Teaching peace in the feminist classroom: Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing.

In the midst of the ongoing war in Iraq, the dramatic escalation of violence in the Middle East, the mental onslaught of the war on terror, and the highly publicized torture of prisoners in Iraq by US military forces, I, along with many radical teachers and students, seek new resources to transform both consciousness and contexts from war to peace. In 2002 as the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, I felt an urgency to create a specific pedagogical response to 9/11 one year later, and searched for readings and ways to approach this challenge. I chose to use excerpts from Starhawk's speculative fiction novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) to focus on resistance, transformation, and peace. Through the seemingly untenable, and yet peaceful, positions characters in that novel inhabit in response to a hostile invasion, Starhawk calls readers to rethink responses to violence and consider strategies to achieve a peaceful society. I advocate the use of Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing as a text to teach and learn about peace and non-violent resistance. In this article I discuss the questions and concepts that emerged in an Introduction to Women's Studies course as we examined Starhawk's challenge to imagine non-violence as a tool to rethink societal values, resist oppression, and transform the enemy.

I teach Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), rated the most diverse university in the Midwest by US News and Worm Reports. In 2002, the enrollment was 10,898, and the undergraduate population (8,101) included 14 percent African American, 13 percent Asian and 28 percent Latino students, with 64 percent women and an average age of 26. Many students are the first in their families to go to college, are working at least part-time and have a language other than English as their first language. The 30 students, overwhelmingly female, who enroll in the introductory undergraduate Women's Studies course "Women's Perspectives and Values," reflect the population of the university. Most students take this class because the course title seems interesting and because it satisfies a general education humanities requirement.

The desire to understand women's perspectives and values forms the basis for the course's introduction to feminisms. We focus on how gender, race, class, sexuality and other identity markers shape our awareness of others and ourselves. I have been teaching variations of this course since 1994 and currently use a compilation textbook in order to include as many different points of view from women (and some men) in the US as possible (1). I view the class as an opportunity to think about how we are impacted by our gender, race, class, sexuality, family, context, religion, age and ability. Topics include: Becoming a Woman; Learning Sexism; Women's Diversities: Race, Class, Sexualities and Differences; Beauty; Health; Education; Work; Family; Violence; Social Change; and Activism.

Before the semester began in fall 2002 I searched for ways to discuss 9/11 one year later. (2) I used first person narratives about the impact of 9/11 on people's lives (such as Robin Morgan's online diary) and found essays critical of the US government's responses to 9/11 (for example "Algebra of Infinite Justice" by Arundhari Roy). However, I also wanted a feminist text that would promote dialog about terrorism and peace, one that would raise questions about violence, war and peace in a way that resonated with current situations and offered opportunities to envision different ways to respond. I felt The Fifth Sacred Thing could be such a text because its futuristic conflicts invite readers to examine contemporary issues through images of possible futures. I was moved by Starhawk's future, where groups of people have the capacity to transform violence and war into peace and community, and by the idea that imagination might be a location of change. She posits that the first step toward transforming violence in our lives is to imagine non-violent responses. As a 35-year veteran of progressive movements and a well-known global justice activist and organizer, Starhawk brings incredible insight and experience into her fiction (see her website for more on her work: htrp://www.starhawk.org). Additionally, the genre of The Fifth Sacred Thing, speculative fiction, with its focus on possible outcomes of current contexts, provides opportunities to consider what our futures might hold and how the contemporary political, economic, and social structures produce what those futures are becoming.

Teaching Starhawk's novel fits into a tradition of including works of feminist science fiction, speculative fiction, or utopian/distopian fiction in Women's Studies courses. When I took my first Women's Studies course in 1985 we read Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Women's Studies syllabi frequently include Joanna Russ' The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, Sally Gearhart's The Wandergound, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, or many others. Frances Bonner in her article "From the Female Man to the Virtual Girl: Whatever Happened to Feminist SF?" makes the case that "... feminist science fiction provided invaluable texts for Women's Studies courses (and Russ or Piercy or the like remain valuable for this ...)" (106). The use of these utopian/distopian novels is not surprising, Bonner reminds us, given Ruth Levitas' definition of a utopia as "the expression of the desire for a better way of being" (107). One of the challenges of feminism is to create a better way of being. This includes how and in what ways to advocate for social change. In Women's Studies courses these novels are opportunities to explore imaginary problems and possibilities of the future. Women's Studies and utopian/science fiction share a similar goal of social change; many of the journals in Women's Studies reflect this with science fiction issues (for example NWSA Journal and Women's Studies). Feminist social change advocates continually struggle with the challenge to imagine a better way of being. Many educators take this challenge seriously and create syllabi and enact pedagogies that offer students opportunities to think about our futures differently and as a result reconceptualize and work to transform the present into a more humane and just society--for example, by confronting sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and anti-Semitism in our lives and the world we live in.

One of the classroom pedagogies I use to encourage the participation of all students and to highlight aspects of the readings that are insightful, challenging, or confusing, is to ask students to volunteer to read paragraphs out loud (many of these passages are included here and prompted the ideas in this paper). We discuss as a class (or in small groups that report back) the selected passages, students' interpretations, and how the concepts contained within these passages relate to our lives. This process values the text and students' voices. Even students who don't have something to say about the readings can volunteer to read out loud. Practically, this pedagogical strategy gives me an opportunity to discover how much of the reading students understand and to increase their comprehension through dialog. In addition, when someone reads out loud in the classroom it offers an opportunity to hear the words, their emphasis and meanings in a new way. I chose many of the passages because in them the authors' words are so poetic and meaningful that hearing them transforms or deepens our understanding of the significance of the words and the text as a whole and thus creates an immediate chance to re-engage with the text collectively. This classroom dialog not only helps to clarify meanings, but actively involves us with the text and each other.

To further facilitate student connections and dialog, I created online discussion assignments to encourage written examination of the ideas and questions raised by the readings. (3) The online discussion was structured so that a student posted her reply to questions, and other students then replied to her post. She in turn would reply online to other students' posts. Pedagogically this gives students a rare opportunity to read other students' words and respond to them in writing, engaging with each other online as well as in the classroom. Students used this forum to discuss their own lives and their responses to each other and to the readings. For example in responding to The Fifth Sacred Thing, one student wrote:

   A year later I am able to look at
   things differently as far as 9/11. I
   think that we all should take a step
   back and look around. We live in
   an imperfect world and the only
   thing that we can really contribute
   is to figure out what you can do to
   make this place better for yourself
   and others. We must work on a
   small scale and deal with the situation
   we've all been thrown into.
   Maybe in some ways, everyone's
   small contribution could grow to a
   global change.

Starhawk calls readers to imagine how we might transform our present relations with each other and with the environment through juxtaposing utopian and distopian futures. The back of the book describes The Fifth Sacred Thing in the following way:

   Imagine a world without poverty,
   hunger, or hatred, where a rich culture
   honors its diverse mix of races,
   religions, and heritages, and the
   Four Sacred Things that sustain
   life--earth, air, fire and water--are
   valued unconditionally. Now imagine
   the opposite: a nightmare
   world in which an authoritarian
   regime polices an apartheid state,
   access to food and water is restricted
   to those who obey the corrupt
   official religion, women are the
   property of their husbands or the
   state, and children are bred for
   prostitution and war. The best and
   worst of our possible futures are
   poised to dash, and the outcome
   rests on the wisdom and courage of
   one clan caught in the conflict.

The allure of the book is that both the authoritarian future and the peaceful future could conceivably spring from our present context. It is the eerie familiarity of these futures and the possibility of either of these two worlds as our future, that compel readers to take her seriously. One half of the hook focuses on the utopian future, the future where people are valued and peace and consensus are goals. The other half deals with the distopian authoritarian future where religious fascism, sexism, and racism prevail. In the end, the two societies collide. Starhawk explores a range of ideas in the text: alternative medicine, polyamory, telepathy, genetic mutation, religious fundamentalism, and biological warfare. However the length of the book (484 pages) seemed overwhelming to teach in the context of a semester-long course on the broader topic of women's perspectives and values. Therefore, I excerpted the book, focusing on the utopian future where peace and consensus flourish (4). The excerpt outlines how Starhawk's peaceful society, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is created, organized and maintained, even in the face of violence. I chose this excerpt specifically so that in the classroom we could discuss the dilemmas Starhawk's peaceful San Franciscan society face and analyze their nonviolent responses to violence. I hoped that through our investigation of what Starhawk's San Franciscans endure and transform we might alter the way we view violence and war, perhaps transforming our selves in order to make more peaceful choices in our own lives and the world.

In the Bay Area peaceful society, people from diverse backgrounds and races live together, forming many different family arrangements. The main characters--an intergenerational interracial mix of biological family, lovers (both homosexual and heterosexual), and friends--live together in a large house. Their society has no racism, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, anti-Semitism, nor heterosexism. They all work and are equally valued, all have food, water and shelter, and societal decisions are based on consensus. They have regular citywide meetings open to all where they discuss everything from water and sewage to inclusive religious ceremonies. Their community contains no violence against others and is based on respect for the four sacred things--earth, air, fire and water--and the fifth sacred thing, love. These beliefs are grounded in the story of their beginnings (17-18). Their society was formed in the future (2028) after another civil war when the repressive fascistic society was growing and trying to control all the water, land, and people in the U.S. Four old women, Las Cuatro Viejas, with nothing to lose, demolished a main street with pickaxes and planted a garden. Soon the Bay Area was transformed into gardens and the survival of people in the area was dependant on the natural elements. Thus, when food was scarce and they were hungry, the people pledged to share and to feed the children first. For the San Franciscans the food they shared became sacred to them as was the water, the air, and the earth on which their continued existence was based.

The description of the utopian society and their "sacred things" offers students an opportunity to discuss societal organization. In order to focus on the differences between our present society in the U.S. and Starhawk's, I started our dialog with a student reading out loud the following quote, which is the basis for the peaceful society in the book: "When something is sacred, it can't be bought or sold. It is beyond price, and nothing that might harm it is worth doing. What is sacred becomes the measure by which everything is judged" (18). We discussed what, if anything, is sacred in our U.S. culture. Most students felt that maybe money might be sacred because of how much it is valued and coveted. Further, it seemed obvious to most of us that our culture did not value people since there are so many in the US without food or healthcare. The differences between the San Franciscans' futurist society and ours gave us an opportunity to think about how cultures are organized and what does or doesn't exist now. We tried to imagine what changes might have to take place to live in a society that valued life. In that society, students suggested, all people would have health care, a place to call home, healthy food to eat, opportunities for valuable work and education. We asked whether the valuing of life and love can foreground peace and guide our ability to question and resist the racist, warring society we live in.

Resisting violence forms the narrative focus of The Fifth Sacred Thing excerpt I selected, which centers on a San Franciscan family whose eighty plus year old matriarch, Maya, is a woman who actively protested the Vietnam War. She shares the lessons she learned from her protesting experiences:

"The ends don't justify the means," Maya said. "That was what I learned from Vietnam, from the war and the protests against it. The means shape the ends. You become what you do." (emphasis added 164)

The anti-Vietnam war movement Maya was a part of began to use the same tactics as the government and this transformed their peaceful protests, blurring the line between the anti-war movement and the war itself. Maya believes that the peaceful impulse to end the war in Vietnam became a violent movement for the people she knew. Since the protests Maya participated in became more violent, she questions whether it is ever possible for the means NOT to shape the ends and for people to NOT become what they do. Can people remain unaffected when responding to violence with violence? Maya raises an interesting question that we examined in class: whether or not it is always the case that the means shape the ends and you become what you do? Is it sometimes necessary to meet aggression with aggression, perhaps in self-defense or in cases of genocide? Does that still shape the ends? The way the San Franciscans are faced with these questions offered students and me an opportunity to reflect. Perhaps we are always shaped by the choices we make. In the online discussion one student wrote the following in response:

   I completely agree with Maya's
   statement about becoming what
   you do. There are ALWAYS other
   non-violent ways to reach a goal
   and there are no excuses for not
   exploring them. I find it hard to
   believe that some politicians and a
   lot of Americans even try to see
   another perspective. They talk
   about how horrible the rising murder
   rates in certain cities in the
   U.S. are and then they bomb
   whole villages in other countries
   like that's not murder! It's really
   amazing to me the distance we let
   our emotions have from the things
   that our government does to other
   countries. A lot of what she said
   ties in to Iraq and "the war on terrorism"
   for me. We don't like
   Saddam for many reasons (some
   good and some because of threats
   on our interests) and so a lot of
   people in our government are willing
   to start a war with a whole
   country, killing our citizens and
   theirs. Of course, if the war starts,
   we won't see the devastation on
   our soil, it will stay safely in our
   TV screens. As people who have
   considered the other options of
   resistance and action, it's our job
   to make them known to people
   who can't see past their anger.

Her consideration of our government points to a question we discussed in class: Are we also formed by choices made for us? For example, we reflected on how people are affected by what is done in their names. In the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the US government is "fighting" for justice and democracy, leading hostile invasions to create "democratic" nations and keep America safe. Knowing they have devastating effects on the people who live in those countries, what impact do these wars have on US citizens? How are we affected by what is done in our name, for our "safety," for our "freedoms"? Maya's lesson is that people are shaped by the actions they perform, and, we speculated in the classroom that perhaps we are also impacted by what is done around the world in our name, in the name of the US, its citizens and its democracy. How does this impact manifest itself? As alienation from the world and a continual need to be ready to attack? This led us to question how the struggle for peace and justice continues. Where is the space for peace within a country that is invading others?

This question of how to create a strategy of non-violence is forced upon Maya and the San Franciscan community when they face violent invasion. Together they utilize their community-wide forum to consider how to respond to their hostile attackers. Their way of life is challenged and they grapple with the possible outcomes in the following conversation:

"... [I]f we start choosing guns over food and water, we become what we're fighting against."

"But if we lose to the Stewards, we won't have the luxury of choosing food or water or anything else."

"That's the dilemma patriarchy has posed for the last five thousand years," Greta said.

"I don't find that grounds for optimism," Sam said. "In all those five thousand years, has the peaceful side ever won out?"....

"Isn't that our collective challenge, then?" Lily said. "If we don't have .guns, we have vision and imagination."

"A vision ain't much protection against a laser rifle."....

"Don't give up," Lily addressed the room as discussion lagged. "We are simply challenged now to extend our imaginations beyond solutions that have been tried before." (emphasis added 233)

The San Franciscans grapple with the dilemma posed by the coming invasion and impending domination by racist, sexist fascists: Try to live by their own peaceful ideology and be killed or try to resist violently, become like the oppressors, and die in spirit if not in body. The characters in The Fifth Sacred Thing are challenged and challenge readers to extend our imaginations beyond solutions that have been tried before. The San Franciscans face the dilemma from the point of view of those about to be invaded; we discussed in class that in the U.S. these questions are asked from the point of view of the invaders. The government led citizens to believe that there were no alternatives, that either we invade or Iraq will use their Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) to kill us. This was another false dichotomy (constructed with false information) but served the purpose of justifying the invasion and made the public believe that we were in a "kill or be killed" situation. How can those resisting invasions, terror, and violence extend our imaginations in order to conceive of peaceful responses to terrorism or countries with suspected WMDs? Could there have been engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan that was not invasion and war? Other countries in the world responded to the "threat" of Iraq without violent takeover. We contemplated the differences and asked ourselves to conceptualize possibilities for peace. We tried to extend our imaginations beyond solutions that have been tried before.

In their community forums to brainstorm how to resist the invasion, the future San Franciscans also wrestle with how and in what way responses to violence are limited by imagination. Students read out loud the following quote which captures the community's discussion:

   We ... see this struggle as more
   than a question of whether or not
   the Stewards can take over here.
   Crucial as that question is, something
   even broader is at stake.
   Greta put it well when she said
   that this dilemma has faced every
   peaceful culture for the last five
   millennia, at least. Once this drive
   for power and domination
   appeared on the planet, it became
   a force that no one could escape
   for more than a breathing space.
   For either we submit, and it triumphs,
   or we mobilize to fight
   against it, diverting our energies
   and resources and transforming
   ourselves into what we do not
   want to be. It's like a virus, mindlessly
   destructive, yet we cannot
   eradicate it without changing our
   own internal balance.

   We must develop an immunity to
   that virus. Not just for ourselves
   but for the planet..... Many years

   ago the poet Diane di Prima wrote
   a line that comes back to me now:
   "The only war that counts is the
   war against the imagination." I
   often wondered what she meant
   by it, but now I think I understand.
   All war is first waged in the
   imagination, first conducted to
   limit our dreams and visions, to
   make us accept within ourselves its
   terms, to believe that our only
   choices are those that it lays before
   us. If we let the terms of force
   describe the terrain of our battle,
   we will lose. But if we hold to the
   power of our visions, our heartbeats,
   our imagination, we can
   fight on our own turf, which is the
   landscape of consciousness. There, the
   enemy cannot help but transform.
   (emphasis added 238)

In the classroom we first considered how the solution for the San Franciscans began with the task of imaging a response to violence that was neither violent nor a simple acceptance of oppression and death. The San Franciscans pushed themselves to imagine how to resist in a non-violent way while keeping their own internal balance, which Starhawk doesn't define. Although internal balance is an ambiguous concept, we challenged ourselves to examine its meaning in the present and to remember historical peace movements that did not succumb to violence to create change. We thought Gandhi's response to colonialism was an illustration of how not to change one's internal balance. There are also examples from the Civil Rights movement; the Montgomery bus boycotters appeared to maintain their internal balance while walking instead of riding the bus. Perhaps maintaining internal balance is a matter of resisting oppression without becoming an oppressor, desiring transformation, not the opportunity to dominate. We accepted Starhawk's challenge and considered how the landscape of consciousness can become a location for revolution. Is this really where war is waged? Will the enemy "transform" as a result of the conscious choice to not recognize them as the enemy? As peace movements and anti-war activists work to create peace and justice in the US and abroad, one student mentioned how the constant terror alerts within the US continue to create a culture of fear. As a result, the public might be convinced that invading, killing, imprisoning, and torturing others is okay and justified, to save lives and protect freedom. How has this "necessary" violence become acceptable? How does torture in the name of freedom and democracy shape one's consciousness.

Faced with invasion, domination possible torture and death, the San Franciscans offer what resistance means to them.

   Our strategy ... is to refuse to participate
   in the patterns that perpetuate
   violence. If we succeed, it is
   likely that we will do both knock
   our opponents off balance and
   convert some of them..... [The]
   temptation [to fortify, protect and
   defend] will always be with us.
   Force seems so dear, so simple and
   direct. When I was young, one of
   my brother's friends had a van
   with a bumper sticker on it that
   said, FORCE, IT WORKS! And
   nobody can deny that it does. But
   meeting force with force produces
   nothing but what is already known
   and planned for and expected. It's
   what has already been done, over
   and over, for thousands of years.
   .... There used to be a saying,
   "Insanity is repeating the same acts
   and expecting different results."
   (285)

For the San Franciscans, meeting the invasion with armed resistance would just produce the predictable outcome--war. In addition, if the San Franciscans adopt a violent resistance and hope for a peaceful outcome, they repeat the same acts and expect different results. We considered whether peace could ever be an outcome of a violent takeover. How can "democracy" be created after a violent overthrow? Is the US government engaged in insanity; repeating the same acts, violent invasions, and expecting different results, democracy, rather than more violence? The challenge the San Franciscans face is to imagine nonviolent responses to violence, to imagine new ways to resist and oppose violence. In our classroom we also took up this challenge and thought about violence in our lives and different ways to resist peacefully These themes continued to influence our discussions throughout the topics of the course. For example, when analyzing women's roles in families, we considered parenting styles, how we discipline our children or were disciplined as children, as a location of violence and how we might transform parenting into more peaceful relating. We took up Starkhawk's challenge and began to imagine how we might relate to all others in our lives with peace, whether they be street harassers or our intimate partners.

The strategies that the San Franciscans devise to convert the violent takeover originates in Maya's dreams and connects to the racial identity of the invading soldiers. The San Franciscans invite the soldiers, mostly men of color who have lived their lives as slaves of the white fascists, to join them in their multicultural multi-racial egalitarian society. The San Franciscans say to the invading armies, "There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us" (234). This transforms the enemy from invading foe to human ally, someone to join their community. They couple their invitations with non-cooperation and non-violent resistance. Faced with guns and armies, these strategies seem crazy to the San Franciscans (and to us in the classroom). However, their approach has an interesting impact upon the invaders, who begin to be haunted by those they kill. Starhawk raises questions about how killers are affected by killing and what must be done in one's consciousness to create an enemy. She describes the ways both the San Franciscans and the invaders conceptualize each other in the face of non-violence on one side and violent killing on the other. She investigates the impact of the invitation to join the table and we wondered what that strategy might look like in our time. How violence interacts with non-violence presents intriguing ideas about morality, evil, and the impact of brutality on the lives of the perpetrators; for example, the impact of killing civilians on the soldiers. These are incredibly relevant issues as soldiers and civilians are being killed on a daily basis in Iraq. Starhawk asks readers questions about how violence affects us and our society. Online a student weighed in on some of these issues:

   I sat and sat and tried to think of a
   peaceful solution to all of the conflict
   that goes on around us but I
   was speechless (maybe for the first
   time in my life). I couldn't even
   imagine this world without conflict,
   isn't that terrible to say. I
   guess you nor I can solve the
   world's conflicts but we can take a
   step back and look at our lives.
   There we will have more success. It
   starts with you and yours (family
   values) but can I be that strong, do
   I believe in non-violence, all these
   questions surfaced when thinking
   about 9-11 and other horrible situations.

The violent invasion that is altered by the San Franciscans gives The Fifth Sacred Thing its ingenious conclusion. In the classroom, we grappled with the believability of Starhawk's ideas and discussed strategies that might be similar and how we could use them in our families and beyond. Starhawk challenges our imaginations as the characters in the book find their own imaginations challenged.

This book offers countless opportunities to engage with difficult questions about violence, resistance, imagination and peace. We discussed how the US military also appears to be overwhelmingly young people (5) and whether that made a difference for their value in our society. Someone asked if the US was not indeed the Stewards; given the racism and classism of our society, were not poor young people enslaved by the military somehow? Another student in the online discussion commented:

   Most people accept violence
   because "that's just the way things
   are, right?" What we refuse to see
   is that the idea of a peaceful society
   does not only exist in the
   imagination, and by silently
   accepting these crimes in our society
   we silently accept the continuance
   of them. There is a common
   sociological argument that violence
   has a function, and in our
   present day society it does. The
   perpetuation of violence supplies
   many with jobs (including the
   government, oddly how violence
   benefits them so nicely ... hmmm).
   It is difficult to imagine a non-violent
   society because we don't know
   the first thing about one. Starhawk
   creates a society where the community
   works together for the
   greater good of the whole. If we
   could just imagine the possibilities
   of responding to crime in a nonviolent
   manner, as Starhawk suggests,
   maybe crime and violence
   would cease to be deemed as the
   "norm." It seems so silly to think
   that we respond to violence with
   violence (think capital punishment).
   It is literally a vicious cycle.
   There has to be another solution.
   "Cant we all just get along?"

When we took seriously this student's question, we really engaged with what getting along might mean and how to learn to think and act differently.

When teaching this text, I felt the entire class (myself included) really pushed each other to consider different responses to 9/11 or alleged WMDs in Iraq. As we read and analyzed the aforementioned passages from the text, I experienced the kind of teaching and learning where it seems as though most of the students are also considering these issues simultaneously. We thought about what George Bush did in response to 9/11 and wondered if that also made us terrorists. Someone raised the question about whether Bush could have done something peaceful or non-violent in response to 9/11 that would have honored the pain and loss but would not have invited war. We thought of possible answers to many of the questions raised in this article, and yet many we did not have answers for, and this pushed us to imagine answers. The discussions that arose from using Starhawk's book seemed to engage the whole class in considering the violence in our lives, especially the social and political aspects that support violent responses to perceived threats; how can we make our lives non-violent and in turn how can we create a peaceful world?

The possibilities for discussing social chance and the transformation of violence into peace using Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing seem endless. Yet, challenging ourselves to imagine new responses to violence is only the first step in transforming violence into peace. Here is where I see the limitations of using speculative fiction; for example, when do we learn the social history that led to this point with Iraq so that we can understand the situation rather than just discussing what we see in the news? Once we imagine some changes, how do we implement them? Starhawk's San Franciscans had no choice but to move from imagination to action, since the invading army came to their homes, but what of us? The U.S. military is going to the homes of those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, radical teachers need many tools as we continue to use our classrooms as locations for social change; speculative fiction can engage and stimulate, a first step toward social change. Nevertheless we cannot stop here; we also need tools that help us transform our ideas into actions in our lives and the world around us.

Although I came to The Fifth Sacred Thing as a pedagogical choice for my Women's Studies course in response to 9/11, the questions and concerns raised in the book continue to be highly relevant to the issues of violence and war that we face daily. The book, more complex than I portrayed here, offers an opportunity to investigate ideas about peace and violence and I recommend its use in the classroom. Starhawk's futurist novel challenges readers to imagine how to respond to violence in a non-violent way. The two different futures she describes seem so plausible, inspiring readers to consider how to create a present that works toward a multicultural egalitarian future, rather than a fascistic repressive one. Her ideas about using the imagination as a tool of resistance, to oppose oppression and transform enemies, offers opportunities to rethink our lives and to picture peaceful communities. This text provides possibilities for teaching and learning about using our imaginations to create progressive futures and the challenge of imagining non-violent resistance and peace in the classroom and beyond.

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Women's Studies. 14 (1987).

NOTES

(1.) Recently, I have chosen Women, Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology by Kessleman, McNair, and Schniedewind, although there are many excellent introductions to women's studies/gender studies books.

(2.) Fall 2002, I scheduled the readings concerning 9/11, its aftermath and peace during the weeks surrounding that date. In the subsequent semester I moved The Fifth Sacred Thing reading to later in the syllabus and found it just as successful. I have used the text twice in the past, am using it this semester and plan on continuing to use it.

(3.) The Starhawk assignment focused on the following questions: Do you think Starhawk's imagined peaceful response to war is plausible, might work? Why or why not? Do you agree with Maya's point on page 164, "The ends don't justify the means ... The means shape the ends. You become what you do"? Why or why not and how does that impact your ideas about US policy toward Iraq and the "war on terrorism"?

(4.) The excerpted story line follows one family, bringing coherence to the selection: 16-19, 102-104, 160-164, 231-246, 270-279, 282-290, 308-316, 330-341, 342-353, 374-381, and 410-484.

(5.) In valuing life, students and I meant truly valuing the lives of all people, not just the "unborn." Creating a society where lives are all meaningful and all people have the necessary "things" for self-determination, such as healthy food, comfortable shelter, meaningful work and love.

(6.) "In FY 2002 86 percent of new active duty recruits were 18 through 24 years of age compared to 38 percent of comparable civilians. The mean age of new active duty recruits was nearly 20..... Almost half (49 percent) of the active duty enlisted force was 17-24 years old, in contrast to about 15 percent of the civilian labor force." Executive Summary of Population Representation in Military Services, 2002.