Katsi Cook is a traditional Mohawk healer, midwife, and environmental health researcher working to restore midwifery and herbalism in indigenous communities. She has extensively documented effects of toxic pollutants on the Iroquois Six Nations tribes.
This speech was presented at the 1999 Bioneers National Conference.
Following is an excerpt from Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons’ book Nature, Culture & the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018).
Terry Tempest Williams may seem at first glance to be a paradoxical figure — part desert mystic and defender of wildlands and creatures who is comfortable alone deep in the wilderness; part scientist and scholar with a highly refined literary and artistic sensibility; and a woman strongly tied to her family’s deep roots and Mormon religious heritage in Utah, and yet also a modern dissident and sophisticated, cosmopolitan citizen of the world. As such, she perfectly illustrates that amazing weaving of factors that makes for a transformative leader, in my view.
I am honored to also call Terry a beloved sister, friend and teacher, and she’s helped me understand a new relationship to paradox: she’s taught me to eschew either/or solutions, to find ways to dance with and celebrate apparent contradiction, rather than being seduced by some effort to resolve it. In embracing all those parts of herself, she’s blazed a pathway for each of us to celebrate our own inherent diversity.
She’s most often thought of as one of America’s greatest nature writers, and though her work defies comparison, she belongs in the illustrious company of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Henry David Thoreau. She has won many of the most prestigious literary awards, but her writing explores and illuminates so much of the human condition that it transcends any categorization.
Her writing poetically and soulfully traverses the domains of love, family, activism, religion, art, nature and the quest for healing and meaning. Witnessing how many passions and ways of being Terry weaves together into coherent narratives has given me greater permission to navigate multiple domains and systems at a time. Because of course, it’s all one system.
She has long been recognized as one of our greatest defenders of wildlands and passionate advocates for peace, environmental and social justice, and freedom of speech. Her activism has taken many forms, from acts of civil disobedience on a nuclear test site to marching in the streets to testifying about women’s health before Congress, to doing something only she could pull off: quoting Mormon scriptures to explain the wild desert’s spiritual essence to a room full of stunned Republicans.
What is most inspiring to me about Terry is her essence, her being, her awakened presence, the penetrating authenticity and inquiry she brings to every encounter and conversation. This is a woman who is emotional, vulnerable, passionate and ferociously engaged, but she is so deeply centered, so attuned, so refined, so devoid of any reactivity or malice, and radiates such intense dignity and purity of soul that her words have the potential to reach deeply into even hardened human hearts. From Refuge to Leap, and from Finding Beauty in a Broken World to When Women Were Birds, her books never fail to illuminate the invisible web that connects the world anew for me.
The podcast transcribed below and hosted by Bioneers Everywoman’s Leadership program, was a conversation between Terry and me that took place in July 2012. In it we explored how women find voice, as well as the relationship between inner, reflective work and outer, activist work. Our conversation braids together so many threads and themes that have arisen throughout this book previously, pointing to essential aspects of leading from the feminine, including the practice of relationship intelligence, deep listening and the power of emotions and grieving. I hope you’ll find yourself resonant with it, and may even find some new wrinkles or clues that help illuminate your path forward.
Nina Simons: Terry, I am thrilled to be able to talk with you about some of the ideas in your beautiful book When Women Were Birds, and to visit with you as someone who has been a really profound influence and role model and mentor for me in my life in finding my own voice.
Terry Tempest Williams: Nina, I can say the same back to you. You continue to mentor me about what women’s leadership from the heart looks like, sounds like, feels like. I will just honor you.
NS: Thanks for that. Hard to receive from someone I love and respect as I do you, but I hope it is getting easier as I practice. For me, what I have realized is that finding my voice has been directly connected to finding my own sense of purpose, or assignment, or that unique set of instructions that feel like they are mine to do. I was so moved by a quote in your book, Terry, where you wrote that your mother Diane said: “There are two important days in a women’s life. The day she is born and the day she finds out why.”
As I’ve witnessed the arc of your last fifteen years or so, it struck me that perhaps, like me, your sense of assignment keeps unfolding. It is not like it lands fully blown in your lap and you suddenly know what you are born to do. For me, it is more like crossing a river, where I step on a stepping stone and I know that is the right place for me to step but I can’t see the next step until I am fully there. My instructions keep emerging over time. I wonder whether you will be willing to share any reflections you might have on your instructions and unique purpose.
TTW: That is so interesting that you shared those words, instruction and purpose. And honestly Nina, I don’t think about that. What I am aware of is what I love, what I have lost, and what I have tried to reclaim. For me it is very simple: it’s a question of really being present in the moment. If we are present in the moment, then we know what to do.
NS: Well, then let me offer you a reflection on one of the things that I feel I have learned from you and keep learning from you: how to bring all the parts of myself into full presence in the moment. When I reflect back over your last several books, it seems that in each book you share something about what guided you into that exploration of presence.
In Finding Beauty in a Broken World you talk about how you asked the ocean for some words. What I notice about you, Terry, is that you seem to be very good at listening for guidance from somewhere either deep inside yourself or in the natural world or both. I wonder if you have any idea how you learned to listen so well.
TTW: I remember after September 11th, you and I talked about this. I was in Washington DC when the twin towers were struck, when the Pentagon was hit. I witnessed people running across the White House lawn and I was with a group of photographers at the Copland Gallery and we found ourselves stunned as I know everyone was. The next thing I knew, we were in a cab in gridlock and the cab driver turned around and asked, “Where would you like to go?” I realized there was no place to go. We were there.
That next year I made a conscious commitment to speak the truth as I saw it. I realized there are many forms of terrorism and environmental degradation. But during that year I realized my voice, my critique, had become as brittle and as hollow as those as I was opposing.
It was at that point that I went to the ocean. I addressed the ocean spirit, however we define that, and I said, “Give me one wild word, and I promise I will follow.” So perhaps you are correct in using that word instruction, because the word that came back to me, the word that I heard in my own heart was “mosaic.” It became a seven-year journey, following what mosaic is, how do we take those pieces that are broken and make something new, something whole.
With this book, When Women Were Birds, you know what I was listening to? I was listening to the very real fact of my uncertainty about my own mortality, realizing that I had turned 54, the same age my mother was when she died. I really was looking back and remembering what I had chosen to deny, that my mother left me all her journals before she died and all her journals were blank. And so the book becomes a reflection and meditation, a deep listening, to what that emptiness might have meant.
NS: What inspires me in you is the way that you listen both for the ocean, for the spirit of the natural world, as well as for what’s most alive and questioning and wondering and burning in yourself.
TTW: I think it is about survival, don’t you? I mean, both of us are in very privileged positions but life is not easy. If we are interested in an evolution, a revolution of the spirit, then I think it demands that we ask these hard questions and that we stay with them. That we don’t avert our gaze, that we sit with the uncertainty. Revelations do come, but not without a cost, not without patience, and not without compassion for ourselves and for those that we live closest with.
NS: I agree, and I find for myself that the older I become and the more aware I am of my own mortality, the more burning the questions become. As I age, the more my desire to fully manifest the artwork of my life or the assignment that my soul was given in its fullness burns in me. Because we live in a time of so much transformation, and so much loss and so much suffering, I feel called to bring my “all” in response to that. I also feel an increasing need to not shrink away from what most frightens me. I think you’ve modeled that for me.
TTW: You know, I think of my grandfather when he said, every day counts. I was just in Madison, Wisconsin on the eve of the Scott Walker election recall. There was such angst on both sides about what would happen. Mat Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive, is a friend of mine. We ended up that morning at dawn going out to Picnic Point Nature Preserve and we watched birds. I cannot tell you the glory of the moment when, as we were talking politics, wondering what was going to happen, suddenly we heard this incredible prehistoric call. We both smiled and a sand hill crane flew right over us, we could have touched his or her legs. You know, you think, “Nine million years of perfection just graced us,” and it really does put things into perspective.
NS: Yeah, it sure does. I am curious to lean toward the reconciliation of paradox because just as you were saying, Terry, part what prompted you to write When Women Were Birds was the legacy of your mother’s journals and how her voice was reflected in the emptiness of words on those pages. I find myself so drawn to the inquiry of how we unlock from paradoxical duality.
For me, one of the most important capacities we can look to develop is how we connect across difference. And you have modeled that for me, Terry, in so many ways, from adopting a grown man from Rwanda as your son, to studying prairie dogs up close and personal for weeks. You model it by helping us understand their world by going inside it and writing about what you learned. I am curious about any thoughts you may have about how we connect across difference and the value of it in this time.
TTW: Nina, I am struck by the words “reconcile” and “paradox,” and I am not sure that I ever reconcile anything. I think I embrace paradox. I grew up on the edge of Great Salt Lake, a body of water in the American West that nobody can drink because it is salt water. So, I think I am very comfortable with paradox.
I grew up in the Mormon church, which is very patriarchal, and yet all the women around me were unbelievably powerful. You know, paradox. It is true, Brooke and I are childless by choice and suddenly, at 50 years old, I find myself adopting Willy into our family and re-defining what family looks like. You know, I am not Willy’s mother and he is not my son and yet he has allowed me to be a mother. To understand what it’s like to have your complete heart soul, mind embodied by another person out of regard, and love, and care and often times, confusion.
I gravitate towards what I have loved. I think I am most interested in what is other than myself. I know who I am, and I am much more interested in who you are and what this world around us feels like, looks like, tastes like; what it is like to touch. I think it is my curiosity that keeps moving me forward.
NS: Of course. As another woman who is childless by choice, you have helped me understand that whether or not we have biological children, we all, and I suspect regardless of our gender, we all can have the essence of parenting and mothering and loving another person so much that they become a part of our being.
TTW: I think that is right. I was having a conversation this morning with a dear friend of Brooke’s over coffee. How do we expand? How do we amp up our frequency? I can speak this language with you.
I am very well aware of the desert. When we first moved to Castle Valley from Salt Lake City, Utah, five hours South, it took me several years to feel that my body was in frequency with the desert because the vibration in the desert is so high.
You know this from living in Santa Fe, Nina; very little is hidden. You are living in this very erosional landscape and it is asking of you to be bare-bone and exposed. I keep thinking with all the changes that are happening on the planet right now, with all that we are asked to take in, how do we keep expanding and allow ourselves greater porosity, so that we don’t shut down, so that we don’t become numb, so that we can continue to engage. That is the question that I am living with. At times, it feels like it is too much and yet as you say, I want to be of use. I want to be alive, awake, and alert to that which surrounds me.
NS: For me, that requires that I keep giving myself the permission to feel as deeply as I do, because I am mindful that we live in a culture where that permission is somewhat rare. And as a woman, I have often felt derided or ridiculed for being emotional. What I am learning is that actually that love is the source of my strength, and my wisdom, and my power. And that in order to celebrate life — which I really think is part of why all human beings are here on the planet at this time — we have to allow ourselves to feel the loss and the pain of witnessing as what we love is diminished and threatened.
TTW: I so agree. Such power in what you are saying. What kind of human being we would be if we were not feeling this grief, if we weren’t being emotional about the lives and the life before us.
I was thinking about abuse and I believe that we really are in an abusive relationship with the feminine, however we define it — whether it is emotion, truth-telling, anger or understanding, or maybe silence — the feminine in all its diversity. I often find that we are minimized, trivialized, invalidated, we are discounted — that makes for craziness. So often, what I feel inside is not mirrored on the outside, and that makes me crazy.
And when we are talking about voice, we really do have to stand in the center of authenticity and realize, “No, this is what I am feeling. And, no, I will not allow you to minimize my thoughts or my actions. And, no, I will not allow you to discount me.”
We cannot do it alone and yet we try to do it alone. That is why I think community is very important and this is why I so appreciate what you have put together with your program. We cannot do it alone. I so appreciate what you have done with Everywoman’s Leadership and Cultivating Women’s Leadership because it shows that there is a community of women and this is what leadership from the heart looks like. It gives all of us the courage to follow our instincts and our intuition.
NS: I find myself feeling increasingly supported in the awareness that what the feminine offers us is the capacity to flex with changing conditions. To live with uncertainty. If there is a key to cultivating our whole humanity and our voice and our leadership, it has something to do with how we stay connected, and how we live with uncertainty. So, I wonder if you have any thoughts about that because you have lived with so much, Terry.
TTW: Nina, I think a lot about Wangari Maathai, who passed on too soon, on September 26, 2011. I think about the uncertainty that she lived. As an African woman, as a woman in Kenya, in a very patriarchal society, what was certain for her was that women were carrying the environmental crisis on their backs and that an environmental crisis is an economic crisis, is ultimately a crisis of social justice. That was certain to her. She saw it, she felt it, she witnessed it.
What was certain for her was that women could change the course of their lives and what was certain for her was the faith of a single seed. I love that and now, you know, how many millions of trees have been planted because of her love and her capacity to grieve for what we were doing to the planet?
Again, it is that paradox. What is certain, what do we know and what is uncertain and what we will never know? You know, none of us knows how long we are going to live. That is the first great uncertainty but we know that we’re alive, that is a certain thing. You and I are speaking to each other. So again, it is a dance, this balance, this scale. And I love how even the brush of a feather can tip that balance. So, I want to live with that feather.
NS: It is so beautiful because it is the power of the small and the particular to make big change…
TTW: Truly.
NS: What you are saying gets us back to the dance of paradox. I am reminded that nature’s way of resolving paradox is a spiral. That when you pour cold milk into hot tea, the difference in their temperatures gets resolved by a spiral, whether you stir it or not. Just the liquid does that. When the seaweeds are dancing in the ocean current, they spiral in order to be resilient. It is a dance, not a marriage, or a reconciliation.
TTW: I love that. You know, there is spiral all around us. Perhaps that is the nature of paradox. I went out with Willy and his friends to the spiral jetty out on the shores of Great Salt Lake and it struck me how profound that form and that metaphor is to progress, to evolution, to revolution.
NS: I also find myself wanting to appreciate what Wangari did, which was that she kept speaking even though she knew it meant incurring wrath and anger and violence to herself…
TTW: Even being separated from her children and hoping that they would understand and forgive her for what she was taking on. Again, that word “courage.” As she often would say, it was not courage, it was just what needed to be done. Recently, I was talking with a student of mine about the definition of courage. She said, and I love this: to her, courage is sustained focus. For her courage is that. Don’t you love that?
NS: It’s beautiful. Because what we appreciate appreciates. I recently attended a memorial service for a dear friend and a remarkable activist who died too young and I found myself so aware that like you, she brought celebration to the fight for justice. Always. I noticed as I was speaking at her memorial, how rare that is, because the fight can so often engender bitterness and anger and we can shut down because it is so hard. And the beauty and the power of staying connected to what you love, even as you are putting your body, your voice and your heart into helping to ignite change, is something I admire so much.
TTW: Yes. I just was at Dartmouth for the last three months. One of the most special days was being on the Dartmouth Green during the Powwow. Dartmouth was one of the first colleges in the country to honor Native people and Native American students. This was the 40th Powwow they have held on the Green. For two days I sat next to the singers and I just felt their drum beat going up my spine. In all the celebration of shell dancers, the jingle dancers, it was so thrilling, and yet, again the paradox, you don’t know but you imagine the difficulties of the lives on the reservations. Having worked in Navajo Country, I know this is America’s hidden wound that we have never fully acknowledged, and yet, when I think about the deepest humor I have experienced, it’s been from my Indian friends. And, when I think about the really dark humor with my own family, it’s come out when we were facing the death of a loved one. Again, it’s about survival, and we all have these evolutionary skills. I think rituals — singing, celebration, dancing — all these things help us move in that spiral of what it means to be human. Often, we seem to be caught in a downward spiral, an entropy of work and scale. Lately, all I hear is: we need to work to scale or scale up, and I just keep thinking really, can we just scale down? I just do not understand that. I just find myself wanting to get quieter and quieter and smaller and smaller.
NS: [Laughter] Well, and your book invited me into a meditation in such a beautiful way because I want to be slower and stiller, and you know, it is the blur of fastness and pressure and too muchness and busy-ness, that causes me to miss the particularity and the beauty and sacredness and the humor that you are talking about.
TTW: And then we end up being tired, and angry and resentful and we have all been there. More and more, I just want to be still. I also think about Robert Pinsky when he says “motion can be a place too.” But my mother always talked about being the nest behind the waterfall. How do we find that core of stillness in our heart so that we can, again using your words, fully appreciate where we are here and now.
I think it is tied to voice and to paradox. When I was writing When Women Were Birds, I thought I was writing a book about voice, about how we as women speak to the truth of our times, to our own authentic nature. But what I have written, Nina, is a book of silences and stillness and I think one begets the other. Again it is that balance of space and time and scale.
NS: Well, I find myself aware that the need for silence is also a marker of the imbalance between the feminine and masculine in our culture and in all of us. I was just speaking to a friend the other night about the unfinished wounding in the conquest of this land. The huge destruction that has been wrought on Native peoples all over the world and also the wounds of slavery, of sexism, racism and ageism. How do we encourage and invite the healing that can come from naming and ritually pouring our love into addressing all those wounds? I see them as fractals of the same tear in our relational fabric.
TTW: Again, love is not the secret. Pain is. And why are we so fearful of that? Because I really believe if we embrace our pain we can move beyond that. Again, I am scratching my head. Here we have a president that we have supported and admired, Barack Obama, and I will certainly be voting for him again. But with a community of people we have been trying to embrace the Arctic to preserve this reservoir for our spirit, and yet it is Barack Obama and his administration that has opened up the Arctic for oil and gas drilling. They have opened the door to Shell.
Just last week in The New York Times, they were talking about how Shell has been very sensitive to the Native American people when in truth, I have an Alaska Native student who has been working with her father to stop drilling in the Arctic, to stop drilling in the Arctic Ocean. They are buying off Native Americans with trucks with boats and anything else you can imagine. So, what do we do? I keep thinking, do we lay our bodies down? Is it the time for direct action and yet how do we still proceed with calm and understanding? I don’t know what the answers are. And that is the paradox where I find myself torn, by my anger and by my love, and sometimes I think they are the same thing. So, what do we fight for, and what do we accept?
NS: Yes and how do we recognize that not only our pain deters us but our shame and complicity as well.
TTW: The only way I can reconcile the paradoxes of action and contemplation — and I’ll use that word “reconcile now — is in discernment. To me the power of discernment is most potently rendered in our own communities, on our home ground with our own people. That is where it is the toughest to speak truthfully because we cannot walk away from our friends and family.
NS: What you’re naming so beautifully is the complementary wholeness that is created by combining contemplation with action, and that unless they are met in full measure, it is not the full humanness that I aspire to.
Terry, you’ve said that you “do not believe we can look for leadership beyond ourselves.” Can you talk a little about what that means to you in both your personal and professional work and how you maintain the connection between the two?
TTW: It is such a good question. I am going to refer it back to you Nina.
NS: [Laughing] It is such a hard question and such a good question. What’s clear to me is that the landscape that I can be the most responsible for is the one that lives within me. I need to keep challenging myself, I have to keep finding the spaces that scare me and the places that I have anger and actually lean into them so that I can find ways to bring myself into congruence.
I keep crafting myself inwardly as if there is a social sculpture in my own life that is me, and I am the only one that can make this artwork come out the way I hope and intend it. When I began to understand the extent of harm as a result of the invisibility of racial injustice to many people of privilege in this country, I began to realize that even though it terrified me to talk about it, I actually had to push myself towards that edge and find ways to challenge myself to step into it.
For me, weaving the boundary of personal and professional, the inner and the outer and the activist, feels like to me like it is the work of my life. And I observe you traversing that ground with quite a bit of grace. So, what do you think?
TTW: I have been very aware that my view of leadership is not the same as the traditional view of leadership: the kind with one powerful person at the top, who we follow. That is not the kind of leadership I am interested in. I’m interested in: What does leadership of the heart look like? What does leadership rising out of the community look like?
I think the Occupy movement has showed us an organic form of leadership where each voice has its own strengths and radiance. That takes time. We’re used to top-down decisions, we’re used to saying a leader is decisive and doesn’t care what other people think. I am interested in a circle of leadership, in spiral leadership, in organic leadership that emerges out of community.
I’m also wondering, Nina, about how we can lead ourselves forward in courageous ways that sustain us and the people that we love. It takes self-reflection and accountability. If we want our country to change, we have to be asking how we change ourselves. The quote that you read from goes on to say that if I want my country to change, how do I change myself.
I was interested in a review of When Women Were Birds that appeared in Christian Review that the reviewer, male, said, “This woman must have written this book while looking in the mirror and mistook indulgence for literature.” I mean, that is pretty harsh. It’s interesting that if a man is self-reflecting, culturally we view that as wisdom, but if a woman is self-reflecting then we view it as self-indulgence. So, I think that goes back to those traditional models of what we imagine leadership and wisdom to look like, the all-knowing or the all-questioning. And I would rather exist in the questions.
NS: Terry, I wonder how you navigate the challenge of balancing your service to the world with adequate self-care? I am so motivated by my love and I think because we as women have so much cultural conditioning that tells us to equate our value with what we can give, or how well we serve others, it is easy to give more than we can replenish.
I just find myself actually relying on the wisdom and love and reflection of friends and sisters who encourage me to take time off, who remind me of the value of stillness and self-care. I keep telling myself that we are in a marathon here, this is not a sprint. If I want to bring myself with this much passion, presence, and commitment, I have to take care of the instrument, myself. I need to find ways to ritualize and practice and strengthen my capacity to care for myself at the same time. What about you Terry?
TTW: I agree with you, Nina. We’ve all been there. I’m thinking a lot about source. What is the source of our joy, what is the source of our pain, what is the source of our strength? And each of us answers that differently, I’m sure. For me, my source is my solitude, my marriage, my community of sisters and friends. My ultimate source is in nature — birds, plants, lying on the ground as barefoot and as exposed as I can be on the hot sand in the desert or walking in the forest barefoot, with that soft, yielding soil underfoot. Just water, ocean, shell. So again, it’s discernment, it’s assessment, it’s all the things we have been talking about, each in our own way and in our own time, with the gifts that are ours.
Republished with permission from Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons’ book Nature, Culture & the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018).
This year, we’re celebrating Women’s History Month with a record number of women in Congress. Historically male-dominated fields, from politics to business to tech, are shifting to pull their ecosystems more in-line with the general population. Women continue to break through ceilings in the workforce, but empowering women goes beyond the professional. It starts with the personal.
Sisterhood transcends boundaries of land and language, but the unique, lived experiences that inform it can look a lot different around the world. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights advocate and law professor, developed the concept of intersectionality, which she describes as “a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power.” It illustrates how the interconnection of personal identities can layer political, economic and social disadvantages. Learning from women of various backgrounds provides invaluable solutions to resisting injustice for all, especially as society moves toward a more equitable future for both men and women.
Watch the five empowering lectures from women below to learn how they use their own spaces in society to incite change, and how you can too.
Patrisse Cullors, a Los Angeles-based artist and activist, is one of the most influential movement builders of our era as one of the three original co-founders of Black Lives Matter. In this talk, she explores the contributions women have made to the movement for Black lives, and some of the issues the movement aims to change: institutional racism, mass incarceration and high rates of maternal mortality in African-American communities.
World Pulse founder Jensine Larsen and Sister Zeph, an award-winning Pakistani digital crusader for girls’ education, illustrate how their global network is harnessing the power of digital communication into a powerful force for change by connecting women from more than 190 countries – including those reaching out using Internet cafés and cell phones from remote rural areas and conflict zones. Jensine shares her personal journey building World Pulse from a vision into a network now impacting over two million lives. She and Sister Zeph show us how we can participate in this soulful digital revolution to unleash the true feminine intelligence of the planet.
Workers have been rising up all over the country to join the campaign for “One Fair Wage,” and demand higher wages and the elimination of lower wages for tipped workers. Innovative, award-winning labor leader Saru Jayaraman says that, if we join together, we can end economic inequality in America. Director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, Saru co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which has more than 25,000 worker members, 200 employer partners, and thousands of consumer members in a dozen states nationwide.
Drawing on her lifetime of social justice activism, Fania Davis depicts the essence of Restorative Justice, an emerging approach that seeks to move us from an ethic of separation, domination and extreme individualism to one of collaboration, partnership and interrelatedness. Rooted in Indigenous views of justice and healing, this rapidly expanding global movement invites us to make a radical shift from either-or, right-wrong, and us-versus-them ways of thinking. It seeks to midwife an evolutionary shift beyond domination, discord and devastation toward healing, wholeness and holiness with one another and all creation.
A mother and member of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara nation of North Dakota, Kandi Mosset is known worldwide for her involvement on the frontlines of the protests at Standing Rock. Mosset is passionate about bringing visibility to the impacts of climate change and environmental injustice, specifically those affecting Indigenous communities throughout the world. This is her keynote speech on defending indigenous lands and communities from the negative impacts of the fossil fuel industry.
For thirty years, Bioneers has acted as a seed head for the game-changing social and scientific vision, knowledge and practices advancing the great transformation to a restored world.
Worldviews create worlds. Our civilizational crossroads reflects a crisis of consciousness. Everything’s going to change, and the only question is how.
Released in honor of the 30th Anniversary of the founding of Bioneers, this video is part of Seeding the Field: 30 Years of Transformative Solutions, a video series which celebrates some of the best moments of the Bioneers Conference through the last three decades.
An idea whose time has come is unstoppable. Please join with us to help realize 30 years of transformative solutions and make the Revolution from the Heart of Nature and the Human Heart.
Directed and Edited by: Theo Badashi
Sound Mix: Stephanie Welch
Produced by: Theo Badashi and Maximilian DeArmon for Cosmogenesis Media Group
Ilarion (Larry) Merculieff was one of the last Unangan people of St. Paul Island, Alaska, to experience a fully traditional childhood. Now he uses that wisdom to serve Indigenous communities as an author and accomplished native activist. Among many other positions, he is most notably the current president of the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways (GCILL), and co-founder of the Indigenous Peoples’ Council for Marine Mammals, the Alaska Forum on the Environment, and the Alaska Oceans Network.
In this essay from his book, Perspective on Indigenous Issues (GCILL, 2018, written with Galena Vladi, Libby Roderick, Sumner Macleish and Sharon (Shay) Sloan), Merculieff offers Elder wisdom as a guide to solving modern challenges. He describes how reversals of traditional knowledge in Western society, like prioritizing science over spirituality and mind over heart, can cause isolation from the wider world of which we are a part. But by reflecting on our connectedness to self, life and all creation, Merculieff shows how getting out of our heads and centering ourselves can help us focus on making dreams of peace a reality.
I had a fully traditional Unangan (Aleut) upbringing, as the entire village raised me. I had to spend equal time with the men, the women, the Elders, and my peers. For thirty years I worked 17 hours a day, six days a week. I have never experienced ‘burnout’ as it is called in Western society. What kept me centered and “in the flow” came from what my people gave me.
The Unangan people are taught to live according to laws that have guided their thoughts and behavior for millennia. Examples of these laws include reciprocity with all living things, humility, respect for all life, honoring Elder wisdom, giving without expectation of a return to self, thinking of others first, and more. Such spiritual principles for living did not come from logic or thought but from a much deeper source of wisdom, which our Unangan culture referred to as the ‘heart.’ When Unangan Elders speak of the ‘heart’, they do not mean mere feelings, even positive and compassionate ones, but of a deeper portal of profound interconnectedness and awareness that exists between humans and all living things. Centering oneself there results in humble, wise, connected ways of being and acting in the world. To access it, you must ‘drop out’ of the relentless thinking that typically occupies the Western mind. Indigenous peoples have cultivated access to this heart source as part of a deep experience and awareness of the profound interdependence between the natural and human worlds.
If heeded, this portal provides the inner information that keep us in “right relationship” with all of life, thus ensuring our long-term survival and wellbeing, individually and collectively. When guidance or information comes from the heart, it can be relied upon and has impeccable integrity, whereas our fallible thought processes regularly deceive us.
Listening to the heart gives us access to an even deeper source of wisdom, “the Womb at the Center of the Universe.” A true story that took place on my home of St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea off the western coast of Alaska helps illustrate this point. When I was sixteen, I lamented the loss of the traditional mask-making artistry at the center of thousands of years of Unangan ceremony. I sought out Aggey, an 88-year-old Elder, whose grandfather had been the community’s last shaman. I shared my sadness at the loss of the masks. Speaking in Unangan Tunuu (Aleut language), Aggey told me that the knowledge had never been lost. To rediscover it, I should go to the seashore, pick up a stick and rock from along the shoreline, and beat them in concert with the rhythm of the ocean, wind, and grasses, and the sounds of the fur seals. “Get out of the head and center yourself,” Aggey said, “then set your intention and wait.”
I had known how to get “out of my head” since I was six years old. As one of the last Unangan to experience a true traditional upbringing, I could walk the three miles from the village out to the bird cliffs even as a very young child. There, I could be amid the tens of thousands of migratory seabirds that came to the island to breed: thick-billed and common murres, red and black-legged kittiwakes, tufted and horned puffins, least auklets, crested auklets, pelagic cormorants, red-faced cormorants, fulmars, and seagulls. I noticed how thousands of birds darted diagonally, up and down, left to right, and right to left, flying at different speeds and in different directions simultaneously without ever even clipping another’s wing. In my six-year-old mind, I decided that the only difference between those birds and myself was that they existed in a vast field of awareness rather than an intellectual thought process, although I did not use such words at the time. I wanted to be like a bird, so, after months of effort, I developed the capacity to maintain this state of “awareness without thinking” for several hours at a time. That was when the magic happened: I could sense many things I’d never experienced before, and my world expanded enormously.
I applied what I’d learned from the birds to what the Elder told me. Sitting on the beach, I centered myself. Without thought, I went into my heart, set my intention and waited, trusting that the answers would come. Setting intention without thought means to set the intention at the cellular level of the body. After several hours, a small black dot appeared in my mind’s eye. The dot increased until, suddenly, over a hundred ceremonial masks poured out of the black dot of my mind’s eye and into my awareness. Mask after mask appeared, each with a completely unique design I’d never seen before. Afterwards, I wondered if I had imagined the entire thing. I shared this experience with Elder Aggey. The Elder’s response was, “exumnakoxt laakaiyah,” Unangan for “good boy.” “You touched the womb at the center of the universe,” Aggey told me. “That is where we get our teachings from.” From then on, I understood how Unangan people received their spiritual instructions for living, principles that had helped them sustain their communities for thousands of years. The “Womb at the Center of the Universe” was and is a source of creativity and creation for all people.
Humans are trying to deal with these issues with the mind alone and not the heart. The heart tells us to focus on making our dreams of peace and harmony a reality; the mind keeps us focused on the problems. Indigenous Elders ask the question: “What are you choosing to focus on? Are you choosing to focus on that which you are trying to move away from or that which you are trying to move towards?” Because, they say, what we choose to focus on becomes our primary reality. If we choose to become emotionally attached to that which we are trying to move away from – for example, if we become attached on an emotional and intellectual level to “winning the fight” against pollution and climate change – we may unintentionally perpetuate the violence we are committed to transforming. From the standpoint of the Elders, violence involves any actions, thoughts, feelings, or words that consciously or unconsciously sets one person against another, regardless of how well intentioned we are. According to Indigenous Elders, if we feel, think, or act without compassion, understanding, empathy, and love, we contribute to that which we are trying to move away from. There may be short term gains, but no real long-term solutions. Instead, we must take the same bold actions to protect that which we depend upon and love, but do so from a place of positive vision, intention and compassion. The Indigenous Elders say that nothing is created outside of ourselves until it is created inside ourselves first.
The Indigenous Elders say we have reversed the laws for living. In the past, we used to contemplate the mysteries of death; now we contemplate the mysteries of life, probing ever more deeply into life’s mysteries with our technologies and research. The Elders know that, even more important than a scientific understanding of how the world works is a spiritual understanding of human limits and our proper place within the web of creation. They say we need to contemplate the mysteries of death to fully live in the NOW with humility and respect for all living things. They say that in the past we honored feminine energies and capacities in the world (exhibited by both men and women, and by Mother Earth herself), while now we almost exclusively honor the Masculine. We used to respect the Elders and now we excessively venerate youth. We traditionally prioritized process, but today we fixate on goals and outcomes. From an Indigenous standpoint, proper process always produces results that exceed individual expectations. In the past, we focused on wisdom and knowledge and never separated the two; now, we focus on knowledge alone. The Elders know that knowledge without the wisdom to apply it correctly is useless if not dangerous. We used to experience the depth and richness of silence in our lives; now there is noise everywhere. We used to engage in genuine interaction with a wide range of people within our communities; now we live alone or in single family units with limited interaction beyond the nuclear family. This isolation destroys relationships, contributes to mental and emotional problems, and separates us from the wider world of which we are a part. And the most important reversal is that now the mind tells the heart what to do, instead of the mind following the heart.
This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Perspectives on Indigenous Issues (GCILL, 2018) by Ilarion Merculieff, Galena Vladi, Libby Roderick, Sumner Macleish and Sharon (Shay) Sloan.
A few weeks ago a group of young people, including myself, stood in front of Senator Diane Feinstein to ask for her help in saving our future. These young people, representing Earth Guardians, Youth vs. Apocalypse
This encounter not only highlighted the lack of willpower in our current governing bodies, it also emphasized the vast chasm between how those in power choose to view climate change, and how those in frontline communities, especially youth, have no choice but to see the dire implications of how this changing planet will affect our futures.
Global and national governing bodies still seem to only see the abstract concept of climate change as it relates to our economic systems – capping CO2 emissions, mitigating pollution, more renewable energy, etc. Climate change is so much bigger than economics, peoples’ lives and homes are at risk. Our collective home is at risk. As Bioneer Heather McGee said recently on Meet the Press, “There is no higher responsibility of anyone with any kind of political power right now than to try to stop a global catastrophe that’s not happening in three generations. It’s happening now.”
Young people will not wait for old-world politics to keep moving chess pieces around. We don’t have the time. We have twelve years, if that. We went to Feinstein’s office because we know that our future, and the futures of those that come after us, are at stake. And we know we cannot do it without standing together across race, class, gender and borders. We know we need to speak up for economic justice and against environmental racism when we talk about solutions to climate change. The Green New Deal, initially put together by Sunrise and proposed by Sen. Markey and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, is the only legislation on the table that not only addresses climate change, but also creates good jobs and addresses inequality in our current socioeconomic system.
Youth are building new models for social movements, ones that include self-care to avoid burnout, caring for each other because this is the beloved community we are stepping into the world with and caring for our earth because she gives us life. From Parkland to Sweden to Oakland to India and Brazil, young people are no longer sitting back and waiting for older generations to make the change we know needs to happen. The activists of this next generation will need to be fearless and resilient. They will need to rely on one one another, and lead with intersectionality and solidarity.
Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s strike that began in August of 2018 outside of the Swedish Parliament, on March 15th over 1.4 million youth in 123 countries around the world participated in a Global Climate Strike. Bioneers joined some of our youth partners at the Bay Area Climate Strike where over 1000 young people participated in the march led by Youth vs. Apocalypse.
The speakers began with a Native American high school student named Poppy who honored the N
Toward the end of the day, youth leader Isha Clarke identified that there were a lot of white faces in the audience and followed up by saying, “Thank you for being here, we need you as allies, and for this movement to be intersectional we need to centralize the voices of native youth and youth of color. We also need you to show up for racial justice and economic justice in your communities.”
Youth today, across a spectrum of backgrounds, recognize the ways in which communities are being marginalized and hurt by outdated political systems, exploitative economics and social constructs that divide us from seeing our shared humanity. They see how important it is to have diverse leaders speaking from their own experiences, calling in others who have historically felt left out of the conversation.
As Edna Chavez stated in her 2018 keynote at Bioneers,” We need to focus on changing the underlying conditions that foster violence and trauma in the first place…People need to listen to us, this is our moment as young people. As black and brown youth leaders, we need to use our voices to be more inclusive in these conversations, to share our stories, to reclaim our power, and most importantly to hold policy makers accountable…Those in power need to remember that we are the future.”
For more day to day updates and pictures about what the Bioneers Youth Leadership Program and our partners are doing, follow us on instagram @bioneersyouthleaders
In recent months, the Green New Deal proposal has been front-and-center in conversations surrounding climate change. Based on several decades’ worth of ideas, the idea found its way into the mainstream thanks to the phenomenal efforts of the next generation of leadership along with yet one more round of highly publicized climate reports indicating an extremely urgent need for widespread climate action. For all the talk about a Green New Deal, however, much of the actual detail remains to be developed (learn more about the Green New Deal here).
Vien Truong, former President of the DreamCorps, has worked tirelessly to bring equity, social justice and climate justice to the frontlines of the environmental movement and public policy. Prior to her role at Green For All, Truong was a central force in the effort to put environmental justice at the center of California’s groundbreaking climate policy mechanisms and cap-and-trade funding.
Bioneers’ Teo Grossman spoke with Truong about the potential future of the Green New Deal proposal and how California’s climate action can serve as a template for national progress.
TEO GROSSMAN, Senior Director of Programs & Research for Bioneers: Starting with the basics, what is the Green New Deal and why do we need it?
VIEN TRUONG, President of DreamCorps: The Green New Deal is an idea that’s been in the dialogue in the public realm for over a decade now, but it was refreshed recently with the Sunrise Movement in collaboration and with the leadership of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom I love, and Senator Markey. Both the Congresswoman and the Senator have introduced peer resolutions in the House and the Senate to get us moving toward an aggressive climate change plan meeting the science targets that we need in the next 10 years. That resolution has already the support and the sponsorship of over 100 people, which is great. So it’s growing in the national realm, and in the national dialogue.
We want to make sure that we continue to move that dialogue forward to meet the moment with a plan that grows the support necessary to realize the promises in the Green New Deal resolution.
GROSSMAN: The preamble to the Green New Deal legislation introduced by Ocasio Cortez and Markley specifically highlights the inequitable distribution of economic, social and environmental impacts resulting from climate change. You’ve obviously been focused on these realities for much of your career – how big of a deal is it to see what the bill collectively labels “vulnerable and frontline communities” called out in this way in proposed federal legislation?
TRUONG: It’s heartwarming and reassuring. It tells us the kind of leadership that is behind this work. For too long, when we talked about climate change solutions, low-income communities and communities of color, who really are at the frontlines of the problems, were left out of the conversation. But you really can’t address a problem if you won’t even acknowledge it. By having the communities cited first and foremost in this conversation has been amazing and reassuring that this is a priority for the leaders behind it.
I’m in Oakland, California, and when I look out the window here, I see West Oakland, where I grew up. For us, growing up in a community that has been surrounded on all sides by freeways and highways, we’ve been so close and proximate to the problems, literally breathing in the tail pipe pollutions. We have been deeply concerned and increasingly scared about what’s going on and how we’ve been left out of the conversation, even when directly impacted.
For instance, in West Oakland, you’re three times more likely to get cancer than anywhere else in the Bay Area. You’re five times more likely to have asthma than in other areas. The disease rates are so much higher than average that we now have a better prediction of your life expectancy based on your ZIP code than your genetic code.
That is made worse by realizing that the pollution problem is aggravated by poverty issues. This is an area that has been deeply underinvested in. The school system has been neglected for far too long. We have inconsistent, inadequate access to healthy foods and healthcare. When you put those two things together, it’s no wonder we’re now seeing a proliferation of tent cities in the community here. We’re seeing a proliferation of people who are working and can’t even afford the cost of living. In fact, in the Bay Area and in California, we have the highest levels of poverty because of the gap between the cost of living and the disproportionate amount of costs we are burdened with to be able to have a quality life. We live all of those realities on a daily basis, and I think that has made us feel more righteously indignant about the inability of our elected leaders to address and solve the issues in our communities with us.
So to have the leaders in Congress and the Senate recognize these issues, and with community-based organizations helping to lead this charge, it has been heartwarming and reassuring.
GROSSMAN: In many ways, the policy work that has taken place in California since the early 2000s could serve as a sort of blueprint for a national Green New Deal. You were certainly instrumental in the implementation of some key components of California’s leading-edge climate policy. What are the differences between what has happened in California in the past two decades and the proposed national Green New Deal and what can we learn from work already underway at state and regional levels?
TRUONG: I think California has been a clear leader nationally in setting strong environmental targets. From AB-32, which was passed in 2006, getting us on a path toward 1990 levels of pollution by 2020, which we’re on target to meet; to passing SB-100, which gets the state and the energy systems to 100 percent renewable by 2045; to policies that have been part of leading toward the largest investments of funds to low-income communities to green up; to the most ambitious charge for the transportation sector to electrify and green up as fast as possible; to really investing in communities to build and create their own vision, and then supporting that vision with investments from both the private and the public sector.
It has been reassuring to see that even as the federal government steps backward, we have seen states and leaders in California stepping forward. The results speak for themselves. California has gone from the eighth largest economy to now the fifth largest economy in the world. Based on what we’ve seen, all of this scaremongering in the national conversation pointing to job loss and economic ramifications is unfounded. Actually the reverse has been evidenced in truth. We have seen the economy grow, and more jobs have been created because of California’s doubling down on climate policies. Businesses have risen because they now have consistent, transparent and committed language that allows for them to build and plan, and to invest in their work being responsible not only to their employees and to the shareholders, but also to the planet and to the environment.
California is one of the largest states with one of the largest economies, and it has been able to demonstrate that these policies do well, by doing better. We can now let the federal levels and other states know that this is possible, and that they can also step up and—I would say not even try to meet California, but try to beat California. As much as I love California, this is the time when I think we need people to actually be better than we are here.
GROSSMAN: There’s a bit of a paradox that I’ve been struggling with regarding where solutions need to come from. In many ways, it’s the federal and large-scale systems that are broken and have gotten us to this point. They’re brittle, not particularly nimble, unresponsive to rapid changes and, by definition, are large, centralized bureaucracies. Much of the innovation and pathways forward in a time of climate crisis are coming from smaller scales, highlighting the need for different, more resilient systems – decentralized smart grids, local food economies, water systems that aren’t reliant on pumping water over mountains. How do we reconcile the need for something on the scale of a wartime mobilization that only a federal actor can bring when so much of what we need is going to be built and implemented at a local, regional or state level?
TRUONG: It’s not a surprise to anyone that in order for us to reach the scale and promise of the Green New Deal, we’ve got to have buy-in from people and groups beyond the federal government. Even having support on the state and local levels isn’t enough. We’ve got to have the top-down and the bottom-up work.
Top down, we need the federal government to direct the energy systems, the utilities and the power plants, to double down and keep protection around clean air and clean water. We’ve got to make sure we’re creating a fair playing field across the country to create and enforce fuel efficiency standards for car manufacturers. There are so many things that the federal government can and must do for us to rise to what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need in order to meet our targets in the next 12 years. It’s a lot of demands, and it’s necessary.
At the same time, in order for us to get anything passed at the federal level right now, we need Senate buy-in, which is Republican-dominated, and we need our president to sign off on the law. Right now, that is very unlikely on any ambitious climate policy. In order for us to wait for Senate and presidential buy-in, as well as to get a plan in place and implemented, it’s going to take at least half the time that the scientists have told us we have to dramatically reduce pollution. We need to do it within 12 years. We don’t have that amount of time to wait for the federal government to really step up and do the work.
That means that right now we need a bottom-up strategy. We need cities to work toward investing in renewables at the local level and to support the workforce development needed to make that happen. Cities need to help green up their municipalities, green up their utilities, their schools, and their hospitals. We need the states to commit to strong targets.
In order for us to meet the transformation that we need in the Green New Deal, we’ve got to have the top-down and the bottom-up strategies: the federal level working to help transform and create the platform needed, and also the localities and the states to do the same.
GROSSMAN: I detest the political horse race type coverage of the Green New Deal (long on political speculation, short on relevant policy details) but given you have some experience getting unexpected legislation through a major governing body, I am curious what you think needs to happen to see it through? Considering your experience with coalition building and working to craft legislation, what are the important steps you feel can bring about the bold actions that are needed? How do we avoid getting bogged down in conflict among various stakeholders?
TRUONG: I’ve continued to grapple with that question in my work. I’m the youngest of 11 kids, and I feel like I was born in a circus, like I was born to build coalitions, because I just saw a whole lot of siblings fighting over everything. I grew up in Oakland during the crack years, and it was a time when there were a lot of gangs, there was a lot of trouble, and I saw a lot of fights in schools. Being in a home and in a community and in a space where there was always fighting taught me that I hate fighting. I always want to be focused on what we’re trying to accomplish
When people are fighting and shouting and they can’t hear each other, it’s the people who are the most vulnerable and who are most in need of support that are left behind. They’re forgotten and neglected. They’re the ones who suffer because we cannot get our acts together.
That experience as I was growing up is now many times worse on a national scale with our political and elected leaders. While the left and the right have been fighting, we have seen criminal justice problems slip between the cracks, and we have seen our planet burning up. California literally saw Paradise burned to the ground. Meanwhile, we still see people shouting over each other trying to get air time.
The Dream Corps and I have been focused on the solutions that we need at this moment. Who do we need to work with in order to make those solutions happen? Who’s ready to actually throw down and make some change? Because if we don’t, we’re going to see these continued problems in our communities. I’m going to see my family members losing 12 years of their lives because of the increased amounts of pollution and poverty. Those things are going to continue without end because people are fighting with each other, and I just can’t have it. I just can’t deal with it anymore. I’m done with it.
At the Dream Corps, we have been working to build partnerships with unlikely allies. For instance, last year we were able to help pass the First Step Act, which The New York Times said was the biggest criminal justice reform bill in a generation. That has led to giving more rights to incarcerated women, to unlocking and freeing people who have done their time and served their penalties, and are now able to rejoin communities much earlier than they had expected. We have been able to hold events in all 50 states calling for a day of empathy to support people who have been affected by the criminal justice system. People who are now moving forward with empathy, saying “Instead of fighting against each other, how do we fight with each other for a better future for all?”
We at Green For All have realized that this climate change conversation has been seen as a white conversation for too long, even while African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans are more directly impacted by these issues. Survey after survey is saying that these populations care even more because we are breathing in the polluted air and drinking the polluted water. Our team is making sure that we’re growing the community of people who realize their right to sit at the table of these conversations and to shape solutions.
For instance, we’re calling all artists to be part of this as part of our #fuelchange work. We’re having artists, hip-hop musicians and poets contribute to sharing the word about why climate change and tail-pipe emissions actually matter to us, and why and how we can be part of creating solutions.
We’ve been partnering with a bunch of amazing folks across the country. At the end of the day, if you’re tired of fighting and trying to shout at each other, you’re tired of the bickering and animosity and just want to work with other people who share your values, your solutions, and want to do something good in the world, we want to be one of the homes where you can find some of your peers to do that.
GROSSMAN: Is there anything else that you want to share with the community here in terms of the work Green For All is doing?
TRUONG: One thing we haven’t talked about yet is business. I’ve just come back from a few conversations with big and small businesses, and I think that there’s a bit of heartburn around businesses’ part in the Green New Deal. There’s been a profound lack of their voices, and I think that’s on both sides. We can do better at inviting business voices to be part of the conversation, and we need businesses to step up and take leadership around how they can help realize the dream of this Green New Deal.
When I’m in these conversations with my friends in the environmental sector and the social justice community space, there is some justified suspicion around big businesses. For far too long, we have doubled down and over-invested in businesses that have contributed to getting us into this mess. And there’s a belief that if they got us into this mess, they can’t get us out of it. But I think that even though that’s a justified concern, it’s over-attributed.
Right now, we have a lot of businesses that are actually trying to do good and to do better — from having stronger emissions targets, to hiring people that can diversify their voices and perspectives, to committing to their communities. We have seen businesses continue to green up their supply chains and continue to diversify the contrast they have to low-income communities. There are a lot of businesses that are trying to do better, but they can benefit from activists and leaders helping them figure out how they can go even further.
For folks who want to hear more examples, some of our friends at GreenBiz.com are chronicling the journey of businesses that have been trying to do better for a long time. I think we need their help. Nonprofits can only go so far. Leaders at the federal and state and local levels can only go so far.
Right now, when we have this scale of a pollution and poverty problem, when we’re dealing with the reality of 12 years left to deal with dramatically reducing pollution, we need businesses that have access to capital, that have access to supply chains, that have access to business acumen, that have access to shaping and influencing policymakers in ways others may not have, we need to work with businesses to meet the promise of this Green New Deal. I implore for us to make sure that we are not forgetting important sectors and important partners that can help us realize this goal.
I also want to note that my support and push to make sure businesses are at the table does not mean we should have unmitigated support for businesses just because they stamp green on their labels. There’s a lot of greenwashing out there; a lot of businesses want to capitalize on this new consumer demand for better business models and better business systems, and they slap on a green sticker and think that’s enough. That’s not enough. We want to make sure businesses have strong targets, strong regulations around hiring from the community, and that they’re paying workers a good wage and making sure that they can actually afford to live in their communities.
I am done with waiting for other people lead the conversation. Now it is our time. And in order for this to happen, we need all in.
Learn more about Vien Truong and her work by visiting The Dream Corps or by watching her keynote address to Bioneers. For more on the Green New Deal, check out Bioneers’ #GreenNewDeal page.
The late Terence McKenna was one of the most extraordinary personalities ever associated with visionary plants. One of the most gifted orators of the late 20th Century, he was a fascinatingly paradoxical figure: an absolutely charming but somewhat misanthropic mystic, a blindingly erudite genius who never achieved mainstream recognition, and a down-to-earth guy who advanced a range of astonishing prophetic scenarios. He brought verve and excitement to this field, and, since his tragic death in 2000, things have never been quite the same. Quite simply put, there will never be another like him. In this 1993 talk he initially delved into what was for him not his usual area of primary focus—our planetary environmental crisis, but in the end, Terence linked, in his inimitable voice, the fate of the biosphere to visionary plant use. Because time is so short, he argued, we need radically powerful means to communicate with the intelligence of the natural world because there has never been a time when hearing what that intelligence is trying to communicate has been more crucial, and sacred plants with long histories of shamanic use are, he argued, while not free of risks, the best tools for that job.
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With the illustrious anthropologist Francis Huxley of the renowned Huxley clan; a leading figure in Native American and American Studies, the late, beloved professor John Mohawk; and groundbreaking anthropological thinker and author Jeremy Narby. Practices by different Indigenous people around the world were labeled “shamanism” by anthropologists and dismissed as irrational superstition, but in the 20th century cultural observers began to see shamans in a new light, as creators of meaning. Are science and shamanism compatible? Is Indigenous knowledge safe for a modern, secular world?
The brilliant, award-winning contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Journalism professor and best-selling writer Michael Pollan, author most recently (May 2018) of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, had a fascinating conversation back in 2001 with renowned anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis on the co-evolution of people and plants. Michael explained the importance of gardening to human evolution and Wade shared his insights into the centrality of plants in cultures from the jungles of Borneo to the secret “zombifying” herbal mixtures of Haiti. (2001)
Jessica Neuwirth has spent her career fighting for human rights. She’s worked for Amnesty International and the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, and taught international human rights at Harvard. She’s also the founder and co-president of the ERA Coalition and a founder of Equality Now, both of which are working toward the Constitutional guarantee that a woman’s rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution are equal to those of a man.
Bioneers spoke to Neuwirth about the history of the Equal Rights Amendment and why pushing toward ratification is still important today.
The ERA Coalition commissioned a poll in 2015, and we found what previous polls over decades found: 80% of Americans think that we have equal rights in the Constitution. The first challenge is to close that information gap, because people think we already have it, and we actually don’t. I graduated college in 1982, the year the final deadline for the ERA expired. Anybody a little older than me usually remembers it, and people younger than me have no idea what it is.
As most people know, women got the vote in 1920, and the Constitution was amended. Right after that, a number of the suffragists developed the Equal Rights Amendment because they wanted women to have equal rights in all aspects of life, not just the vote, and felt the Constitution should be amended to reflect that. The ERA was first introduced in Congress in 1923, but it took a long time to build up momentum for it. In 1972, it passed two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate and was sent to the states for ratification. By 1982, 35 states had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment.
But you need three quarters, or 38 states to ratify, so we were just three states short. By many accounts of activists who worked so hard on this, it literally was just a handful of votes in a few states that made that difference. But the deadline expired, and the Amendment did not get into the Constitution.
Since 1982, it has been introduced in every single session of Congress. But most people don’t even know what it is because it’s never really been publicized. It doesn’t get a lot of visibility. Many congressional representatives sign on as co-sponsors, but it never moves. There’s never been a hearing. There’s never been a vote. It just sits there.
It’s been treated as symbolic and unnecessary, and that’s what we want to change — to make it real and to really try to get it out of Congress and into the Constitution. That’s our goal. In 2017 Nevada voted to ratify the ERA, and in 2018 Illinois followed suit with ratification of the ERA, bringing the number of ratified states to 37, just one state short of the 38 needed. In 2019 Virginia came very close to being this 38th state, failing by just one vote to get the bill passed. Other states including North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and Georgia are all racing to be the 38th state to ratify. These state actions have sparked new momentum in the campaign, and there is a bill in Congress to remove the 1982 deadline. ERA-related developments have been further fueled by the energy of the #MeToo movement, and constitutional equality now seems within our reach.
A very simple sentence constitutes the ERA: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Very hard to disagree with that. It’s simple, straightforward, and I think pretty non-controversial. It was a very bipartisan campaign.
Why do we need it? Well, here are a number of remedies that are not available to women who suffer from various forms of discrimination as a direct result of not having that Constitutional protection.
Many cases have been thrown out by the Supreme Court for failure to have a basis in the Constitution – violence against women cases, other forms of discrimination. As a matter of practical remedy, we really need it.
But I think we also need it as a matter of principle. I think all Americans — and by “all” I mean all women and all men — should want, and most do want, to see the Constitution really embody the human rights basic principles that we all believe in, and the first one is equality. That wasn’t the case when the Constitution was written. We all know that women were intentionally excluded, and that African Americans were intentionally excluded. Fights for those rights have made some progress over time, but they really need to be enshrined in the bedrock of our legal framework. That’s the idea.
There are lots of really tragic stories, but one that is especially timely for us is a story of campus sexual assault from 1994. A young woman named Christy Brzonkala’s story reads like any story that you could read today. As a freshman, she was gang raped by several varsity football players. She went to the school, she went to the state, but she couldn’t get justice.
Right around that time, Senator Joe Biden helped to pass the Violence Against Women Act, which included a provision that allowed access to federal courts for gender-based violence cases. She used that new provision to bring her case against the rapists and against the university. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, but it was thrown out. It wasn’t thrown out because it wasn’t gender-based violence. The judges said it fit within the scope of the Violence Against Women Act. The problem, they said, was the Act had no jurisdictional basis in the Constitution. They struck down that part of the Act, which then denied all other women subject to that form of gender-based violence access the federal court system for remedy.
That was in 1994, and I always wonder what would have happened if Christy Brzonkala had been able to prosecute her case and won, and the university had been held responsible. Who knows if that might have started a pattern of cases and a pattern of responsibility that would have helped us avoid what we have now, which is as a total epidemic of campus sexual violence. Because there wouldn’t be this culture of impunity if people could have gone to court and held universities accountable for failing to take action and failing to take these allegations seriously.
Here’s another example. The Supreme Court uses a lower standard to judge sex discrimination than it does for race and religious discrimination. The highest standard of review for race discrimination and religious discrimination cases is called “strict scrutiny,” but when a sex discrimination comes to the Supreme Court they use a lower standard called “intermediate scrutiny.” Why? That’s discrimination in judging discrimination! These layers of discrimination sound legalistic and obscure, but they actually affect the outcome of cases, which affect policies and practices and women’s lives.
Look at the Wal-Mart case, where a class action suit went up to the Supreme Court and was thrown out. The Supreme Court basically said even if workplace discrimination has been proven (by showing that in every single one of the thousands of Wal-Mart stores across the country, women were paid less and promoted more slowly) that evidence wouldn’t be even the tip of the iceberg of what would be needed to prove to make this case work. Why wouldn’t that be enough? If there is a statistical finding of discrimination in every single store for women being promoted more slowly and getting paid less? Why wouldn’t that be even the tip of the iceberg of what is needed? But that’s the way the Supreme Court has looked at these issues.
I have to be honest, when I wrote the book Equal Means Equal, even I was not that aware of the really horrendous things the Supreme Court has said about discrimination against women — and I’m a lawyer. If we put the ERA in the constitution, it covers so many different areas that are each associated with entire movements, like pregnancy discrimination, women in the workplace, gender-based violence, etc. They all come together, because they’re all manifestations of inequality.
When you think about how the law works in conjunction with social change, it’s a synergistic process. A case might push a social agenda forward, or a social revolution might push the law forward. They work hand in hand. I think people don’t see the potential for legal reform to help change things like closing the pay gap or ending gender-based violence. But if you can’t get a legal remedy, then it’s very hard to promote change.
The courts have been closed to many women who have suffered severe forms of discrimination and violence, and that is something that the Equal Rights Amendment would definitely change. It doesn’t mean that the day we have the ERA is the day we get equality, it just means that we’ve established the principle at the highest level of the law, and that has many ramifications. It has practical impact in terms of giving women remedies.
I don’t hear any opposition now. What I hear is: “What is the ERA?” People really don’t know what it is, and don’t really know why we need it.
That’s why I wrote the book, just go through some of these cases and show people why the ERA would make a difference. I think what happened is that the women’s movement moved on after 1982 and started to use whatever they could, other litigation tactics short of Constitutional reform, to bring about sex equality. Many laws have been put in place and the 14th Amendment has been stretched to try to incorporate some of the concerns of women.
The first time the 14th Amendment was ever used for discrimination against women was in the 1970s. The Amendment often makes people think we have equal rights. “Oh, equal protection under the law,” but it really has not been very helpful to women. Most of the legal protections women have don’t fall under the 14th Amendment, they fall elsewhere.
Lawyers who have tried to use the 14th Amendment have had some success. There has been progress on the legislative front and through litigation, but we still need the ERA. We want to take this moment of opportunity to kick it across the finish line because there’s no substitute for a Constitutional amendment. Whatever great legislation we have is riddled with loopholes, has been gutted by court interpretation, and can be rolled back any time a new Congress comes into office. We want something more permanent, and a Constitutional amendment would be that.
Most of my work prior to founding the ERA Coalition has been in the international women’s rights field, and a few years ago I started Donor Direct Action, a project of the Sisterhood is Global Institute working to strengthen front line women’s groups in countries such as Afghanistan, the Congo and Somalia. We’re very lucky to have Robin Morgan, its founder, and Gloria Steinem on our board and to have their vision of feminist solidarity — a global vision, really.
People often think we’re in much better shape from the point of view of gender equality than a lot of other countries, yet so many have elected women heads of state, and a long time ago. Countries like Rwanda have 50% women in Parliament, while we’re only at about 25%, which is the highest it’s ever been.
From the ERA point of view, many countries have equality provisions in their Constitution. It’s very, very common. In fact, U.S. foreign policy has strong-armed countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan into putting the exact same ERA provision in their constitutions. We diplomatically support countries that put quotas in for 33%, and we can’t even do 20% here. It’s very hypocritical. Women in other countries are often very surprised to find out that we don’t have these protections.
We are behind in many ways. Of course, not all ways, but I think most women and men would acknowledge we don’t have equality in this country. So many statistics tell us women make 79 cents on the dollar for every man makes, and less for Black and Hispanic women, 64 and 54 cents on the dollar, respectively. That’s not equality. Everybody knows we don’t have equal pay. Everybody knows we suffer from gender-based violence. There’s a lot of pregnancy discrimination. There are so many different forms of discrimination, so I think people know we don’t have equality.
For some further perspective, CEDAW is the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women or (in more user-friendly terminology) the International Bill of Rights for Women. It’s a United Nations treaty, and every country in the world has signed and ratified it except for Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Tonga, Palau and the United States. Those of us who have worked in the international women’s right movement are ashamed that our country has not signed on to this treaty that everybody else in the world accepts.
The treaty has quite a lot of provisions in it, and most of them are really very straightforward. One that has drawn some attention is the requirement to give women paid maternity leave. Every country in the world gives women paid maternity leave except four: Swaziland, Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and the United States of America
I can’t really defend that in any way, but that’s the status of it.
Anyone can go on our website, ERACoalition.org, and click on “advocacy”, find a map of the country, put in their zip code or click on their state, and see exactly who in Congress supports the ERA and who doesn’t. With one other click, they can write to that Congressperson.
That really, really helps, because our biggest problem is that none of these representatives have been hearing about the ERA. The moment they do hear about it, they sign onto it because they really have no reason not to. It’s just not something they’ve thought about or think is important to their constituents.
This what we want to change, and we’re using our website as an advocacy tool to really try and build the pressure we need to finally pass the ERA.
Learn more about the Equal Rights Amendment and the issues surrounding in a recent episode of Bioneers Radio with Jessica Neuwirth, Joan Blades and Kimberle Crenshaw.
A U.S. policy analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund, Charlie Jiang advocates for just climate solutions at the state and federal level. He was a key SustainUS youth delegate to the 2017 U.N. climate negotiations, organizes for climate justice in Washington, DC with 350 DC, and received a 2017 Brower Youth Award for co-leading a #NoDAPL divestment campaign in DC.
Jiang’s own history has been a massive influence on his life thus far. The son of Chinese immigrants, Jiang is familiar with the struggles involved with attaining the American Dream, and through his work he’s realized that our country’s promise falls short for too many—or is simply impossible. He wants to change that.
In his Bioneers 2018 keynote address, Jiang talks about his own experiences growing up in the US, the environmental and humanitarian crises we are currently facing, and what needs to be done to make the American Dream attainable for all.
Watch Charlie Jiang’s keynote address in full here.
View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.
My mom carried $300 in her pocket, and barely spoke a word of English when she immigrated to the US from China in search of the American Dream. She and my father believed that if they worked hard enough they could create a better life in America for themselves and for their kids.
But today that dream seems unattainable for too many, and as I have learned and witnessed, it always has been in a country founded on the injustices of slavery, genocide, patriarchy, and white supremacy. I’ve seen that for people in my generation the promise of the American Dream seems laughable in the face of police brutality, gun violence, deportations, unlivable wages, threats to water and Indigenous sovereignty, and climate change.
When I was little it seemed like we had all the time in the world, but in this era, time is running out. Today we face a choice. We can go down a path of denial rooted in a politics of fear, or we can choose to confront our legacy of racism and injustice, and forge a new vision for our nation, a new kind of dream in which everyone can lead their lives with dignity and grace, where all of us—whether a queer black woman from Baltimore or a working class family from the California’s Central Valley or a Chinese American kid from the South Side of Chicago—has a chance to thrive in communities that are healthy, safe, and just, with access to good healthcare, education, housing, and jobs, where the air is clean and the water is safe to drink, where women are believed and respected, and privileged men are held accountable, where communities can self-determine their own futures, and where pipelines and pollution are a thing of the past. This is the future we are called to create.
It’s not an easy path, not when our political system is held captive by billionaires and corporations who profit off of violence to workers and communities of color, not when there are still resource inequities in our own movements. But I believe we must try.
We face a crisis on a global scale. We need action for global climate justice, and we need concerted federal efforts to mobilize trillions, for a Green New Deal to stop climate change and create opportunities for millions of Americans in a new economy.
But it starts with our communities. It starts with you. And it starts with me, a son of Chinese immigrants, who grew up wanting to be a scientist, who became an organizer because I saw that I have a voice to give to a struggle for a new ideal for this nation.
So what can we do? First we must do what we need to do to process the trauma and grief in ourselves and our communities from the pain and damage that has already been inflicted. We are called in this time to be vulnerable and strong so we can hold space for the deep relationships, trust, and love that we need in ourselves and each other.
Second we have to vote. If our elected officials won’t prioritize the needs of millions of people over those of the wealthy few, then we must replace them with leaders who will. Knock on doors, make phone calls, help your neighbors get to the polls, and go vote.
Third, we have to organize to build solutions in our own communities, and in doing so ensure that communities of color, Indigenous People, young people, leaders on the frontlines of the crises we face, who know what need to be done, have the resources, access, and power to lead the way. It’s already happening.
In Washington, DC, we’re building a diverse movement to divest from Wells Fargo and create a public bank that will promote a just economy for the district, not pipelines and private prisons. In Chicago, a statewide coalition secured funding for a solar job training program for formerly incarcerated individuals and youth in the foster system. In California, youth and frontline communities are demanding the governor phase out fossil fuels for good, a movement led in part by dear friends of mine from the organization SustainUS.
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My parents came to this country and dreamed they could build a better life. It’s a dream I grew up believing in, and it’s up to us, to all of you and to me, to get to work to make that dream fully possible.
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