The Beadworkers, Stories by Beth Piatote

The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Author Beth Piatote's book shows us clear truth of Indigenous survivals in a hostile world which has mistaken their way of life and individual lives as "hostile" and inferior. Piatote, a Nez Perce and an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Berkeley, gathered a packed house at the Tuesday night Ohlone Café University Press Bookstore on Bancroft Way for her reading of parts of The Beadworkers, recently released by Counterpoint Press, another Berkeley endeavor. We munched “the first foods of that place” and drank dark herbal teas as Beth read and Café host Vincent Medina gave a quick historical background of the place, people, language and its foodstuffs.

It was the day after an Alameda County Superior Court judge turned away a quick approval process for the planned development on the historical West Berkeley Shellmound, halting the bulldozers for perhaps another five years, in recognition of the site’s “cultural heritage.” Cultural heritage is the foundational material of Piatote’s book, expressed in beautiful, funny and poignant characters and their tales and lives in poetry, story and a short play.

Antíkoni crafts a rewriting of the Antigone story around the seizure and possession of “thousands of ancestors’” remains “held across the street” in the anthropological “collections” of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, confronting Kreon as an “apple” (red on the outside and white on the inside) who has bargained away her “outmoded” respect for the bodies of their ancestors. He has taken what he sees as “the only path to power” “Through diligence and obsequious posture,” ignoring both justice and their community, as represented by a chorus of the legend-telling Aunties. Antíkoni, her brother and the Aunties defy him with immediate action and timeless legends of the interconnectedness of all life on Mother Earth.

Language, family, land, cyclical returns, collective care and labor illuminate these tales of loss and revitalization, resilience, humor and attention. Prayer, ways of expressing the aesthetics of “We are those people from that place,” and the “adaptability” and “continued practice” for the forms their culture and communities hold flow through her work, inspired by Indigenous “tactile working together” from beading a sash to protecting the waters of North America and the world for the salmon and at Standing Rock as well.

All Our Relations! Aho!

Kreon’s son says to him, “you remain an Indian. And an Indian is no one without his Tribe.” Truth told. A very good collection. More to come, please!

Water Protectors Camp 1 Dec 2016 reutersmedia.net

The Berkeley Times, 9 January, 2020, ©2020 Wyndy J Knox Carr



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Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese American Rights by Charles Wollenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese-American Rights, Charles Wollenberg, former Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of History at Berkeley City College, sounds unnerving alarms recurring in the present as well. Wollenberg states that his “argument is that the United States Constitution is not self-starting; it needs human intervention to transform its noble words and principles into concrete reality.”

A researcher and writer of Berkeley: A City in History in 2008, Wollenberg scrupulously followed attorney Wayne Collins’ defenses of “the rights and liberties of the West Coast’s Japanese and Japanese American population,” and drew a good-sized crowd to the eclectic and elegant temple of creativity that is the ACCI Gallery (Arts & Crafts Cooperative Inc.), 1652 Shattuck Ave. Our curiosity was not disappointed.

Mr. Wollenberg explained that Fred Korematsu was one of the irascible but deeply persistent and committed Collins’ defendants, as was Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a U.S. citizen unwillingly captured in Japan and forced to read radio scripts as one of several “Tokyo Rose” voices, with whom he pursued citizenship reinstatement and pardon for over 20 years. Collins was connected to the defense, release and eventual recompense for thousands of detainees at Tule Lake detention camp and elsewhere on the West Coast.

They survived years of discrimination encumbered, interned, threatened with deportation and/or disenfranchised by public fear and Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, echoing racialized past U.S. domestic legal wrongs through post- 9/11 anti-Muslim attacks and our present Southern border panic and inhumanity.
Irish-American Wayne Mortimer Collins mobilized not only his defendants, but whole communities of volunteers to work for their rights and personal dignity, inspiring civil rights lawyers and social justice advocates well into the 21st Century.

Waiting for Registration 1942

Collins died in 1974, but by that time Dorothea Lange’s exhibit of photos of the 1942 initial removal and incarceration had been presented by the California Historical Society and toured the country, significantly moving public and government opinion.
In 1983 a U.S. Commission “unanimously concluded that the policy of removal and incarceration was unnecessary, unconstitutional, and motivated by racism and political expediency.”
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!


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The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America During World War II

by Mary Jo McConahay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In The Tango War, Mary Jo McConahay uncovers this neglected, generally unknown history of “the competition between the Allies and the Axis” for land, resources and political dominance in captivating detail. As a veteran journalist traveling worldwide and posted to cover wars in Central America and the Middle East for 30 years, this graduate of Cal Berkeley gives us a "masterful" and compelling rendering by not only describing key events, but by following political and individual persons involved in governing, map-making, aeronautics, rail and road-building, resource-hunting, diplomacy, propagandizing, spying and fighting battles.

McConahay and Maya Sapper

They were escaping, filming and doing things as unheard of as rounding up Japanese Peruvians to deliver to FDRs detention camp in Texas, turning away ocean liners of European Jewish emigrants in Havana or sinking U-boats and Italian submarines in the Caribbean. Over a vast territory in our own hemisphere, “a distance of 6,640 miles from the Rio Grande…to the Argentine Antarctic,” action and human drama roils in the background of her history as smoothly as a Bogart and Bacall script.
This is the book to read if you never did figure out which side of the continent Chile and Argentina are on, where the rubber, oil and Panama Canal are exactly; colonial and imperialist heartlands, heroes and landscapes; what the U.S.A. really did and did not do.

McConahay describes curving Amazons of intrigues, alliances, courageous acts and vile betrayals. In some of the most shocking cases, mass murderers brought along the “Fourth Reich” and its hatred of communists, resolving to settle quietly working for Bayer, Krupp or Volkswagen in Central and South America or backing fascist dictators.

Hollywood film crews and Disney animators explored and exploited the favelas and carnivals of Rio for U.S. PR, whole neighborhoods of urban European Jews bought up and settled in the pampas to raise alfalfa and cattle, celebrating the remainder of their holy days in peace. Who knew?
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!

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Judy Wells' Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West

Dear Phebe by Judy Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judy Wells’ Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West, resurrects her ancestors in a poetry and prose reimagining of her great-grandmother and great aunts and uncles’ lives, culled from a trove of letters found in the 21st Century which were sent to Phebe before and after she came West from Massachusetts. Wells’ work is an exposition of the pioneer wife’s existence after she moved to Walnut Creek in 1865 as described in family letters, but poignantly reconstructed by Wells from the 21st Century. It’s a beautiful book from Crockett, California’s Sugartown Publishing, not light, but profoundly moving in a “real-life” way. “Delia,” she has one character say, “your pride in teaching/ gives you money and power/ to change your life.” True then as now!
Not exactly “mail-order brides,” the three sisters were highly sought after helpmeets, courted by dozens of suitors. The dangers, joys and losses of their young wife-and-motherhood and maturation and in her great-uncle’s grim Civil War history appear materially in Wells’ own life as she holds her grand-nephews, Nathaniel and Damon; and then as she recites “the names of my dead in the last year.” It is all fabric of the same cloth as she bluntly observes:
“I want to accept death
though I do not accept death.
I want to be courageous
though I am often fearful.”
It makes me want to read some of her eleven other poetry books and prose, including I Have Berkeley and The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon, co-edited with Marsha Hudson, Bridget Connelly, Doris Earnshaw and Olivia Eielson.

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Julia Vinograd!

Between the Cracks by Julia Vinograd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Julia Vinograd’s Look Out, Between the Cracks and Detours: published by Zeitgeist Press in Berkeley, teach me why she was SO MUCH MORE than “the Bubble Lady” of Telegraph Avenue. She changed things outside herself by changing herself and by seeing and feeling things differently because of what and who she had seen and felt. The real power and simple, original imagery of her poetry cut a sharp line directly between the intellectual voice of reportage and observation of Phebe and the overwhelmed verbal heart-lava of Disorder.
She reminds us that “I was young” in “ANNIVERSARY OF PEOPLE’S PARK,” but “I remember when heroism grew wild/ as dandelions/ and people talked about how to get rid of it.” Her balance of leaden truth distilled with our greatest human desires, dreams and hopes is ferocious and visceral while seamlessly blending her focus on immediate experience with the much-needed long view.
In MY COUNTRY, she says, “I rode a bright red royal tricycle/ through my endless country/ and never believed anything could change.”
And then the clarity of her persona and voice in TRUCK:

I drove a truck down a highway at night
following the white line to the middle of the road.
The truck was packed with poems
wrapped in brown cardboard boxes
and bumping against each other when I drove over
fallen branches from the storm. Beetles and dragonflies
crashed against the windshield
until I sprayed them loose.
There were no other cars. Hunting owls. Wet mice.
A rest stop coming,
coffee, burger, pie, bathroom, jukebox.
The poems dragging me back,
my feet on the gas pedal.
The white line opening me up again,
forever.

Now THAT is our poetry. That is our voice.

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Robert Bly - Our Unique Stories, Our Shared World

The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last by Robert Bly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars (c) 2019, Wyndy J. Knox Carr

I was reading Robert Bly’s 1977-1996 The Sibling Society on my three-week train and plane trip to family and friends in the Midwest and South during June, and 35 years ago or more, Bly was hearing Joseph Chilton Pearce and others talk about Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, and the neuroplasticity of the brain. Pearce and Bly grasped onto these theories of a human brain which could indeed not only distance itself from the lowest order Reptilian way of savagely reacting, but actually move forward into the midbrain Mammalian (hear, “Women,” “mammaries,” “community,” “cooperative,” “feminist” etc.) and on into the measured Neo-cortex human(e) being self-awareness of the homo supposedly sapiens.

However, we need new stories that link to the biological makeup that is hundreds of thousands of years old.

A story on which we can act. And love. And survive. And live… As Joseph Campbell said, "Not stories about 'meaning,' but about THE RAPTURE OF BEING ALIVE."

Robert had just published The Teeth Mother Naked at Last when I moved to Minnesota, so I heard him read it several times, and got to know him a little through Bill Holm and Poetry Outloud. As I remember, his grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and he was steeped in the rhythms of the Bible as well as Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Classical and Nordic mythology and sagas; the piercing winds of the Madison and Moose Lake prairies, their awesome, daunting and sometimes dreadful skies.

“In 1956, he received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there, he found not only his relatives, but became acquainted with the work of a number of major poets whose work was barely known in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson.”[i][ii]

He was a brilliant and faithful lover of The Word to bring and translate their works for us here. For this, if nothing else, we must be filled with enormous gratitude.

He revolutionized the concepts of academic American poetry readings entirely by reading poems by other people than himself, striding around the stage instead of staying timidly behind the lectern; and by communicating with the audience directly, often roaring “Want to hear that one again?” and then launching into a repeat reading without waiting for a response from the startled audience used to sitting silent and bland, his other, bookless hand turning slowly like a pinwheel or wind turbine, pulling truth up from the ground.

He reached down into the bloodstream of the planet and brought up songs, symbols, skulls and Carl Jung. He may be the least “gentle” of the "Men's Movement" men, and many of us questioned his co-optation of the dualistic Death Mother “pole” of his interpretation of Great Mother myth and imagery to characterize the furious release of the CIA and our military-industrial complex on the peasant village communities and landscapes of Vietnam, Africa, Guatemala, Chile, Guernica and Palestine; even though he said

“All of my poems come from the Ecstatic Mother; everyone’s poems do…All men’s poems are written by men already flying toward the Ecstatic Mother.”[iii]

In 1966, he founded the American Writers against the Vietnam War with other writers, City Lights published his Teeth Mother in 1970, more poetry, and Iron John: A Book About Men and The Sibling Society followed in 1990 and 1996, respectively, co-edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology with James Hillman and Michael Meade, which came out in 1993.

He co-authored The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine with “mythopoetic” Jungian psychotherapist Prof. Marion Woodman in 1998, and his Collected Poems has recently been released by W. W. Norton (2018). I am sure Berkeley welcomed, drummed and debated with him whenever his book tours and men’s gatherings came here. He was everywhere!

“Old women watch the soldiers as they move.” Last line of Part I of Teeth Mother

He grasped the lightning. He tasted the drop of wisdom from the cauldron of Cerridwen. He spouted astrology.

When my fiancée and I entered the Minneapolis college amphitheater where he and several dozen drum-pounding men were preparing for a performance at a late 1980s men’s gathering, he sonorously shouted “Wendy!” across the room, strode up to me and delivered me a huge hug to his Indigenously-vested barrel chest (he was about 6’2” and I 5’4” at the most), which completely shocked the drum circle, who almost lost the beat. When I introduced him to Greg, he said not “How do you do?” but “And what was YOUR father like?” his snake-lidded, steely eyes peering down like a fascinated, otherworldly Inquisitor from Carlos Castaneda, Huichol dreams, hungry cobras or Odin hanging upside down from the cosmic World Tree.

Was he a poet and activist, or just mad? A messenger bearing shocking news from other lands wise enough to step sideways of the assassins’ poisons and disappear into the sand? Hope is really part of being human, too, and either hope or just curiosity drove him along to question the trajectory of humanity we are riding on 23 years later.

“All of us who have been angry at the fathers rejoiced at first when the fathers lost authority, but the picture becomes more somber when we realize that the forces that destroyed the father will not be satisfied, and are moving toward the mother. Mothers are discounted everywhere. (“Lock her up!” wc) When mothers and fathers are both dismembered, we will have a society of orphans, or, more exactly, a culture of adolescent orphans.

Adolescent elders who have not been initiated into adulthood by same-sex elders of a thriving and continuous community..."

but have been ignored by overwhelmed parents and “educated” into consumerism by cynical, violent, hopeless and shallow images of humanity and “reality” by TV and the consumptive, surveilled and “monetized” social media spawned by the once-idealistic Internet.

Impulse control and societal values have often been discarded along with the huge, unused potential of the human, emotive, intuitive, sensate body and brain working as one with our supportive environment and all the beings and spirits that entails.

Have we lost our souls? Was no one there in our periods of initiation to accompany and guide us out of bimbohood, narcissism, violence or obsessive drug and alcohol indulgence, random sexuality, virtual and actual violence?

Listen to this wisdom from Robert's "Notes" section of The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood about the elaborate adolescent initiations, "especially for males," that we have abandoned and must re-find.

"...now we see our past everywhere on television. This knowledge makes a potent stew of guilt and shame. There is a pervasive sense of unworthiness that is not completely accounted for by our private lives...

We used to look into the eyes of our mothers and fathers, and their eyes sometimes said that we were worthy. Now we look into the eyes of television, and the eyes reply almost always that we are unworthy....some educators encourage us to throw away all literature created by men and women who were alive at the time... ugly events occurred...

I am against that... the person's healing will have to be based on their accumulated history is genuine change is to take place...

Growth can proceed only if people honor that part of their soul that is turned toward the goodness, so to speak, of their ancestors, so that they know there is something essentially worthy in them, for whose sake they go through all this agony…

We have to swallow all the dark truths about the Conquistadores and Puritans, the enslaving and murdering of powerless people, and still preserve the common story, ...so that we do not lose touch with whatever good there was in our ancestors, and with that part of our own soul." [i]

Prophetic, written in 1996 at the latest, because it is deeply contemporary now. He now lies disabled by dementia, but as Margot McLean-Hillman told me, “He is very strong.”

May our hearts and minds be strong enough to learn from him and his followers, the human stories we all carry, and the unique story of each of us in the world that is to come...


[ i ] Bly, Robert, (1977 and 1996) The Sibling Society : An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY. p. 257.

[ii] Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, (8 February 2019) “Robert Bly,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bly (15 February 2019)

[iii] Bly, Robert, (1973) Sleepers Joining Hands, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, p. 40.

[iv] Op. Cit., (1997) The Sibling Society, Vintage Books, New York NY.

[v] Op. Cit., (1973) Sleepers Joining Hands, p. 40.

Bly, Robert, (2018), Collected Poems Robert Bly, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY.

Bly, Robert, (1977 and 1996) The Sibling Society : An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY.

Bly, Robert, editor with James Hillman and Michael Meade, (1992) The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men, Harper Collins Publishers Inc., New York, NY.

Goodreads, (14 February 2019) Bly, Robert, () https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... The Sibling Society, (1997) Vintage Books, New York, NY.

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Your Crocodile has Arrived: More True Stories from a Curious Traveler by Laurie McAndish King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Totally Non-Apologetic Creativity -- After domestic terrorism shooting sprees at Gilroy Garlic Festival, El Paso and Dayton; it was SPECTACULARLY refreshing to attend Women Travel Writers “Sharing Their Secrets” Monday August 5th at Book Passage Left Coast Writers in Corte Madera.
Cool, funny, smart, well-read, powerful and highly competent women telling their stories about getting PAID to travel worldwide for wildlife, ecotourism, historical, athletic gear, news journalism, cultural or food research writing and photography! Hooray! Whoopee! Yahoo! You go girl, just like the U.S. Women’s Soccer team!
I couldn’t help but praise all the panelists for giving me a bounteous, healing evening full of “totally non-apologetic creativity.” Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Joanna Biggar, Laurie McAndish King, Mary Jo McConahay, Jill K. Robinson with 25 people in the audience hanging on their every word. We were alive and inspired!
Laurie McAndish King works at Berkeley’s Wilderness Travel, and also writes articles and collections of travel stories like Your Crocodile has Arrived: More True Stories from a Curious Traveler and Lost, Kidnapped and Eaten Alive! Her compact, catchy style is just great. Every first paragraph has a “hook” in it, promising a weird, fun, surprising, seductive or mysterious tale leading on into the future, like Scheherazade.
Definitely curiosity seems to be her number one motivating trait, and she goes about it with scientific detachment that’s always ready to widen out to love beauty and/or empathize with somebody having fun.
“Why?” She seems to ask, and “How?”
Why are these animals/ insects/ humans/ religious relics/ smugglers/ parrots/ whiskies/ gypsies/ moas/ dumplings/ snakes/ elephants/ worms/ flying saucers/ camels/ groups/ taxicabs or gondolas LIKE THIS, anyway, and how do they work / together/ not together/ OR NOT?
Everyone on the panel had some kind of Berkeley connection. They were writers, whether they were saving their postcards and letters and making a book out of them, or getting assignments to cover Latin America or Antarctica for The Washington Post, Sierra Club, Food & Wine or National Geographic Magazine.
Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar edited Wandering in Cuba: Revolution and Beyond (2018). They both have pieces in it, as does McAndish King, who provided the cover and other photographs.
The variety in Wandering gives me a sense that I’ve actually been there in a way that few “travel journals” can.
Many of these stories hark back to the pre-Revolutionary Havana days, its haven of nightclubs, prostitution, political and financial corruption, its drastic haves and have-nots scenarios. Most show the grassroots reforms and ideals of Jose Marti, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro as having a deeply beneficial influence on the people of Cuba as far as universal free education, health, subsistence food and government supports persisting through the Soviet pullout and the U.S. embargo was concerned; but at a cost of many goods and conveniences of modern culture as well as “a certain conformity.”
When Obama loosened the limits on travel, the “kaleidoscope of art, culture, politics, and ideas…(caused) changes…where entrepreneurial spirit was ignited and creativity in full force.” The past several decades have been up and down.
There are no homeless people, but many live in colonial or some Soviet-style buildings in great need of repair, and among the young there are many highly educated working at semi-menial jobs, with not a lot of hope for improvement, either. They don’t want to leave, though, because they’re a family, cultural and political island like no other. There’s no place like it to go to. Even a full education as a MD is free, and artists and musicians get free studios, food, cheap housing and stipends like everybody else.
I remember a story an organic farming “slow food” couple from Minnesota told after spending an exchange month touring around in Cuba about a decade ago. Everyone came back home in the evening around the central square plaza in a village’s neighborhood and had a kind of walking stroll, sitting on front stoops, talking and intergenerational visiting with kids playing around like Southern European cultures do.
The Cubans didn’t have many consumer goods, books or TVs, however, and culturally were used to entertaining each other socially with talk, music and stories. Due to the Russian pullout and U.S. embargo, there were few cars, and there was only one bicycle on the square.
Kids lined up casually and played hopscotch, sang and hung out with other kids or elders while waiting for their turn on the bike. Each kid, no fighting or arguing, would happily take their turn, ride slowly or quickly all around the outside of the square and back to the beginning, and give the treasured bicycle to the next child waiting patiently in line.
Can you imagine what would happen in an American town, urban or suburban neighborhood if there were maybe 200 kids and only one bike? Blood on the Reeboks, man. Get down.
Reading all the stories in Crocodile and Wandering in Cuba will definitely give you a different world, a different “point of view.”


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