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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An Elephant Ate My Arm -- Laurie McAndish King

 An Elephant Ate My Arm: More true stories from a curious traveler by Laurie McAndish King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Reviewed in The Berkeley Times 12 August, 2021. (c) Wyndy J. Knox Carr

Laurie McAndish King writes cogent, often gripping and dryly amusing or hilarious travel articles; but the subtitles hint at her depth, scientific eye and deeper meanings: As to the title story, she says On the ethics of riding a two-ton orphan; on a foodie spa visit, she adds Italian spirits raise existential questions. Not your normal brusquely bubbling travelogue fare. The kind of "curious" (and well-informed) "traveler" you'd really like to take a trip with!

       On an Earthwatch research program in the Trinidadian rain forest, “home to more than 400 species of birds…ocelots and monkeys, leatherback turtles and boa constrictors, anteaters, agouti and more,” a native guide with a “PhD in integrative biology” helps her readjust her values, cultural biases and experience the “beautiful, diverse ecosystem” that “exists for itself, not as a benefit for humans” under “the Milky Way cutting a sparkling swath through the darkness.” She always tells a good tale and often weaves an invisible magic spell, too.

      I’ve praised her “True Stories” before, but once again encourage those of us who want to be a “curious traveler” once the bans are lifted to enjoy Ms. McAndish King’s pieces. We can certainly love them if we're satisfied to stay armchair travelers with book budgets or library cards, too! The tales don't always "end up" where you think they're going to lead, and with McAndish King, that's generally a much broader and more profound journey. Stepping right in to the unexpected is often just exactly where she wants to go...    

Mayflower Memories: The Truth about Tisquantum, about her ancestors and how those Pilgrims eventually treated the Natives who kept them alive the first "Thanksgiving" and beyond; A Voyeur in Libya: A photographic invasion leads to indelible regret talking about casual American "tourist behavior" and At the foot of Uluru ("Ayers Rock"), where she makes a last-minute choice NOT to climb an Aboriginal sacred site are particularly timely and revealing. It's all in the traveler's perspective,  openness to the real differences: and hers are indeed very curious, flexible; often becoming wise. as well.

A good person making intelligent observations that encourage us to "first, do no harm." Listen and learn... What a relief! 

Is it time to contrast unconscious values, distorted histories and habitual privileges with inner, interpersonal, cultural and world peace? In an aware and balanced universe; “Yes.”


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From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life

Wyndy Carr's review  

Goodreads Apr 25, The Berkeley Times, May 30, 2021

Whatta Gal! "It’s amazing how much one can learn from reading. You see how other people do something, whether right or wrong. Either way. It’s a fantastic thing. You can’t live without books.”
 

Margot Smith’s Mother, Ethel Liebman Wiesinger, (1890-1984) boldly narrates her own story in From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life. It’s something between Elie Weisel’s Night, War and Peace, People Magazine c. 1938-49 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a Studs Terkel interview, City Lights and Gone with the Wind. 

 

Like the intrepid Margot, who earned a doctorate in Public Health from Cal in 1977 and raised awareness on California healthcare through research, videos/films and advocacy as well as four children in Berkeley since she moved here in 1967; her Mom fit definitely in my “Whatta Gal!” category. Of “another era,” quaint and embarrassing here and there, but chock full of smarts and chutzpah* as well, albeit hard won.
 

And what a life! World War I, the international enclave in Shanghai, weeks on ocean liners across the Pacific discussing Schiller with fellows 20 years older, The Boxer Rebellion and her analysis of the insurgence of Chinese communism: “the situation was so desperate that anyone with guts could rule…the ancient tradition of graft, protégés; not able men but favored men were getting the good jobs…”  

 

With additional material from her daughters about their lives in Shanghai, San Francisco, Hamburg and Los Angeles; I found her story frank, observant and astutely educational, especially in the "forgotten history" department. (Women's history, especially as entrepreneurs, Germany and Germans between the World Wars, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Jewish immigrants in America and international trade communities, Eastern Europe, Asia, the Opium Wars, European Imperialism....)

 

Born as a “surprise” last child of 11 in a well-off Jewish family in what is now Ukraine when her parents were in their 40s, Ethel Liebman Wiesinger says she was a “very pampered child … I was left alone…I was the toy of my parents…”  

 

However, “Every Saturday (the Sabbath) we had men from all stations in life come into our house…They were the most interesting nights because they would sit and talk…I was partly listening, partly inside and partly outside, and I was serving them with tea. I listened to the conversation from the time I was four or five years old up to the time that we left Austria (when she was 21)…”  

 

This ability to listen and really hear and consider what was going on in adult conversations gave her a lifelong advantage.

“I read books, which my mother did not do…. It was a house with reading and literature and art and music, and all these things were part of life…Education counted more than money…You considered education, you considered patronage; it was considered more glory than being rich. And I think the people were happier, too.”

I just love her voice. A real raconteur, looking back at every part of her life. "China was an exciting place. I was the only girl. I went to lots of parties and everyone wanted to dance with me. And I was so stupid to show off what I knew because I didn't know anything else to show off. I used to sit and recite poetry...There was a piano. And I could sing...all the German songs we sang in school...they were lonesome for them...I was the queen of Shanghai...how I impressed them was incredible."

 

Life in New York, being ostracized from her family for marrying a Christian, the Great Depression, loss, bankruptcy -- building her and her children’s lives back up again and again. A line on the back cover blurb says Czernowitz to China “tells of being married to a German entrepreneur in pre-revolutionary China and how politics affected her life” is only a shadow of her story, reflected in and reflecting the “world outside.”

 

Marital battles with Otto “lasted about three years" in earnest. Like Martin Niemoller and many Germans, “(he) …hailed Adolf Hitler for beginning a "national revival." But Ethel "packed up my clothes and went ....”  which was very daring for a woman with two children in 1933. She went from San Francisco to Los Angeles, he went back to Germany in 1938. 

 

She began running a gift shop where movie stars like Walt Disney, Fred Astaire, Al Jolson and Charlie Chaplin dropped in. “…they sat down and they talked and they laughed and they smoked cigarettes and it was fun. I was so interested…my place, where he (Disney, Shostakovich, Chaplin…) could be a plain human being.” In Beverly Hills and Hollywood, they did and did not pretend that war and suffering were a million miles away. They knew.

Naive, trusting, cultivated, privileged, but a gutsy gal who learned, loved and charmed friends, too: “you still have your own intellect; how you use your education and if you use it at all” she said in 1980. 

Wise words for survivors, recent graduates and rule-breakers in another disaster year, another rough world, for finding the rays of light. 

 

Whatta gal! 

 

Find From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore in Elmwood in Berkeley or through Regent Press. 

*“A Yiddish term meaning audacity, courage, or nerve.”