Deep Hanging Out with Malcolm Margolin, & Native News

 Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California by Malcolm Margolin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Deep Hanging Out: Wanderings and Wonderment in Native California is a truly wonderful collection of Malcolm Margolin’s forewords to books he’s published at Heyday, selections from his own books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, and many of his articles and interviews from News from Native California, a quarterly magazine devoted to California’s Indigenous peoples, founded by Malcolm, David Peri, and Vera Mae Fredrickson in March of 1987. 

“Ah, Berkeley, a place of bookstores, libraries, coffeehouses, and (at that time) surrounded by large amounts of open space,” he waxes. A marvelous jumping-off place and welcoming hearth for his many meanderings and meetings in between 40 years leading Heyday, the independent nonprofit publisher and cultural institution which he founded in 1974 when he self-published his The East Bay Out: A Personal Guide to the East Bay Regional Parks, and his now maybe even more marvelous dot-org, California Institute for Community, Art & Nature.

Born in 1940, Malcolm Margolin came to Berkeley with his wife Rina in 1970 after two years hippieing around North America in a VW bus, and has been here ever since. He had grown up in a Jewish section of Boston where the older generation spoke Yiddish and “Jews, like Indians, have a long history of being rejected and oppressed…have experienced genocide…practicing a spirituality and using a language not readily available to others…Food and other traditions bound us together; a sense of tribalism prevailed.”
He says, as well, “I was constantly surprised,” as he “hung out” with N. CA Indians; probably because people could sense his kindness, honesty and curiosity; speaking to him in ways they would not have spoken to others; revealing themselves because they knew he would represent them clearly and fairly.
 

But represent them, he does; and by doing so, as well as researching news reports, ethnographies and settler histories; he is mirroring thourselves as colonizers more clearly back to us in contrast, often demythologized of Savior and Lone Ranger heroics. In the belly of the Hearst Museum with three regalia-making Indian families among the “woodpecker-feather headdresses, obsidian blades of great size and rare color, white deer skins, civet-skin kilts, dentalia necklaces,” of his article on “Wealth and Spirit (1993),” for example, he gently and patiently explains:
 

“It is difficult for outsiders to understand regalia (ceremonial/ritual/dance adornments) and the role it plays in the lives of the Native people of northwestern California. The dominant culture does not have anything quite like it, and the language and thought structures by which outsiders attempt to describe regalia never quite fit.”

 

And then he goes on to do so, using the descriptions of the Indians’ responses, the regalia itself; its uses, “being” and “aliveness” in the social contexts of tribal life and spirituality; his feelings and observations as they share, touch, examine “material culture” in the Hearst as Julian Lang explains how “The wealth system of northwestern California brings together the earth, nature and spiritual enlightenment.”…Ending with “a reminder that “we are descended from a people who made beauty and who used that beauty, to fix the world.” Aho!
 

Reading these pages is like getting 200 miles out of town at night, pulling over, turning off the car, walking out into a meadow, hearing nothing but the wind and looking straight up at the thousands of stars in the sky. We are nothing. We are tiny. We are just a piece of a cosmos that barely cares if we snobby, over-mechanized and material-acculturated humans live or die.
 

Remember that? We have emotional, biological, neurological and ancestral memories of how that was in the thousands of years we spent in hunter-gatherer times. When life in nature itself was awesome. And being in a small, well-known community of interdependent humans who knew we had to depend on each other and follow the sharing traditions and earth conservation so it all would go on and we could survive. For Native Americans, them, (we/them) it wasn’t that long ago.
 

If only the missionaries/ settlers/miners had had Margolin’s curiosity, humility, respect, breadth of mind!…The Native Californians even share their grief with him of “What Has Been Lost,” the magnitude of “damage done to traditional culture…” and how “to rebuild the self, one first must come to terms with and acknowledge the fullness of loss.”
 

They carve out of the darkness, not only with courage, but with song, strength and humor. “Deal with what we have and work with what we have…sense the presence of the ancestors” “standing around saying ‘Listen, they’re singing that song again! Isn’t it great? They’re so cute; they’re singing it all wrong, they don’t even know what they’re talking about. It’s so wonderful.’ In that way, you do have to be careful about how you use the songs and ceremonies. But there’s also that element of intent that is so important in connecting back.”
 

And in dealing with anger, Greg Sarris tells him what Mabel McKay said, “You’re going to let holes grow in your heart, hatred and poison will grow there, and you’re going to poison yourself and you’re going to poison other people….You have another choice. All the things that have happened to you,” she said, “could become medicine. This is an opportunity to doctor." 

And more, and more, and more.

From his obvious respect for the individuals, cultural and historical backgrounds of Native Californians; the persistence and generosity of his research, listening to, recording and elegantly writing about their worldviews, experiences and resounding “stories;” I have no doubt of his sincerity and humility in this project. 

Others may “play Indian,” snatch fragments for the marketplace, further colonize and insult by appropriating and profiteering, but not Malcolm. He could not have heard all this from them without “walking his talk.” By listening, and by choosing so ably what and how to share. 

As Vincent Medina told him, “We learn with the heart.” Tappe ta-ak hin-nan. And as he says, “I feel that the Indian world has a great deal to teach the rest of us…Beauty and wisdom abound.”


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Bridging Parallel Worlds

A Spy in the Struggle by Aya de León
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Aya de León, Creative Writing teacher in UC Berkeley’s African-American Studies Department, weaves a rough-and-ready novel around the consciousness-raising issues of what “defunding the police,” “disaster capitalism” and climate crisis justice have in common. 

Through the “coming of age” of her main character, Yolanda Vance, de León explores how a person who thought they knew, can learn “the Real history” of race, gender, privilege, power and pollution in America at ground level. 

Yolanda grew up in Georgia, got scholarships to prep school and a women’s college that looks a lot like Mills and takes a job infiltrating a grassroots climate change organization. By going undercover with activists opposed to an East Bay government contractor, she finds herself on the wrong side of the law as well as her gut feelings, childhood intuitions, eroticism, moral values, legal expertise and heart. 

The two separate “silos” of Yolanda’s federal police work and the “Red, Black and Green” (RBG) teens and activists she’s been sent to surveille jostle for dominance with her consciousness, upbringing and “education” to bend and penetrate her tough and naïve surface masquerades. She starts transforming her vision of what she was told were her employer’s “regrettable” (murderous) 1960s “tactics” into the reality of cover-ups, disappearances due to immigrant status, greed, fact and data manipulations and denial all around her. 

At rock bottom, de León uses her “experience in the anti-nuclear movement as a teen in the 80s… the Livermore Action Group in South Berkeley,” in the Black community in Roxbury, Massachusetts and “with the climate initiative of the Movement for Black Lives” as excellent detail material for her fast-moving action; diverse, lively characters and outstanding flair for dialogue that moves Spy along smartly.

 As fiction, she doesn’t name names here or dwell on current events, but the lines are pretty clearly drawn from East Bay life where we all know who gets “cheap land, a freeway, a place to dump their toxic waste and don’t have to pay a cent in taxes…(I)t’s not enough (for BIPOC) to have a handful of custodian jobs ---“ “…our people were the ones dying, while the employees … who live in cozy white suburbs worked from home” when COVID hit. Ouch! Hey, Sistah, tell it like it is!

Like my political “deflowering” hearing about and witnessing the police riots of 1968 in Chicago and at University of Wisconsin anti-war sit-ins; Yolanda doesn’t want to believe it’s really happening, that corruption really goes down that deep or spreads out that far. Or that her own actions, like Meridel LeSueur yelled at do-gooder dummy me in 1980, were going to “splinter the movement! That’s counter-insurgency,” a knee-jerk habit of infighting all-too-common in liberal and radical left orgs letting competition and egoism open the doors to distrust, confusion and provocateurs.

 
As I straggled into the Orlando, Florida airport motel three days before a visit to Mom for Thanksgiving; a wiry white man with crisp, short grey hair; a sneering, angry look and a yellow-on-black “DEFUND BERKELEY” T-shirt was being dragged out of the breakfast area by his exhausted-looking younger wife or daughter. I rolled my eyes and went about my business, but the image stuck in my mind:
 

“DEFUND BERKELEY?” “What the hell does that mean?” on the one hand (besides “Please get in a fight with me!”), and “Good luck with that!” on the other. (Would that include “defunding” Livermore Labs and Cal? I think not.) 

Soon after that, a massive storm of tornadoes flattened whole towns in Western Kentucky, hitting already impoverished, jobless and homeless people especially hard; and last week 600+ homes were destroyed and tens of thousands evacuated in Colorado wildfires with winds up to 100 miles an hour. As Marvin Gaye called out to us in his 1971 hit release, “What’s Going On?” “We’ve got to find a way, to find some loving here today…Don’t punish me with brutality, talk to me…What’s going on?”

On the first anniversary of the U. S. Capitol insurrection and riot, disaster and disunity signal major human misunderstandings about each other and the world around us on which we tenuously depend. The difference between the huge police, National Guard and White House responses to the peaceful Black Lives Matter and Wall of Many protests and the former President’s absence of planning, ugly encouragement and then despicable apathy and lies during and after the January 6th insurrection.
 

The 99% INCLUDES people duped into thinking an election was stolen, so that we fight EACH OTHER while the Boards of Directors and real estate barons laugh all the way to the bank.
 

Marcus, the head of the RBG teen and neighborhood center, says about a white attorney working for them, “He clearly had no idea what kind of violence the government has done in our community.” Neither does a guy in a DEFUND BERKELEY T-shirt. What violence has been done to “THEM,” too.

When Mr. Floyd called, “Mama, I’m through!” he was calling to ALL OF US in the human family to get smart, listen to each other’s truths and help each other and the Earth SURVIVE. 

Listen to the youth!
We demand the truth!

It is our duty to fight for (th)our freedom
It is our duty to win
We must love and support one another
We have nothing to lose but (th)our chains


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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.