Liza Minno
Unspeakable Home and the Settler Uncanny
Up until last year, Burning Man occupied very little space in my mind. I knew it existed, of course; I could even conjure up an image in my mind of a begoggled steampunk in a fur vest, cruising through the desert in a ramshackle art car, like Mad Max on his way to the rave. I knew the broad strokes—started by Bay Area hippies and radicals, a DIY art and music anti-festival that’s gotten panned in recent years for becoming a playground for tech-bro billionaires looking for a week of glamping on steroids—but that’s about all. Some years ago, two of my friends went together: one of them had a transcendental experience and the other a hellacious one, complete with her puking in a port-a-potty and trying to save her camp neighbor from dehydration.
I’ve never had particularly strong feelings about it, except a clarity that it’s not my cup of tea, a suspicion that, had I gone, my experience would have been marked more by puking in port-a-potties than by achieving a higher state of consciousness. I don’t love large parties, EDM, or being around a lot of strangers on drugs. I also lived in the Southwest for about a decade and, as part of the work I was there to do, I co-organized large annual gatherings, off-grid in the high desert of Northeastern Arizona on the Navajo Reservation. These gatherings were always immense logistical challenges, but were deeply rewarding in that they were part of a larger anti-colonial organizing effort led by a group of traditional Diné elders resisting a forced relocation from their ancestral homelands. So, my open-and-shut feeling about Burning Man has always been: no thank you; I’m not looking for off-grid gatherings in the desert unless they’re for a very specific reason that aligns with my most closely-held political commitments. I can find a party elsewhere.
But last year, Burning Man and its setting, the Black Rock Desert, wormed their way into my imagination as stories about the unexpected heavy rains that turned the dusty alkaline flat into a sloppy mud pit dominated the news cycle. I read about the seventy thousand people stuck for days, the mud making it impassible to most vehicles, sewage overflowing, fresh water in short supply, and trash cementing into the hardening mud. Then there were the confirmed reports of a death onsite mingled with the prank rumors of an Ebola outbreak and cannibalism; it was all so uncanny. So, whether it was because of my experience organizing large off-grid desert gatherings, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I fascination, or just run-of-the-mill gaperism, last year I got curious about Burning Man.
Watching videos and reading Burner blogs, I found out that for many of its attendees, Burning Man is way more than a party and it does in fact align with their most closely-held political commitments. It has its own practices and norms, a Philosophical Center, ten core principles—including “radical self-sufficiency,” a shocking amount of bureaucracy, and, like any proper subcultural phenomenon, a rich lexicon. The default world, for example, is how Burners refer to life outside of the gathering, AKA the other fifty-one weeks of the year. In a potent rhetorical inversion, they refer to Burning Man itself as “home.” When Burners arrive at the gathering, I learned, they’re greeted by the phrase “welcome home.” Why does the concept of home figure so prominently into Burning Man culture, I wondered? What are the implications of home being a place where you spend only a small fraction of the year? And what happens when, like a spider web, home is also a sticky trap that, last year, caused some Burners to abandon entire camps in an effort to make it back to the default world? My curiosity tipped into obsession.
In order to access “home,” incoming Burners traverse Route 447, a two-lane desert highway that crosses the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation and they are, for that time, under tribal jurisdiction. This jurisdictional reality came into sharp relief before the 2023 gathering officially commenced when on August 27, a group of environmentalists, some of them former Burners, blocked the highway with a trailer and a small lockdown with signs in protest of the proliferation of private jets and single-use plastics at Burning Man. One sign read “No Burn on a Dead Planet,” a riff on the “No Jobs on a Dead Planet” slogan familiar to anyone who’s attended a contemporary environmental protest. Traffic backed up into gridlock. Amped-up Burners got agitated and attempted to talk the protestors into clearing the way. When it was clear that the protestors wouldn’t budge, someone called the police. The Pyramid Lake Tribal Police arrived and, in a there’s-a-new-sheriff-in-town stunt, one of the Native officers plowed through the blockade with his truck and announced over his PA speakers, “I’m going to take all of you out, you better move, you’re gonna go next.” He got out of his truck and pulled his gun on the (mostly white) protestors and pinned one of them to the ground with his knee on their back. The protestors cried out in fear and yelled, “We’re nonviolent! We have no weapons!”
Having spent over a decade in Indigenous solidarity work and in frontline climate justice movements, I have a fucked-up retinal burn of white cops harassing, intimidating, sometimes pulling weapons on, and generally busting up Native-led environmental blockades, protests, vigils, prayer circles, and civil disobediences. Watching the footage of the Burning Man protest, my mind wasn’t quite sure what to do with this bizzarroland role-reversed version of the events. One video shows a woman, who says she is a Paiute resident of the reservation, approaching the blockade, attempting to dismantle it by hand, and chiding the protestors. One starts to explain their earth-loving purpose to her; she interrupts, saying, “I don’t give a shit. Get off the reservation! Get out of here . . . We live here on this land, you don’t. Go back to where you came from.”
What Burners refer to as home, the desert playa on which Black Rock City is constructed and dismantled each year, is on the ancestral homelands of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, a federally-recognized tribe that consists of two bands of the Northern Paiute. While the Black Rock Desert is outside of the reservation bounds and is on federal land, it holds sacred sites and burial grounds of the Northern Paiute who were shunted into reservation borders after the bloody Paiute Wars of the mid-1800s. Prompted by the incursion of gold-seeking settlers onto Paiute territory, the wars resulted in irreparable damage to Paiute people and lands, as the settlers had the full force of the United States military backing them. By the end of the wars, the Paiutes had been starved, harassed, and forcibly relocated off the majority of their homelands, of which the federal government and individual homesteaders took possession.
“. . . for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This . . . enables us, furthermore, to understand . . . the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
—Sigmund Freud, The “Uncanny,” 1919
Having lived my whole life on the East Coast, I had the clichéd experience of feeling like I’d landed on a different planet upon moving to the Southwest in 2008, in my early twenties, and first seeing the moon rise above ancient red rock formations, or stepping in petrified dinosaur tracks, or sitting on the edge of a canyon etched epically, epochally by the determined meanderings of the San Juan or Colorado rivers. I met East Coasters during my time in the Southwest who expressed some version of the sentiment, “I’m finally home,” about landing there. I never had that. I love so much about the high deserts and scrub forests where I spent such formative years. Those landscapes, the people in them, and the work I was doing indelibly sculpted my worldview, politics, sense of deep time, sense of what’s possible. But it never felt like home. Never, the whole time I lived there, did I cease feeling out of place in a way that kept me disoriented and in awe.
Freud rendered his conception of the uncanny in terms of home. In the original German, the word for canny is heimlich, meaning homey, domestic, familiar, known and also, crucially: secret, concealed, withheld. The uncanny, das unheimlich, means unhomey and deals with not just the weird or strange, but the familiar turning unfamiliar, the capacity for a thing to turn into its opposite, the home turning unhomey. A dusty desert playa turning into a mud pit, for example. Or the use of excessive force by a Native officer in breaking up a non-Native protest. Scholar Joseph Masco uses the uncanny to think through nuclearism—how the manufacturing and storage of nuclear weapons in the United States potentiates the destruction of the very home(land) those weapons purportedly exist to protect. One slip of the hand, one faulty storage container, one disgruntled employee, one wingnut with access to the codes . . .
Along with moving to the Southwest for Indigenous solidarity work, I was there to attend a graduate program with a concentration on the ongoing processes of colonization and resource extraction. While there, I lived in an activist community house in the South Valley of Albuquerque that offered meals, showers, and laundry to people experiencing homelessness and also organized against the nuclear industry, which has a stronghold in New Mexico because of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) outside of Santa Fe. LANL is a research and development lab where, in 1943, the first atomic bomb was created as part of the Manhattan Project. From Albuquerque, motley crews of us nuclear abolitionists would pile in vans or cars converted to run on veggie oil for the two-hour drive to protest at LANL. My dog, Frankie, a now elderly Australian Cattle Dog, who someone abandoned at the community house as a floppy month-old puppy small enough to fit into a loaf pan, would accompany us on some of these outings and is now officially banned from LANL (along with the rest of us) for acts of civil disobedience.
Burning Man takes place a few hundred miles from the Nevada National Security Site (formerly known as the Nevada Proving Grounds and the Nevada Test Site) where, in another stretch of the Nevada desert, on Western Shoshone land, from 1951 until 1992, the United States tested its atmospheric and underground atomic weapons. During the four decades that the site was active, the United States detonated over one thousand nuclear weapons at the Cold War arena, making it “the most bombed place on the planet” and leaving a toxic millennial legacy on Shoshone lands and downwind communities. Ian Zabarte, Principal Man for the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians, writes about this as a military occupation of Shoshone homelands and a “secret massacre of Shoshone people with radioactive poison.” The test explosions were visible from nearby Las Vegas and tourists would gather for cocktail parties in Vegas hotel rooms to watch mushroom clouds form.
The desert is storied with superlatives. In 1997, Andy Green set a new land speed record of 763.035 mph, creating a sonic boom, and becoming the first person to break the speed of sound right there on the playa of the Black Rock Desert. And before that (as in way before that), in the Pleistocene epoch, what is now the Black Rock Desert was five hundred feet under the waters of Lake Lahontan, the largest glacial lake in North America. It dried up about nine thousand years ago. The playa is so flat—ideal for building a temporary city or reaching previously unimaginable speeds—precisely because it is a (former) lakebed. A lake is a playa is a desert is a test site is a race track is a giant rave is a home is a mud pit. Anything is possible in the Nevada Desert, it seems. Unspeakable destruction, unspeakable speed, unspeakable home, unspeakable transformation.
Many participants speak about their time at Burning Man as one of deep personal transformation, a genuinely moving experience of people at their best, co-creating an artful world, caring for one another, attending to each other’s wants and needs, present with each other in ways that are rare in day-to-day life. I recognize the appeal of a gathering in which to prefigure a new, more liber- ated society. I recognize, too, the radical potential of embodying a different way of relating, if only for a short time.
But, the more I read about Burners’ visions for an alternative society, based on mutual care and collective decision-making, the more I was intrigued by the appeal that Burning Man holds for celebrities and tech industry executives. What is the draw for them? And, regardless, if this is the type of person that is now drawn to the event, how much capacity could it actually have to transform society outside of the bounds of the gathering? In a Durkheimian understanding, festivals themselves are sites of reversal, of intentionally creating collective effervescence by encouraging reveling in a form of social unfamiliarity—through intoxication, orgies, farcical performance, or ecstatic spiritual experiences—in a boundaried way, with a clear beginning date and time and an equally clear ending date and time—in order that extant power hierarchies can find homeostasis the rest of the year. Burning Man certainly seems to act as a sort of pressure relief valve for the quotidian demoralization of life under capitalism. For a week, attendees can experience a form of social organization outside of the mundanity of the office, monetary exchange (nothing except ice and coffee are for sale there), and (if desired) clothes, and experience a form of collective care and communalism, premised on radical self-sufficiency and the ability to afford the tickets, supplies, and travel. Afterwards, an increasing number of attendees return to jobs in a tech industry that is exacting massive planetary destruction, mediating and manipulating reality in the interests of giant corporations, and creating ever-more-sophisticated forms of social control and surveillance that serve to increase consumption and consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a techno ruling class with deep ties to the state.
Long-time Burners, people who established Burning Man as “home,” make clear that this tech bro cohort does not represent the ethic or core principles of Burning Man. And yet, there they are, borne of what Anna Wiener calls “. . . tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity,” taking mushrooms in the desert for a week each year, participating in a gift economy (however temporary and qualified), dancing to Diplo beats, and opening to orthogonal thinking through free-flowing philosophical conversations and/or sex with strangers. Could this actually be softening, with a sort of glowy, psychedelic pastel, the worst of what big tech could be unleashing? In other words, without this pressure release valve, would tech be somehow more nakedly vicious and authoritarian in its ambitions?
Burning Man’s relationship to the tech industry is symbiotic, it seems— material as well as aesthetic and philosophical. Burning Man was ahead of the curve when it came to digital nomadism. Long before COVID shutdowns afforded the privileged “worried well” among us the time to reevaluate our relationship to commuting, unpaid lunch breaks, and business casual attire, Burning Man forwarded a vision of a (tech) worker able to work anywhere, someone who, theoretically, maintains a small footprint and a sort of grind-defying ontological agility that can only come by being untethered to place. And Burning Man is really white. Certainly not all white—lots of Burners of color have deep attachments to the gathering—but overwhelmingly so, 80.5 percent in 2022, and most Burners are college-educated and progressive, according to their own census data. And, while I’m no apologist for the spirit-stomp of the nine-to-five work week, I am troubled by a white subculture for whom nowhere is home and therefore everywhere is home. When there are Indigenous-led movements all over Turtle Island fighting for the right to return to or remain on specific homelands or specific sacred sites, the idea of a non-Native movement premised on the fungibility of place, well, it smacks of coloniality.
But so does a white culture (sub or otherwise) that feels extraordinarily emplaced or at home in an untroubled, uncomplicated, settled way in a settler colonial context. Like the nativist anti-immigrant, I-want-my-country-back militias. Or like Cliven Bundy who, in yet another corner of the Nevada desert, staged a standoff with the federal government in 2014 over the rancher’s refusal to pay grazing fees to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Incensed at the incursion onto the Bundys’ rightful home, armed sovereign-citizen-types from far and wide amassed a giant spectacle in solidarity. Forming the stuff of right-wing populist legend, the Bundy family and their followers actually caused the BLM to stand down from their show of force. After the standoff, Cliven told a reporter, “From the moment that [the federal agents] left, we have felt freedom on this ranch. We might be the freest place on earth.”
But the ongoing expression of the settler desire for home and belonging is, far more often than not, very unspectacular. No standoffs, no range wars, no armed cells at training camps. Most any white settler in (what we now know as) the United States spends precisely no time actively thinking about the legitimacy of their claim to this home(land). And that may be the most effective strategy of all, especially for “good liberal” white folks wanting to be on the right side of history. This unthinking allows their/our desires to just be anodyne desires for a fun time at a festival, for home ownership, a good life, not desires to actively participate in the ongoing project of settlement.
Claiming a week-long gathering as home and relegating the remaining timespace of the year to the flat and colorless default world can justify a decidedly white settler brand of anti-relational evasion. To one’s home—either a site of origin or a place one commits to remain—one generally feels a sense of responsibility and a desire to protect, maintain, improve, and, if needed, fight for. If you abstract yourself out from the relational accountability—to place, to others—intrinsic to the concept of home, then you can place a chasmic philosophical divide between yourself and the Cliven Bundys of the world, the “bad whites” who in taking up arms and fighting for their homes seem unhinged, backwards. But then you can, too, justify having no particular responsibility to place or others, no responsibility to work out the messy truth of just how this land became home to you in the first place.
Having been raised in white, fundamentalist Christian churches, you’ll forgive me if I bristle at any group that says our home, our true home, is not here and now, but somewhere else (heaven, the playa, etc.) and, in so doing, demotes earthly life or the default world to some sort of anteroom. I’m aware that Burning Man’s philosophy and fundamentalist Christian theology aren’t comparable in many ways, mostly scale—the latter, in its most weaponized form having been used as the theological buttress to most every ruling class or white supremacist political project in the United States. But both prompt fair questions about what exactly a devotee is to do while not yet home.
“The Zecks [a family] are . . . like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again.”
“Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich’ . . . Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?”
—Karl Gutzkow, Die Ritter vom Geist (1851)
as quoted in Sigmund Freud, The “Uncanny” (1919)
White settlers in the United States have evolved all sorts of creative strategies to quiet nagging anxieties about belonging on colonized Native land. One enduring strategy is that of “playing Indian,” trenchantly examined by Rayna Green, Philip Deloria Jr., and others. During the Boston Tea Party, colonists dressed up like Mohawks. This was tactical, for disguise, but also significantly symbolic. It was a way to establish a unique (native) American identity, distinct from Great Britain—a teenage, Fuck you, dad, I mean King George. You’re not the boss of me. I live here now and we dress like this. Jake Angeli, AKA “Q Shaman,” dressed in furs, a horned headdress, eagle feathers, and body paint at the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Angeli was, purposefully or not, playing Indian as a way to assert independence, rebellion, wildness, untameability, ungovernability, and a warrior-spirit against, in his estimation, a tyrannical Democratic party.*
This cultural or spiritual appropriation shows up with a special rabidity at music festivals, like Coachella and Bonnaroo, and at predominantly white New
Age gatherings, most egregiously in the form of white hipsters donning headdresses or participating in faux sweat-lodge ceremonies. The Burning Man organization was pressured to change the theme of the 2021 gathering from “Terra Incognita” (meaning Unknown Land) because of its cringey colonial ring. They settled on “The Great Unknown” instead. Burning Man, Lightning in a Bottle, Coachella, Bonnaroo, etc.—all of these events have been criticized for creating the conditions for or, it seems at times, inviting this appropriation. Whether or not it’s actively invited, there is something notable about troves of young, white or non-Native city-dwellers decamping to remote rural areas to get in touch with their true natures or wild sides, to cut loose or have a spiritual awakening. To feel authentic and free and to experience land-based ritual and collectivity. All of this, in a settler colonial society, is mediated by an understanding of Indigeneity. It’s coded through Indigeneity as symbolic of connection to land, home, true nature, rebellion, and unmarred spirituality.
Whiteness studies scholars talk about the formation of whiteness in the United States as a sort of Faustian bargain. In order to access the social capital, actual capital, and bodily shielding afforded by whiteness, people of European descent, many of whom were considered non-white upon arrival, needed to give up their cultural practices, languages, religious customs, foods, and rituals, often leaving them with only a box of Nonna’s recipes or a St. Patrick’s Day parade as the single tie to an ethnic European culture. This severing was achieved in part by Americanization programs that were mandatory in most states for European immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century. These assimilatory programs inculcated immigrants in the norms of whiteness and consumerism, fostered anti-Black racism, and normalized dependency on a capitalist market.
Prior to that wave of European immigration to the United States—prior, indeed, to the very existence of the United States—there was, what Diné and European scholar/activist Lyla June calls the “vast and beautiful world of Indigenous Europe,” replete with rich land-based spiritualities, diverse folk customs, celebrations and feasts, communally-stewarded land, and non-extractive economies. This world and its practices were violently stamped out over the course of centuries by land enclosures, feudalism, scorched earth campaigns, witch hunts, industrialization, urbanization, proletarianization and, finally, full-blown imperialist capitalism.**
The anxieties that white settlers articulate today around Indigenous sovereignty or demographic shifts that minoritize white people are projected fears based on actual practices of white settler harm. The white fear of affirmative action is the fear that whites will be excluded from jobs and schools (as whites have excluded people of color); the fear of the “woke mob” is the inverted fear of lynch mobs. The white fear of Indigenous land rematriation is the fear that white land will be violently thieved (as white settlers violently thieved from Indigenous people). The uncanny fear of the “great replacement” or “white genocide” is the projection of the actual, ongoing, genocidal project of settler colonialism.
Describing the collective trauma of being severed from place and its aftermath, Resmaa Menakem writes:
Throughout the United States’ history as a nation, white bodies have colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered Black and Native ones. But well before the United States began, powerful white bodies colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered other, less powerful white ones. The carnage perpetrated on Black people and Native Peoples in the “New World” began, on the same soil, as an adaptation of longstanding white-on-white traumatic retention strategies and brutal class practices [in Europe]. This brutalization created trauma that has yet to be healed among American bodies of all hues today.
This unresolved epigenetic, collective trauma, like some psychosomatic principle of mass conversion, cannot be destroyed. Instead, it mutates, often into a terrorizing form, until it’s addressed. It’s hurt people hurt people, but on an industrial scale.
Maggie Nelson writes, “The sounds of white folks making audible their apprehension that the systems that have given them dominance have also drained something vital from them, fucked them up in ways they feel strongly but have difficulty understanding or articulating, is not usually pleasing.” The something vital Nelson references is home, belonging, or, nebulously, culture. One common expression of this is in jokes about white people having no culture. What are the implications of saying that a dominant group in a country has no culture of its own? And it isn’t pleasing because it is, in and of itself, an expression of the hegemony of whiteness.
It comes out violently and sideways, but it is true that many white people in the United States, if they’re not actively numbing it, feel some of the pain of being cleaved from ancestral homelands and set into motion on a seemingly unstoppable assembly line of victims becoming perpetrators, the colonized becoming colonizers. They/we feel some kind of haunted about simultaneously having and not having a home, a culture. It isn’t pleasing because, truly, who has any sympathy to spare for the pain of the oppressor? But it is important to pay attention to in order to address the crushes of glazed-eyed white people, frantic in need, running towards any perceived sense of culture or home, hands outstretched and grabbing like a Black Friday mob surging through the doors of a Best Buy.
Belonging, for white settlers, is always an uncanny prospect, a fraught prospect. I believe that there is an ever-present awareness, conscious or not, in white people that they/we are the beneficiaries of theft: stolen land, stolen bodies, stolen labor. With that awareness comes a day-of-reckoning-type fear, however repressed. When will the great reversal happen? The Ghost Dance prophecy realize? When will they come demanding their pound of (white) flesh? When, exactly, will the water come up again from that buried spring or dried-up pond? Lakebed?***
When I studied briefly in Prague, at the same university my grandfather attended decades prior, I attended a lecture on the Czech language in which the lecturer said that in Czech there are many words for home. He believed this was because the nation itself was forged in a crucible of the existential threat of erasure, having been nearly wiped off the map several times by invasions and other geopolitical maneuvering. My ancestors were in present-day Slovakia, on the other side of what was once one country and now looks like an off-kilter bird in flight, split roughly in half by a border. They, too, had anxieties about home—less about belonging to it, more about surviving in it. The variety of ways to speak home seems like the linguistic equivalent of prepping, stockpiling enough words for something that could disappear at any moment, hoping they still work when the big one hits.
After the man is burned, signaling Burning Man’s official conclusion, camps and art installations are dismantled and with them any recognizably defining features of home vanish, returned to the terra incognita of the desert sands. Like the eerie, shadowy, midspace evoked in the short story “neither” by Samuel Beckett, if Burning Man is home, it is one suspended between being and nothingness, belonging and metaphysical homelessness, an unhomey home, an “unheeded neither, unspeakable home.” But, in a world slashed up and scarred by imperialism, is there any other kind?
*“Playing Indian,” too, is a way to validate settler rebellion by, uncannily, mimicking the Indigenous peoples they/we colonized, the very people who have extremely valid reasons to rebel against the mechanisms of settler colonialism.
**In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich writes how part of the stamping out of Indigenous European, land-based, cultures included outlawing pagan festivals in the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, which were heavy on the dancing and singing. With the banning of these festivals and what she calls their “mind-preserving, life-saving techniques of ecstasy,” a collective despair followed.
***Incidentally, Summer Burkes, of Burning Man’s Department of Public Works (the committee responsible for setting up, breaking down, and cleaning up after the gathering), told Wired Magazine, “there’s an underground river that courses beneath Black Rock.” Burkes may be referring to the urban legend (rural legend?) of “Wally’s River.” In the 1990s, Robert Wallace “Wally” Spencer, a rocket scientist, claimed to have found an ancient underground river running the length of Nevada, five hundred feet beneath the earth’s surface.