As founder and leader of the Revolutionary Love Project, activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur advocates revolutionary love as the call of our time. It is the foundation of our movement toward a better world, as it emphasizes the very truth of humanity: that we are all interconnected. Valarie empowers us to practice the labor of revolutionary love for ourselves, but also for our opponents, in response to the hate and division seeming to consume our world. In the following speech, she shares three ways you can join community leaders and peace builders in fostering a mindset of revolutionary love today.
I want to invite you to imagine my grandfather standing behind me, a tall man who wore a turban as part of his Sikh faith. He taught me how to be brave.
More than 100 years ago, he arrived from India to America sailing by steamship in the year 1913. He arrived in a port in San Francisco, not just a few miles away from here. His generation fought for the right to become citizens, to earn equal protection under the law. It was my grandfather’s spirit, his ancestry behind me when I was growing up on the land that he farmed. And so I invite you to imagine him behind me now as I tell you my story, and share with you why I believe Revolutionary Love is the call of our times.
My story begins in the aftermath of September 11th, in the wake of the horror of those attacks, when hate violence erupted on city streets across the country. Members of my community were killed. The first person killed in a hate crime after 9/11 was Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh father who was killed in front of his store in Mesa, Arizona, by a man who called himself a patriot. He was a family friend I called “uncle.”
I was going to be an academic. His murder made me an activist. I joined a generation of Sikh and Muslim Americans fighting for our communities, fighting hate violence on the street, fighting policies by the state. And soon, I realized that our liberation is bound up with one another. I found myself working with brown and black communities across the United States, sometimes when the blood was still fresh on the ground. And with every film, with every loss, with every campaign, I thought we were making the nation safer for the next generation.
Fast forward to present day: White nationalists declare this presidency as their great awakening. Executive orders and policies rain down on us every day so that it becomes difficult to breathe. And hate crimes have skyrocketed once again.
But now, now I am a mother. Just a few weeks ago, my son was coming home with my father and my mother from a summer concert. My son was sitting on my father’s shoulders, on top of the world. They were going to grab a ride on a ferry to cross the marina and come back home. His childhood had been magical. Until they heard it:
“Go back to the country you came from.”
My father was hard of hearing, so my 4-year-old son had to tell him what the mean lady said. When they came home, my parents were shaken. “Didn’t anyone say anything?” I asked them. And they said, “No. There was a crowd of people who watched, who saw, but no one said anything.” Just like last time when my father was walking on a beach with a baby carrier, with my son at his side, and someone called him a suicide bomber. There were no bystanders who spoke up then.
I realized that I have been reckoning with the fact that my son is growing up in a nation more dangerous for him — a little boy with long hair, who may someday wear his hair in a turban as part of his faith — than it was for me. More dangerous even than it was for my grandfather. That generations of advocacy have not made the nation safer for our children, for my son.
I’ve had to reckon with the fact that there will be moments on the street or in the schoolyard when I will not be able to protect my son. For Sikh and Muslim Americans today are still seen as terrorists. Just as black people in America today are still seen as criminal. Just as brown people are still seen as illegal. Just as indigenous people are still seen as savage. Just as trans and queer people are still seen as immoral. Just as Jews are still seen as controlling. Just as women and girls are still seen as property. When they fail to see our bodies as some mother’s child, it becomes easier to ban us, to detain us, to incarcerate us, to concentrate us, to separate us from our families, to sacrifice us for the illusion of security.
I realize that I am being inaugurated into the pain that black and brown mothers have long known on this soil; that we cannot protect our children from white supremacist violence. We can only make them resilient enough to face it, and to insist until our dying breath that there be no more bystanders.
But does it have to be so painful?
You know, I realized that the last time my body has been in this much pain was when I was on the birthing table. In birthing labor, there is a stage that is the most painful. It is the final stage. The body expands to 10 centimeters, the contractions come so fast there is barely time to breathe, it feels like dying. It is called “transition.” I would not have given it this name. During my transition, I remember the first time the midwife said that she could see the baby’s head, but all I could feel was a ring of fire. And I turned to my mother and I said, “I can’t!” My mother had her hand on my forehead. She was whispering in my ear, “You are brave. You are brave.” And just then, I saw my grandmother standing behind my mother, and her mother behind her, and her mother behind her. A long line of women who had pushed through the fire before me. I took a breath. I pushed. My son was born.
You see, the stage called transition, it feels like dying, but it is the stage that precedes the birth of new life. And so birthing as a metaphor has begun to fill my imagination. You know how we say “warrior on” or “soldier on.” Only a subset of men for most of human history have had the experience of going to war, yet we all know what it means to be brave enough to “fight the good fight.” So too, only a subset of women have had the experience of birthing, or birthing that way. It is not special. It is very specific. It is distinct. It requires a certain kind of courage to create something new. I began to wonder if the metaphor of birthing may have something to offer all of us.
It has filled my mind and formed a question in me — a question that I have been asking every single day of the last two years: What if? What if the darkness in our country right now, in the world right now, is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country still waiting to be born? What if all of our ancestors who pushed through the fire before us, who survived genocide and colonization, slavery and sexual assault, what if they are standing behind us now, whispering in our ear, “You are brave. You are brave.” What if this is our time of great transition?
My sisters, my brothers, my family, I believe that we are convening right here, right now on this soil at a time when our nation and our world are in transition, for as we speak, in this very moment, we are seeing the rise of far rightwing supremacist movements in this nation and around the world, propping up demagogues, mainstreaming nativism, undermining democracies and politicizing the very notion of truth.
And we know that America, right now, is in the midst of a massive demographic transition; that within 25 years, the number of people of color will exceed the number of white people for the first time since colonization. We are at a crossroads. Will we birth a nation that has never been? A nation that is multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-gendered, multicultural? A nation where power is shared and we strive to protect the dignity of every person?
Or will we continue to descend into a kind of civil war? A power struggle with those who want to return America to a past where a certain class of white people hold cultural, economic, and political dominion.
The stakes become global when we think of climate change. Those same supremacist ideologies that justified colonization, the conquest and rape of black and brown people around the globe, those same supremacist ideologies have given rise to industries that accumulate wealth by pillaging the Earth, poisoning the waters and darkening the skies. Global temperatures are climbing. The seas are rising. The storms are coming. The fires are raging. And our current leadership is doing nothing to stop it. Humanity itself is in transition. Will we marshal the vision and the skill and the solidarity to solve this problem together?
Is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb? I hear your cheers and I feel your energy, and I want to say yes. I want to say yes. We will endure. But I don’t know. I don’t know.
All I know is that the only way we will survive as a people is if we show up. If we show up to the labor the way that you are showing up right now with your ancestors behind you, because this brings me to you. You are the community leaders. You are the peace builders. You are the faith leaders. You are the Indigenous healers. You have at your hands thousands of years of scriptures and stories and songs, inspiring us to show up to the labor of justice with love. I believe that you are the midwives in this time of great transition, tasked with birthing a new future for all of us.
So I’ve come to ask you, how will you show up? How will you let bravery lead you? And how will you show up with love? Because love, the greatest social reformers in history have built and sustained entire non-violent movements to change the world that were rooted, that were grounded in love; love as a wellspring for courage, not love as a rush of feeling, but love as sweet labor, fierce and demanding and imperfect and life-giving, love as a choice that we make over and over again.
I’m a lawyer. For so long, I couldn’t even use the word love. I was afraid that I’d be eaten alive. Until I finally came to terms with the truth, that the only way we will survive, the only way that we will endure, the only way we will stay pushing into the fire is through love. Labor requires pain and love. That’s why I believe revolutionary love is the call of our times.
So this is the offering that I have come to make for all of you today, because if love is labor, then love can be practiced, love can be modeled, love can be taught. So what does it mean to practice love when we are tired, when we grow numb? How do we keep showing up to the labor? I lead something called the Revolutionary Love Project. We produce tools that equip and inspire and mobilize people in the labor for love. I’ve come to give you an offering of three practices that have guided us today; three practices that I want to offer you right now.
Revolutionary love is the choice to enter into labor, for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves. The first practice: See no stranger. All the great wisdom traditions of the world carry a vision of oneness; the idea that we are interconnected and interdependent, that we can look upon the face of anyone on anything and say as a spiritual declaration and a biological fact, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.”
Yet brain imaging studies tell us that the mind sees the world in terms of us and them. In an instant, who we see as one of us determines who we feel empathy and compassion for, who we stand up for in the streets and at the polls. Authoritarians win when the rest of us let them dehumanize entire groups of people. But we can change how we see. We can expand the circle of who we see as one of us. Love begins with a conscious act of wonder, and wonder can be practiced. Drawing close to another person’s stories turns them into us. And so I ask you, whose stories have we not yet heard? Whose stories we hear determines whose grief we will let into our hearts. Who have you not yet grieved with? Because who you grieve with, who you sit with and weep with, determines who you organize with and who you will fight for. How can you use your pen, your voice, your art to show up in places you haven’t yet been to fight in solidarity? Each of us has an offering.
And that brings me to the second practice: Tend the wound. How do we fight even our opponents with love? It’s tempting to see our opponents as evil, but I have learned that there are no such things as monsters in this world, only human beings who are wounded; people whose insecurities or anxieties or greed or blindness cause them to hurt us. Our opponents – the terrorist, the fanatic, the demagogue in office – are people who don’t know what else to do with their insecurity but to hurt us, to pull the trigger, or cast the vote, or pass the policy aimed at us. But if some of us begin to listen to even their stories, we begin to hear beneath the slogans and sound bites. We begin to understand how to defeat the cultural norms and institutions that radicalize them. Loving our opponents is not just moral, it is pragmatic. It is strategic. It focuses us not just on removing bad actors, but birthing a new world for all of us.
So the first act in loving one’s opponents is to tend to our own wounds, to find safe containers to work through our own grief and rage so that our pain doesn’t turn into more violence directed outward or inward. Then in our healing, at some point, if and when we are ready, we may be ready to wonder about our opponents. Now I know this is hard. It took me 15 years to process my own grief and rage. When I was ready, I reached out to Balbir uncle’s murderer and listened to his story. It was painful, but I learned that forgiveness is not forgetting, forgiveness is freedom from hate. And white supremacists, they carry unresolved grief and rage themselves, radicalized by cultures and institutions that we together can change.
Now, it took 15 years for me to make that call, and so this is what I say to you: You may not be ready to reach out to some of your opponents. In fact, if you are in harm’s way right now, your job is to tend to your own wounds to survive, to endure. Let others do the labor of understanding our opponents. That’s why we are a community, that’s why we are a movement. We all have different roles.
This brings me to the third practice: Breathe and push. Our social justice leaders – Gandhi, King, Mandela – they tell us a lot about how to love others and our opponents, but not so much about how to love ourselves. This is a feminist intervention. For too long have women and women of color specifically been told to suppress our rage and grief in the name of love and forgiveness. No more. The movement can no longer happen on our backs or over our dead bodies. The midwife tells us to breathe and then to push. Not to breathe once and then push the rest of the way. No. She says breathe and push and then breathe again. In all of our labors, the labor of raising a family, or making a movement, or birthing a new nation, we need people to help us breathe and push into the fires of our bodies and the fires in the world.
And so I ask you, how are you breathing right now? Who are you breathing with? Breathe with the earth and the sea and the sky. Breathe with music and movement and meditation every day. Breathe to summon the ancestors at our backs, for when we breathe we let joy in. These days, even on the darkest days, I come home and my son says, “Dance time, Mommy?” We turn on the music, and I kind of sway, but pretty soon the music rises, and my son says, “Pick me up, Mommy,” and I throw him in the air, and my little girl, now 11 months old, we twirl her up in the air and suddenly I’m smiling, and suddenly I’m laughing, and suddenly joy is rushing through my body. When we breathe we let joy in. And joy reminds us of everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for. How are you protecting your joy every day?
Loving only ourselves is escapism. Loving only our opponents is self-loathing. Loving only others and forgetting to love our opponents or ourselves, that’s ineffective. Love must be practiced in all three forms to be revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community. And so this is my invitation to you all. The Revolutionary Love Project has built a powerful, formidable community in the last few years; a coalition of artists and activists, educators and faith leaders committed to showing up in our lives and in our movements, in 2020 and beyond, with revolutionary love. We are curating dialogues, hundreds across America. We are hosting convenings, we are building tools and curricula in a book that will come out next year. We are mobilizing the vote.
I ask you to join us. Are you in? Here’s the truth: The labor for justice lasts a lifetime. There is no end to the labor. That’s what I’ve learned. But I’ve learned that if we labor in love – love for others, love for our opponents, and love for ourselves – then we will last. I want to last. Let us last.
For some day, we will be somebody’s ancestors. They will gather here in this room, and if we get this right, they will inherit not our fear, but our bravery.
As survivors of trauma navigate their path to emotional freedom, a true apology can help validate their emotions and return their dignity. But apologies are just as healing for the person making them as they are to whom they are being made.
Eve Ensler is one of many women who have never received an apology from the perpetrator of her sexual assault. Having struggled for years with the sexual abuse inflicted by her father, the award-winning playwright and author has dedicated her career to women’s rights, not only with her nonprofit, V-Day, but also with her words.
In her new book, The Apology, Ensler formulates an apology to, and by, herself from the perspective of her father. (Read an excerpt from The Apology here.) Ensler’s transformative journey with storytelling, and using the words she longed to hear in a practice of self-healing, taught her that forgiveness truly comes from within.In this speech, she offers her own story as inspiration for all other women who can reclaim the apologies that, otherwise, may never come. (Watch a full video of her speech here.)
A couple of notes before I start. This is an offering, not a prescription. If it doesn’t work for you, release it. If it does, excellent. When I use the word woman, I mean to include women – straight, gay, bi, trans, non-binary, queer, gender queer, agender, and gender fluid.
I was sexually abused by my father from the time I was 5 until I was 10. Then physically battered regularly and almost murdered several times until I left home at 18. Some place deep inside, I believe my father would one day wake up out of his Narcissistic, belligerent blindness, see me, feel me, understand what he had done, and he would step into his deepest truest self and finally apologize. Guess what? This didn’t happen. And yet the yearning for that apology never went away. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve rushed to the mailbox, believing that finally today there will be a letter waiting, an amends, an explanation, a closure to explain and set me free.
It’s 31 years since my father died. For over 22 of those years, I have spent and been a part of a glorious movement to end violence against women, struggling day in and day out to put an end to the scourge. I’ve watched as women break the silence, share their stories, face attack, doubt, humiliation, open and sustained shelters, start hotlines. I’ve been part of a movement that is 70 years old, began by African American women fighting off their rape of slave owners and white supremacists. I have witnessed the recent powerful iteration of Me Too. I’ve seen a few men lose their jobs or standing, a few go to prison, a few faced public humiliation, but in all this time, I have never seen or heard any man make a thorough, sincere public apology for sexual or domestic abuse. In 16,000 years of patriarchy – and I have done a lot of research – I’ve never read or seen a public apology for a man for sexual or domestic abuse.
It occurred to me there must be something central and critical about that apology. So I decided I wasn’t going to wait anymore, that I was going to climb into my father and let my father come into me, and I was going to write his apology, to say the words, to speak the truth I needed to hear. This was a profound, excruciating, and ultimately liberating experience. And I have to tell you, I learned something very profound about the wound. I don’t imagine there’s anyone sitting here today that doesn’t have a wound that they carry, that has in some ways defined or guided or determined your life.
And what I learned writing this piece is that when we sit outside the wound, the radiation pours down on us, but when we go through the wound, it’s very, very painful, and it feels as if we might die, but as we keep going and going and going, we come to a point of ultimate freedom. I’ve learned about what a true apology is.
We teach our children how to pray. We teach them the humility of prayer, the devotion of prayer, the attention required, the constancy, but we don’t teach our children how to apologize, or maybe they get to say an occasional meager, “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” or “I’m sorry if you feel bad,” but what I learned writing this book is that an apology is a process, a sacred commitment, a wrestling down of demons, a confrontation with our most concealed and controlling shadow.
I learned that an apology has four stages, and all of them must be honored. The first is a willingness to self-interrogate, the delve into the origins of your being, what made you a person who became capable of committing rape or harassment of violence, to investigate what happened in your childhood, in your family, in this toxic, toxic culture.
In my father’s case, he was the last child, the accident who became the miracle. He was 15 years older than his older brothers or sisters, and he was adored. But I’m here to tell you, adoration is not love. Adoration is a projection of someone’s idealized self-image onto you, forcing you to live up to their image at the expense of your own humanity. My father, like many, many boys, was never allowed to be tender, vulnerable, full of wonder, doubt, curiosity and yearning. He was never allowed to cry. All of those feelings had to be stifled, pushed down, and in doing so they metastasized, and eventually became what he called the shadow man, this buried creature who later surfaced as a monster.
The second stage of an apology is a detailed accounting and admission of what you have actually done. Details are critical because liberation only comes through the details. Your accounting cannot be vague. “I hurt you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “I’m sorry if I sexually abused you” just doesn’t do it. Those words don’t mean anything. One must say what actually happened. “Then I grabbed you by your hair, and I beat your head over and over against the wall.” This investigation into details includes unmasking your real intentions and admitting them. “I belittled you because I was jealous of your power and your beauty, and I wanted you to be less.”
Survivors, and I know there are many here today, are often haunted for years by the why. Why would my father want to kill his own daughter? Why would my best friend drug and rape me? There is a difference between explanation and justification, and knowing the origin of a perpetrator’s behavior actually begins to create understanding, which ultimately leads to freedom.
Eve Ensler’s most recent book, The Apology
One of the hardest things about writing this book was how deeply I didn’t want to feel my father’s pain. I didn’t believe he had earned the right from me to feel his pain. But to be honest with you, I have remained connected to my father since the time of the abuse through my rage. I was a permanent victim to his perpetrator. And I just want to say about my anger, I was very able to be compassionate to so many people in my life, in all sorts of countries and places, I always had compassion. But I found the way I talked about white men very discompassionate. I found it in anger, and I listened to myself. There was a part of me that I just wasn’t happy with. I was stuck in a paradigm I realized that my father had designed. And as my father’s mother says to him in my book, anger is a potion you mix for a friend but you drink yourself. Feeling my father’s pain and suffering, ironically, released me from his paradigm.
The third stage is opening your heart and being, and allowing yourself to feel what your victim felt as you were abusing her, allowing your heart to break, allowing yourself to feel the nightmare that got created inside her, and the betrayal and the horror, and then allowing yourself to see and feel and know the long-term impact of your violation. What happened in her life because of it, who did she become or not become because of your actions?
And the fourth stage, of course, is taking responsibility for your actions, making amends and reparations where necessary, all of this indicating you’ve undergone a deep and profound experience that has changed you and made it impossible for you to ever repeat your behavior.
What and why should one want to undergo such a grueling and emotional process? The answer is simple: freedom. No one who commits violence or suffering upon another, or the Earth, is free of that action. It contaminates one’s spirit and being, and without amends often creates more darkness, depression, self-hatred and violence. The apology frees the victim, but it also frees the perpetrator, allowing them deep reflection and ability to finally change their ways and their life.
My father, in my book, wrote to me from limbo, and it was very strange. I have to tell you, he was present throughout the entire writing of the book. He had been stuck in limbo for 31 years. I truly believe that the dead need to be in dialogue with us, that they are around us, and they are often stuck, and they need our help in getting free.
With this exercise, I believe now that my father is free. And because he was willing to undergo this process, he’s moved on to a far more enlightened realm.
As for those of you who cannot get an apology from your perpetrator, I believe that writing an apology letter to yourself from them is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done, and it can shift how the perpetrator actually lives inside you, for once someone has violated you, entered you, oppressed you, demeaned you, they actually occupy you. We often know our perpetrators better than ourselves, particularly if they are family. We learn to read their footsteps and the sounds of their voices in order to protect ourselves. By writing my father’s apology, I changed how my father actually lived inside me. I moved him from a monster to an apologist, a terrifying entity to a broken little boy. In doing so, he lost power and agency over me.
We cannot underestimate the power of the imagination. And I just have to say in these times that we are living in, our imagination is our greatest tool. It is shifting trauma and karma that has numbed our frozen life force, and in the deeper and more specific my imagining and conjuring in this book, the more liberation I experienced. When finally at the end of the book my father or me, or me or my father, or both of us as one – I’m so not clear who wrote this book – my father says to me, “Old man, be gone.” It was exactly like the end of Peter Pan. Do you remember when Tinkerbell says goodbye and goes whoosh into the ethers? My father was gone, and to be honest, he hasn’t come back.
And I want to talk a little bit about forgiveness because I think often we are survivors of all kinds of things, whether it’s racial oppression, or physical oppression, or economic oppression, or sexual violence. We’re told that we have to forgive and get over it. I don’t really believe that the mandate is ever on the victim to forgive, ever. But I do believe that there is an alchemy that occurs with a true apology, where your rancor and your bitterness and your anger and your hate releases when someone truly, truly apologizes.
People have asked me throughout the tour of my book, “What will it take to get men to apologize?” This is the $25 million question. And I have to tell you, it’s a question that is underlying everything that we are experiencing on this planet right now. At one point in the book, my father tells me that to be an apologist is to be a traitor to men, to be an apologist is to be a traitor to men. Once one man admits he knows what he did was wrong, the whole story of patriarchy will come tumbling down.
So I say to all the men here, what we need now is for men to become willing gender traitors, and stand with us, and apologize so we can all get free.
There are so many apologies that need to be made. Our entire country rests on unreckoned landfill. That’s why it so easily becomes unraveled. Think of the massive apology and reparations due the First Nations people for the stealing of their lands, the rapes, the genocide, the destruction of culture and ways.
Think of the apology and reparations due African Americans for 400 years of diabolical slavery, lynchings, rape, separations of family, Jim Crow and mass incarceration. I honestly believe that apologies, deep, sacred apologies are the pathway to healing and inviting in the New World.
So as I was preparing this talk, something miraculous and difficult happened. I realized there was an apology I needed to make, an apology that would force me to confront my deepest sorrow, my guilt and shame, an apology I had been avoiding since I moved out of the city to the woods where I now live with the oaks and the locusts and the weeping willows, Lydia, the snapping turtle, running spring water, foxes, deer, coyotes, bears, cardinals, and my precious dog Pablo. This is my offering to you this morning. It is my apology to the Earth herself.
Dear Mother, it began with the article about the birds, the 2.9 billion missing North American birds. The 2.9 billion birds that disappeared and no one noticed – the sparrows, the blackbirds, and the swallows who didn’t make it, who weren’t even born, who stopped flying or singing, making their most ingenious nests that didn’t perch or peck their gentle beaks into moist black earth. It began with the birds. Hadn’t we even commented in June, James and I, that they were hardly here? A kind of eerie quiet had descended. But later they came back, the swarms of barn swallows and the huge ravens landing on the gravel one by one.
I know it was after hearing about the birds that afternoon I crashed my bike, suddenly falling and falling, unable to prevent the catastrophe ahead, unable to find the brakes or make them work, unable to stop the falling. I fell and spun and realized I had already been falling, that we had been falling, all of us, and crows, and conifers, and ice packs, and expectations falling and falling, and I wanted to keep falling. I didn’t want to be here anymore, to witness everything falling and missing and bleaching and burning and drying, and disappearing and choking and never blooming. I wanted—I didn’t want to live without the birds or bees, or sparkling flies that light the summer nights. I didn’t want to live with hunger that turns us feral and desperation that gives us claws. I wanted to fall and fall into the deepest, darkest ground and be still finally, and buried there.
But Mother, you had other plans. The bike landed in grass and dirt, and bang, I was 10 years old, fallen in the road, my knees scraped and bloody, and I realized even then that earth was something foreign and cruel that could and would hurt me because everything I had ever known or loved that was grand and powerful and beautiful became foreign and cruel and eventually hurt me. Even then, I had already been exiled, or so I felt, forever cast out of the garden. I belonged with the broken, the contaminated, the dead. Maybe it was the sharp pain in my knee or elbow, or the dirt embedded in my new jacket, maybe it was the shock or the realization that death was preferable to the thick tar of grief coagulated in my chest, or maybe it was just the lonely rattling of the spokes of the bicycle wheel still spinning without me. Whatever it was, it broke, it broke inside me. I heard the howling.
Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn, and the butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling with methane poison. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning, or islands drowned in water. I didn’t see you, Mother. You were nothing to me. My trauma made arrogance, and ambition drove me to that cracking, pulsing city, chasing a dream, chasing the prize, the achievement that would finally prove I wasn’t bad or stupid or nothing or wrong.
My Mother, I had so much contempt for you. What did you have to offer that would give me status in the marketplace of ideas in achieving? What could your bare trees offer but the staggering aloneness of winter or a greenness I could not receive or bear. I reduced you to weather, an inconvenience, something that got in my way, dirty slush that ruined my overpriced city boots with salt. I refused your invitations, scorned your generosity, held suspicion for your love. I ignored all the ways we used and abused you. I pretended to believe the stories of the fathers who said you had to be tamed and controlled, that you were out to get us.
I press my bruised body down on your grassy belly, breathing me in and out, and I inhale your moisty scent. I have missed you, Mother. I have been away so long. I am sorry. I am so sorry. I know now that I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal, pistol, and stamen. I am branch, and hive, and trunk, and stone. I am what has been here and what is coming. I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am impulse and order. I am perfumed peonies and a single parasol tree in the African savannah. I am lavender, dandelion, daisy, dahlia, cosmos, chrysanthemum, pansy, bleeding heart, and rose. I am all that has been named and unnamed, all that has been gathered, and all that has been left alone. I am all your missing creatures, all the sweet birds never born. I am daughter. I am caretaker. I am fierce defender. I am griever. I am bandit. I am baby. I am supplicant. I am here now, Mother, in your belly, on your uterus. I am yours. I am yours. I am yours.
Natural Magic is a one-hour special from Bioneers Radio that explores the time-tested processes, relationships and recipes that have allowed life to flourish during 3.8 billion years of evolution. Our guides are scientific and social innovators known as “the Bioneers.”
Luminaries featured in the program include globally renowned biologist and educator David Suzuki, bestselling author and environmental entrepreneur Paul Hawken, biomimicry master Janine Benyus, clean energy expert Amory Lovins and author and climate leader Bill Mckibben.
They say the solutions to our environmental challenges are largely present – if we just ask nature. They herald a revolution from the heart of nature – and the human heart.
Also Featuring:
Paul Stamets – Visionary myco-technologist working with mushrooms to heal the planet
John Mohawk – Turtle Clan Seneca elder and educator
Jeanne Achterberg – Pioneering researcher in medicine and psychology
Jeremy Narby – Anthropologist and author who has worked closely with Native Amazonian peoples
Dan Dagget – Pulitzer Prize nominated author for the book Beyond the Rangeland Conflict: Toward a West That Works
When we consider our clothing choices, we often make decisions based on color, size, and style, not on the carbon pool from which a piece of clothing originates. But the ultimate source of your clothes makes a huge difference. We should be considering clothing in the context of the following questions: Are we wearing clothing from the fossil carbon pool or are we wearing clothing grown in the soil? Are our clothes designed to return to the carbon pool from which they came? Can we compost our clothes and return them to the soil? Does our clothing degrade into smaller and smaller synthetic fossil carbon fibers (plastic) and create microfiber pollution in our oceans, soils, and landfills? How can our clothing choices help us move atmospheric carbon into the soil? Then we must discontinue our part in the production of carbon dioxide emissions by divesting heavily from fossil carbon sources of clothing: virgin acrylic, nylon, and polyester, as well as synthetic dyes and synthetic finishing agents. Once we regain our focus on natural fiber systems—materials that are farmed, ranched, and in some rare cases wild-harvested—the opportunity to restore carbon to our soils becomes a reality.
The next step is to restore and maintain healthy soils on our farms and ranches. Again, how we grow organic food is a good comparison. The same factors that make the soil productive for organic food—abundant microbial life, proper nutrient cycling, vigorous plants, holistically managed livestock, and resilient watersheds—also produce durable and self-renewing fiber for our clothes. Plant and animal fibers have historically been grown without pesticides, insecticides, or fossil fuels, and instead with natural processes that mimic natural ecology. The Soil-to-Soil system is the same whether a farmer is producing organic lettuce or organic cotton, and consumers should be just as demanding when considering the source of their clothing as they are about the source of their salads. This natural affinity between food and clothing, as well as their corresponding markets and social movements, is a critical element in the fibershed model.
Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, scientists estimate that we’ve lost 136 gigatons (136 billion metric tons) of carbon from our soils globally, and the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from soil degradation and fossil carbon burning is trapping the sun’s long-wave radiation and heating our planet at a pace unprecedented in geologic history. Making matters worse, our industrial fiber and food systems are net emitters of greenhouse gases, contributing approximately 50 percent of annual global emissions. [1] Nearly every aspect of the production and distribution of food and fiber in industrialized nations, not to mention the waste they generate, carries a large carbon footprint, including the fossil fuels required to power machinery and transportation, as well as the synthetic chemicals used as fertilizer and herbicides to keep yields up.
However, as dire as it sounds, this situation can be turned around. Soil-to-Soil systems are designed so that agriculture and its supply chains can move from being net emitters of greenhouse gases to net reducers. In other words, by employing region-appropriate carbon farming practices, food and fiber systems can help build up the soil carbon pool over time and thus become part of the solution to climate change. [2] This turnaround in food and fiber systems is good for farmers and ranchers as well, because global warming is creating increasingly frequent and unpredictable weather extremes, making it more difficult to farm and ranch across a wide variety of landscapes. We are seeing an increase in soil moisture loss due to evaporation and an increasing rate of soil erosion due to severe weather events, from floods to droughts. The overall heating of our planet is also contributing to carbon losses in our soils. [3] Altogether, these outcomes of climate change are leading to wide- spread soil degradation. There is a great need to create resiliency strategies that can support farmers and ranchers in growing and producing our fiber and food regeneratively.
Building soil organic matter has an important additional benefit: It increases the soil’s water-holding capacity, thus reducing agriculture’s need to draw from aquifers and surface water sources. This means water can be conserved for other uses, including the survival of imperiled species, lessening the tension between biological diversity and human-managed systems. From an economic perspective, improving the soil’s ability to capture and retain water can be done naturally and relatively inexpensively while increasing yields and net primary productivity on working lands. This equates to increased fiber and food security and less land required to meet our essential needs. Focusing on the ground beneath our feet is a place-based strategy that every community can engage in without the need for complex technologies that come with hidden costs.
An illustration of the many benefits that accrue when soil organic matter is increased comes from research conducted by the Silver Lab at the University of California–Berkeley. In 2008 a single half-inch layer of compost produced from green waste and animal manure was applied to two different types of grazed rangelands in Northern California to see whether there would be any increases in forage production, soil carbon, and soil water-holding capacity and whether these increases could be sustained over a period of time. Initial results were very promising. After three years data showed that forage production increased by 40 and 70 percent, respectively, on the two sites; water-holding capacity of the soils increased by nearly 25 percent, while soil carbon increased by about 0.4 metric ton (the equivalent of 1.49 metric tons of CO2) per acre per year. Significantly, these increases have persisted across ten years of data collection, and ecosystem modeling by the scientists at the Silver Lab suggests that these improvements will continue well into the future—all in response to a single application of compost. [4] The research provided an important starting point for proving, through peer-reviewed science, what the ecosystems response to adding energy (carbon) into the system could do to regenerate that system while having a positive climate impact. This body of research enabled changes in policy at the state level.
There are many methods for increasing soil organic matter (which is roughly 58 percent carbon), of which compost is just one. Integrated crop-and-livestock systems, windbreaks, hedgerows, silvopastures, and riparian corridor restoration are a few noteworthy practices that are commonly implemented in our region. These methods are most effective when stacked and combined into a farm or ranch setting. Regardless of the methods a land manager chooses for their particular place, the Soil- to-Soil system provides organizing principles that are key to regenerating soil, food, and fiber.
[1] Eric Toensmeier, The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practice for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2016).
[2] Doug Gurian-Sherman, Raising the Steaks: Global Warming and Pasture-Raised Beef Production in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2011), https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents /food_and_agriculture/global-warming -and-beef-production-report.pdf.
[3] Kees Jan van Groenigen et al., “Faster Decomposition Under Increased Atmospheric CO2 Limits Soil Carbon Storage,” Science 244 (May 2014): 508–09, https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.1249534.
[4] Rebecca Ryals and Whendee Silver, “Effects of Organic Matter Amendments on Net Primary Production and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Annual Grasslands,” Ecological Applications 23, no. 1 (2013): 56, https://doi.org/10.1890/12-0620.1.
This is the second part of a series on indigenous food systems with Diné artist, activist and scholar Lyla June. In Part One: Kelp Gardens, Piñon Forests, she shares some of her personal journey with food and agriculture and what inspired her to focus the next stage of her life on traditional food systems and language.
In Part Two, she delves more deeply into the eye-opening science coming forward about pre-colonial land management practices and the sophisticated foodscapes co-created with nature over the centuries. This piece was drawn from a presentation to the Sovereign Sisters Gathering at Borderland Ranch in South Dakota.
The squash blossom, a recurring image in Diné art and jewelry, is a part of the Diné traditional agricultural and food system. Lyla June/Instagram photo in honor of Mauna Kea.
I’m introducing my clans from the Diné nation; our first clan is the Black Charcoal Streak Division, aka Zuni People; Division of the Red-Running-Into-the-Water People of the Diné Nation, also currently known as the Navajo. My father’s mother is of the Cheyenne clan, Tsétsêhéstâhese. My mother’s father’s mother is the Salt Clan of the Diné, and my father’s father’s mother is the Scandanavian clan. Those are the main matrilineal lines that I carry.
There’s a huge mythology that native people here were simpletons, they were primitive, half-naked nomads running around the forest, eating hand-to-mouth whatever they could find. That’s how Europe portrays us. And it’s portrayed us that way for so many centuries that even we’ve started to believe that that’s who we were. The reality is, indigenous nations on this Turtle Island were highly organized. They densely populated the land and they managed the land extensively. And this has a lot to do with food, because a large motivation to prune the land, to burn the land, to reseed the land, and to sculpt the land, was about feeding our nations. Not only our nations, but other animal nations as well.
So for instance, one of the things I’m interested in is the soil cores that they get out of the Earth; they’re very thin but they’re maybe 10 meters deep, and you can analyze the fossilized pollen from the bottom up to the top. And you can date each layer to see what time it was deposited; and there also is fossilized charcoal, and this is evidence that the people would burn the land routinely and extensively.
There’s a soil core from what we now call Kentucky that goes all the way back to 10,000 years ago. And it shows that from 10,000 years ago up to about 3,000 years ago, there was a mainly cedar and hemlock forest. But about 3,000 years ago the whole forest composition changed to a black walnut, hickory nut, chestnut, acorn forest. Also they noticed that a lot of edible species like goosefoot and sumpweed, their pollen was found around that time. So these people – whoever moved in around 3,000 years ago —radically changed the way the land looked and tasted.
This is a type of what we call anthropogenic or human-made foodscapes, where we would shape the land – not in a dominating way but in a gentle way. Similarly, in the Amazon you have these food forests where again they look at the soil cores and you have a lot of fruit trees, and they call it hyper-dominance, which means naturally you wouldn’t see that many fruit trees and nut trees. So you couldn’t know it but human beings really made the Amazon rainforest as we know it. And they also utilized the terra preta soil composting technology where they would generate highly fertile soils that were 10 feet deep and they would use their refuse and their compost to generate these black soils. And you only find the terra preta or black earth near these human settlements.
Human beings are meant to be a gift to the land. Another example is in Bella Bella, BC, where the kelp gardens are actually planted by hand by the Bella Bella Nation. And these kelp gardens provide the spawning ground for the herring, which lay their roe and their eggs – and their roe is a major foundation of the whole web of life there. The humans eat the roe, the wolves eat the roe, the salmon eat the roe, and that in turn feeds the killer whales — everyone eats the roe, and everyone eats the things that eat the roe. And without this human touch along the coastline, the whole ecosystem would be compromised.
What we’re finding, and what European scientists are finally figuring out, is that human beings are meant to be a keystone species. And a keystone species is a species that if you take it out, the whole thing unravels.
When I was at the Parliament of World Religions there was a Yoruba elder there giving a speech. And he said in our language, the word for human means “chosen one.” And he said, “We are called chosen ones because we were chosen by Creator to take care of the Earth. We are the chosen species to steward her and to facilitate.” We are here for a reason.
Every being is here for a reason – every rock, every deer, every star, every person is here – Creator doesn’t just make things that don’t have a purpose or a function or a part in the puzzle. And so we as human beings are trying to bring the human being back into the role of keystone species, where our presence on the land nourishes the land. And one of the women I’m learning from for my doctoral pre-research is saying – I don’t like the word sustainability. We’re not just going to sustain ourselves; that’s a low standard. I’m going for enhanceability. The ability to enhance wherever I walk. The ability to make it better than when I found it.
So it depends on where you are from; what biome or ecosystem you live in, that will determine how we are meant to work with the land. For example the Amah Mutsun Nation, which is indigenous to what is now called Santa Cruz, California, have a ceremony that they do with the oak trees. And if you look at their oak trees, they’re very hard and fire resistant – because they co-evolved with Amah Mutsun people for tens of thousands of years. And he said what we do is, we have a rule of thumb. We say only 14 trees per acre. He said, these days you go around and you see 200, 400 trees per acre. The land can’t handle that. All those trees and all those plants are starving. They’re starving because there’s limited nutrients and limited water in the soil. So what our people used to do is we would create savannahs where there are 14 trees per acre.
And what we’d do each year is we’d cut down the low-hanging, older branches so that they wouldn’t get burned. And we’d gather all the leaves together and we would burn around the oak trees. And he said the smoke would go into the leaves and it would smudge the oak trees. He said we would bless the oak trees with the smoke. And the oak trees began to get used to that. And they miss us, because we hadn’t been doing that. He said the smoke would go up and burn or suffocate the pests, so you’d have a healthier acorn crop to choose from. And all the bugs would fall into the fire. And all the saplings would die off. So only the hardiest and strongest plants would arise, he said. So this is just one example of the very important role of fire in maintaining the health of the land.
He said we would do this all throughout what is now called California – and because we have been prohibited from our burning, we now have these catastrophic fires throughout California. He said that this has to come back. He said we wouldn’t just change the land however we wanted it; we would look at what was going on on the land, and we would preference the food-bearing plants, but we would listen to her, and then create what she had there and tend it. So European explorers and pirates would come to the Eastern seaboard and would marvel at the forests there, and they would say, wow, these forests are like parks. There was space between the trees, there were deer walking through; and they said wow, the wilderness here is beautiful.
Native Stewards tend hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) at the Amah Mutsun Relearning Garden at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum with AMLT Research Associate Rick Flores. (Photo: Amah Mutsun Land Trust)
But wilderness is a very interesting word that we need to examine and reconsider how we use it, because it’s not necessarily wild. If you call it wilderness, for one thing, you separate yourself from it. Like that’s that, and I’m over here in the non-wilderness. But secondly, it wasn’t so wild, actually, because it was very, very tended by human hands.
But this is not necessarily a bad thing. My father for example says, “We should just leave nature alone – don’t touch it, because it’s perfect the way it is.” But we’re saying you have to find a middle ground – where you don’t leave marks on the Earth, you don’t harm the Earth, but you’re also allowed to go in and gather. You’re allowed to go in and harvest. You’re allowed to go in and spread seeds as you harvest.
That’s what the Amah Mutsun elder said. He said, first we give one shake for the birds. And one shake for the next year’s planting. And then we take the seeds. So you’re regenerating as you’re harvesting. And the harvest was the way in which we’d do these management practices.
So the Great Plains and the buffalo we hunt are also anthropogenic. People don’t know that but people used to call them Indian Summers because the sky would be black because there would be fires all over. And we would manage the Great Plains with fire. And yes, we hunted buffalo – but we hunted in the grasslands we made for them.
For example, there’s something known as successive regrowth, where if you burn an area one year later it will have one set of flora and fauna. Two years later it will have another set of flora and fauna. Three years later it will have another set of flora and fauna. Four years later it will have another set of flora and fauna. So you had patches all over the Great Plains that were at different stages of regrowth. Maybe this one was burned a year ago; this one was burned two years ago. Three years ago, four years ago. And each one had a different set of flora and fauna, and in that manner we’d enhance the biodiversity of the area. That’s the kind of genius our ancestors held.
But even today you’ll see our elders thinking that we weren’t all that smart. But we have to understand that 98% of our people were wiped out before they even started writing stories about us. Before they even started taking pictures of us. Every picture you see – those black-and-white pictures – were taken after 98% of the population was decimated – or at least 90% – by disease and massacre.
So the native nations we know of today – Cherokee, Seminole – these are survival bands. These are the 2% who survived and got together and tried to make things work. They do not reflect the original composition of the people. It doesn’t belittle them, it’s just beckoning the world to look deeper. To understand that the story that unfolded on this continent is much greater than what any of us had been told. And that story needs to be told. And when we think about the original composition of the people, it was vast, and it was highly organized. We are the ones who inspired Ben Franklin to generate this new thing called democracy.
The Iroquois Confederacy is the blueprint for American democracy – which at the time was very revolutionary, coming from monarchies. So we had technologies not only that enhanced the Earth but we had social technologies as well. And we didn’t learn these technologies just magically. We learned them through trial and error. The Peacemaker of the Iroquois Confederacy only came after centuries of war. We had war here, we had slavery here, we had horrific things go on here.
My people, we descend from the Chaco Canyon people. Chaco Canyon is revered as this great archaeological site – but if you really dig into it, we had caste systems there, we exhausted the land, we manipulated the water, we had running water there – which isn’t necessarily bad – but we weren’t honoring the way it wanted to flow. And Creator sent us a drought. And it was the youth of Chaco Canyon who decided that we were going to not live that way anymore. And so when the drought came it gave us the courage to change. And we left; we abandoned it.
And as Diné people, we’re not supposed to go back there. We say, That era is over. And so from that fire was born a new society.
All of these kinship terms: my maternal grandmother, my paternal grandmother, my sister, my younger brother – all those terms of endearment, of humbling yourself, of preciousness, came from that period of complete chaos, where we learned the hard way that inequality does not work. That altering the Earth does not work.
So that’s true for a lot of Native nations. We’ve been here for hundreds of thousands of years. They try to say we’ve just been here since the Bering Strait. No. They just found mastodon bones in San Diego that had human carvings on them. 130,000 years old. And of course all the Western scientists don’t want to believe it. They say, “No, no, no, you must have dated it wrong. No, those can’t be human markings.” No, we didn’t date it wrong. And those are definitely human cuts. Someone cut that mastodon up with a tool. There’s no doubt about it. But they don’t want to hear it, because they want our time period to be shortened. Because then we never really were here anyways. And if they exterminated us – well, we hadn’t been here that long. They don’t want to face the truth that we’ve been here a very, very, very, very long time. And this is our home, and we do have a right to be here.
They also don’t want to face the truth that we were highly civilized. More civilized than they – in the sense that we did not leave marks on the Earth. If you leave a mark on the Earth, it meant you’d done something disrespectful – marks that you could see hundreds of years later. So the archaeologists are like, there were no people here – you would see aqueducts, you would see pyramids, you would see roads – you would see something. And we say, No. We never made marks on the Earth that lasted more than a decade at the most. Because we were the original “Leave No Trace.” But we did leave one thing in our wake, and that was biodiversity.
And so the archaeologists don’t even have the tools to detect how long we have been here because they’re looking for the wrong things.
They say, “Oh, Chaco!” and “Oh, here’s a Mayan city in Guatemala!” The Mayans left that city the same way we left Chaco, because we decided we were not God. They went back to the forest.
So that’s why the Maya cities collapsed — they left the cities on their own because they decided they were not God. They were going to live humbly again. They’d kind of been there, done that.
So now here we are with all our fancy technology and we can’t even close the wealth disparity gap. All of our PhDs going to the moon and we can’t even keep our oceans clean. So we have all this knowledge but we have no wisdom. So here we are learning, just like our ancestors learned – inequality does not work. Patriarchy does not work. Rape culture does not work. That’s why White Buffalo Calf Woman had to come – the Lakota were steeped in rape culture. And it wasn’t working. Their whole world was unraveling. And White Buffalo Calf Woman came to say, “This is how you treat the women.” Then it gave birth to a great nation that we learn from today.
Lyla June holds hickory nuts from Kentucky forests tended by the ancestors of the Shawnee for over 3,000 years. Lyla June/Instagram photo.
And so we are in the process as a species of learning the hard way. And it does suck – it’s hard. We’re taking out a lot of species just to learn this lesson. But we will emerge wiser, and we will emerge more sovereign. We have to; it’s the only way. Only sovereignty is sustainable.
So when we circle back around to food, it’s not so much what you do but why you do it. What you do can change from biome to biome; but why you do it remains the same. You do it to honor what Creator has made; you do it to enhance the land you live on. You do it to diversify genes at every opportunity; and you do it to honor the natural flow of water. You do it in the spirit of selflessness, in the spirit of service, in the spirit of community. And as long as you’re doing that, the technical skills will follow.
And so when we talk about food sovereignty, I know the theory but I need to practice a lot more. I don’t know a whole lot about on-the-ground stuff, which is what I’ll be spending the next few years doing. But I think the core principles are: don’t leave marks on the Earth; honor what Creator has made; honor the women; honor women’s leadership; and diversify – diversify – diversify.
They talk about the Andean people having 400 types of potatoes. This helps us in a time of climate change because one potato does good in a drought; one potato does good in a rainy season. And they look at the signs of the plants – oh, this one’s blossoming early; that means it’s going to be a rainy season. Or they look at the stars at a certain time of year; this is going to be a wet season. But they still prepare for every situation. They might plant a little more of what they expect to work. But they’re still going to plant all the different types.
When we went to Villa Rica, Peru, that had so many fruits I’ve never seen in my live. They have fruits that probably most of us have never even heard of. When I went to a restaurant to order a juice — every restaurant has juice – you could order from 12 different kinds of juice. How many kinds of juice do we have? Apple juice, orange juice, maybe some kind of cranberry juice if we’re lucky – but that’s Minute Maid, right? That’s your palate. So our corn, too, was smaller, but it had way more nutrients in it. And when Cheryl and I went to Cuetzalan, Puebla, I had the most delicious banana in my life – and it was only this big. (uses fingers to measure about 6 inches)
And so those bananas – we don’t need to blow things up with our GMOs. Because it dilutes the nutrient content; we don’t need to eat as much as we eat. We don’t even know what it’s like to eat normally, to eat like a normal human being, the way Creator intended. We eat and eat and eat, and we’re still hungry. Back in the day, the Chia seeds would sustain a warrior for a whole day.
It’s hard to know where to go if you’ve never been exposed to the truth of what happened on this planet, and how it flourished – huge civilizations. There were 80 languages spoken in California alone. Eighty languages that were mutually unintelligible. Incredible things happened here – and a lot of that has been erased or we’re just not able to find it. So expanding your imagination about what happened here will help us set the record straight about who was primitive and who was civilized – and will also help us generate that world again. Maybe through thinking about which seeds we plant. Maybe trying to have 12 different kinds of squash, 12 different kinds of corn in your garden. Maybe instead of cutting down a forest to make room for a farm, realize the forest already is a farm, if you know how to take care of it – it will make food for you, way better than any monocrop.
So it’s time for us to remember that a forest is a farm. And if it’s not a farm, delicately, respectfully, carefully turn it into a farm. Don’t cut it down.
The pop culture story of the First Thanksgiving, often told to children in grade school, is a myth. For the true story of what happened at the First Thanksgiving, and how Indigenous lives have been affected ever since, Bioneers’ Indigeneity Program’s Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik) hosted a conversation with Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy), the Akomawt Educational Initiative’s Director of Education.
ALEXIS: I’m really happy that you’re joining me today, Chris, to talk about Thanksgiving as a tradition, as a myth, and what happened on the real Thanksgiving. First, could you tell me a little bit about the Akomawt Educational Initiative?
CHRIS: Sure. That word, Akomawt, is from my language. I’m a Passamaquoddy, coming from Maine originally. Akomawt translates to “the snowshoe path,” and it’s the symbol driving the mission of what my partners and I are doing at Akomawt. We’re trying to change the way Native people are talked about in all levels of education.
The snowshoe path, in my territory, was the common way that people made their way out into the woods to collect things like firewood and look for places to hunt. They would spread themselves out from a snowshoe path to get their work done. As they had to find their way back home, they would return to the snowshoe path.
In that way, we’re creating new learning paths for the world in general, not just Native Peoples but non-Native folks as well, to engage Native content. One of the things this comes out of is our observances at the Pequot Museum.
We work with a lot of non-Native educators who come to that museum asking us how they can teach Native culture better. We can do a great job inside the walls of the museum, but not every school can come there. What this means is that we need to take the onus on ourselves to bring this education outside of the walls of the museum in a way that is culturally competent, but is also respectful of Indigenous perspective, especially when it comes to issues of history and contemporary issues.
We use the word “decolonize” a lot, and that has a lot of application in what we do. But really what we do at Akomawt is re-indigenize history. History in America has always included Native Peoples. We’ve been there through every piece of American history: World War I, the American Revolution, World War II, the Industrial Revolution. Native Peoples were there for each and every part of that. Yet we’re not very well talked about in American history education, and that needs to change. It’s rendered us into a relatively invisible culture.
We need to make Native Peoples once again human in the history of this country, to add our perspective of how this country was formed. There’s a whole different side that’s not being told. We teach kids myths. We teach them lies sometimes, not always knowing that we’re doing it. Students grow up, and they take this with them.
There’s so much that needs to be done, and Akomawt is trying to answer that need in a regional sense, but also in a larger, national sense, to change the conversation. Let’s go beyond the myths that have been told. Let’s expose those for what they were and what they are, and let’s start teaching truth. When we teach even the very young the truth about how this country was formed, with Indigenous perspectives included, they actually grow up to become better citizens of this country. They understand all aspects of how we arrived where we are today.
We’re doing a disservice to our children by not giving them all of the facts when it comes to things like Thanksgiving. There is some truth to the widely told story of the First Thanksgiving. But there are a lot of mistruths as well. By exposing that, we change the story of colonialism from one of sanitization, as represented in the modern First Thanksgiving story. We provide a Native perspective.
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ALEXIS: I totally agree with you that re-indigenizing our knowledgebase and worldviews is important, no matter what our backgrounds are. Whether we’re Indigenous, settler descendants, or a little bit of both. It has so many benefits for being a responsible citizen and understanding what this country stands for, and what our responsibilities are to change it and shape it in the direction that’s inclusive and upholds our values for equality in this country.
There is no bigger time of myth making and telling lies in the public educational system, and private, in America, than Thanksgiving. It’s such a big moment every year. I was wondering if you would share with me the real story of the First Thanksgiving.
CHRIS: The narrative of the First Thanksgiving doesn’t really appear in America until the 19th century. The first claim of a First Thanksgiving was in 1841 in a publication by a gentleman named Alexander Young. He had found a letter from somebody who was there at Plymouth in the 1600s: a man named Edward Winslow, who was one of Bradford’s men. The letter described the harvest that took place in 1621 between Massasoit’s people, the Wampanoag, and the Bradford’s people of the Mayflower, English settlers who had just arrived there.
This was an actual event that happened in history. There’s no doubt that there was a feast between Massasoit’s people and Bradford’s people. But while the 19th century narrative called it the First Thanksgiving, the 17th century ideas of Thanksgivings on the Native side and the English side were very, very different than our modern-day interpretation of what a Thanksgiving is.
On the English side, a Thanksgiving was a day of fasting and prayer. It was a very solemn occasion. Sometimes they took place as celebrations of harvest, so it’s not completely divorced from the modern idea of Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t uncommon for the English to declare days of Thanksgiving after a victory in a battle or a war.
In fact, one of the first declarations by the English of a day of Thanksgiving actually happened after the Pequot massacre in 1637 in Connecticut. After that massacre, John Winthrop, who was governor of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, declared that day in May an English day of Thanksgiving.
These folks were Calvinist reformers. They were very religious and very much into interpreting the scripture in a very personal way. The idea of making merry on a day of Thanksgiving, which is supposed to be a solemn day of prayer and fasting, would’ve been looked down upon.
The idea of Thanksgivings as celebrations of harvest is more along the lines of what the Wampanoag and other tribes in this region did. They would have continual, year-long Thanksgivings in celebration of the harvest of different foods as they became available. And they would typically celebrate them with feasts.
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ALEXIS: I think one thing that most Americans don’t realize is that a lot of tribes across North America were very successful farmers. People often don’t realize that the people of the region in the Northeast farmed, and that the harvest they were eating was the Native foods. The Pilgrims were farmers coming from England, but they didn’t even have the right kinds of seeds to grow here.
CHRIS: Right. The English arrived in Plymouth in 1620. They set up a settlement there, but that first winter, half of them died. Before the feast, the English were starving and searching the area for any food they could find. They disturbed several Wampanoag graves. They also stole a cache of dried corn to survive. This all made Wampanoags wary of these folks that they had never met.
The English had grown vegetables back in England, but what they grew there didn’t grow as well in the soil conditions and weather conditions that we had here. They would have had to learn horticulture from the tribes. All over the continent, tribes had started to grow corn, beans, and squash as complementary farming. If you grow them together, not in straight rows as we do nowadays, but in bunches, they will actually help each other grow. They will feed each other, and you will get bigger vegetables than if you grew them separately. That first feast would’ve been a lot of corn, beans, and squash. Especially corn. Corn is the staple food of Native Peoples all across the continent.
So Massasoit was weary of Bradford’s people. They were cutting down the trees. They were building permanent structures. They were changing the landscape. So he sent in a group of 90 warriors. This is a fighting force, which threatened the English, of course, in a way. They didn’t come with a specific threat, but they showed up with 90 men.
The English had guns. They had new technologies that were very interesting to Massasoit’s people, who became engaged in trying to figure out how to use them. The English decided to showcase their guns, and were doing military drills at this feast. The feast lasted three days, and the English contribution was, according to Bradford’s account, waterfowl. Not turkey, but ducks and things like that. Massasoit’s people brought five deer.
Really, that was a very tense encounter. It wasn’t the happy time that the narrative of the First Thanksgiving that’s been told in the 19th century and onward depicts.
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ALEXIS: It all sounds like women and families weren’t very present.
CHRIS: 20th century paintings depict the First Thanksgiving with a lot of women. Even though the real account that we have from Edward Winslow says that on the Native side, there were no women. But depictions of it will look very friendly, with a lot of women.
The first Thanksgiving as illustrated by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris, 1932
ALEXIS: Always serving food. Patriarchal, always doing the serving role.
What are some ways that people today, once they’re educated about Thanksgiving and where it comes from, can decolonize or re-indigenize Thanksgiving to make it better fit the kind of America they want to live in?
CHRIS: Well, first off, let’s throw out the First Thanksgiving narrative. Let’s just get rid of that story and stop teaching it as fact.
Now, let’s talk about where the actual Thanksgiving holiday came from. This is how we can work on decolonizing it. It was first declared a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln. Over the years, states had started to celebrate Thanksgiving as a celebration of harvest. They were borrowing, once again, from the Wampanoag. These were happening in different states at different times. Most of them were in November.
A very important woman who has been totally written out of history was named Sarah Josepha Hale. She was the first woman to publish a book, Northwood, in the English language in the Americas. She wrote a little ditty called “Mary Had a Lamb,” which we all know these days as “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And she was also the editor of a magazine called Godey’s Lady’s Book, which was the precursor to Ladies’ Home Journal. Godey’s Lady’s Book, under her editorship, raised from a distributorship of 5,000 to close to 500,000. In the 1800s, this magazine had a humongous sphere of influence on American culture. Sarah Josepha Hale made it her mission to create a national holiday to bring together all of these holidays that were happening around the country.
The idea of the typical Thanksgiving dinner came from her description of a New England Thanksgiving dinner in Northwood, which involved turkey and also a lot of major meats. That became the popular picture of Thanksgiving dinner. And for years, she wrote editorials saying, ‘We need to create this national holiday.’
Eventually Sarah Josepha Hale became friends with Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, and through that friendship, she became a friend of Abraham Lincoln. Through her influence with this magazine, she was able to get Abraham Lincoln to agree with her, and that’s how we ended up with that First Thanksgiving proclamation: a national holiday on the last Thursday of November. It was done by proclamation for years after that, and then finally Congress created the national holiday using the First Thanksgiving narrative that had became popular.
So it became a myth of how this country was founded. It was a way for people to get their minds around a great story of the creation of this country. To build nationalism amongst them.
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ALEXIS: How do we effectively teach young people about the history of colonization and Native Americans? I’ve heard a lot of parents say they don’t want their kids to hear about all this brutality.
CHRIS: Young people can handle more than we give them credit for. The Pequot War was the first time a European power took on a Native power here in the Americas and won. This was an attempt at a genocide. The English intended to wipe out the Pequots completely. I’m teaching that to third graders, and guess what? They can handle it. They can understand it. They can digest it. They can realize that it’s not their fault that this happened. They don’t feel guilt about it.
It broadens their understanding of how their state and country came to be, beyond the fairytale. It includes all the good, the bad, the ugly, because if we don’t include that, we’re not going to learn from it. That’s such an important takeaway for our educators and our children: When we teach these things, we don’t teach them as a way to make people feel guilty. The idea is to expose that this happened, to expose that it was probably the wrong decision, and to discuss how we, going forward, can avoid making the same mistakes.
As Cara Romero and I reflect on what it means to be Indigenous in America, 2019 has certainly been a year of extremes. From the swearing in of the nation’s first two Native American women to the House of Representatives in January, to the Trump Administration’s recent rebranding of November as “Native American Heritage Month” to “National American History and Founders Month,” we are reminded that the 518-year, ongoing land grab in this country is rooted in rhetoric. A simple phrase, “Make America Great Again,” can normalize a massive push to offer up sacred Native lands for drilling to the highest bidder.
On the other hand, the simple phrase, “Rights of Nature,” can ignite a revolution, as you can see through Casey Camp’s powerful keynote speech, Aligning Human Law with Natural Law, at Bioneers last month, and Congressperson and Laguna Pueblo tribal member, Deb Haaland’s commitment to the Indigeneity Program’s “Rights of Nature Tribal Governance” initiative to support US federally-recognized tribes in self-determining the well-being of their ancestral territories for future generations.
Three years ago, I shared “3 Ways to Decolonize Your Thanksgiving,” and two years ago, “How to Indigenize Thanksgiving.” At this time last year, I had a fascinating conversation with my friend, Chris Newell, Passamaquoddy tribal member, and co-founder and Director of Education of Akomawt Educational Institute. (By the way, we showed the Emmy Award winning film he advised, “Dawnland,” at Bioneers this year.) Chris explained to me how the Thanksgiving Holiday was “invented” by a prominent New England woman writer, who lobbied Abraham Lincoln’s administration to proclaim Thanksgiving as a National Holiday to unify a Nation recovering from the Civil War.
Chris and I also talked about complex tribal relations in the area, that perhaps the Wampanoag –who had already an estimated 80%+ of their tribal members to war and disease– allied with the Pilgrims as part of an effort to protect themselves against other tribes in the area. So for Thanksgiving this year, I’m thinking about the Wampanoag, whose tribal member, Tisquantum, showed the Pilgrims how to raise corn, making it possible for the Pilgrims to settle permanently.
Also last year, the Trump Administration reversed a decision to return 321 acres of land in trust to the Mashpee Wampanoag to self-determine their future on land they have tended for 12,000 years. Given this state of affairs, I’m feeling a little more deliberate about how I will celebrate Thanksgiving this year. It is in this spirit that I’d like to share some events taking place around the country for Thanksgiving that you might join, or simply reflect upon as you gather with your family for the Holiday.
New Englanders can join the 50th National Day of Mourning at Coles Hill in Plymouth Massachusetts at 12 noon hosted by the United American Indians of New England. Tribal member, Danielle Hill, who shared her insights on the connections between food sovereignty and traditional birthing practices in the 2019 Indigenous Forum panel, “The Circle of Life—Women as Life-Givers and First Responders” will be there.
West Coasters can attend the annual Indigenous Peoples’ Sunrise Gathering at Alcatraz Island. Many of our friends will be there, including organizer, Morning Star Gali, who offered powerful and moving words at the 2019 Indigenous Forum Panel, “MMIW – Native Women on the Mother Earth Road from Violence to the Sacred.”
Those of you living in the Southwest are invited in peaceful prayer to join former Chairman of the San Carlos Apache tribe, Wendsler Nosie, in a march from San Carlos to Oak Flat, a sacred ceremonial site awaiting a death sentence of copper mining in 2020. Wendsler’s granddaughter, Naelyn Pike, gave a powerful keynote, “Youth Leadership for a More Just Future” at the Bioneers mainstage in 2017 as a part of the Apache Stronghold movement. Wendsler will return to live in his ceremonial ground in an invitational prayer.
As fellow Bioneers, we call on you to be aware of these events taking place, as the endless assault on Native American lands, religions, and lifeways continues today. We know that you reading this are allies, and that we will win the fight to protect our ancestral territories for all of our future generations of Americans.
November 18, 2019
Alexis Bunten, Co-Director, Bioneers Indigeneity Program
Indigenous Peoples are often on the frontlines of environmental justice movements. As original caretakers of the land, these communities have not only sought to protect their own livelihoods, but also to preserve humanity’s harmony with the Earth.
Below, three leaders on Indigenous issues discuss current events.Journalist and activist Julian Brave Noisecat explores how Indigenous communities are rising in a global renaissance; Ponca tribal Councilwoman, actress and activist Casey Camp-Horinek explains why aligning human law with natural law will help humanity regain balance with the world around us; and Leila Salazar-López, Executive Director of Amazon Watch, urges us to stand with Amazonian Indigenous Peoplesto protect and restore the bio-cultural integrity of the “lungs of the Earth.”
Julian Brave Noisecat
At 6 in the morning on Monday, Indigenous Peoples Day, I stood on the sandy shoreline of San Francisco’s Aquatic Park, as a 30-foot ocean-going canoe, hewn from cedar and crewed by a dozen members of the Nisqually tribe of Washington, pulled out into the breakwater, its bow pointed for Alcatraz Island. The Bay glistened in the first light of the sun as Nisqually voices rose in unison above the din of the waking city, their paddles stroking the water to the rhythm of their song.
On the beach, I hugged my dad and then my mom. We’d envisioned and organized and fundraised and planned for this moment for more than two years. On Monday, our vision became reality.
The Nisqually canoe was the first to depart on the Alcatraz canoe journey, an indigenous voyage around Alcatraz Island to honor and carry forward the legacy of the 1969 occupation led by Indians of all tribes 50 years later. The Nisqually were followed close behind by the Northern Quest, its hull crafted from strips of cedars and painted with the crest of the white raven. Its crew hailed from the Shxwhá:y Village in British Columbia, Canada. They were soon joined by an umiak, pulled by an intertribal group from Seattle, as well as a dozen other ocean-going canoes from the Northwest and outriggers from Polynesia, representing people as far flung as the Klahoose First Nation in Canada and the Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii. At final count 18 vessels representing dozens of tribes, nations, and communities pulled out into San Francisco Bay that morning.
One of the last canoes to depart was a tulle boat, fashioned from reeds gathered from local marshes. It represented the Ohlone, the First Peoples of these waters. Antonio Moreno, the captain and artist, who made the canoe, paddled his craft and canoe out into the open water, the tulle reed sidewalls of his vessel barely rising above the waves. Antonio and his courageous crew pulled to Alcatraz and touched the craggy shore. His was the only vessel to make landfall that day.
The visiting canoes meanwhile circumnavigated the island, paddling counter clockwise, from south to north and back to Aquatic Park. A local ABC station captured the scene from high overhead.
The late Richard Oaks, one of the leaders of Alcatraz, once said Alcatraz is not an island, it’s an idea. The idea was that when you came into New York harbor, you’d be greeted by the Statue of Liberty, but when you came through the Golden Gate, you’d encounter Alcatraz, a former federal prison reclaimed by Indians of all tribes as a symbol of our rights, our pride, and our freedom.
The Alcatraz occupation lasted 19 months, by the time it was over, the United States had shifted its official Indian policy from one of assimilation, relocation, and termination to one of self-determination and sovereignty.
It’s possible to draw a line from Alcatraz to Standing Rock, Bears Ears, Mauna Kea, and much more. But today the occupation, if it is remembered at all, remains an afterthought. Every year over 1.4 million people flock to Alcatraz, more than any other national park in the country, to peer inside jail cells that once held notorious criminals like the Bird Man and Al Capone. The island has become a monument to carceral nostalgia, to the Mafiosos and lawmen and convicts and fugitives, not to Native Americans.
But for a day, or maybe even just a morning, the canoes made it possible to see Alcatraz as what it could be, a symbol of indigenous rights, resistance, and persistence, an island reclaimed by our elders 50 years ago, an idea, a story, and a moment of organized action that changed history.
On Monday, Courtney Russell, skipper of the Northern Quest, was the first to return to San Francisco. She stood in her canoe and said, “We are the original caretakers of this land. We are still here. We will not be forgotten, and we will continue to rise.”
Ashore, 85-year-old elder Ruth Orta, Ohlone elder, Ruth Orta welcomed her and all the canoes. Orta later told KQED that she was so proud to see the young people, to see the young generation participate in learning what the older generation did, she said. I love it.
Then we gathered in Aquatic Park to share songs, dances, gifts and stories about what Alcatraz meant to our families and our people. Hanford McCloud, skipper of a Nisqually canoe spoke of his auntie, Laura McCloud, who joined the occupation when she was just a senior in high school. Sulustu Moses of the Spokane tribe shared the story of one of his ancestors, a warrior imprisoned on the island after an 1858 war. When he finished, he stood and sung the war chiefs death song.
Alcatraz is not an island, it’s an idea. And with a little imagination and a lot of work, that idea moved bodies, pulled hearts and changed minds. As our people and all people face devastating crises, catastrophic climate change, growing inequality, revanchist hate, maybe the power of audacious and enduring Indigenous ideas like Alcatraz are exactly what we need.
And at this time of imbalance, when humans have gotten their egos so berserk that they think because we speak a particular language that we share, we’re the boss. Yeah. That shows you just how stupid we are. We’re still that little child. We haven’t even hit adolescence. We’re still those little guys that say, “No, no, no, no, no! I want it my way! I want creature comforts! Give me something to eat. Give me something to drink. Take care of me right now!” And she does. And she does.
And those green things that taste our breath as we breathe out oxygen and they breathe it in and shoot that oxygen back to us, they take care of us. Those sacred things in the ocean that have the same pH level and the same saline solution as the womb of the woman still tries to care for us. Those relatives, whether they are of plant life, whether they are of rock, whether they have four legs or whether they have fins, or creepy crawlers that live way underneath the earth, they still take care of us.
So now what? Now what? If you realize that you’re this embodiment, if you take responsibility because you ate this morning, because you drank this morning, because you breathe, what further responsibility will you take? We are beyond the seventh generation, but we haven’t gone so far as to step out of our creature comforts, like that 3 year old. What will do next?
The Ponca Nation has chosen to follow the rights of nature, the immutable rights of nature by recognizing those rights of nature, and recognizing that we as human beings are not separate from but part of this sacred system of life. And so what we have to do, and we cannot wait, is we have to allow ourselves to grow to the point to take chances, to believe that there is a just transition away from fossil fuels, and that we can say that, we can demand that, we can vote people into office, or just kick them out and do it ourselves.
Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today. We need to make that difference. And within our community, we do it in the kitchen-table way. All of our conversations looking for native rights to be upheld and environmental rights, which are one, was begun around our mama’s kitchen table, being taught. All of my daughters and granddaughters go to MIT. I myself am a graduate of Matriarch in Training. Two fists for that one! And down to the babiest one. They know how to listen to our Mother and to receive instructions from her, and to follow through with those fearlessly, as you must do.
We have strong, strong men in our family, and they’re beautiful warriors. They stand around us. Have you ever seen a herd of buffalo protecting the weakest in the center? They stand facing out taking on any obstacles. That’s my family. I’m proud of them. I didn’t even know this word called activist and environmentalist was something separate from what being a human entails.
And that’s what I’m here asking you to do: Take responsibility. Pay back to the Earth herself what she has gifted to you. Take responsibility today. Gather your family around your kitchen table, talk to them about what is going to happen in the next seven generations. Do you want to breathe? Do you want to eat? Do you want to drink? If you do, do something. Go to your state government. Go to your local government. Go to your federal government and say: We are part of nature. We want you to enact these laws, like in New Zealand with the Whanganui River. And if they don’t do it, you do it. You do it. And if you want to look in the mirror this evening, in the morning, any day, see yourself, really see yourself, you have the capabilities, you have the innate understanding, you have the spirit living within you that’s connected to all. Honor that. Honor yourselves. Honor all of creation.
In reference to the Amazon fires: A lot of people ask us, Well, who’s responsible? Who’s doing this? And it is the government. It is the Bolsonaro government. Let’s not make light of it. The Brazilian government has a policy, has not only the rhetoric, but the policies to destroy the Amazon to make way for economic development, to make way for agribusiness, to make way for soy and cattle, to make way for mining. It is their policy to destroy the Amazon for economic development. So it’s not a mistake. It’s not a wildfire. It’s intentional and malicious, and destructive. And not only are they intentionally setting fire to the forest, they’re intentionally rolling back rights of Indigenous Peoples. The moment Bolsonaro got in office, he rolled back the rights of Indigenous Peoples, merged environmental and agribusiness ministries to intentionally destroy the lands and the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
And so we have been standing strong with Indigenous Peoples, APIB, the Indigenous movement of Brazil, to say no, to stand up for rights, to stand up for lives, to stand up for territories. And the Indigenous movement of Brazil, actually just on Friday, embarked on a trip to Europe, a 20-city tour for six weeks, to go to Europe to go to companies, to go to banks, to go to European governments, to the EU parliament to say don’t trade with Brazil. Don’t trade in high-risk commodities with Brazil. Because that is what’s destroying the forest. If you care about the forest, if you care about human rights, if you care about Indigenous rights, if you care about the climate, then don’t trade in high-risk commodities. No government, no corporation, no retailer, and no bank should be doing this.
And that’s why we actually joined together with APIB to put out a report called Complicity In Destruction to highlight and expose these corporations, big agribusiness traders like ADM, and Bunge, and Cargill, and retailers like Costco and Walmart, and banks, financial institutions like Chase and Santander, and BNP Paribas. And asset managers, very, very big banks, like BlackRock, and—How many of you all have heard about BlackRock? So thank you for those of you who know about BlackRock’s big problem. The rest of you look up BlackRock’s big problem and you’ll know that they are the biggest investor in climate destruction, whether it be agribusiness or fossil fuel.
And speaking of fossil fuel, these are the fossil fuel reserves in the Amazon. You may have heard about Chevron in Ecuador or Occidental Petroleum in U’wa territory or in northern Peruvian Amazon. That’s in the Western Amazon, that’s in the most biodiverse part of the Amazon, an area that we call the sacred headwaters region. It is the most biodiverse, culturally diverse part of the Amazon, and it’s in the Western Amazon. And these are the fossil fuel reserves across the Amazon that these companies and these governments would like to get their hands on.
There are many protected areas throughout the Amazon and Indigenous Peoples’ territories that are protected in the Amazon. In Ecuador, for example, Indigenous Peoples have rights to their ancestral territories, but they don’t have rights to the subsurface minerals. So the government can still go in and drill, and concession off territories like this. These are Indigenous Peoples’ territories overlapped with oil concessions. And this has been the model for decades.
And as I mentioned, I was just in Ecuador last week with some of my colleagues, and standing with Indigenous Peoples in meetings, actually. We were in meetings to talk about the alternative—alternative solutions to oil development. And it was very hard to be there last week because we were in meetings but we were also standing with Indigenous Peoples as they were rising up, rising up against the continued policies that would cause this, that would cause the destruction of Indigenous Peoples lands and the rainforest to cause massive oil spills like this. This is what it looks like. This is just a very small picture of what it is. We’re talking billions and billions and billions of gallons of oil and toxic wastewaters that have been spilled into the Ecuadorian/Peruvian Amazon as a result of oil development.
And for what? For a few weeks’ worth of oil? This is why people like Sarayaku, who are very close allies, have said no. We’re not. We’re not going to ever allow fossil fuel companies onto our land. We want to be free from oil development. We want to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
And it’s Indigenous People, it’s Sarayaku, it’s women, Women Defenders of the Amazon Against Extraction, it’s Indigenous movements that we’re working with to protect the Amazon, to restore the Amazon, to advance Indigenous solutions, to advance and support climate justice. And we’re doing this together. We’re doing this as NGO allies, we’re doing this as movements in the climate justice movement and Indigenous rights movement, in the women’s movement. We’re doing this together. And this is what we have to do at this time.
The youth have called upon us to stop talking and take action. How many of you were out in the climate march, climate strike? I was out there with my kids in San Francisco marching for climate justice, and I have to say that it restored my hope. After the fires, it was pretty daunting and devastating to come to work, and just get up in the morning, but seeing the youth stand up for climate justice and demanding that we take action really restored my hope.
Being in Ecuador last week, seeing Indigenous Peoples stand up to the IMF and to their government who is imposing policies on them without their consent gave me hope and re-inspired me to really do everything possible to stand up to forces like BlackRock for our children, because like the sign says, we have to act as if our house is on fire, because it is. It’s the Amazon. It’s the Arctic. It’s the Congo. It’s Indonesia. All of these ecosystems have been on fire, and we have to put out the physical fires and we have to put out the political fires, and we have to come together like we did in this ceremony last week. We have to come together, all of us. We have to get out of our silos and we have to come together for our future, for our collective future.
So I want to ask you all to please come together, unify. That’s what we’re doing here at Bioneers. We come together. We share ideas. We inspire each other. We challenge each other. We cry together. And what I want to ask you all to do is to take action for the Amazon.
My time is up, but I want you to go to AmazonWatch.org and take a pledge to protect the Amazon, and stand with Indigenous Peoples. And just—If you remember anything of what I’ve said today, I want you to remember that the best way we can protect the Amazon is by standing with Indigenous Peoples. And if we protect the Amazon, we will protect our climate, and we will not reach that tipping point, and we will have hope for our future generations. So will you stand with me?
Transformational women leaders are restoring societal balance by showing us how to reconnect relationships – not only among people – but between people and the natural world. This astounding conversation among diverse women leaders provides a fascinating window into the soulful depths of what it means to restore the balance between our masculine and feminine selves to bring about wholeness, justice and true restoration of people and planet. In this one hour special, join Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Nina Simons, Sarah Crowell, Joanna Macy and Akaya Windwood to imagine a future where women, children, men and the planet can thrive.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer: Neil Harvey
Managing Producer: Stephanie Welch
Production Management: Aaron Leventman and Chuck Castleberry
Station Relations: Creative PR
Interview recording engineer: Jeff Wessman
Original Recordings provided by Reference Media Group
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Our theme music is taken from the album “Journey Between” by Baka Beyond and used by permission of Hannibal Records, a Rykodisc label. Additional music was made available by Sounds True at Soundstrue.com.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: Imagine a gathering of women. Feisty, fierce women, young and old, determined to make the world a radically better place.
This group of women shares more than gender. Studies show that women really do approach the world differently from men. Women share a biological compass that, in stressful times, orients them to “tend and befriend” – rather than the male reaction/response of “fight or flight”.
In most parts of the world, women continue to live with the oppression and violence related to male-dominated power structures. It’s true that some women have far more power, opportunity, equality and rights than in the past. Yet even where women have gained ground, there’s usually a long way to go before reaching parity. The word “patriarchy” may sound polemical to some, but women everywhere nod knowingly when they hear it.
SARAH CROWELL: I think men take it really personally when we talk about why women re-imagining the world. I don’t even know if it’s re-imagining. I guess it’s remembering the world, and then recreating it. So it’s holding the balance. It’s bringing us back into balance.
HOST: Some believe that the environmental crisis can be seen as an expression of that power imbalance between men and women – and of the internal imbalance between the masculine and feminine qualities within each of us and throughout our culture and institutions.
JOAN BLADES: I want women in leadership. I want mothers, specifically, in leadership. I want people that understand, you know, the full breadth of the challenges we face in this society. And it’s a very important voice that’s being excluded.
HOST: Could restoring that balance restore not only justice, but also the Earth?
Join us for a wide-ranging exploration from a woman’s-eye view – MoveOn co-founder Joan Blades and sustainability advocate Annie Leonard speak about activism powered from the experience of motherhood. And author Alice Walker, social entrepreneur Nina Simons, psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen, teacher Joanna Macy, youth arts director Sarah Crowell and leadership executive Akaya Windwood together ponder the global benefits of a truly egalitarian society.
This is “They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth For Nothing: Women Re-Imagining the World”.
I’m Neil Harvey. I’ll be your host. Welcome to this one-hour special from the Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature.
Akaya Windwood
AKAYA WINDWOOD: I’ve prepared some questions and these women haven’t seen them yet, so what we’re going to do is allow for what I call emergent woman’s wisdom to happen here, and we’ll trust that what gets said is exactly what needs to be both said and heard.
HOST: At a recent Bioneers conference a remarkable circle of women gathered for a free-wheeling, wide-angle conversation led by professional facilitator Akaya Windwood.
AKAYA WINDWOOD: So, we’re re-imagining the world, and we’re women. Imagine that!
My first question is a simple one. Why women? [AUDIENCE LAUGHS]
JOANNA MACY: Because it’s the age of patriarchy that is dying.
JEAN SHINODA BOLEN: Because women have unique, as a gender. We’ve got compassion. We use conversation to bond. And we look after the kids.
ALICE WALKER: I think it’s just time to give women the opportunity in this period of history or after history to show what we can do in terms of protecting the planet, which is being destroyed so rapidly just in front of our eyes.
NINA SIMONS: I think that one of the greatest gifts we could all bring to the world is restoring the feminine in all of us, and I think that, as women, we have a certain leg up on understanding what that might look and feel like.
AKAYA WINDWOOD: Thank you.
HOST: Akaya Windwood is President and CEO of the Rockwood Leadership Institute. Previously, she served as an executive leadership coach and organizational development consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area.
AKAYA WINDWOOD: Mary Oliver writes, You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That’s from her poem “Wild Geese.”
The line between women and animals has often been drawn to shame us or keep us in line. As we re-imagine this world, what is the rightful relationship between women and our animal bodies?
JOANNA MACY: We will call our brothers and sisters to celebrate animals and our animal bodies.
HOST: Teacher and author Joanna Macy conducts workshops to train environmental and social activists worldwide. She combines Buddhist practices, systems theory, and an irrepressible love for life in what she calls the “Work That Reconnects.”
Joanna Macy
JOANNA MACY: The terrifying thing that is happening to our culture, to our global culture now, is that the instinct for the preservation of life has been cut. There has been a rupture,– so that we are actually able, as a civilization with the most well-trained minds, to plot how, with our weapons, we can shatter flesh or breathe in flames to be burned that you can’t put out; that we can go off and turn a desert into radioactive hell for thousands of years.
We have lost our connection, our erotic connection to life, and this is what our greatest task perhaps is, the greatest task– this we have to do and do it fast, and to relieve ourselves of the terrible loneliness that makes us crazy when we cut ourselves off from the rest of the web of life.
Chief Seattle warned us of that. He said without the beasts you will perish of a great loneliness. And we’re cutting ourselves off from each other as well as our own bodies because of this.
So we can praise be that we have bodies, that they can make you sane again.
AUDIENCE: Amen! [clapping]
AKAYA WINDWOOD: What is the rightful relationship between women and our animal bodies?
ALICE WALKER: Well, I think Mary Oliver is right to say that we should let these bodies love what they love…
HOST: Alice Walker is one of the most important writers of our time. She is a self-declared “womanist” who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Color Purple.
ALICE WALKER: …because when you do that, you break every possible law, and that’s always very energizing. [AUDIENCE LAUGHING/CLAPPING]
SARAH CROWELL: That’s so succinct. (laughing) I love to sit at a table with my mentors.
HOST: As artistic director of the renowned Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, California Sarah Crowell has supported the growth of diverse inner city young people through dance, theater, martial arts, violence-prevention and youth leadership workshops for more than 20 years.
SARAH CROWELL: I think about the young people that I work with, I teach hip hop and modern dance, mostly to teenagers now, and they’re exposed to a lot of sexuality through the media. Even though it’s really messed up, some of it is good because it’s just- at least it’s there. It’s not like hidden.
And then I am able to have the conversation with them because they’ll bring these dances and they want to choreograph them, and it’s all to this booty-shakin’ stuff, and all of it is booty, booty, booty, shake, shake, shake, pussy, pussy, pussy right? And I’m like, okay, sexuality is all good. Your body is beautiful, as it is, and it’s yours. It’s your temple. And you own it. And so when you come from that, when you shake that, when you shake what you have, shake it for you. You know what I’m saying? Because then when you shake it for you, there’s something empowering about it rather than giving away the power to somebody else. Right?
And so my whole chant last year was Sexy & Strong, Sexy & Strong.
NINA SIMONS: I want to echo what Sarah said. It’s amazing to sit at a table with so many mentors…
HOST: Social entrepreneur Nina Simons is co-founder and President of Bioneers. She speaks and teaches about women’s leadership, cultivating relational intelligence, and organizations as living systems.
Nina Simons
NINA SIMONS: What I’m reminded of is lessons that I’ve learned from several of you about the value of grieving and darkness. And it’s come to be a real, sort of, guidepost for me to help me orient myself toward the places that are painful and difficult.
I think I read an interview with Alice where she talked about how we- when we encourage ourselves to go deeper, we expand our capacity for joy at the same time, and it feels to me like that’s part of reinventing how we understand ourselves to be human is to expand our capacity at both ends.
And the other thing that your questions raises for me, Akaya, is that we all have the disease of modern American culture, which lets us think that our minds are so smart. And actually, I’ve been struggling to find my own voice in writing and speaking, and one of my favorite teachers keeps telling me that if I stop trying to sound like a smart, white man I’ll be fine. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
And I realize how scary it is to me to believe that I have within me what I need. And I think that that’s part of us re-imagining the world is to know that we have within us everything we need, and some of that is about recognizing the wisdom that’s in our bodies and that’s in our hearts and our spirits, and not imagining that our minds have to solve it all, ‘cause they can’t and they won’t. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
ALICE WALKER: I’ll add to that. I think that, for me, the journey lately has been getting closer to the other animals and understanding that is a path to myself.
HOST: Alice Walker.
Alice Walker at the 2007 Bioneers Conference
ALICE WALKER: Because about a year ago, I- it occurred to me that I had married early on, and- sort of early, and I’ve been in many long relationships with people, but I had only truly started to feel married with my dog and my cat. (laughter) And so I decided that I felt really married to them and that I wanted to make it official. (laughter) And so I asked, you know, the local priestess to come and all of our friends, or a lot of our friends, with lots of flowers and lots of kitty treats (more laughter), and dog biscuits and German chocolate cake for the rest of us, and we had our wedding.
And so that is really how I feel now, that the closer we can get to the other animals, the better for us, the more we will understand that we actually do have these animal bodies, because I’ve learned from my cat and my dog just what it is to really love being alive in the sun, feeling the wind on my face, having really good food, having a nice place to sleep. You know.
So that is, you know, that is really, for me, getting more and more free to feel myself as just another one of the animals on the planet. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
HOST: Again, host Akaya Windwood.
AKAYA WINDWOOD: In an all-or-nothing dichotomous world, which is where we’re living, inclusion has meant allowing for everything, including war and rape and greed. What’s your wisdom about boundary setting, about limits, and how women can do that? How do we say yes and no within a framework of inclusion that’s also creates a space for other?
JOANNA MACY: Well, that’s an important question because our species and probably complex life forms are all threatened with extinction because we don’t recognize limits. There are limits to this Earth and the resources we can draw from it. There are limits to the waste we can dump.
When I look at what’s taught me a lot about limits, which has been the anti-nuclear movement and nuclear waste and nuclear power, I see that women have really stepped forward and taken amazing leadership there over the last quarter century or more. And maybe it’s because there’s something about being anchored in the body, being child bearers, being washers of the dead. We- our minds are anchored to our bodies, we know that, so we know that we can’t just go spin off and think that we can draw those lines of exponential growth and think things’ll be okay, and- because we have always noticed that somebody has to take out the garbage, I’m really proud to see how women have recognized the limits we must set to the way we are treating the Earth and what we can extract from the Earth and dump on the Earth. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
JEAN SHINODA BOLEN: You know, we changed the world in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. It was just women sitting in circles talking, but talking about what was true and supporting each other to do what each woman, individually, was moved to do. And it usually started with going home and bringing about an egalitarian relationship with a significant other or not. But it also involved marching. It involved doing what you felt you could do and wanted to do.
JEAN SHINODA BOLEN: And I think that the whole notion of, when a critical number of people change their way of viewing things, humanity changes. And the natural form that women have is actually to be in circle and to talk and to reduce stress by speaking about what’s true and then supporting each other to do whatever it is. And I think that the boundary stuff, whether it’s with a significant other or to- or it’s with some major whatever, corporation, government, that to do it together, to have sisters at your back, so to speak, makes it a lot easier to do.
And now it’s time for a third wave of the women’s movement that has to do with bringing peace to the world. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
NINA SIMONS: I need to reveal something of the inner workings of my brain here, which is that this question about boundaries has me goin’.
HOST: Nina Simons.
NINA SIMONS: I realize that because I’m much more comfortable, generally, and have been through most of my life, in a kind of boundary-less space where we all feel each other, because I tend to feel other people without trying, and I often assign internal gender properties to what I notice in myself.
So, I noticed this boundarylessness as sort of unity and sort of feminine, and I’ve noticed that my struggle to define limits and to befriend boundaries feels to me like something of the healthy masculine in it, that part of the legacy of this time is that we not only are learning and reclaiming what it means to be a healthy feminine, but what’s a healthy masculine.
And so I really want to have both of them in me.
And one more thing I was gonna add is that another little piece from a teacher of mine who’s here this weekend, Jeanette Armstrong, who said, you know, there’s something very healthy and very needed in this time about the anger that flows up through your feet. And I’ve been sort of exploring that because I grew up thinking anger was bad. You know? And had no place in my world. And I’ve been beginning to understand, like when I hear you talk, Joanna, about the anti-nuclear movement, that’s the outrage and the anger that comes up through the soles of our feet that says No, this cannot be; we have to stop this; we have to take a stand. And I think, actually, for me, I’m wanting to encourage that in my life, because it feels like a strengthening of limits for myself that’s about what I really want to take a stand for, and how much I want to encourage everyone else to join me. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
HOST: From our relationship to animals and our animal bodies, to each other and to planet Earth, Joanna Macy says we are in the midst of a “huge and necessary revolution”. Nina Simons points to our need to restore value to the “feminine”–those qualities of compassion, caring, collaboration and emotional intelligence, qualities that have been systematically devalued in all people and our civilization, to the detriment of our collective future.
When we return, the experience of motherhood inspires profound change for two global activists.
I’m Neil Harvey. You are listening to “They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth For Nothing: Women Re-Imagining the World.”
HOST: You are listening to a one-hour Bioneers special program.
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth For Nothing: Women Re-Imagining the World.”We will return to the Bioneers conference panel discussion featuring Alice Walker, Nina Simons, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Joanna Macy, Sarah Crowell and Akaya Windwood in a moment.
But first Social network innovator Joan Blades and sustainability advocate Annie Leonard speak about activism that comes from each of their experiences of motherhood.
Recognizing the power of women’s leadership means recognizing the need to integrate the best of the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ capacities within each of us. We all carry both.
Joan Blades says the culture is ready to shift now. As co-founder of MoveOn.org she helped revolutionize web-based political organizing. Through her own experience with motherhood she found a way to effect positive change for the vast majority of Americans – women, men and children.
JOAN BLADES: There’s deep discrimination against mothers in our country. And none of us really expect that. I didn’t. I only realized this a couple years ago.
HOST: Joan Blades is an artist, attorney, writer and businesswoman, building on her web-based organizing successes to right another injustice that’s very personal to her.
Along with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, she founded MomsRising to bring together millions of people who all share a common concern about the need to make the world more family-friendly.
Joan Blades
JOAN BLADES: A mother is going to get paid on average 27 percent less than a man, who is equally educated and has an equivalent job. A single mother’s gonna get paid 33 to- 33 to 44 percent less than a man in equivalent education and job. Well, all of a sudden that explains a whole lot to me.
It explains why there’s so many women and children in poverty really easy. Yeah. But it also explains to me why there’s so few women in leadership.And so I really want to have both of them in me.
If you look in the board rooms, you look in the halls of power in politics, women are under-represented. They’re- we’re lucky if they’re 20 percent. Often it’s five percent. Well, what’s happening?
You have a career path that’s traditional and linear. And 82 percent of women become mothers. Well, having a baby is, for many women, not a linear experience. It requires, certainly, a little time off, and fact is if a woman want to take a year off, say, or two years off, or a father does, they should be able to do that. That’s a good thing. But, with our traditional expectations, too often those mothers and those fathers that make those choices are put on a mommy track or a daddy track where they never get to the top of their field, wherever that may be. And that’s bad for us.
It’s bad for us for a couple reasons, one of which, I want women in leadership. I want mothers, specifically, in leadership. I want people that understand, you know, the full breadth of the challenges we face in this society. And it’s a very important voice that’s being excluded.
Our belief is that the reason there’s so much bias against mothers in the United States is we don’t have the kind of support that the vast majority of industrialized countries do for parents. And that starts with leave, you know, paid leave when a woman has a child.
Out of 168 countries there are four that have nothing. That would be the United States, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and Lesoto. Okay. That’s jaw dropping. You gotta be kidding. What are we thinking?
You know, we have women that are making the choice between taking care of their infants and having a roof over their head.
HOST: Moms Rising is promoting policies that support America’s working women, the majority of whom already hold the job of “mom”. Women, and mothers, are in the workplace to stay. Yet appropriate public policies and workplace structures in the United States lag far behind most other countries. This mother saw the situation as a kind of mother of all issues. It led her to co-create the Motherhood Manifesto.
JOAN BLADES: We’ve taken the word MOTHER and made it into the manifesto points because, yeah, you want this to be memorable. M is for maternity/paternity-leave paid. O is open, flexible work, and that means the ability to adjust your schedule to be able to take care of kids. T – TV and other after-school programs, The after school programs, for Pete’s sake, this is proven to be a good investment because kids that have good after school programs have much better academic outcomes; they ultimately do much better in society. Health care. Every kid should have health care. Frankly, all Americans should have health care, but first give health care to all kids and stop messin’ around. Excellent child care. That means, you know, staffing, education, really respecting childcare as the huge community value it is. Finally, Realistic and fair wages. Someone that’s working full time, more than full time should be able to support themselves and support their family.
HOST: Since 2006, MomsRising has gained over 150,000 citizen members and keeps growing. More than 85 national and state organizations have aligned with the aims of MomsRising.
Social networking strategies developed at moveon.org have been put to use raising awareness and catalyzing action on motherhood and family issues. As part of the digital menu, members can download chapters of the Motherhood Manifesto online. It’s also a multimedia organizing tool: available as a documentary film for screening at house parties, and in book form.
JOAN BLADES: One of the stories in Motherhood Manifesto is about a business owner, Jim Johnson, who’s a conservative. But he heard Joan Williams talking about the issues of work and family and that somehow our society has got our values transitioned. It used to be God, family, work. That organization doesn’t seem to be coming through. And he heard that and he said, well, I don’t mean to be making things harder on women and mothers, and he went back and he checked in his company and he found that, yeah, mothers were impacted the most by not getting benefits for part-time and were most likely to be part-time, and that vast majority of the company would like flexibility.
And we’re talking about Johnson Moving & Storage, an- over a hundred-year-old organization, but he changed it. And he found it was good for his bottom line. You know, there was much less turnover, people were happy there. They were productive. He could attract new people that were, you know, very excellent too because he had such good policies. It was a win-win.
But, somehow, this understanding has not permeated the business community in general yet. It’s sneaking in here and there, and we need to make it stop sneaking in and just be a tidal wave. It’s time. You know? (laughs) We’re all paying for- it’s a real big payment we’re making because of this because we’re not taking care of kids.
In 20 years from now, these kids are the engine of our economy, and they’re not gonna be as able as they should be because we didn’t invest in them now.
HOST: Moms Rising change-maker Joan Blades joins a world full of women who are acting on behalf of women, children, and families.
Environmentalist Annie Leonard polled a group of her colleagues to get a sense of how women themselves are faring in the midst of working so hard to make the world a better place.
ANNIE LEONARD: The women I talked to, when I asked them about the activism work that they felt most comfortable with and most proud of, the- all of the women felt most excited about and most comfortable in organizational structures or in activist settings that were based on collaborations and relationships, rather than traditional, positional power hierarchical kind of dominant, centralized organizations. And the excitement was about this- this model of organizing that is spreading, that’s about networks of organizations and movement-based work rather than individual issue or individual organization.
HOST: Annie Leonard is a leader in the global movement to reduce waste and end over-consumption. “The Story of Stuff”, a film written and hosted by Leonard and produced by Free Range Studios, has been viewed on her Website over 6 Million times and counting. She’s traveled the world advocating that we all make a life-affirming shift in our values, away from possessions and towards family, friends and community.
Annie Leonard speaking at the 2015 Bioneers Conference
ANNIE LEONARD: Now, a number of the friends that I talked to, women friends, talked about an incredibly strong connection to life and connection to connection itself. Now, in terms of life, I recognize that not all women can or choose to have kids, but still, I believe that the ability to bear life is a very strong unifying thread among many, many women. For me, it was an incredible experience. I- I’m the mother of an 8-year-old daughter, and I always thought of myself as, you know, a very strong-willed, powerful woman. When I had this baby, it was the first time that I felt like a mammal. I- I- I literally felt like a mammal. I felt like a mother lioness when I was pushin’ that stroller down the street or feeding my child. I felt if anyone threatens her, I will rip their head off. (audience laughter) This- this incredible power. And I’ve been an activist for 20 years, and I have had a- moments of incredible anger, outrage, courage, hope, I have never had any feeling, in my 20 years of activism, that came near that mammalian, lioness protecting my child, force from within me. And I was like, whoa! Where is that coming from? It was an incredible power. And I wondered, what is this power? And where does it come from? And, can women, through this- this, um, unifying experience, is there some way to harness that energy and use that to transform the world towards sustainability and justice, because that was a hell of a power.
HOST: In motherhood Annie Leonard found an unexpectedly fierce new source of power for her activism. When women redefine leadership in “feminine” terms, they often find, like Leonard, that that power to act on behalf of themselves, their community and the Earth, actually comes from within.
ANNIE LEONARD: I think that this- this has profound implications for how women work if we want to make the world a better place.r.
If it’s true that women are more inclined towards seeing the world through relationships and through community rather than individuals, then does it follow that we can more aptly nurture about a culture of communal care or an ethic of care? And will nurturing and encouraging women’s voices in the political arena and in the activist arena, will that lead us more quickly to a culture that’s grounded in social democracy and ecological sustainability and justice? Can we replace this more domination-based, individual-based, um, society that we’re now operating in? And if that is true, then it seems to me a primary goal and role of women activists, in addition to whatever activist work that we’re doing, is to develop organizational structures and cultures that really encourage women, and especially young women, not to silence that voice, but to really nurture it.
And I just want to close with one quote that I just loved from this In A Different Voice. She says that staying in connection, then, with women and girls, in teaching, in research, in therapy, in friendship and motherhood, I would add, in our activist work, is potentially revolutionary.
HOST: Annie Leonard.
When we return more from Akaya Windwood, Joanna Macy, Nina Simons and Alice Walker.
HOST: This is “They Don’t Call Her Mother Earth For Nothing: Women Re-Imagining the World” – a one-hour special program. I’m Neil Harvey.
Now back to our Bioneers panel of imaginative women. Alice Walker, Joanna Macy, and Nina Simons spoke with host Akaya Windwood.
AKAYA WINDWOOD: Down in my belly is a place of deep despair and sitting underneath it is my greatest hope and desire for this wonderous and amazing world…So what’s under your despair and what wisdom can you offer us from that place?
HOST: Joanna Macy.
JOANNA MACY: Well, you know the work that I do in groups is originally was called despair work, despair and empowerment, then it was called deep ecology work because we found that by honoring our despair and not trying to cement it over or talk it away or privatize it into some personal pathology, we found that that was- that pain for our world was a gateway into our full vitality and to our connection with all life.
So the other side of that pain for our world is a love for our world that is bigger than you would ever guess from looking at what this civilization posits as the good life. A love so raw, so ancient, so deep that you know that if you get in touch with that, you can just ride it; you can just be there and it doesn’t matter. Then nothing can stop you. But to get to that, you gotta stop being afraid of hurting. The price of reaching that is tears and outrage, because the tears and the power to keep on going, they come from the same source. It’s like two sides of the same coin. I do believe that. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
HOST: Alice Walker.
ALICE WALKER: What I find underneath my despair is actually ecstasy because I am so incredibly happy that I’m here now, not in the future, not in the past, but somehow lucky enough to be born just right now, to be here right now. It’s such a gift.
Because the despair is, for me, that- is that mile-thick covering of ice that Al Gore tells us about in his film, and when I think of our planet, which is so glorious and so alive and so colorful and so warm and with so many birds and all kinds of things, when I think all of that under the ice, I feel such sadness, it’s almost unbearable. But the joy of actually being here, to somehow to have made it here, and I feel this very intensely at times when I allow myself the space to experience eternity.
We actually have eternity. We can have it in our lifetime. It’s not something somewhere else. It’s not something in the future. It is in the moment. And so when I rest enough to give eternity back to myself having foolishly squandered it looking at my watch. Then I know, you know, I know that it’s really okay, you know. Ultimately it really is. That Mother has all the time there is. That’s all she gives, Mother, is time. And she will melt this ice ball many times.
I’m very sorry that seems to be the future of the planet, but I also feel that she will be fine. She will be fine, and she has somehow managed to leave me here now, to have me witness, to be a witness to her magnificence, her beauty, and her generosity and her grace. And that’s the ecstasy. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
HOST: Again, host Akaya Windwood.
AKAYA WINDWOOD: So many of us can taste and see and feel this world that we are re-imagining. Arundati Roy tells us another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. Tell us how we can get from here to then. What practical, everyday actions can ordinary women like me do to move us along?
HOST: Alice Walker.
ALICE WALKER: I think that sometimes it’s very hard to know where you will serve next, because the place that you’re standing is not holding or you don’t see the effectiveness. For instance, all of those marches and all of those speeches and all of that anguish to try to stop the war, the last big war against Iraq and before that against Afghanistan, and it’s not that I personally gave up on that, and I still do that, but I also realize that we have to change the consciousness of our children about war, that they don’t know what war is, and how could they because their parents give them camouflage diapers and they buy them toys that they use to harass and hurt each other, and they think war is a game.
So, it was necessary to move on to writing children’s books about war – or a children’s book about war – to help shift the consciousness of our children. It seems to me maybe a very, very long shot, but it certainly seems worth doing, and I think in my own life, the now and the distant yonder is held together by hard work. And sometimes it’s too hard, and sometimes, you know, I feel like I have, you know, eighteen or nineteen arms as Durga has, and all of them are whirling. And then someone comes along and they want me to use a 20th arm, and I don’t have it.
So that is very possible, but it reminds me of what my friend Gloria Steinem used to say. When we worked together on Ms. magazine, I would see her, you know, frantically going around trying to raise money to keep the magazine going, then she’d come in in the middle of the night and try to write articles. And then there were always people wanting this and wanting that. And then they were kvetching, you know, so she’s doing all of these things, and somebody would say, well, why don’t you speak up about, I don’t know, whatever, and she used to say, she said, you know, I feel like a sitting dog being told to sit. (laughter) And this is how it is. This is how it really is often for the people who are showing up to hold up the hoop. You know? Everybody really should be showing up to hold up the hoop and if everybody showed up, the hoop wouldn’t be so heavy.
But those of us who feel like we have to hold up the hoop, we’re there and we are often being told, you know, to sit. You know, we’re already sitting.
So, hard work and understanding that, at this point, it really has to be about service. It’s not about career, you know, it’s not about hardly anything else but where can you serve the people and where can you serve the planet, and where can you, you know, serve humanity and all of the rest of the animals, and finding the joy of that. I find it, actually, when I’m not myself, wanting to take to my bed, just really, really joyful and happy. So that’s what I would say, Akaya.
NINA SIMONS: For me, one of the things that I’ve wrestled with for a long time has been this idea of reconciling a false dichotomy that I had between self and service.
HOST: Nina Simons.
NINA SIMONS: And I grew up believing that service was good and service was how I was going to get my strokes and prove my worth, and so I spent a lot of years serving things outside myself that I knew were important. And some things changed for me in the last ten years, and- through a lot of teaching, that included some guidance to pay exquisite attention, internally, to see what made my flame grow brighter, and really noticed what my specific assignment was, is. And what I’ve been discovering is there is absolute ecstasy in service that’s connected to what makes your flame grow brighter, and that there’s no dichotomy and there is no difference, and it’s the most joyous work I know to do.
And so it feels to me like, you know, part of what we’ve lost in this sort of plowing under of the feminine is the respect for the work of cultivating our inner gardens, and doing our inner work, and for a time, you know, around our house, we call the folks who do inner work to the exclusion of outer work the naval academy (laughter) ‘cause it’s naval gazing, right? And- but there is immense, immense power in connecting up our inner work with the call to serve what so greatly needs us out here.
And, so, that’s what I think, is to notice where your flame grows brighter and see how you connect up what you most love with what’s most needed out there, because it’s all needed and there’s no lack, and there’s so much creativity in it and uniqueness, and each of us has our own very specific thing to bring, and it’s- now’s the time. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
HOST: Joanna Macy.
JOANNA MACY: Yes, yes to all that. Service. Finding your passion. Doing what’s right in front of you.
I would only add- take a moment or build it into your attitude the way you look at the sky, the way you breathe the air, up to the larger context. And I’m thinking, actually, about the context of time.
I have just returned a couple of days ago, from 30 days, on a wild stretch of the Oregon coast with 60 people. And we called that Seeds for the Future, an immersion in deep time. Now, all these people who came were right up to their elbows, their shoulders, over the head active in causes for the healing of our world and the welfare of all beings, and we were deliberately taking time to look at the larger context in which we live, knowing that our culture has a very peculiar and I believe unprecedented experience of time, which is accelerated and fragmented, hurrying up the kazoo. You hardly have time to think a thought two inches long. You’re just pushed and driven and, so we were looking at teachings during our time together, and putting them into practice, that would be somewhat similar to what the Buddhists call the Fourth Time in Tibetan Buddhism. They’re the beings of the three times, past generations, current generation, future generations, and then there’s the fourth time that we can access by a choice we make in the present moment to expand our temporal context and include them.
This has the most- so we were inventing ways to do this. We were looking at what it would teach us. And it is remarkable to be able to learn to see what you’re doing within a context that is actually larger than your lifetime. Now, right away, it’s sort of like a poor man’s enlightenment, because immediately you do that, you know that you won’t be able to see the results, you can’t be dependent on observing the results of your own actions. It’s very liberating. And you can feel an enormous support coming in to you. Our ancestors have it, a support coming from knowing that the ancestors are with you, and of knowing that the future generations are within you also.
As my teacher, nuclear activist, sister Rosalie Bertell says, every being who will ever live on Earth is here now. Where? In your ovaries and in your gonads and in your DNA. And the choices that you make now have a lot to do with whether they’ll have a chance to be born, sound of mind and body.
We were practicing these last five weeks how to live and work, particularly now that we’re coming back to good old speedy usual time with an expanded sense, a timeframe, and it gives a sense of buoyancy and a sense of deep companionship, and furthermore, I’ll close with this, it helps us act our age, because we are- well, if only you think of your age as Gaia, there you are four billion years, but when you think of every particle and every atom and every cell of your body goes back to 13.7 billion years, to the primal flaring forth, so it’s time we acted with the full authority as well as grace and beauty and perhaps unexpectedness of our true age. [AUDIENCE CLAPS]
AKAYA WINDWOOD: I’m taking a breath of deep gratitude for women. And I invite you to join me in that. I love women. I’m also taking a breath of deep gratitude for these particular women. Please join me in that. I love these women.
HOST: Akaya Windwood in conversation with Jean Shinoda Bolen, Joanna Macy, Sarah Crowell, Nina Simons and Alice Walker. Joined by Annie Leonard and Joan Blades. Wise women, imagining together how we might live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations… a revolution from the HEART of nature – and the human heart.
The environment in countries of the global South has often suffered most, and how these nations relate to the environment from here on is a make-it-or-break-it factor in planetary survival for all of us. Ethiopian visionary Bogaletch Gebre depicts how the interconnecting forces of environment, economy, women, health and ecological technologies are creating a future environment of hope.
Daphne Miller is an author and a practicing physician who spent time on seven innovative farms around the country to explore the connections among soil, how food is grown and personal health. Dr. Miller is a Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco, and a Research Scientist at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health. Her most recent book is Farmacology: Health from the Ground Up. Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director Arty Mangan interviewed Dr. Miller at a past Bioneers Conference.
ARTY: What was it that made you realize that conventional medicine doesn’t have all the answers for health?
DAPHNE: I was working in Salinas, CA as a medical intern and realized that most of my patients had been harmed by the environment and by the agricultural systems that surrounded the hospital, either from toxins in the soil or in the air, or from labor conditions that were unjust, or from eating foods that were too high in calories and didn’t have enough nutrients. I realized that although I had been in medical school for four years and done all this training, that I didn’t have the tools to help address those issues of the environment, the food system, diet and unjust working conditions.
ARTY: What turned your attention to soil?
DAPHNE: I realized that if I was going to trace all of the disease that I was treating to one thing, it was soil and mistreatment of soil. It was either planting the wrong things in the soil or spraying the wrong things on the soil or using the wrong mechanized practices for treating the soil or having policies that were affecting both farm workers and even the local economy in an adverse way. Everything, in a way, traced back to soil.
ARTY: You actually worked on some farms.
DAPHNE: I started to realize that our food system was broken. It was not a system that was nurturing us or protecting us, but rather was a system that was making us sick and harming us. I started to look to the medical literature to understand what the models were for growing food and for distributing and processing food that could actually be healthy. I remember the day I went to PubMed, which is one of the premier medical research search engines, and I put in the words “soil health” and “human health” to see what studies would come up. I was hoping that I’d find preventive medicine studies on agriculture and health. Pages and pages of studies came up, but they were all about toxins, lead, heavy metals, tetanus, sewer sludge, etc. Reading these studies, it seemed like soil was a horrible dangerous place. Certainly not a place that you would want to eat from, or let your child play in or stick their hands in or a place where you would spend your profession digging in soil. There had to be another model, a model that actually created healthy soil and healthy farms to protect us, and yet there was absolutely no research on the health-promoting impact of agriculture.
Dr. Daphne Miller
That’s when I decided to go out and learn from farmers who were farming in a regenerative or sustainable way so I could start to understand from the farm perspective what these models looked like and begin to ask questions that span between the soil and agriculture and ourselves. I wanted to research how farming in a healthy way influences personal health.
ARTY: What did you learn on those farms that informed your medical practice?
DAPHNE: I would say it gave me more of a systems approach or a holistic approach to treating patients because good farmers are not reductionist in the way they think. They think about using many different tools and different natural systems together to farm in the best way possible to protect the soil and protect the microbes in the soil and generate healthy food. I started to borrow from that model in terms of thinking of treating my patients. What are the ways we can actually use the natural system to promote health?
A lot of the work I do is not in the clinic; it is as a healthy farming advocate working on issues around policy, pushing research, and thinking about how hospitals and the medical system can actually support healthy agriculture, both through aggregate purchasing and through advocacy and policy. The clinical piece is only one slice of the pie, but there’s a lot of ways to connect health and farming.
I also learned, from family farmers around the country that farmers are using practices, like tilling and spraying chemicals, that are destroying soil and directly destroying our health.
ARTY: How does tilling or plowing the soil affect our health?
DAPHNE: Tilling puts particular matter or PM10 into the air. When farmers till, there are much higher rates of asthma and allergy and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. But tilling also destroys the unpaid workers – the soil microbes – whose job it is to scavenge nutrients from organic matter in the soil, and pass it on to the rootlets of the plants. These nutrients then go into the plants and ultimately nourish people. We have a lot of evidence that when you lose biodiversity in the soil, you lose the nutrient value of those plants. By tilling, we are basically stealing our own nutrition.
ARTY: Is there is a relationship between a healthy soil biome and a healthy intestinal biome?
DAPHNE: We understand the links theoretically and there are even some studies showing that the bacteria that are in the soil might influence the bacteria in our gut, but the science is not well established yet. But there are lots of plausible connections, including the fact that if you use a lot of herbicides and pesticides in the soil, they actually get transported via the food into our gut, and can kill off our own bacteria, much the same way that antibiotics do.
But I don’t want to make false claims. You are asking about exactly the area where we need a lot more research. Unfortunately, to do that research requires human microbiologists and soil microbiologists collaborating together and asking questions that span both environments, but it is very challenging to get researchers to move outside their comfort zone and ask questions that are a little more expansive.
ARTY: There is more science that supports the idea that a healthy soil biome will deliver better minerals to the plant.
DAPHNE: Yes. Now that is something that, once again, we still need to do more research on in order to establish exactly what a healthy soil looks like. We haven’t even come to a universal definition of how to measure soil for health. What does soil health look like? The USDA’s Soil Initiative is trying to publish standards for healthy soil. Obviously, we know it’s going to look different in Kansas or in California, but at least we need some principles and some basic criteria that have to be met in order to call a specific soil a healthy soil.
We do know that plants will get a better uptake of nutrients from a very alive, biodiverse soil with a good ratio of fungi to bacteria. That’s because the higher the diversity of these fungi and bacteria, the more likely it is that there will be the right bug to do that specific job of harvesting that nutrient and passing it on to that specific plant, kind of a lock-and-key relationship that exists.
DAPHNE: This research is really exciting for me and it is an example of that kind of discipline-spanning research that is needed. It initially started with allergists in Germany who were trying to understand why it was that their patients, who grew up on sustainable Bavarian farms, had such low rates of asthma and eczema and even certain chronic autoimmune diseases, especially when compared to kids living in urban areas in Germany, but also compared to kids living on more conventional farms. What they found through their research was that it looked like it was the biodiversity of microbes on those farms and in the soil and in the milk and in the cowsheds and on the mattresses and everything else that seemed to make a difference. The kids on those sustainable farms were exposed to a much larger diversity of microbes. The microbes, in some way, were helping to stimulate their innate immune system. Maybe even early on when those kids were developing in utero in their moms, they were being protected. The microbes were sort of training the immune system so that it was able to distinguish friend from foe and not to overreact to allergens and so on.
Most autoimmune processes, even allergies, are just our immune system overreacting to things that it shouldn’t. It looks like having that early exposure to a diversity of bacteria really made a difference. Studies in the US have similar findings.
ARTY: More and more, there’s a growing awareness about the risks of the use of antibiotic soaps in the home. How does that relate to this conversation?
DAPHNE: Oh, it truly does. For generations people were really paranoid about germs and did everything they could to sterilize, and for with good reason. People used to die in scores from things like polio, tetanus, you name it. In the 1950s we really went overboard and started to lead unbelievably sterile lives, where we had absolutely no contact with bacteria. Everything was sealed and packaged and pasteurized and boiled and so on, which corresponds to when we started to see an uptick in a lot of autoimmune diseases.
I think what’s happening now is there is a recognition that you need a healthy profile of bacteria in your life; it doesn’t matter if you live in an urban or a rural area, you need it. There’s much more of an effort to expose kids to it, with playgrounds where they’re encouraged to play in healthy dirt, and the idea that urban farming and getting your hands in the soil, no matter where you are, is really important.
Doctors are getting on board too and prescribing antibiotics a lot less. Of course, they’re still prescribing it for pneumonias and kidney infections and things where you absolutely need it, but we used to prescribe it for things that you’d think maybe at some point might develop into an infection, maybe. You’d send someone home with 20 days of antibiotics. It was just completely overboard. Now they’re giving shorter courses of antibiotics that are less broad spectrum and are more specific for what’s needed. I think that there has been a big change in the medical profession.
Where there hasn’t been enough of a change is in agriculture, and we use way too many antibiotics in agriculture. We use it basically as a growth promoter in conventional agriculture for livestock and chickens and so on. There is research to suggest that a lot of antibiotic resistance in humans might be coming from agriculture. So, that is a place that still very much needs to change. I think that San Francisco is going to become one of the first cities in America to require antibiotic labeling on meat, so you’ll understand whether that meat was treated or not with antibiotics so that consumers can really demand antibiotic-free products.
