the space that @jeannette_ng is asking after here. We have no choice. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that Le Guin the anthropologist would want it any other way.