At the End Is Piuraa: The Raven’s Gift by Don Rearden
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This paper considers Alaskan author Don Rearden’s novel The Raven’s Gift (2011). The novel deals with environmental injustice, and is built around an apocalyptic plot, depicting the destruction of the Alaskan Yup’ik community through several forms of genocide, culminating with an artificially induced virus. However, the novel ends with a substantial degree of hope imminent in the concept of piuraa, which is pregnant with the spirit of the place and the nature of the Native culture. This concept is conceived in the imagination of a holistic circular cosmogony of the Native culture, and is contrasted to the linear spirit and nature of the progressive civilization which eventually must imagine ends of societies and cultures. Therefore, the paper discusses Rearden’s novel against the background of some recent historical, ecocritical, and sociological studies, such as those of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, and Peter Turchin, as well as through the lens of indigenous epistemology as interpreted by Daniel Heath Justice and John Trudell.