In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations

I recommend the last section on contemporary indigenous struggles. It is the one part that successfully integrates his main themes with specific case studies. The preceding chapters seem to me like two distinct, unfinished books: one on Native Americans and another on technology. He says at the beginning that this was his original plan. However, for the reader who knows nothing about critiques of technology or indigenous people, this book is a fine place to start.

Introduction “Indians Shmindians”
Part one: Question we should have asked about technology
Growing up with technology:
City, Woods, Suburbs; Shopping; Family Doctor; Milton Berle; Family Buick; Florida; Summer Camp; Democracity; The American Dream
Fantasy and reality:
Ingredients of the Pro-Technology Paradigm
The importance of the negative view:
“Holistic” Criticism; Guilty Until Proven Innocent; Retrospective Technology Assessment: Cars and Telephones; Victim of Technology; Ten Recommended Attitudes About Technology
Part two: The inevitable direction of megatechnology
Seven negative points about computers:
Pollution and Health; Employment; Quantification and Conceptual Change; Surveillance; The Rate Acceleration; Centralization; show more Worst-Case Scenario: Automatic Computer Warfare; Can We Blame Computers?
Television (1): Audiovisual training for the modern world
Living Inside Media; Freedom of Speech for the Wealthy; The Technology of Passivity; Acceleration of the Nervous System; Perceptual Speedup and Confusion; The Politics of Confused Reality; The Television President; Late News: Video War
Television (2): Satellites and the cloning of cultures. The case of Dene Indians
“Unpopulated Icy Wasteland”; Invasion from Outer Space; Testimonies; Effects on Storytelling; Visit to School; The Ravens
Corporations as machines
Corporate Shame; Corporate Schizophrenia; The Corporate/Human Dilemma: Three Cases; Eleven Inherent Rules of Corporate Behavior; Form Is Content
Leaving the earth: space colonies, Disney, and EPCOT
Business Opportunities in Space; Futurist Love Space Travel; Star Seeding: Sending the “Best Humans” to Space; Banishment from Eden; The West Edmonton Mall, Edmonton, Canada; EPCOT Center, Orlando, Florida; San Francisco, the Theme Park; Antidote: Reinhabitation of the Earth
Chapter ten: In the absence of the sacred
Molecular Engineering; The Postbiological Age; The Madness of the Astronaut; Megatechnology; Statement on the Modern World
Part three: Suppression of the native alternative
Chapter eleven: What Americans don’t know about Indians
The Media: Indians Are Non-News; Prevalent Stereotypes and Formulas; Indians and the New Age; Cultural Darwinism
Chapter twelve: Indians are different from Americans
“Mother Earth”; Table of Inherent Differences; “We Are Helping You”
Chapter thirteen: The gift of democracy
Rule Without Coercion; Our Founding Fathers, the Iroquois; The Great Binding Law of the Iroquois Confederacy; Iroquois Nation, 1991
Chapter fourteen: Lessons in stone-age economics
Pre-Technological Leisure; Banker’s Hours; Dietary Intake; Deliberate Underproduction; The Choice of Subsistence; The Creation of “Poverty”; Fast Forward: Leisure in Technotopia; The Alleged Superiority of Modern Resource Management
Part four: World war against the Indians
Chapter Fifteen: The imperative to destroy traditional Indian governments. The Case of Hopi and Navajo
Declaration of Independence; First Came the Hopi; Arrival of the Navajo; Hopi-Navajo Symbiosis; The Americanization of Indian Governments; Current Events
Chapter sixteen: The imminent theft of Alaska
From communal to Corporate; The Requirements of Corporate Profit; “Social Engineering”; ANCSA’s Effect on the Yupic Eskimos; Resistance to Cash Economy; Reinstatement of Native Governments
Chapter seventeen: The theft of Nevada. The Case of the Western Shoshones
Land or Money?; Indian Claims Commission: Plot Against the Indians; “ We Should Have Listened to Our Old People”; The Dann Sisters’ Case; MX Missile; Visits with the Government; Current Events
Chapter eighteen: Desecration of Sacred Lands. The Case of the Native Hawaiians
The Fourth of July, 1980; The Great Mahele; The Invasion of Kahoolawe; The Desecration of Pele; Current Events
Chapter nineteen: World news briefs (1): The Pacific Basin and Asia
“Fourth World” Wars; The Pacific Basin; Asia
Chapter twenty: World news briefs (2): Canada, Europe, Africa, Latin America
Epilogue: The new order and the new resistance
Market Economy; “We Can’t Go Back”; Signs of Life; Against Pessimism show less

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