A Mixed Bag* -- Cervine, Stageberg & Moody

Poetry, Story, Novella -- Reprint from the 4 November, 2021 Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, © 2021, Wyndy J. Knox Carr

I was getting ready for Seasonal Affective Disorder (the “Winter Blues”) by stocking up on a variety of writers and genres, in spite of most of the dry, sunny California "winters" I’ve experienced since 2012. Long-time residents tell me it used to rain for four months straight in The Bay Area, and they had lots of time to curl up and read. Anyway,

People finally attended an in person (outdoors) poetry reading August 29th for Sixteen Rivers Press with readers Stella Beratlis and Dane Cervine. What fun! 

It was in the garden behind the Northbrae Community Church on the Alameda, where both readers were excellent, and all well-managed; but as a Northern California poet who “lived in Berkeley on Bienvenue” during grad school, Cervine donated BTx a copy of The World is God’s Language: Prose Poems.

Thank you! As I lazed in the shade of the warm afternoon, his “kind of blended American haiku and haibun in prose-poem format” lifted my tech-befuddled brain out of my weary body and quickly made my cellphone irritating, but totally irrelevant. The present moment, as the Buddhists say, took over, as Cervine seemed to be in each of his short prose poems.

His title comes from Simone Weil,* another mystic he admires, but remembered more for her philosophically and politically minded writings and activities. His poems are clear human images taken “from life;” stripped down into real, contemporary, but also beatific “Histories,” “Bali,” “World” and “Colors of the Underworld.”

Looking in and looking out from a centered place is what spiritual and creative practices give us all, and gives Cervine a place of words and heart to stand in while small-minded “Gated Communities” fight over who will have “the privilege of being the last to starve” outside. 

The Big Picture is his universe, expressed in authentic images from his intimately human and caringly connected mind and life. He is so bare, so courageous, I cannot help but admire his work and hope to seek out his other six books.

Weil had a mystical experience at the Porziuncola, St. Frances' chapel just outside the town of Assisi in Umbrian Italy, where I also felt overcome by the power of contemplation. (The tour guide had to drag me out of one of the pews to "keep up with the group," I was so transported.) The tiny Romanesque chapel is now surrounded by a huge, Baroque basilica, but the chapel of Santa Maria Degli Angeli is like a storehouse radiating energy. 

I just had to reproduce the photo here during the Nativity Solstice season! 

I have great respect for Sixteen Rivers Press, “a sustainable, shared-work publishing collective run by and for Bay Area poets.” We Berkeley poets who hang out at cafes like Nefeli (NOW CLOSED! Oh no! "merged with A & V" Wonderful baklava and espresso…) and read at poetry readings there and  Le Bateau Ivre” (The Drunken Boat – still open – Thursday through Sunday! Patio seating, and 25% indoors) on Telegraph Avenue, deeply appreciate their support of poetry, writing, writers, independent bookselling, distribution and publishing.

Bruce Moody, Berkeley poet and writer, toys with such feelings in “The Jaunt,” the last and perhaps most engrossing and climactic of the 26 fine “works of regional prose storytellers” in the Carquinez Review 2020: Writings from the Carquinez Strait Shoreline Communities. Blind reviewed by a sagacious selection panel, edited and published by the Benicia Literary Arts with beautiful photography and design, this volume is truly a marvel of what a dedicated team of professionals, semi-professionals and community members can do.

Mr. Moody wrote in his BTx poem “Trompe 2016,” “Because self-pity is the sole noise available to the duped,/ we whined for compassion./ And tromped ourselves.” But “The Jaunt” is a third person narrative that goes to the edge of thour delusionary blunders of humanity and self-ignorance, but then knows somehow, a more authentic way, true-to-self-and-thour-world and then returns, relatively unscathed and newly whole in the person of the observed observer, “He.”

And that self is very honest, and the self is really real, in a real Northern California place, person and time that rings with both questioning inquiry and the risky verisimilitude of being on the edge. I won’t say any more than that, except Moody did a fine job, and people should look for the Carquinez Review 2020 on the Benicia Literary Arts site. Holiday time is almost here! Treat yourself or treat a friend…

Mia Kirsi Stageberg’s novella, Everything For the Beloved, published by Berkeley’s Beatitude Press in 2010, was another real gem. It’s from another new sub-genre of writing, Creative Nonfiction, married to the old epistolatory novel that gives voice to seven of her blood ancestors and their/her intertwining short narratives and points of view in a mere 50 pages.

Its depth, honesty and intimate, homespun-to-contemporary lyricism just “knocked my socks off,” Rashomon in chorus, or a Scandinavian-American mini There, There. The idea that this little, dark-jacketed booklet could grab me to the core was astounding. So glad she sent it to me after meeting me at the Ralph Walbridge memorial. I just love the literary crossroads of Berkeley and the Bay Area.

Sixteen Rivers is having an online benefit reading through eventbrite 3 p.m. this Sunday November 7th, too, and are sponsoring a Youth Poetry Contest. See their sixteenrivers.org site. Be aware, be present, be humane…

 

*“The bag referred to here is a hunting bag containing the different kinds of animals and birds that the hunter has shot.” Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2012

**For Weil, "The beautiful is the experiential proof that the incarnation is possible". The beauty which is inherent in the form of the world (this inherency is proven, for her, in geometry, and expressed in all good art) is the proof that the world points to something beyond itself; it establishes the essentially telic character of all that exists. Her concept of beauty extends throughout the universe:

"[W]e must have faith that the universe is beautiful on all levels...and that it has a fullness of beauty in relation to the bodily and psychic structure of each of the thinking beings that actually do exist and of all those that are possible. It is this very agreement of an infinity of perfect beauties that gives a transcendent character to the beauty of the world...He (Christ) is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe".

She also wrote that "The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter".[72]

Beauty also served a soteriological function for Weil: "Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul." It constitutes, then, another way in which the divine reality behind the world invades our lives. Where affliction conquers us with brute force, beauty sneaks in and topples the empire of the self from within.

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (28 November 2021) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil "Simone Weil." (5 December 2021)

Shoulders to the Wheel, Holiday Hugs All Around

 Out of My Shoes: a Memoir by Meredith Stout and Book of Itzolin: Life and Works of Itzolin Valdemar García, collected and edited by his Mother, Mia Kirsi Stageberg, are models for women putting thour shoulders to the wheel of change.

The ingrained, habitual sufferings of women, mothers, girls and thour children are degrading, destructive and murderous. Creation spirituality theologian Matthew Fox calls thour destruction of Mother Earth “matricide,” and poet Jane Hirshfield calls it something like “biospheric suicide.” The effects on thourselves, thour children and societies continues to be onerous, in spite of some scientific, mechanical progress that has “made our lives ‘easier.’” But at what cost?

I asked a woman neighbor of mine “So what happens when we sit in our apartments feeling sorry for ourselves?”

She replied, “I don’t know.” So I said,

“Nothing!”

Nothing happens. Nothing changes at all, and we just habituate the misogyny and destruction all around us into thourselves.

 

Stout, publishing through Driftword Press, tells the story of her life from her 1950s sheltered childhood in Altadena, where her brother got to go to an expensive college prep school, but she and her sister went to public schools. Their Mom said, “Aren’t you glad you got to have horses instead?” The girls agreed dutifully. Until they didn’t. Through her Berkeley faculty wifehood, she nodded and agreed, drank and gave dinner parties, but then picked herself up, took a job, moved out and tells a gripping and powerful story of friendship, self-examination and finding her true callings.

Stageberg’s collection of her son’s poetry, novella and other writings, Book of Itzolin: Life and Works of Itzolin Valdemar Garcia, with photographs and artwork published by Tarsal Press, is difficult for me to integrate, a little too “close to home.” Two of my four children are “not yet past their Saturn Returns,” depression, alcohol and drug abuse run in thour families. 

They are all gifted creators and passionate activists, just like Itzolin was. Itzolin took his own life in his late 20s, but left a moving and expressive body of artistic and literary work showcased in this volume.

As “womenwivesandmothers,” we’ve been conditioned to use thour excess “lovebeautyandjoy neuropeptides” in service to others, as well as thour bodies and minds. This would be OK if everybody in modern society valued, uplifted and emulated that, but we don’t.

Thour skills in caregiving, nurturing the young, empathy, sensuality and communication are often manipulated for marketing profits and others’ power, relegated to essential but disrespected low-paying employments and “greenwashed” into exhausting, burnout-ridden volunteer work. Thour families, communities and world are diminished and damaged.

It’s taking a long time to transform thour way out of it.

I’m persisting in using my invented personal plural pronoun thour because I think verbalizing the lack of divisions is one of the ways to “transform thour way out of it.” If we keep on therapizing “my Mother made me a homosexual,” “my brother made me a perpetual victim” et cetera, we’re just sitting in our rooms “feeling sorry for ourselves.”

That’s why I chose an email address nohkauznohgunz. No cows, no guns: the stereotypes of passive women and violent men, Warring and Whoring, we’ve been stuck with all of these years. Noh Theater is a ritual acting out embedded in the culture, and I think we need to act differently and practice different behaviors if we’re going to evolve, survive and change. Let’s hug thourselves, hug our kids, friends, community, Earth and elders for the Holidays.

The Machinery of Sleep: Poems

The Machinery of Sleep by Patrick Cahill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Machinery of Sleep: Poems by Patrick Cahill is another book beautifully published by Sixteen Rivers Press, “a sustainable, shared-work publishing collective run by and for Bay Area poets.” Cahill did a Grad Literature seminar at Cal here and did research for his dissertation at Bancroft Library, hung out at cafes like Nefeli (NOW CLOSED! Oh no! Wonderful baklava and espresso…) and read at poetry readings there. 

“The last poetry reading I attended before the pandemic was at Le Bateau Ivre” (The Drunken Boat – still open – Thursday through Sunday! Patio seating, and 25% indoors) he said, on Telegraph Ave.

I wish I loved his poems as much as other Sixteen Rivers Press books, but his poetry isn’t as “accessible,” a more etheric taste. As the editor of Ambush Review and a skilled craftsman, he’s certainly been published and admired, but the clever word play and obscure references hide him, hide any voice with excesses of mind. He leans hard on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, very popular at Cal, but I often don’t “get” that sub-genre, either.

“An apocalyptic goat plus an apoplectic owner…Salt marsh harvest mouse. Salt march harvest mouth. Malt harsh marvest south...A word with a thousand meanings, the same meaning in each of a thousand words…” After hearing the City Lights Diane DiPrima Memorial Reading, full and ripe with her direct, actionable statements of fact, feeling and self in the midst of passionate humanity; I look at his first 28 pages and say “Right. OK.” Too much time in the library? 

“Drift Prairie,” on page 29, has some actual places, objects and almost descriptions in it, so I can locate myself (Dakotan to Minnesotan) and his poem on the “Coteau des Prairies.” 

“Killdeer…Against the black furrows a flurry of late stubborn snow…middle-distant plowed disorder… bowls of glacial melt, glacier’s pothole ghosts” makes more sense, both to him, I think, and to me.

The “you” has appeared in section Two, and by section Three, he puts more meat on the bones of his language, “There where the story and desire begin.” In fact, if any word appears more than three times in this book, it is desire. That’s what brings his words and thought-activities into the present moment, otherwise it’s kind of disembodied, out in space, technical chicanery.

It’s kind of getting to actual relationships, but still falls back on extreme self-consciousness of verbiage, obscure references: “Augustine…the Isle of Thanet,” and even ones I recognize from Comparative Literature – French (Poetry) class in grad school and Boudicca from my obsession with Celtic Goddesses and feminist heroines. But not everyone is “in on the game.”

“Days Like This,” I would call a “real poem,” as are “Reality Made Easy, “Gone Astray,” “El Autobús” and certainly “The Dictator Reflects.” 

He’s almost autobiographical, I think, in “Big Dog” when he says “eccentricity’s just his cover,…But resignation’s just his cover…” and then “compulsive observation’s just his cover…Though reason too is just another cover.”

Then there’s the lurking cynicism and disaster. The seduction of apocalypse just around the corner. I keep thinking of Pennie Opal Plant when asked “what can we do about (climate/ecological/political) disaster?” she replied, simply, “I will not live in fear.” 

Rootless intellectuals and the guilty privileged, I feel sorry for, but I will not take on thour emotional atmosphere of distanced arrogance bandaging up thour terror and despair. Been there, done that. Doesn’t work for me any more… 

Then I noticed on the dust jacket that “He received his Ph. D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz,” which explains a lot.

Sixteen Rivers is having an online benefit reading through Eventbrite 3 p.m. this Sunday November 7th, 2021 too, and are sponsoring a Youth Poetry Contest. See their sixteenrivers.org site.  

Be aware, be present, be humane…

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The Power of the People Won’t Stop

Published 7 October, 2021, The Berkeley Times.

The Power of the People Won’t Stop: Legacy of the TWLF (Third World Liberation Front) at UC Berkeley, A Collection of Writings marked a 50-year anniversary (2019) of the largest student strike in Berkeley’s history. “Without courage, it is impossible to live up to your values,” Maya Angelou said, and all of these individuals have shown up, stepped up and spoken up so that their values of social justice and education grounded in reality and truth could and can be lived here at Cal and in the community, the world at large.

EastwindBooks of Berkeley on University just west of Shattuck produced a timely assemblage edited by Harvey Dong and Janie Chen, with historical photos by Douglas Wachter. It brings together representatives of the “hyphenated” student groups of 1969 -- African-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American and Native American – who led the white students, diverse faculty and community members who supported them; just as these unnecessarily divided, oppressed and marginalized peoples have voiced another shout for unity and support as white supremacy, police brutality and violent misogyny have been re-exposed to public view.

They won concessions, promises of self-determination and autonomy for their curricula, faculty and staffing in a unified Department of Ethnic Studies; but have fought a battle against divisions, cutbacks and institutional disempowerment ever since. Many of the leaders, participants and organizers are interviewed and tell their stories here, but contemporary students and organizers who’ve shared their thoughts, research and reflections are impressive as well. (photo, archival - the arrest prior to the beating of Manuel Delgado by CA Highway Patrol officers)

One of my favorite parts is “Lessons Learned from the Third World Strike,” by Filipino social worker/ community organizer and attorney Lillian Fabros, from Salinas, CA:

“1 – Build Coalitions Before You Need Them…

2 – Race Matters – …No race has “made it” until all races have made it.

3 – Class Matters – Never Forget Class Background…

4 – Women Hold Up Half the Sky… (active involvement, leadership, service, direction, persistence…)

5 – Organize, Organize, Organize. It is difficult for individuals on their own to bring about change. And you can never stop organizing…(As Rickey Vincent says, “the opponents of Ethnic Studies have been diligently studying what happened and working on how to devise means to contain & eliminate the progress made back then.” p. 118)

6 – The Journey is as Important as the Goal. It is arguable that because the strike ultimately ended in a moratorium, there was no victory for Third World students…the victory was the jumpstarting of (Asian American) activism over the past decades…The strike coalesced a longing for justice that expressed itself in multiple personal and professional endeavors.

7 – Find the Goal YOU are Passionate About… We need a broad range of skills for people…because they will remain committed to helping the communities when they remember their roots. There are different paths to furthering justice.”

My other “favorite” is the  “Ethnic Studies Historical Legacy” by Maria E. Ramirez and Nina Genera, which encapsulates the painful, bitter truths of world histories of genocide, kidnapping, slavery, disenfranchisement and other forms of oppression and suffering inflicted upon BIPOC-(W), which continue to this day. (Photo, Ethnic Studies at Sather Gate, Third World Strike by Fotor)

We can’t let defensiveness and denial “stop” us. Chew on and swallow the WHOLE bitter pill of historical truth. THEN -- It will take a whole lot of individual and collective Showing Up, Stepping Up, Stepping Back, Speaking Up, Listening Up and Acting Up to actually accomplish the global tasks before us.

We have it in us to heal…

 (Photo - Indigenous Peoples Day Celebration, Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, 2021)

Mission Statement, University of California, Berkeley Ethnic Studies Department: "The Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley is committed to the comparative study of racialization and indigeneity within the Americas, as well as between the U.S. and other nations. We seek to understand race and racism as “moving targets” that undergo mutations or evolve, and to recognize the complexities of the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, religion, and other systems of difference and axes of power. Our approaches to these issues interrogate the relationship of social structure to those of literary and cultural practices, and in so doing question and challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries and assumptions. In addition to grounding our scholarly work in the concrete situations of people of color, we also use a methodological framing that emphasizes both the structural dimensions of race and racism (social, political, and economic inequalities and struggles against them) and the associated cultural dimensions (literary, artistic, musical and other forms of humanistic expression). Our scholarly concerns are explicitly linked to the development of critical knowledges and are informed by a commitment to social change and decolonization."

 The Berkeley Times, "Knox Book Beat."(c) Wyndy J. Knox Carr, 2021.
 

 

FOG AND LIGHT: San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets

 

Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here by Diane Frank
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a place! That’s just what I had to say when we came to visit my Aunt Dawn and Uncle Jim and played hide and seek with our cousins in the row houses with the arched doorways and tuck-under garages of the foggy Sunset District in the Baby Boomer days. Diane Frank, a former resident of Berkeley, shepherds and showcases 64 wonderful poets’ works into this kaleidoscope of words, ideas, images and experiences.

FOG AND LIGHT: San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here drifts in on the evening, a stately and specifically situated paean to the “City by the Bay.” This collection lingers and holds us with this place’s difficulty, delight and dreamlike human, desert and ocean dramas.

Even Lawrence Ferlinghetti gets into the act, in “Dog:”
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with…
something to say
about reality
and how to see it
and how to hear it…

And Joan Gelfland responds in “The Ferlinghetti School of Poetics:”

Ferlinghetti’s words sink, weighted
On the business end of an invisible fishing line,
Dredging last nights’ dream to surface, gasping for air
Shivering like some catfish
Eyes bulging, wet lake water dripping off its scales.
The knife of memory slices open
That dream, finds me on haunted streets,…

Is the skill of life just keeping on
All the gears oiled, the doors open?
Even if the past keeps drowning and the knifed open
Dream fish still swims around?

The “many other celebrated poets” who editor Frank includes also craft images and sensations that ring beautifully true “through their eyes.” Some are specifically located, like Heather Saunders Estes’ “San Francisco, 14th Avenue:” (Outer Sunset and the Pacific Ocean)

The expanse of ocean
is in perpetual conversation
with the mutable sky.

(And then she responds:  )

In unexpected urban quiet
I pause on the narrow overlook –
thirsty for salt air and freedom.

Berkeley-related teachers, salonistes, residents and former Cal students Alison Luterman, Marianne Betterly, Stewart Florsheim, Joseph DiPrisco, Susie Meserve, Jane Underwood, Alejandro Murguía, Jack Hirschman and Joan Gerstein populate these pages. Even the prolific pedagogue Kathleen McClung is the wife of the Community Minister at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists. 

Once a resident of Cow Hollow, Katherine Hastings gave The City a voice in answer to the “smooth-coated and swift” fog in her elegant "Clouds" excerpts:

Silver melt of sorrow’s opposite,
brush my waiting beneath the cypress
cleaved and swept, perpetually
receiving. Hold open your palm
Droplets gather fragrance from the shore
Torrential mist!
You are the poetry and the tongue
of my hills

Not all are lyrical and landscape, however, just like the place. One of my favorites is Robin Lim’s “Daughter of a Cracked Dragon Teacup from Chinatown:” 

…San Francisco … My daughter learned her Asian heritage
in your cement and sidewalk flower cracked dragon district.
Pregnant with her, I fought a cop,
for my right to park. He wanted my space
for “Official Business.”
Official business! This is just your lunch break?
Go find your own parking place! We all gotta eat. …

I grew so proud that the knives in my heart
from being beat up as a small kid because “Your mama’s a ni--er!”
flew back to hell. Even my scars softened.
I anticipated earth tremors. …

That cop I fought, he called me, “F---ing Dragon Lady.”
I was, I am, prideful. I don’t suffer insults anymore.

Right now, and today is one message; but also lots of specifically Bay Area poignant memories, like Meg Pokrass’ “Rice Paper and Luck:”
… How happy we were to know that world existed,
Lining up at the tofu truck, holding fingers.

And Karen Poppy’s “Marina Safeway, San Francisco for Armistead Maupin” March 25, 2019:
…In Marina Safeway, back in the day, before tech
millionaires, before the impending influx of more, …
I’d have roller-skated my way between high pyramids
of avocadoes and bananas – myself high – not waiting
for their ripeness, not asking their cost, or mine.
Woken up blissful with anyone, not fearing death.

That Angel had not yet arrived here, unrolling a river,
merciless and vast, on which you saw all your friends
float by: wasted to bones, so young and afraid, dying
one after another. Beautiful, then gone. Just gone.
Whitman, Lorca, these are your dead, your children.
Do not turn from them. The Bay is wider than a river.
Is that optimism or sorrow, America lost even then?
As we look forward, look back, was San Francisco?

And here’s a wry and hilarious essence in Michael Angelo Tata’s “Tenderloin Darlings:”
…Blood or Kool-aid? Poop
or avocado? The sidewalks
are always rife with mystery…

Summations and ponderings like Chris Cole’s “San Francisco Told Me to Write You a Letter,” dance through inner-outer description, and then:

the creases of your problems
fit perfectly
into the folds of my jacket …

and i have not yet forgotten
the face of my father
the way i became liquid
when you touched me
and stone
when you didn’t …

if i could,
i would keep the memories i want
and forget the ones i don’t.
but since i can’t,
i’ll just keep them all.

I’d like to quote many of the poems here in their entirety, so just go buy the book at your local independent bookseller, like Mrs. Dalloway’s or Eastwind or Pegasus or Sleepy Cat or Moe’s. Marianne Betterly’s “The Pleine Air Toilette of Madame X” is one of them, a perfect character study in two pages and three short lines; Lynne Barnes “The Call of the West” is a praise-song to “this people-plashed cove at the edge of creation,” and you’ll take home mini-portraits of neighborhood families and adventures, epistolatory poems, elegies, prose poems, lyric, pure imagist, sonnets, odes, praise songs for Oya, diversity, dignity and endurance; humor and lamentation.
Often I heard prophetic warnings: like Jack Hirschman on the “quiet glory” of Greta Thunberg and other “women…who can, / at any apt moment of injustice,/ become thunders of bluntness…/ resonating with “How dare you?!”

Personal/political condemnations like Jodi Hottel’s “Shikata Ga Nai:”

Means
it can’t be helped …
a tacit agreement
to adopt the government jargon:
relocation and internment,
not concentration or prison camp, …
Shikata ga nai means
End of discussion.
I don’t want to talk about it.
There’s nothing more to say.

“16th & Valencia” by Alejandro Murguía:
We were tired of living from the scraps of others
We were tired of dying for our own chunk of nothing
And I saw this barrio as a freight train
a crazy Mexican bus careening out of control
a mutiny aboard a battleship
and every porthole filled with anger
And we were going to stay angry
And we were not leaving
Not ever leaving
El corazón del corazón de La Misión
El Camino Real ends here

But I’m going to leave you with the end of the poem by Thomas Centollella, “Accumulated Knowledge,” which you must get the book for in order to read the first seven-eighths of:
I would like to say we were drunk in love, and went on to see
the better side of thirty – and forty and fifty. I would like to
say any number of things I wish were true. Don’t ask me what
happened
to the Toronado, both car and bar, or slow dancing to slow jazz
while time and its terrors take a back seat. Or how the night
and the day will take turns moving us, whether tenderly or
gingerly,
around a black and blue room someone named the world.

 

Frank, Diane, editor, (2021) FOG AND LIGHT: San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, Blue Light Press, 1st World Publishing, San Francisco, Fairfield and Delhi.


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A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom

 A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom by Huston Smith, Edited and prefaced by Phil Cousineau

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

From Congress to the United Nations, Indigenous and native people are calling for peace, rights, reconciliation, restoration of land, water, “All Our Relations” and/or some kind of just recompense for these failures. Our pressure from migrants fleeing industrial farming corporations, their bulldoze-and-burn techniques, maquiladora slave-labor camps, dictators and funded wars could be pulled back if we listened to the moral balance of their stories, histories and the balanced relationships with the earth from which they came.

       With any luck and good wisdom, we can ALL learn from these truth-tellings to blend the edges of “fiction” with “history” and cleave to a center which is humane, spiritual, material and changing. This “gravitation” to a unified, healthful center is elucidated by longtime Berkeley resident Huston Smith’s A Seat at the Table: In Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom, edited and prefaced by Phil Cousineau. He quotes Gene Thin Elk (Lakota, 1994, p.119) “We have, at the very core of our being, more power than anything human kindness has ever made ever since the beginning of time…We can, in any given second, start that healing process and walk a healing road."      

       Vine Deloria Jr., author of God is Red: A Native View of Religion and The World We Used to Live in: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men said in 1979, “The fundamental factor that keeps Indians and non-Indians from communicating, is that they are speaking about two entirely different perceptions of the world.” (p. xviii) 

       Smith, in conversation with Anishinaabe activist and politician Winona LaDuke, responded to one of her questions about world religions by saying “the unique contribution of the Indigenous peoples is to focus on this point of mutual relatedness,” (p. 52) and she “vigorously described this way of conducting oneself in the world.”   

       She said the name for her nation was “the land of the people,” “But it also means the land to which the people belong…In all our stories, in our oral history, we say this is where the giant went to sleep, or this is where the great river was made. All those stories are contained in the land itself, and they are not contained elsewhere.” (ibid.) 

       “It’s not about looking back – it’s about being on your path – staying on the path the Creator gave you,” (p. xx) and to “live in accordance and respect to the Akin, the Earth that cares for us, which is our Mother. That is what we are taught in our community.” (p. 52)

       Cousineau says, “Along with the recovery of lost land and revenues comes the revitalizing of what many elders call the “Good Red Road,” the spiritual path that emphasizes the community and the great web of life.” (p. xviii)  

It is painful to see and own up to the bitter truths of the Gold Rush and settler California Genocide, discoveries of residential school children taken from their families to be abused and neglected, dying far from home; and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) and girls; raped, abducted and "disappeared" even now by residents of the "man camps" of the resource extractors of West and Upper Midwest. 

       The lost children and wise adults who see the Earth sinking under her human burdens are turning to old ideas and stories of ecological and community balance and wisdom; the Elders who experience, repeat and remember them and the old “songs” celebrating "the great web of life."  

        The process of storytelling is the oldest of human oral traditions that encompass culture, ethics, religion, history, family and all parts of Natural History: geology, geography, botany, zoology and more. We circle around back to a worldview where dreams, songs and visions of interconnectedness are held in the highest esteem; a worldview where ALL is held in balance by each part working together harmoniously, even in the midst of change, BECAUSE of change. Because of creative and natural gifts of curiosity, learning and sharing “songs.”

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