The Ola People

1 Vasiliki Leibow New Black Ethnographies Final 11/26/18 Ola People Introduction I have traveled through time to the year 2150. I am researching gender dynamics on the island of Kathara. The island is off the coast of what was once America. Just large enough to hold a population of 2,500 people. Kathara is a refuge island for the Ola people. It was formed in the year 2095 and has now been in existence for 55 years.

The history of the Ola people began in 2080. They were found in different countries around the world and were victims of hate crimes including rape and murder due to their mixed race. As a brief history, the world’s population steadily became increasingly ethnically diluted, which resulted in the lack of acceptance by homogeneous societies. The people who began to have three or four different ethnicities were viewed as the least valued in society for their lack of pure blood and therefore lack of nationalist representation.

The world’s most powerful countries such as the U.S., Germany, England, Japan, South Africa, China and many more became dictatorships with nationalist pride being of utmost value, along with this, having an ethnicity that matches each person’s country became essential. The nuclear war of 2040 ended with the nuclear destruction of Canada and the United States and those who survived were sent to the country of their DNA origin. After 2050, when each country began exchanging all immigrants to their nation of origin due to the majority ethnicity of their

2 DNA test results, the world reformed into completely homogeneous countries. The exchange was completed in 2060.

The land that was once North America is now used to grow crops for the rest of the world’s needs. The workers on this land are mostly political prisoners from countries around the world who protest the new order. Additionally, all international trade treaties and unions were burned to increase nationalism. This evolved into most countries becoming crony capitalist systems and the only ties that exist now internationally are through private corporations and their lobbying power.

The Ola people were tested and found to share DNA from almost every country around the world. Their DNA was too mixed to identify them as people from one country. The other mixed people who were enough of one ethnicity to be assigned one country are lawfully seen as equal but incredibly discriminated in their society do to their lack of pureness. The Ola people were sent, as refuges, do to the hate crimes committed against them, to an island off the coast of Florida. Each Ola looks quite different from the rest. They each hold different features than their fellow Ola, but nevertheless are a compilation of almost every ethnicity.

Due to the similar experiences all of the Ola people had they are an extremely close community that were able to decide how their society would run as an isolated environment from the rest of the world. Their government is matriarchal and consists of 50 female elders voted in through a democratic process. The Ola cannot physically leave the island because the environmental pollution in the ocean, which is so acidic that it is not swimmable without major skin deformations. The first task when the Ola people arrived to the island was to create a well system that filtered the toxic rain water into clean drinkable water.

3 What makes the Ola people so unique is their family structure. The Ola originated as 67% female 29% male and 4% other, and today biological females are still the majority. All the inhabitants on Kathara live in a kibbutz style society where all the work is shared. There is no marriage in the society and no proper class system. The Ola people have children together and as a community raise the children without any designated parents. This was decided by the community to eliminate the idea of possession. Any parent can spend as much time with their biological child as wanted, however this concept was accepted by the people because most parents in the past world wanted as much help as possible for their children with childcare as an uncommon value of society. The parents who become overly attached to their children where they would not share them with the community or a possessive lover, are punished by being sent to the America’s to be farm laborers for a designated period of time.

Possession is one of the highest crimes in Kathara along with assault and murder and is punishable by the accuser of the crime during an open forum with a vote from the community to exile the accused. This has been a positive contribution to their society because no man has a wife and no mother has a child. Love is shared throughout the community depending on which people naturally connect with others. The Ola women are the majority and still remember the horrors of the outside world. Here they describe themselves in a safe environment because they are the ones who lead their government.

Each woman on the island teaches the skills they know best to the children. This way young men and women are raised to learn all skills equally and are viewed as children rather than their gender. The reason men are not teachers yet is due to the fact that their minds are still corrupted from the evils their previous societies have taught them in regards to women. The next

4 generation of children will be teachers of all genders. The society is broken into two sections, children and adults. Children are considered people 16 and under, while adults are everyone 17 and above. The children are not considered male or female but simply as children. Gender is not a concept most children understand on the island. They are surrounded by the fact that everyone is different for reasons that aren't structured through society such as gender, instead differences are highlighted to differentiate people by physical appearance, hight, specific knowledge they hold and their affiliation to others.

The Ola children learn to farm, read, cook, clean, dance, play sports and any other subject taught by their adult teachers. When the children turn 17 they choose their favorite tasks and are able to focus their time on them, while simultaneously doing their part to help society in the kibbutz fashion. Kathara is a new society so it is in the process of shifting from two genders to unidentified genders, which is the basis of my research. The shift has already begun with the first generation of children who have only known Kahara and have not been taught a gendered system. I conducted research through interviews with children who have been born and grown up on Kathara, the only world they have ever known. The research sight is the school classrooms on the island and there I make observations of the teaching methods the Ola adults teach their children.

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7 Mora The technology running the world is Mora, filtration birth control. It is a device implanted in every woman’s uterus from every country after menstruation, the only exceptions are the Ola people. Mora is set to each country’s ethnicity and is a form of birth control that allows sperm into the woman’s body but only allows the sperm to live that have the highest percentage of that country’s ethnicity in its DNA. Each country has socialized healthcare, in order for any woman to receive it she must be implanted with Mora. This way all the women that become pregnant in each country will only be able to have children that are the highest percent of the homogenous ethnicity.

The option to use birth control as a contraceptive to not have any children is not legal in most of the world. Mora was created by a private company based in Germany and sets each nations’ Mora electronically. There have been successful results in having children with the highest DNA percentages that are desired, however the system has been hacked in the past by an unknown source to create children that have almost equal DNA percentages of every ethnicity, Ola people. These children were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to Kathara to live among the Ola people. The hacking has only occurred once and produced 150 children, it has not occurred since then.

The Ola people are free of the Mora device and continue having children of mixed ethnicities. They are not provided medications from the outside world so the majority of their healing methods come from the vegetation and the natural world around them. The doctors on the island will mix herbs to help with the women’s health needs. However, the option to not have

8 children is not wanted by many women on the island because fertility rates are so low, therefore it is usually a great surprise for people to be fertile enough to carry a child to term.

Environmental Conditions The environment has been permanently damaged as a direct result of climate change and nuclear catastrophe. However, humans are not the only ones affected by their devastating actions.

Animals are almost entirely infertile due to the nuclear explosion that occurred in the Americas.

While there is farming in the Americas of crops and animals, there is a heavy use of technology to make this process possible. Most of the food is grown in greenhouses with soil shipped to the Americas to mix with the soil that still contains radiation. The animals are cloned instead of bred by scientists that focus on livestock and agriculture who live in the Americas.

On Kathara, where the Ola people live, they are unable to eat meat due to the shortage of animals on the island. The few animals they do have they use for milk and dairy products.

Kathara luckily has a few fertile animals, but they are too precious to be killed for their meat.

They must be kept alive in order to breed new, hopefully fertile animals. Kathara also has many

9 greenhouses to grow their food. It does not rain often on Kathara so they have filtration plants on the island to filter the toxic and salted sea water into safe drinkable water. The water is still of not great quality so the Ola people grow herbs to mix into the water in order to add vitamins and a better taste to the bitter liquid.

The rest of the world has all their food, both meat and vegetables, shipped to their country from the Americas. There is a disproportionate amount of food sent to each country.

Food supply is determined by one private company and its relation with each country’s government. It is a complete monopoly and the government that has the best relationship to the company receives the most food. The company is based in Japan, which is also the country with the strongest food supply.

Most of the rain is also highly acidic so people must be inside when it does rain. Being outside can result in flesh being badly burnt. The world now runs on water filtration systems, which is also controlled by one company based in South Africa. The rain water is not to be drunk fresh from the sky, it must be filtered to remove the toxins it contains.

10 Field notes I am on the island of Kathara, it is 06/03/2150 at 10:00 am. I am attending one of the classes at one of the education areas on the island. The air is warm and smells of vegetation. It is a sunny day with very few clouds in the sky. On Kathara the classrooms I am at are on the North of the island. The area consists of a small vegetable garden, an area for young livestock, two buildings with open windows and 50 desks in each. The classrooms are split up for children 3-10 and 11-16 years old. I am sitting in the classroom for children 3-10. For the 50 students there are four female teachers. The teachers still identify as their gender even though the children are not assigned any gender. Each teacher is wearing a short sleeve shirt and long skirts all of different designs. The teachers are having an open conversation with the class that is based on the discussion of the outside world. One teacher explains that the outside world exists based on differences. She describes that in those places your DNA results that label your ethnicity assigns you to a country full of people who look like you and gender is the only difference between people in the outside world.

She asks the class what is DNA? One nine year old raises their hand and explains DNA as something in the body that makes people look the way they do. The teacher agrees with the student and continues to explain the scientific meaning of DNA. Another one of the teachers circles around the classrooms and asks, what is gender? The same student answers and says it is the different bodies people have. The teacher explains that the rest of the world separates people into two groups, men and women. She describes how the world doesn’t see that each person is different and the same in many more ways so they separate people to make their lives easier. She then tells the children to follow her to the live stock outside the building. The children crowd

11 around the four teachers and make their way to the wooden fenced area that has young pigs, goats, cows and an area for chicks. The students go inside the pen and begin petting and observing the animals. The youngest children are held by the teachers.

Everyone eventually sits on the grass with the animals in a large circle. One teacher asks the students to each explain something different and the same about all the animals. A five year old begins explaining they are all animals but are different colors. Another seven year old say they are all tame until the animals are being treated badly. A ten year old student started to compare the animals to the people and how each student looks very different and thinks differently but work together to make a group of people that help the island.

As the students answered the questions they spoke freely about the topics with excessive hand movements. Some were petting the animals and looking around, seeming to not focus on the conversation. The teachers would whisper the students’ names when they began to get distracted and they would refocus on the conversation. After the discussion the teachers granted the students time to run around and play. Many of the children stayed with the animals. Others traveled to the garden and ate some of the vegetables that were ready. The rest of the children moved to the field to play games they made up with each other. The youngest children stayed with the teachers and played with them.

All the students have short sleeve shirts and long skirts on. All their hair is of various different lengths and textures. The children on the island have an independent freedom that is not governed by an individual group of parents so they are shaped by all the members of their society.

Are the children aware of the gender roles of the outside world?

12 Do the children only understand the life they have on the island or has the influence from the adults on the island affected them?

Do the teachers discipline the children?

The children seem genuinely happy, what do they not like about living on the island?

Methods: I took detailed notes of the people’s interactions and their behavior during the school session. Analyzed why the children may think the way they do. Asked questions about how the students may think of themselves and their lives in relation to the rest of the world.

Interview Pethy, 9 year old Ola child and Kali, 13 year old child (do not have an assigned genders) Pethy VL: What’s your favorite part of Kathara?

Pethy: The animals are my favorite. I spend time with them in the fields. My friends come too and we pet and play with them. It’s what I want to do for Kathara once I’m an adult, take care of the animals. See if I can help them to have babies so there can be more, but that usually doesn’t work. One cow died the other day and we don’t know if the other cows will be able to have a baby. That means there might not be any more cows one day. I want to try to keep them here.

VL: Do you hear the adults talk about the outside world?

Pethy: Yes, but they get quiet if any of the children or me come in when they’re talking about it.

They talk about what their lives were like when they didn’t live on Kathara. They always tell me

13 the outside world is dangerous but I’m getting tired of the same things here. Everything on Kathara is the same and I want to see what everyone is talking about.

VL: What are the bad things the adults discuss when they talk about the outside world?

Pethy: They always say the worst part, especially in school, are the, I think the words are, men and women. It’s two different people, but they’re both people. I don’t know why they are upset though. The adults say the women were treated so badly. But we don’t have any women on Kathara. One of my friends from class also told me that everyone looks the same. I can’t even think of that. Having people that look like me would be so funny. How would you tell anyone apart?

VL: Usually people look just different enough to tell the difference.

Pethy: I don’t know if I’d be able to. Here it’s easy to describe each person. I just say, oh Shay, the one with the blonde Afro and brown eyes with freckles, the really tall one. And everyone knows who I’m talking about because only Shay looks like that.

Kali VL: What do you learn in school? What are you learning right now?

Kali: Right now we’re learning about all the plants on the island. We study them and how they make fruit and help with disease. I think as an adult I’ll make medicine from the plants, be a healer. The flowers are so beautiful and we crush them and mix them, I can make people feel better from them. It just gets boring sometimes because it takes so long for the plants to grow.

But a lot of things can be boring on this island.

VL: What else do you find boring?

14 Kali: We all do the same things, I’ll walk around the whole island with friends. I’ll be with the animals. I go to school. That’s it. It’s always the same. I hear there is so much more outside of Kathara but we can’t go there. Some people who don’t listen to the elders here get sent to the America’s to work. I hear terrible stories of how their skin falls off and how lonely it is there, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go there just to see what it’s like for a day. See what else there is.

VL: Do you know why everyone here is on Kathara?

Kali: Yes. We learned about it in school. All the adults were sent here. They say at first everyone was scared to go to a new place but in the end Kathara is better than their old homes. Here the adults are free. They always say they are free here but I don’t know what that really means. I mean, I know the word, but they were able to go places and do what they wanted in their old homes. So I asked the teacher how is it they weren’t free in the outside world and she said freedom isn’t just about if you can leave or not leave, it’s about people letting you be who you are. But sometimes I don’t feel free here because we can’t leave. We can’t even touch the water.

Everything is dangerous and we can only live in this place. People let me be who I am so I guess I’m free in the eyes of the adults but I feel trapped. I guess there are lots of types of freedoms.

The adults were lucky because they didn’t feel free and they got to leave. But I don’t feel free and I’ll never be able to leave.

VL: Do the adults like it here?

Kali: Yes. They are always happy to be here. They tell us this is the best place on earth. But they are also sad because of their past. They act like they will never be better from what the outside world did to them. They say we, all the children, are so lucky to be here and grow up like this. I

15 do like being here and I guess we are lucky if the outside world is as bad as they say it is, it’s just, I don’t know. The adults say feeling this way is just part of growing up but all the kids feel the same. They all say that they want more than Kathara. Sometimes we play spaceship and pretend we leave earth because it’s so bad here and we go to a new planet just us kids. That would be awesome. That would be the best freedom.

Conclusion The Ola people and their matriarchal government has succeeded in removing gender as a social construct from their children’s lives. The young Ola people are well educated and are informed of the political situation and ethnic segregation in the outside world. Many of the stigmas that exist in the outside world pertaining to race and gender are not problems on Kathara.

However, isolation is a large aspect of the young children’s lives. There seems to be a lack of understanding of how oppression works in regards to one’s characteristics. Because the children are surrounded by acceptance they do not grasp the concept of living in a world that does not restrict their being and therefore do not fully understand the severity of what the adults experienced before coming to Kathara. Most of the children seem to sympathize with the adults’ experiences, but there is still a yearning from the children to explore the outside world.

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Jamaica Kincaid discusses her experience growing up and living on the small island of Antigua.

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