Drummed in by the transformational art of the women of Ojala – they really know how to start a day – I found out that they offer an annual residential drumming camp for women in Point Bonita, CA.
In her very personal introduction, Nina Simons says we are in a crisis of relationship – within ourselves, with the ‘others’ of humanity, and with the natural world. The wounding is deep inside us, the critical mind of the oppressor that we have embodied turning in on us and keeping us from finding and being our true selves.
From the universal resistance experienced by women in the women’s leadership trainings Nina has been offering she says it’s clear that we have inherited some very flawed models of what it is to be a leader, what it means to lead.
Many of us are not interested in being in front all the time. Like geese we need to take turns leading as we go forward together.
We need all of our relational abilities to face this relational crisis – to be able to feel what others feel, to lead with softness in front and strength behind. It’s important not to over-simplify these qualities, or continue to under-value them, but bring them forward in balance with our practical intellectually-driven abilities. We need them both.
William J. Nichols
Oceanographer, scientist and children’s author Jay Nichols has focused his life’s work on the tracking and understanding of sea turtles, which was the passion of his youth.
A self-proclaimed biased scientist, he admits to an inordinate fondness for sea turtles and kids. Basically, Jay says, the crisis in the oceans boils down to three things:
Putting too much IN the ocean – our massive consumerism has resulted in massive plastic pollution. The sea animals eat it - in some places there is 6x as much plastic as there is plankton – and it accumulates in massive oceanic garbage patches (I read in the Chronicle this weekend that there is one between California and Hawaii twice the size of Texas!). We’re putting too much sound into the ocean, agricultural run-off, industrial pollution, dust and plume from 9/11, creating oceanic dead zones.
Taking too much OUT of the ocean – over-fishing is driving the increasing extinction of many ocean fish species: 90% of the big animals are already gone, exacerbated by ‘bycatching’, or the collateral damage of those creatures whose lives are sacrificed through non-discriminatory fishing practices.
Destroying the Edge of the Ocean – Americans love the coast and everyone wants to live there. The housing industry and shrimp (Don't Eat Shrimp!) fishing industries together are creating extensive erosion that is trashing the liminal zone where life begins.
Carol BeBelle
New Orleans artist Carol BeBelle who co-founded the Ashé Cultural Arts Center greeted us as “faith-walkers”, and acknowledged how it was us, the American people, who responded to the flood in New Orleans when our government failed to do so.
She talked about the role of the arts in rebuilding the internal infrastructures that were damaged in New Orleans along with those of the external landscape. In their capacity to nurture the return of community and recall the strength of spirituality, the creativity of the arts offer a way for people to participate in the rejuvenation of this community and create an exemplary city where social justice and environmentalism ‘rock’, rebuilding a city we can be proud of.
This disaster has given us an opportunity to show the people of New Orleans that they are not alone, she says, a way to prove that people care about what happens to other people.
Charlotte Brody of Commonweal believes that human health and environmental health are inextricably entwined.
The beginning of her talk [all the slides she used are available free on http://www.womenshealthandenvironment.org] focused on the work of Charlotte's childhood heroine Rachel Carson, and the difficulties she experienced in exposing the fallacies of science in regard to the dangers of DDT in Silent Spring, and on the sexist attacks against Carson and other women who tried to call attention to the adverse effects of environmental chemical imbalances on human health.
Estrogen mimics are now showing up in all our water systems and changing behavior in fish, frog and humans. Brody shared shocking statistics of diminishing male birth rates and increasing male birth defects that effect fertility and increase the likelihood of testicular cancer.
She argues that, rather than this harmful unintended chemical feminizing of species, we have to awaken a conscious feminization of science that allows us to trust our intuition and look to patterns to unlock the limitations of a linear science that doesn’t see the links between what is harming the environment and our own bodies.
Erika Luckett introduced a break in the plenary sessions. A cheeky Latina singer with a fabulously innovative guitar technique, Luckett sang a beautiful song with one line in particular that really stuck with me: “If we’re not in awe, we’re not paying attention.”
Winona Laduke, two-time Green Party vice-presidential candidate and indigenous rights activist, was introduced as a valued elder to the younger indigenous activists by chair of the IEN’s Native Energy Campaign Advisory Committee, Clayton Thomas Müeller.
As part of her welcome to this specific place and time, Winona described the native names of each of the moons of the year, smiling as she explained, “It’s possible to have a world view not influenced by empire.”
Laduke described interventions into Ojibway homeland practices by archaeologists from the University of Minnesota, particularly the indigenous process of harvesting the wild rice. These investigations ultimately resulted in state decisions that destroyed this native industry, and replaced native plant-lines with genetically modified “products” from Monsanto.
As a native American, LaDuke is understandably uncomfortable with the “pioneers’ metaphor at Boneers, and she says what we need to be about instead is restoring our relationships to all our relatives, especially those who have roots.
What we have to do, Laduke continues, is deal with peak oil, fight for the water – take it back for the plants’ rights – and protect the old, biologically diverse heritage indigenous plant varieties that are our medicine (figuratively and quite literally), since they are the ones that have the ability to adapt and make it through global climate change.
Her father once said he didn’t want to hear about philosophy if it doesn’t grow corn. What that means is that whatever we do going forward has to be part of the restoring of the relationships that have been damaged between human beings and those elements in the natural world which give us our lives.
Ka Hsaw Wa and Katie Redford
The next speaker was Ka Hsaw Wa and his wife Katie. Hsaw Wa is the award-winning founder of EarthRights International, and he is still in hiding from the Burmese government because of his resistance to the destruction perpetrated by Unical (a California oil company, now Chevron) when they made a deal with the Burmese hunta and began installing a pipeline across the Burmese landscape.
Wa’s wife Katie was a law student when they first met, and they came together during his fight to challenge Unical, which resulted in the first case ever to be tried for human rights violations carried out overseas. They finally won.
Their story shows how problems of globalization are so completely intertwined with so many other problems throughout the world, and how deeply the petroleum industries – whether it is Unical, Shell or Occidental – are implicated in them.
At lunch a few friends and I had an engrossing conversation about dialectics and transcendence. For all the wonderful steps toward integrating human rights issues of race, class, and multi-generational imperatives that this year’s Bioneers conference showed evidence of, there was an alarming increase in polemic. That felt like a bit of a backwards step to me, but perhaps this whole movement is an intricate series of dance steps, some going forward, some back, but ultimately catching a rhythm and ‘dance hammering’ out a response to our times that includes everyone and everything that needs to be at the table.
After lunch, I went to my first afternoon workshop…
Alternet: Social Media Activism/Web 2.0 Networking for Change
An interesting mix of people attended this panel, chaired by Alternet publisher, Don Hazen. The audience spanned professionals like yours truly, to new FaceBook account holders and those frustrated by a lack of Internet acumen.
Deanna Zandt from the Hightower Lowdown opened with a description of web2.0 using a slide show [a list of the resources she referenced is available at http://del.icio.us/tag/bioneersweb2.0]
She went over the fundamentals of tagging, RSS (although she eglected to mention RSS by email, which is a popular, easy option for those new to RSS), user-generated content, multi-media, social networking, ratings & recommendations, ajax and participatory citizenship. Her examples included YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr (she gave a nice description of tag clouds), MySpace (including how to customize your profile page so it looks like you have 2 jillion friends rather than 2), digg (a rating tool), and del.icio.us (a bookmarking tool).
She elucidated on Tim Berners-Lee’s original conceptualization of the web as a participatory platform where information can be collaboratively shared in a “read/write web”, saying this kind of trust can create brand loyalty and community.
Britt Bravo is a blogger who writes for a number of social change non-profits including NetSquared and BlogHer. She is reassuring about how easy it is to actually use these tools for little or no money, and optimistic about their value.
She featured two internet-based grassroots campaigns – one by two women bloggers, CityHippy (in London) and GreenLA girl, who launched the Starbucks Challenge to explore Starbuck’s fair trade coffee practices, the other by an OxFam group who first used traditional tools to protest against Starbuck’s fair trade policies, and ended up videoing their protests and posting them to YouTube, which got them much more exposure. This year they’ve expanded their Web2.0 participation by starting a photo petition on Flickr in collaboration with Ethiopian bloggers, which has been very effective.
Don Hazen says that 25% of Alternet’s traffic comes from reference sites like StumbleUpon, ReadIt, etc. and another 25% from Google, pointing out that 2.0 tools like tagging can offer powerful advantages even for those who don’t use the tools themselves. He also shared Alternet’s plans for rolling out “Pazoomie” their new guide to US media that will integrate public recommendations and ratings.
James Rucker from ColorofChange redefines web 2.0 in his work organizing the African-American community for social change. He explains how organizations like MoveOn.org are modeled on older tools like email, rather than the member-to-member interaction that characterizes true web 2.0 technologies. To get a message out and have it effectively catalyses action takes more than sending out emails. In their campaign highlighting Fox TV’s racist representation of people of color, Color of Change integrated off-line TV coverage media, bringing it to the public view via video exposure on YouTube.
James also spoke a bit to the gap between setting up a blog and making it effective as an instrument of social change, which takes time and expertise.
He shared strategies like posting videos simultaneously on a variety of blogs so the viewing figures are bumped up and pointed to the intricate web of relationships at work in communicating about something like the Jena 6 story in New Orleans that was initially shared through the internet through a few black bloggers and then broadcast through radio, showing how bloggers can (and do) work together to amplify their efforts.
Audience Q & A:
I work in government where there is a lot of time lag & resistance to using these new tools…
Deanna suggests providing staff blogs, Brit shares a good reference book (I didn’t catch the name – sorry!), and suggests using those who are already blogging to get timely information out.
I was sitting next to Leif Utne, of QuantumShift.TV, who suggested several resources, including E-democracy, and a colleague, Griff Wigley, who offers excellent coaching for public officials (another example of how the audience in these sessions is often as informed or more so than the panel, but interaction is limited to a brief Q&A in the last ½ hour)
How to keep your ‘single issue’ blog cooking when there’s nothing happening…
This question got a lot of response, including: use RSS feeds based on tags to offer content from other people’s sites; invite guest authors; be sure your RSS feed is working; and question if blogging is the right format for your needs
Why have a MySpace page?
To use as a marketing tool
How to encourage bloggers to take up your issue?
Shift your mindset a little, and instead ask “How can I collaborate with others who are interested in this content?” Use new media blog search sites like Google blog search & Technorati
And finally, my choice for last session of the conference:
Crossing the Threshold: Indigenous Artists Bridging Divides
Juane Evans, former Executive Director of the Lannan Foundation hosted this panel of native artists, asking each one to briefly describe their work.
The panel included Okanagan artist Jeanette Armstrong, who is not only a poet and writer, but a visual artist, dancer, storyteller and founder of the En’okwkin Centre, Cherokee Apache Bob Haozous, who says he is a man of one opinion, which changes every day, and Celeste Worl, a Tlingit painter of the Eagle clan, born in Alaska of a mother of the Eagle clan, now living in New Mexico.
Bob Haozous began by speaking about the gap he feels between what he sees happening with native people at home and what happens with native art in the marketplace. He says his work is to inspire people to share their lives through art, but art produced in accordance with laws, some of which may no longer even be known.
Celeste Worl followed this by saying she feels we are at a threshold, and that it is through her art that she is in touch with past present and future and it is through art that we can heal our planet.
Jeanette Armstrong too, addressed this idea of threshold – coming from a family that approaches art from a traditional viewpoint that puts her against the threshold between this physical world and everything in it, and the mystery of spirit.
Her people understood the crossing of that threshold as medicine that the artist is responsible for as it is brought into the physical world, a sacred responsibility to bring it forth in a pure way, as medicine.
As a contemporary artists Celeste has broken some of the rules of her traditional forms – a traditional person in a contemporary world – cross-pollinating and birthing new forms.
Bob expresses the discomfort he feels with the philosophical co-opting of the native worldview that he feels is going on here at Bioneers. “You’re not willing to dissect your religions that separate man and nature, you’re not giving up your economic privileges,” he charges. “Native people should be leading the Bioneers… I don’t know answers but I do know the questions, and that’s what I’m trying to do in my art.”
Jeanette shares her own questions about what her art, what all art, has to do with this broken world, with her broken world. Celeste says that in Tlingit culture, the shamans would create this art, and it would be for the purpose of healing. The art was sacred, and produced and used for their sacred purpose rather than commercial value. She finds simple ways of channeling that sacred energy into, for example, her collaboration with other native artists.
Moving into the Q&A section of the session, Jaune asked the panel:
Does it ever feel constricting to be called an indigenous artist?
When Bob was growing up, his father always said he should be proud of being an Apache, and it took a long time to learn what that meant. Now he is an Apache artist even though he doesn’t speak the language or live with the community, but he feels he got something from his father that is more Apache than things he sees done more popularly, like the ‘Ho’ being repeated here at Bioneers. The Apache don’t do that, he says. The role of native people in the world is environmental – otherwise we are “hanging on to the circus” or superficial aspects of our cultures.
Celeste says she thinks the Bioneers are creating a new ceremony, that it is a powerful vehicle to share and cross-pollinate our voices.
Jeanette talks about bridging, which is something she is known for at the En’owkin center where aboriginal artists come and find a way to work with their traditional art forms from both within and outside their communities.
One of the elements that has always been present in Armstrong’s poetry is the recognition that everything shifts and changes. As a Pre-Columbian people, the Ojibway have transformed and changed their name and ways many times, and that transformation has created a different kind of story for them. They have a different sound and design and set of internal workings, and every time that transformation happens the artist has the responsibility to bring forward what in the culture needs to stay, and incorporate what new things need to be integrated.
What processes make your images real, and meaningful?
Celeste answers through showing us visual images of her art… she grew up with people who created art as they lived. Sometimes she feels torn - walking in the western world and yet holding on to what is native inside her, listening to her animal spirits who are there just for the asking, incorporating the sexuality that is part of traditional Tlingit art.
Bob says there is a tremendous gulf between indigenous thought and western thought, but the problem is that there is no way to speak honestly about that, given how much we have incorporated each other’s thought. Bridging this kind of gap is what he tries to do in his art.
What is valuable to me, Jeanette asks, to my children, about the culture of being Ojibway? The next generation is really having trouble in crossing that divide, she shares that the cemeteries are full of children who have been unable to cross, now dead from alcohol or drugs. The incredible loss of their lives is why this divide is so important to understand and what gives her the motivation to find a way across. Last year she couldn’t find even one among her community, but this year she brought four young women students here to Bioneers, and she is so proud that they are here – they are the string to the future.
Celeste talks about how her art is an inspiration to her nephews and nieces, and she feels that is important even though she is not working with traditional forms - which are also so important to learn. We’re on the paths to wholeness, taking the time to heal the wounds from when our shamans were taken away.
Bob talks about Indian art We all know what Indian Art is, he says – baskets and pots and beads and jewelry - but is that really what it is? He’s been trying to define Indian Art for a long time… He loves his work, it inspires him. He brought his Eco War Clubs to show us, which is Indian art, even though there are no feathers.
What is the line between co-option and inspiration in art?
Celeste points to the ongoing debate about intellectual copyright issues in relation to the incredible images indigenous to the NW… One thing that is important to answer in considering this question is what the intention of the art is – is it to make money, or to hold onto the sacredness of it?
Jeanette shares that in her culture their art needs to be a lot more fluid, but it comes from the spirit world. “I am not afraid to cross that divide” she says “the art comes from the spirit world; it is real.”
Recent Comments