Category Archives: Native American Studies

Two Essays on Our Work at Standing Rock

pregnant woman with earth in belly and water flowing around her

“Water is Life” drawing by Ruby Chacón. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Water Is Life: Why Chicana/o/xs Should Support NoDAPL

By Marisa Elena Duarte

On Thursday October 27 militarized police forces from multiple states joined the Morton County Sheriff’s Department in North Dakota to initiate a violent series of crowd control tactics against the peaceful water protectors and land defenders blocking the illegal construction of an Energy Transfer Company (ETC) oil pipeline across land adjacent to the current boundaries of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The pipeline, designed to transport oil from the Bakken Oil Fields in North Dakota down to the Gulf Coast, and from there to various domestic and international markets, also threatens clean water and soil through the entire Midwest region, all the way down to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. In July, Continue reading

Reports from May 2015 Indigenous Knowledge Gathering in California

group moving and dancing through room

Photo of Indigenous Knowledge Gathering by Agos Bawi. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Movements in Motion by Angela “Mictlanxochitl” Anderson Guerrero

On May 2nd, indigenous communities, scholars, and activists were invited to the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco to build understanding around culturally competent integration of indigenous knowledge in the academy. A student-initiated event aimed to raise awareness and attention to the value of culturally competent curriculum and programming at CIIS and other universities. The Indigenous Knowledge Gathering was an experience that inspired dialogue, tough questions, and movement to honor the history and sources of indigenous knowledge. Huge awe for our volunteer team who showed up at 8 a.m. and stepped into action to welcome and invite everyone into CIIS. The day was organized to facilitate dialogue and to build community with all types of knowledge keepers. No papers were presented, but each of the presenters were asked to share their testimonies, which in return help ground our self-reflection as a group and dialogue.

Wicahpiluta Candelaria, Carla Munoz, and Desiree Munoz welcomed all of us into Ohlone territories with songs of mourning and joy to start the day. Monique guided and weaved together the stories shared by Ohlone participants Corrina Gould, Nicholas Alexander Gomez, and Jonathan Cordero of their connections to the land and the transformative possibilities of bringing Native people to the table for equitable say and involvement involving the land, indigenous knowledge, and traditions. Laura Cedillo fired up the dialogue by challenging us all to think about the benefits of indigenous knowledge cultivated in the academy?

To slow down and encourage the dialogue to linger among participants, Corrina Gould blessed the mid-day meal that was prepared by Seven Native American Generations Youth Organization, or SNAG. We were honored to be the first to see the unveiling of the SNAG mural, which will travel with Bay Area urban native youth to Hawaii for the cultural exchange with Native Hawaiian Youth from Halau Ku Mana Charter School in Oahu. Huge thanks to Sylvie Karina and Ras K’Dee for sharing the native foods and allowing us to experience the art of the hawks wings wide open carrying all of our traditions.

Jack Gray and Dakota Alcantara-Camacho ushered in the connections starting to form with a powerful dance, O Hanau Ka Maunakea, inviting all of us to swiftly come together in circles of 10 and to share a story of who we are. There are no words to describe how ancestors, sounds, movement, testimony came through the space. We as a gathering started to really to get know one another and our collective intentions. This sharing became the basis for each group’s creation of actions they hope to see move forward. [Living Report and Dissemination To Be Shared Soon!]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s presentation on “Positioning Indigenous Knowledge in Higher Education” was a moment of poetic justice because it brought into an academic space an indigenous people’s history that validates our stories, traumas, and hopes for all of our peoples. Roxanne also helped contextualize the powerful action of the gathering within CIIS, an academic institution, as a radical moment that she hopes ripples into other institutions.

To bring the dialogue to a pause so it could sit within each of us as we head home, Rulan Tangen and Jack Gray gathered everyone on the ground for our intentions to be heard and to begin to take shape. What followed was transformation, activation, provocation, identification, communication, decolonization, indigenize-nation. The Indigenous Knowledge Gathering committee passed out medicinal tea by Cultura sin Fronteras and white sage seeds were gifted as thanks.

But we were not done… we had to celebrate! After amazing collective clean-up/break-down effort, we were greeted by jams of Ras in the First Floor. Kris Hoag aka “Kwaz” who came in all the way from Bishop Paiute Tribe, gifted us some of his beats from his heart. Then there was dancing and Chhoti Ma dropped in to share more hip hop medicine, then more dancing.  Visiting San Francisco State students and members of Student Kouncil of Inter Tribal Nations or SKINS, Carlos Peterson-Gomez, and Nancy Andrade were inspired to drop some more beats that invited more dancing.

To close it up 14 hours later, we circled up and Antonio from the community shared songs from the Peace and Dignity Run. Pomo Joe and Ras offered Pomo songs of goodness and wellness and a few more hugs of gratitude for all that was given and received were exchanged before we dispersed under the Full Moon light.

Gathering and work will continue…  Please stay posted via our Facebook page Indigenous Knowledge Gathering and our website: www.indigenousknowledgegathering.com.

Angela “Mictlanxochitl” Anderson Guerrero was a lead organizer for the event described in this post. She is a Doctoral Candidate in East West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies whose dissertation is titled “Testimonio and Knowledge Production Among Transterritorial Mexican and Mexican American Indigenous Spiritual Practitioners: A Decolonial, Participatory, and Grassroots Postmodernist Inquiry.” She is a Council Member of Circulo Danza de la Luna Huitzlimetzli in Austin, Texas, and is finishing her nine year commitment with the Circulo Danza de la Luna Xochitlmetzli in Mexico. Previous positions include Center for Metropolitan Chicago Initiatives, Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame; Integral Teaching Fellow at CIIS: Emerging Arts Professional Fellow in San Francisco/Bay Area. She received an M.A. in Public Policy and a Certificate in Health Administration and Policy from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Public Policy in 2004.

speakers at talking session

Photo of Indigenous Knowledge Gathering by Agos Bawi. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Medicine in Knowledge by Susy Zepeda

Attending the First Annual Indigenous Knowledge Gathering at CIIS was exactly what my spirit needed as I work to find my ground and honor past, present, and future ancestors on my path. I was pleasantly surprised to find a critical yet warm space where the knowledge honored and spoken came from the heart of Indigenous peoples.  Participants were invited to be fully-embodied in non-hierarchal space, through eating amazing earth-centered food, building community with each other through sharing story, and listening in an accountable way.

The deep lessons of how to exist and live in a respectful way on Ohlone land and collaborate with Native and Indigenous local communities were insightful and instructive.  Corrina Gould, Nicholas Alexander Gomez, and Jonathan Cordero offered interruptions to the usual “othering” that tends to happen in western-centered scholarly work with Indigenous peoples—instead their assertions spoke to the urgency of taking up this work in ways that are accountable to ancestral knowledges, the earth, and all interconnected beings, as well as facilitative of the complexity of  being present as a vessel for transformation. As a queer Xicana Indígena scholar-activist, critical thinker, and practitioner of curanderismo, this gathering was medicine for my whole being.

The collective space created by Jack Gray, Dakota Alcantara-Camacho, and others who offered words, ceremony, movement, and song opened a path for participants to show up for ourselves and each other through small talking circles that facilitated instant heart connections and desire to learn more about each other’s histories and struggle. Roxanne Dubar-Ortiz’s sharing from her 2014 text, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, offered both wisdom and knowledge about the unseen genocidal and “transcommunal”[1] histories, highlighting the importance of world-wide decolonizing efforts that must also address oppressive dominant social and state structures. The closing movement and creativity brought the gathering full circle. We  all left full of wonderful energy and language to continue the important work of decolonization, solidarity, and loving our whole complex selves.

~Ometeotl

Susy Zepeda,is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Davis.  She is affiliated faculty with the Mellon funded Social Justice Initiative and the UC Davis Race Project. Zepeda is part of a writing collaborative, the Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective and a member of the Mujeres Talk Editorial Board.  She is currently working on her first book manuscript.

Photo of Indigenous Knowledge Gathering by Angela Anderson Guerrero. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Photo of Indigenous Knowledge Gathering by Agos Bawi. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Learning and Practicing Indigenous Intellectual Traditions by Alicia Cox

The First Annual Indigenous Knowledge Gathering at the California Institute of Integral Studies was a landmark in attempts to reposition indigenous knowledge in higher education. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz stated in her talk, the history of the United States has conventionally elided indigenous perspectives and perpetuated systems of colonization and genocide. Even the “integral” philosophy on which CIIS is founded is one of bridging “Eastern” and “Western” thought with no regard for the intellectual traditions of indigenous Americans. As a researcher and teacher of Native American and Indigenous Studies, the gathering invigorated and inspired me. I look forward to attending this event for years to come, and I urge readers to do the same or, better yet, gather indigenous intellectuals at a campus near you!

The opening panel featuring three Ohlone scholars was particularly instructive. Corrina Gould gave an overview of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 and the Termination Era of U.S. Indian policy that encouraged thousands of Native people to move from reservations to urban centers like San Francisco. In Corrina’s words, “Indians from elsewhere . . . were unaware of the existence of California Indians.” Subsequently, Indians from all over worked together to create organizations in the Bay Area such as the United Indian Nations, the American Indian Child Resource Center, and Indian People Organizing for Change. The latter organization has been especially instrumental in raising awareness about issues affecting Bay Area indigenous peoples, such as the destruction of shellmounds and other sacred sites by corporate and governmental construction projects. Since the Ohlone people are not recognized by the federal government, they are working to regain stewardship of their Native homelands by creating a cultural easement, a Native women-led urban land trust. IPOC is seeking volunteers to write grants, develop a website, and provide maintenance and upkeep services once the land is granted. Please visit ipocshellmoundwalk.homestead.com for more information or to donate funds.

The second session was led by Maori Contemporary Dance artist Jack Gray from Aotearoa. During the lunch break, Jack, who is a friend of mine, asked me to sing a song to help open the next session. This was not part of the program, and I was hesitant due to performance anxiety, but I understood that improvisation—a flexibility around the spirit of what is happening—is part of the indigenous intellectual tradition that Jack was offering. To rouse and ready the audience to receive the gifts of the gathering, Dåkot-ta Alcantara Camacho, a Chamorro Contemporary Hip-Hop Theater artist, chanted a welcoming song that honors a great navigator for the knowledge/spirit it takes to travel the seas. I then sang “The Trail of Tears Song” in Tsalagi (Cherokee), Eastern Band dialect, to thank Creator for life and the food, material and spiritual, that nourishes it. Several participants from the Transformance Lab that Jack and Dåkot-ta had co-facilitated the previous week at California State, East Bay, then led the audience in chanting and movement, helping us harness the power of gathering, sharing, and performing to awaken the latent energy and transformative potential that exist in all of us.

Alicia Cox completed her Ph.D. in English with a concentration in Native American Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and she is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include Native American literatures and gender and sexuality studies. She was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and she presently resides in Oakland, California.

References

[1] John Brown Childs, Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). 

Rafaela G. Castro (1943-2015): In Memoriam

photo of Rafaela G. Castro

Rafaela G. Castro. Photo courtesy of Castro Family. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

by Roberto C. Delgadillo

I first met Rafaela G. Castro during the annual week long Guadalajara International Book Fair, better known as the FIL (from its Spanish name: Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara), in early December 2000. The FIL is the most important publishing gathering in Ibero-America. Created 29 years ago by the University of Guadalajara, the FIL attracts academic, public, and school librarians and allows them to see and explore the books that form the core of major US based Spanish language library collections. The face-to-face interaction between librarians, publishers, and vendors result in better service and access to public and academic audiences. With business as one of its main goals, it is also a cultural festival in which literature plays a major role including a program where authors from all continents and languages participate, and a forum for the academic discussion of the major issues of our time. I was a part-time reference librarian assigned to the Hispanic Services Division of the Inglewood Public Library in Southern California. I was given the opportunity to attend and assist my then department head Adalin Torres, who kindly took the time to introduce me to librarians, publishers, vendors, and scholars I now consider friends and mentors. At the time I did not know Rafaela was a “luminary” among Chicana/o /Ethnic Studies Bibliographers. Her book Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican Americans is considered an excellent, and indispensable, starting point for scholars interested in examining terms associated with the Chicano experience, history, and customs.

I remember joining Rafaela for lunch that first time, along with UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Selector/Liaison Susana Hinojosa, after Adalin mentioned my pursuit of a doctoral degree in Latin American history. I enjoyed the many anecdotes Rafaela and Susana shared, and regret that I did not meet with them — as I should have — for the next three successive FILs. At the time, I faced several educational and professional constraints, did not envision a career in academic librarianship, and yet for reasons too numerous to detail here I also did not have what it takes to establish a career as a professor of Latin American history. Nonetheless, throughout that time, Susana and Rafaela kept in touch and strongly encouraged me to switch to academic librarianship. I credit Susana for getting me into the UC system and Rafaela for directing me to UC Davis in particular after I finished my studies in 2004.

To say I was overwhelmed when I arrived at UC Davis in November 2005 would be an understatement. By then Rafaela had retired and was pursuing other professional and personal interests and yet she always made the time to speak to me whenever I had a question — or several, as was often the case. During our phone calls and visits at subsequent FILs, Rafaela taught me invaluable lessons: she made me particularly aware of the vulnerability and necessity of creating and constantly maintaining library collections that document the experience of America’s marginal cultures. Often it is only experienced librarians, archivists, and scholars who can truly understand the significance of such collections. Rafaela taught me that all too often such collections  are especially vulnerable to being undervalued. My success as a Chicana/o Studies Bibliographer is built upon Rafaela’s careful and thoughtful stewardship of her collections. Rafaela’s subject knowledge was, and remains, crucial to the delivery of effective library service, the preservation of these collections and the future viability of the library. She always reminded me that the deferral of timely selection and purchase of materials, lax security and a lapse in reliable service can quickly destroy unique resources such as Chicana/o Studies collections.

Rafaela G. Castro was born in Bakersfield, California but grew up in Arvin, a small agricultural town near Weedpatch Camp, the labor camp featured in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. When she was ten years old her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she lived most of her life. After spending two years in Brazil with the Peace Corps, in the mid-1960s, she returned home to start her education. Attending UC Berkeley, she received degrees in English Literature, Library Science, and Folklore.

Rafaela’s academic library career spanned over thirty years, at community college and university libraries, and in teaching courses on Ethnic Bibliography and Chicana/o Studies at UC Berkeley’s School of Library and Information Studies and Ethnic Studies Department. In between these various positions she also worked at DQ University and Adelante, Inc., a non-profit organization in Berkeley. She retired from Shields Library at the University of California, Davis in 2004.

After completing the writing of a master’s thesis she discovered the joy of writing and wrote articles for Chicana/o Studies and academic library professional journals. She also wrote entries for folklore and biographical encyclopedias. During the 1990s Rafaela wrote opinion columns on Mexican American culture for the San Francisco Chronicle, and she contributed to “Perspectives,” a public affairs commentary series, on KQED-FM.

I last saw Rafaela during a scheduled presentation at a local area bookstore for her collection of personal essays Provocaciones: Letters From the Prettiest Girl in Arvin. I was immediately struck by the number of similarities we shared in our childhood and professional lives. I smile to myself as I write these lines given that I am a Nicaraguan by birth, disabled, and male! I hesitate to discuss the book because that would require an entire essay altogether. I highly recommend it!! True to the book’s subtitle Rafaela was graceful, modest, beautiful, strong…and passionate about what she experienced after leaving Arvin.

The many lessons that Rafaela taught me came into sharp relief during the student occupation of the UC Davis University Library in January 2010. I recall thinking if Rafaela were there she would be at the library entrance to DEFEND student spaces on campus, and LEAD workshops, talks, discussion groups, and film screenings, to help PROTEST cuts to library funding, student co-ops, and public education. Instead I led students on tours of what I still consider Rafaela’s collections. I was amused at the praise I received for the collections and all the more so because the materials Rafaela gathered provide greater context for what the students were protesting at the time. During Rafaela’s career at UC Davis (1989-2004), she was instrumental in the acquisition of the Ada Sosa-Riddell Papers, the Mario Obledo Papers, the Cruz Reynoso Papers, and the Chicana/o Studies archives. According to one of our retired archivists, Rafela’s most important service to Special Collections was “her constant willingness to refer students to our collections. She directed a doctoral researcher to the Jack Forbes papers regarding the participation of Chicanos in the founding of DQU.” When I corrected the students by noting how these collections predated my arrival they left knowing the library and the legacy of Rafaela’s work created a community space they could claim as their own.

I feel honored to have known Rafaela, and will always be grateful for her mentorship. The Chicana/o Studies collections she built at the University Library continue to serve both students and the community as a whole. It is a privilege to build on her work and steward this collection for future students and researchers. Rafaela Castro, Presente!

Roberto C. Delgadillo is a Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian in Research Support Services at the UC Davis University Library.

Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

by Theresa Delgadillo

This essay, originally prepared in 1996 for Professor Cherríe Moraga in her course on “Prophets/Scribes of Aztlán” at UCLA, has been updated and edited to meet Mujeres Talk requirements. Professor Moraga required students to do a kind of writing different from that typically required in a graduate seminar. She asked us to put ourselves into our critical work, and I took this to mean that we should write in a way that explicitly acknowledged the perspective from which we wrote, making clear and concrete, in writing, our investments and histories in the intellectual projects we undertake. For me, what it yielded was a creative non-fiction essay about a piece of literature, a form different than the academic article and made more so here through editing into a blog essay, a form that also calls upon authors to share more of oneself that one might in an academic journal. The blog essay is also a form necessarily focused on a small part of the literature under discussion, meant to provoke reflection, discussion, and further reading. I refer interested readers to the many excellent articles on Silko’s novel on the MLA International Bibliography.

In Almanac of the Dead (1991) Leslie Marmon Silko re-writes the history of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. It is no longer the story of “civilization” meeting the barbarians, not the moment at which Indians begin to disappear, but a brutal, cunning, bloody, savage conquest that spawns equally brutal societies. It is almost as if Silko, in one massive novel, attempts to reverse generations of schooling on the history of this continent, though one has to be open and ready to hear new stories in order to understand the Almanac.

Growing up Chicana anywhere in the United States presents many challenges to one’s “story,” because our experience is undervalued or denied. We live in a nation where ours is not the official story, and yet it is ours. Like the speaker in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem who says, “I’m marked by the color of my skin” (35-7), so, too, have I been marked in every school I’ve been in since childhood. Though I knew it from my first day in school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I only began to understand it in seventh grade. One of my older brothers gave me a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), which I read while my Social Studies class studied the period of westward expansion into the Dakotas and the Black Hills Gold Rush. I was stunned by the glaring difference in these narratives. The two books had completely different things to say about the same events. While Indians were nowhere to be found in the school textbook, they were everywhere in Dee Brown’s account, prompting me to ask our teacher about this discrepancy.

My question to the teacher was not simply about facts or words, it was, as Linda Hogan says, about “ways of thinking and being in the world” (12). Around that time, there were a series of marches and protests by Wisconsin Native Americans in the news. Having already been mistaken for Native American, I knew that discriminatory treatment toward Native Americans was not unlike that directed against Mexican Americans. I was disturbed by how our textbook completely erased Native American peoples from history. Our teacher, however, insisted that our textbook was accurate. He dismissed my question. When I tried to explain what Dee Brown reveals in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he told me to be quiet. I continued, but the teacher yelled at me. I then did something completely surprising to all, myself included: I yelled back. Another supervising teacher was called in. Lots of tense whispering, then the bell rang, and so did discussion.

When I read Almanac of the Dead, I thought back to this youthful confrontation with history. Today, I also have to wonder about where Latina/os were in that curriculum, but back then I was just beginning to understand then what the novel illustrates so well — the difference between dominant history and story/ies/histories. A conception of history in the singular as the static and unchangeable past shields it from inquiry and allows it to be compartmentalized and separated from both the present and the future. New knowledge cannot alter it. History in that sense is perhaps why the teacher could not accept another version of the same events in the Dakota Hills and why he did not even consider it important enough to discuss–the events were safely in the past and therefore not of major concern, not to mention that Dee Brown’s version of events was in conflict with the textbook narrative.

In Almanac of the Dead, there are two conceptions of the past diametrically opposed to one another: dominant history versus story/ies/histories. These distinct conceptions are really competing worldviews and they create conflicts for individual characters, who must decide which view will guide their lives. One character who experiences this conflict is Sterling:

[He] had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. (24)

The past Sterling wants to forget is his banishment from Laguna Pueblo, yet he was raised on the stories of his Pueblo, including the dispossessions and indignities imposed upon them by  government and dominant knowledge systems (31). He cannot forget one portion of the past without forgetting it all. He enjoys reading the Police Gazette, with its stories of criminals past, in part, because this is one place where Indians to appear in the history of the West with some attempt at understanding their perspective (39-40).

An awareness of the contrast between dominant history and story/histories also operates for the character of Clinton, who, as an African-American Vietnam veteran now homeless, tracks on the discrepancies between the two. Clinton remains highly critical of what he learns in university classes  yet he also finds there, in Black Studies, research that confirms his sense of his people as more than mere pawns of history, and gains a wealth of knowledge on the experiences and cultures of Blacks (414-431). When he critically recalls how wealthy Cherokee Indians had been rounded up by orders of Andrew Jackson, Clinton insists that a “a people’s history” must include all the stories: “That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions” (415).

In the novel, characters who refuse the stories of others are racked with fear, and in the novel, doomed to failure. As Linda Hogan observes, “the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end” (93). This is what the characters Beaufrey and Serlo see in the future–cities burning and anarchy reigning–which is why they want to develop modules to survive in space (542). An apocalyptic ending is also what the character Menardo sees and why he is obsessed with insurance and security (266). In the novel, his first wife, Iliana, too, proud of the historical pedigree of having been descended from the conquistador De Oñate “still was gnawed by the fear that disaster was stalking all of them” (270). That fear is also one shared and preyed upon in the novel by characters representing the military regimes of Latin America and their U.S. collaborators.

Another view of the future emerges in the novel from the character of the Barefoot Hopi, who presents a perspective challenging for humans when he says:

            You destroyers….don’t know how much the spirits of these continents despise you, how the earth hates you….All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. (734)

Unlike Serlo’s view or Menardo’s view, this prediction of cataclysmic events is not a prediction of end, but of beginning. In the Hopi’s view, the world does not revolve around humans and therefore the end of things human is not a catastrophe. He predicts that the Earth will cleanse itself and continue; this he does not fear. His view parallels Yoeme’s, who says that the sacred Earth “would go on, [it] would outlast anything man did to it” (718). This is what Sterling comes to understand, too: “Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her” (762). In the course of the novel, several characters arrive at this understanding of the earth’s story, and must re-consider human interaction with it. Yet, do the Barefoot Hopi’s words leave us off the hook for what happens to the Earth or inspire responsibility?

The old woman Yoeme’s notebook, carried by the children in the novel, says, “sacred time is always in the Present” (136). Though it may sound like the same message of the magazines Sterling reads to cope with depression, it is not. Instead, it is akin to what Linda Hogan’s grandmother articulates: “Our work is our altar” (148); or what Hogan herself describes as “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing” (89). The idea of the sacred in the present recognizes the web of existence that links humans with the natural world. It is also an idea that imposes demands on characters in this novel. As Silko says in an article in Artforum, “for the old people, no one person or thing is better than another; hierarchies presuming superiority and inferiority are considered absurd.”

The conception of story in the novel knits together past, present, and future. Story is alive and everything has a story, but not the same one. Story in this novel is not only the narratives characters create to make meaning of life, but movements and experiences of peoples, the variety of plants and animals in the natural world, the Earth itself. To embrace story appears as a way to embrace a worldview that accepts the interconnectedness of organisms through time.

Many characters in Almanac struggle to make sense of their story, trying to fit their past with their present and future. Some try to forget their own story and instead embrace history, like Menardo; some are rejected because they are evidence of a past that their families want to forget, like Root; some think that their own history is everybody’s history, like Bartolomeo; some see only part of the past and therefore mistakenly think they know what the future will be, like Beaufrey and Serlo; some make connections between other stories and their own and organize people to act with others, such as Angelita and El Feo; some people tell their own stories/histories, such as Clinton, Tacho, the Barefoot Hopi, Wilson Weasel Tail Clinton, Angelita and Lecha; while others, most, struggle to understand the relationship between their stories and other stories. Like the children carrying the pages of the almanac north (246-253), each person in Silko’s novel carries a story that is incomplete without the other stories/histories.

The almanac-carrying children are fleeing “the Butcher” who is enslaving and murdering their tribe, an allusion to both a historical genocide and contemporary circumstances forcing children to flee north. In this storyline, the novel represents the very real experience of the Yaqui tribe, who created a testamento of their creation and their land that is passed down today in handwritten notebooks, and even, as Evers and Molina point out, has been carried by messengers who had the document sewn into their clothes (32). Like Silko’s fictional almanac, both a document and an oral story altered with the additions of each narrator, it is expected and necessary that the Yaqui testamento be “unfixed” by those re-telling it (Evers and Molina 23). These are only two examples of the many stories and histories that are embedded in Almanac of the Dead.

As the character Clinton points out in the Almanac, denying people their histories helps to ensure submission and subordination (431), cutting people off from the stories of their ancestors means stranding them in madness and meanness (424). The novel seems to ask us: Do we recognize story/ies/histories, recognize “differences” as Calabazas says (203), and learn from them? Or do we continue to privilege destruction?

Works Cited

Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Evers, Larry and Felipe S. Molina. “The Holy Dividing Line: Inscription and Resistance in Yaqui Culture.” Journal of the Southwest. 34:1. (1992): 3-46.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Norton, 1995.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “The Fourth World.” Artforum. 28:10. (1989): 124-125.

Theresa Delgadillo is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Coordinator of the Latina/o Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She has served as Editor of Mujeres Talk since January 2011. 

 

Holders of the Light

People holding placards with lighted letters spelling out words.

Overpass Light Brigade at American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference, UW-Milwaukee, April 2014. Courtesy of Overpass Light Brigade.

by Kimberly Blaeser

In 1986, when I should have been writing my PhD dissertation, I was reading boxes (no exaggeration) of Department of Energy materials regarding the planned siting of high level nuclear waste repositories. One of the sites proposed was on my home reservation at White Earth, amid Minnesota’s basalt and granite hardrock deposits—very near the headwaters of the Mississippi River.  I don’t now remember details of the science I learned during that time about crystalline rock, fractures, and ground water, but I do remember the urgency with which I investigated, the weeks and months during which I wrote, went to meetings, knocked on doors, and testified.

I had reason to recall that urgent dedication recently when Edith Leoso, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Bad River Ojibwe of Wisconsin, spoke of the way her life had shifted unexpectedly with the proposal of mining in the Penokee Hills of Wisconsin. Likewise, Bad River Tribal Chairman, Michael Wiggins, Jr. was forced to quickly educate himself in the pertinent science and legal intricacies in order to lead the ongoing anti-mining efforts, to protect the land and the people, to guard the future.

Of the many ways to say please stand, I have chosen a few.

∂, Partial Differential Equation

All things being equal, things are never equal. Think of scope. Like the reach of the imperial.  Or consider variables. Value. Or commodity. Ways of seeing. Angles and perspectives. Or how to solve for survival. 

The consideration of seven generations. This wisdom rule has become common knowledge. Leaders teach that tribal decisions should be made taking into consideration seven generations in the past and seven generations in the future.

The national sacrifice.  Lesser known, and frequently unacknowledged, this convenience policy has marked many generations. Uranium mining. The fallout from atomic bomb detonation at White Sands.

What we erase from polite conversation. Bodies on fire. The historic cleansing of the landscape, the sweep of humanity west, west, west. Environmental r  ism. 

Zongide’en, Be Brave.

Another partial differential equation. Let’s say a corporation proposes a mine. Variables include Tyler Forks. Bad. Potato. Rivers. A 22-mile, 22,000-acre strip of land. Jobs. Maanomin. Open pit. Exceptional or Outstanding Resource waters. Legislation. Iron oxide.  Fish. Blasting and pulverizing. New legislation. The functions depend upon the continuous variables. Fluid flow, for example. And changing laws. Somewhere along the granite line, someone enters. Let’s say they have put down one life and taken up another: the solution of the PDE. They face arbitrary functions. Changing laws. Guards. Guns. If the life is stretched over two points.  It vibrates. We cannot measure that vibration in this generation. We can sing it, or make it into light. (See above for a partial illustration.)

Minobimaadizi, Live Well.

This past week an environmental warrior from the Pacific Northwest passed away. Billy Frank, Jr.  Frank was quoted as saying about himself, “I was not a policy guy. I was a getting-arrested guy.” But in the end he changed policy. A Nisqually tribal member, his battle for tribal sovereignty in resource management protected the salmon and left its mark on contemporary understanding of treaty law. To accomplish that he was jailed, beaten, tear-gassed, and chose to sacrifice much of his time and liberty. A life stretched over two points.

The Anishinaabe word minobimaadizi translated gives us the English live well. But it means something more. To live this good life in ways both obvious and less so. Though we may feel dwarfed by the largeness of passion and action of people like Billy Frank, Jr., we remain variables in the equation and can tip the balance one way or the other.

When we held an American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus recently, we invited my colleague Lane Hall and his Overpass Light Brigade to participate one evening. Lane’s idea to create lighted letters and spell out protest messages above freeways has caught on around the country. At our event, we spelled words in Anishinaabemowin. (For these Lane needed more vowels!)  I am not an OLB regular holder of the light, but I volunteered to be one of those to carry and display the large placards. You will find me at the “I,” the third “O,” and the “G.”  One lighted letter in a 14-letter word? Only a pair of legs beneath a billboard? Ahem. Can you spell m  taphor without me?

Gego Googiibike, Don’t Dive Into the Metal.

I’d like to ask you to fold up your deck chair and head to the Penokee Hills protests. But the truth is, you probably have an environmental threat within biking distance. Or canoeing distance. Mining companies are pushing to conduct a toxic new form of extraction for sulfide, right next to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, near the 1,090,000-acre (4,400 km2) wilderness area that is located in the Superior National Forest.  Where insistence is a function of insanity. If x then why.  A mine parallel to 1,000 miles of canoe routes, in the habitat of moose, beaver, wolves, bear, lynx, deer, bobcats, bald eagles, peregrine falcons and loons, within easy polluting distance of our once remote family cabin. We’ve hardly hands enough to hold all the signs or mics needed in this indifferent world of resource capitalism.

And yet.

Poetry is one letter when we spell resistance.

Debwetaan, Believe.

Eloquence of Earth

Nominal signs, these words we use—future, ecology, seven generations

have yellowed into clichés, editorials that line the cages

of captured birds, or burn in unransomed stone fireplaces

of America’s aspiring, royal mining families.

These green futures cast as fairy story,

sealed beneath the calloused ideals of legislators—

sleek smiling handshakes who seal bargains like Jabez Stone;

Our I-do-solemnly-swear paper-promise leaders

enticed by industry frenzy, slight of lips,

the short-sighted tally (seven hundred jobs)

coveted like Stone’s seven years of prosperity.

Though publicly professed (against all enemies, foreign and domestic),

and leather-oath sworn (will bear true faith and allegiance),

still quid pro quos reign, sell the soul of this land—

our waters our manoomin our children, abiinoojiihnyag.

Each season gavels strike new bargains with our oldest enemies

maji-manidoog, handsome fast-talking strangers disguised as prosperity.

 

Daily we watch patient warnings swim the Wolf River,

migrate to absent wetlands, trumpet old calls.

How do we translate the flashing fins of poisoned fish?

What other alphabet do you know to spell contaminated waters?

Like banned books words still burn on my tongue—reciprocity,

sacred, preservation, earth, tradition, knowledge, protect.

Even the vellum of justice has crumbled in fiendish fire.

Meanwhile we gather here, descendants of ajijaak and maang

lift our ancient clan voices in longing, for a chant of restoration

in a Faustian world.

Before a jury of the tricked and trapped and bamboozled,

before the very devil, Daniel Webster sang

the healing brush of common memory

a child’s wonder at each day’s waking

the freshness of a fine morning—waaseyaaban.

 

If I say Gichigami—Lake Superior—a turquoise plain, stretches

infinite, gete-gaming. If I say Wiikonigoyaang, she invites us to her feast,

how many will remember the eloquence of earth itself?

At dawn when jiibay mist backstrokes across the copper of northern prairies

eerie white hovering, damp and alive,

will you stretch out your hands in hope

cup the sacred like cedar smoke,

draw it toward you—a gesture

fervent and older than language?

Now I say wiigwaasikaa, everywhere we look

there are many white birch,

bark marked with sign, scrolls a history.

I say ritual, continuum, cycle of belonging,

I say daga, please; ninandotaan,

you must listen for it—aki.

Yes, our very earth speaks.

Who among us will translate?

Kimberly Blaeser is a 2014 Contributing Blogger for Mujeres Talk and a poet, critic and essayist. She teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature and American Nature Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is a Professor. Her publications include three books of poetry: Trailing You; Absentee Indians and Other Poems; and Apprenticed to Justice. Her scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Blaeser grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota and worked as a journalist before earning her MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Her poetry has also been translated into several languages including Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian and French.

12/12/12: This Time Is Our Time

December 12, 2012

DSCN0026By Inés Hernández-Ávila

Compañeras, hermanas, hijas, nietas, abuelas, madres, madres, madres, todos somos madres, de una manera u otra, porque todas tenemos la profunda capacidad de crear:

Hoy es un dia muy importante, today is an important day, 12/12/12, there will not be another one in our lifetimes, we must give ourselves a moment in our lives to stop our ordinary activity and feel, see, touch, taste, smell, be with the Earth, the Mother of Us All, y darle Grácias. This is the day that tells us that it is time to be the way we want to be, without reservation, unconditionally, to realize ourselves con firmeza, con coraje, con Amor, to remember who we are, as mujeres, as guerreras, as voces, as thinking hearts.[1] Today is a llamamiento to our very innermost beings to stand up and be counted on behalf of the Earth, on behalf of all of Life, on behalf of toda la naturaleza, todos los seres inocentes que comparten esta planeta con nosotras. De nosotras dependen, quién sino nosotras? Humans are not the only peoples on this Earth. Si va a ver Justicia, que sea para todos los seres que vivimos en la Tierra. Interestingly, the U.N. designated April 22 as International Mother Earth Day (I knew it was called Earth Day, I just learned it is officially Mother Earth Day). Día 12 is the Mexican Mother Earth Day. Perhaps not all peregrinos, devotos, would see it this way—for many of them, la Virgen de Guadalupe es, en términos estrictamente Católicos, la Madre de Diós, la Madre de Jesucristo, la interlocutora mas alta que hay para llegar a Diós. Mis respetos a todos ellos.

But for those of us who have been reflecting on her being, thinking about our (dis)connections to Catholicism, thinking about Chicana/indigenous spiritualities, envisioning “transnational feminist spiritual communities,”[2] coming to terms with the idea of Spirit in our lives, we know that La Virgen is much more than how she is defined by the Catholic Church. We know her differently. As our beloved Gloria Anzaldua said, “I’ve always been aware that there is a greater power than the conscious I.  That power is my inner self, the entity that is the sum total of all my reincarnations, the godwoman in me I call Antigua, mi Diosa, the divine within, Coatlicue-Cihuacoatl-Tlazolteotl-Tonantzin-Coatlalopeuh-Guadalupe—they are one.”[3] This is immense knowledge. La Virgen se manifiesta como imagen Católica, some say she was an invention of the missionization campaign, a tool of the imperial project, pero de todas maneras, we have triumphantly (re)indigenized her, claimed her as our own, and she has become an activist on behalf of the people, for so many who know her this way.  If she was an invention of missionization, the invention traicionó al proyecto colonial, because the foundational elements of her being are here, in this hemisphere, in the Land. She is the Land. She is the Earth. Punto.

Today is 12/12/12, but we should see the date as a marker of the momentum of transformation that is happening all around us.  The latter part of the month, some say 12/21/12, will mark the entrance, completed, of the next age, the New Sun. My colleague Victor Montjeo, Jakaltek Maya, from Guatemala, tells us that this is a time of world renewal, not world destruction. In the Conchero Dance tradition, I was told that we are moving from Nahui Ollin, 5 Movement, the age we have been in since before the invaders arrived, to the New Sun, Nahui Coatl, 5 Serpent, and that this New Sun will manifest more predominantly as female, and her symbol will be the Venado, the Deer. For at least two decades, the elders of this dance tradition have indicated that the New Sun has been arriving, coming in behind the present one, dancing. I remember dancing at the Basilica de la Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico City, one December 12th, and suddenly as I was dancing, I felt the earth move beneath my feet, gently, almost unnoticeably, but it was certain, the Earth Mother was dancing with us, happy that we were dancing for her. She is so alive, she sings, she dances, she witnesses, she grieves, she disrupts, she balances, she suffers, she loves.

During this time (during all of our time on this earth in this life), we should walk, as the Yoeme say of saila maaso, the little brother deer, leaving flowers wherever we step.  Tenderly, gracefully, attentively, with abundant awareness of our surroundings, not only our academic or work surroundings, that, too, but our homes, our yards, our jardines (if we are lucky enough to have them), the spaces where we choose to spend time. Spend time, such a Western concept. Even time is cast in monetary, acquisitive terms. Spend time. Take time. Waste time. Don’t waste time. The spaces, circles, spheres where we love to be.

We know we are always in Nepantla (grácias a los antiguos Nahuas por este concepto). Somos Nepantleras (grácias a Gloria por la contemporización del concepto). As Nepantleras, in this time of great transformation, change, shape-shifting, we are ready for whatever comes our way. We must keep our senses, have our wits about us, trust our intuition, and constantly fine-tune it, remember humility, and know deeply that our Spirits are present, always. My Spirit guides me, my Spirit has the answers, my Spirit protects me. This I must remember. This we must remember. And my Spirit helps me see the signs of this new time that has come. Our spirits are ready. This time is our time.

Inés Hernández-Ávila is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Native American Studies at UC-Davis. She is a member of the Mujeres Talk Editorial Collective. 


[1] The term “thinking heart” is from Kathryn Shanley, Nakota scholar of Native American Studies.

[2] Theresa Delgadillo, Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative, p. 94.

[3] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, p. 50.

Comment(s):
Carrie Castañeda-Sound    December 12, 2012 at 3:22 PM

With all the end-of-semester chaos, commercialism, and high expectations from family and friends, I found this blog very grounding. Thank you for that gift!

Decolonize Your Diet!

September 10, 2012

Quelites Harvest

Quelites Harvest

By Luz Calvo and Catriona R. Esquibel

We have a passion for Mexican food. We have a passion for gardens, for healthy food, for food justice, and for people of color reclaiming our histories. All of this has led us to our current project, Decolonize Your Diet. This is a project to reclaim the heritage foods of greater Mexico and Central America as a way improving the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of US Latinos/as.

SOME BACKGROUND

In the US, a person’s health is almost pre-determined by their socio-economic status. For the most part, upper and middle class people, who have access to health care, higher education, healthy foods, and safe spaces to exercise, have significantly better health than poor folks who lack health insurance, education, access to grocery stores, and who live in poor and often dangerous neighborhoods. Public health scholars evaluate the health of demographic groups by looking at mortality, infant mortality, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer rates. Poor people have worse health on all these measures. This is not surprising: Social inequality affects people’s health and lifespan.

However, there is one notable exception to the equation of poverty = poor health—public health scholars have found that recent immigrants from Mexico have very low rates of mortality, infant mortality, and illness compared to other groups. Public health scholars have dubbed this phenomenon “The Latino/a Paradox.”(1) Recent Latino/a immigrants, mainly from Mexico and Central America, have better health than Latinos and Latinas who were born in the US. The health of recent immigrants rivals the health of the [w]healthiest Americans! This fact is somewhat astounding given that Latino/a immigrants face so many challenges: in general, Latino/a immigrants arrive to this country with very few economic resources. They don’t have access to preventative health care and are often afraid to seek care when they are sick. They work in difficult and dangerous jobs and they are under extremely high levels of social, spiritual, and economic stress. One would expect their health to suffer under these circumstances.

Public health scholars have not been able to explain Latino/a immigrants’ health; but there is significant evidence supporting the health benefits of traditional diets of Mexico and Central America. We believe that these food traditions protect Latino/a immigrants from disease, including diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and some cancers. Unfortunately, the health of immigrants declines over time. The longer immigrants stay in the US and the more they assimilate into US culture, the worse their health becomes. By the second generation, Latinos/as face the same issues as other poor folks in the US, with skyrocketing rates of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Cancer rates also start to increase.

DECOLONIZE YOUR DIET

We feel it is imperative that Chicano/a Studies engage food justice in research and teaching. We call to our comrades, colleagues, and students to look at their personal food choices as political acts. Resist cultural imperialism by reclaiming ancestral foods. Honor our ancestors and their wisdom by learning how to cook beans, make corn tortillas, and grow food.  Above all, share your knowledge!

The following chart outlines some of the differences between what we think is a Colonized Standard American Diet (¡Qué SAD!) and a decolonized approach:

WESTERN DIET
DECOLONIZED DIET
Advertising and Fads
Ancestral Knowledge/Oral Tradition
Hybrid Seeds and GMO
Heritage Seeds and Seed Saving
White Supremacy
Respect for Mexican and Indigenous Knowledge and Traditions
White sugar, White flour, White rice
Brown is Beautiful: Honey, Whole Wheat, Brown Rice
Assimilation, Submission, Capitulation
Resistance, Resilience
No connection to the land. Reliance on Chain Grocery Stores.
Community Gardens, Guerilla Gardening, Urban Farming,
Boredom
Creativity
Conspicuous consumption
Simple, accessible food
Disavowal, Thoughtlessness
Intentions, Blessings and Ceremony
Processed Foods
Real, whole food
Anti-union/anti-immigrant
Fair labor practices, Worker cooperatives
Pesticides and Monoculture
Permaculture and Biodiversity
Pharmaceutical industry
La Comida es Medicina, Herbal remedies
Wasteful
Resourceful

As part of our project, we are collecting and sharing knowledge and recipes. We are inspired by Native food activists like Winona LaDuke (2,3,4), Devon Abbott Mihesuah (5) and the Tohono O’odham Nation (6). We’re very excited by the significant health benefits to be gained from eating cooked dried beans (7,8,9), nopales (10,11), chia (10), quelites (12), and verdolagas (13, 14, 15).

JOIN US AND LEARN MORE!

We invite you to join us in the reclamation of Mexican heritage foods: join “Luz’s Decolonial Cooking Club” on Facebook or follow our blog at decolonizeyourdiet.blogspot.com

CITATIONS
  1. Viruell-Fuentes, Edna A. 2007. Beyond acculturation: immigration, discrimination, and health research among Mexicans in the United States. Social science & medicine (1982) 65 (7): 1524–35.
  2. LaDuke, Winona. 1999. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge, MA; Minneapolis, MN: South End Press; Honor the Earth.
  3. LaDuke, Winona. 2005. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
  4. LaDuke, Winona, and Sarah Alexander. n.d. Food is Medicine: Recovering Traditional Foods to Heal the People. Honor the Earth/White Earth Land Recovery Project.
  5. Mihesuah, Devon Abbot. 2005. Recovering Our Ancestor’s Gardens: Indigenous Recipes and Guide to Diet and Fitness. University of Nebraska Press.
  6. Tohono O’odham Community Action with Mary Pagnelli Votto and Frances Manuel. 2010. From I’Itoi’s Garden: Tohono O’Odham Food Traditions.Blurb.com.
  7. Reynoso, Camacho, R. 2007. El consumo de frijol común (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) y su efecto sobre el cáncer de colon en ratas Sprague-Dawley. Agricultura técnica en México 33 (1): 43–52.
  8. Guevara, Lara, F. 2006. Phenolics, Flavonoids and Other Nutraceuticals in Mexican Wild Common Beans {(Phaseolus} Vulgaris).
  9. Serrano, José, and Isabel Goñi. 2004. [Role of black bean Phaseolus vulgaris on the nutritional status of Guatemalan population]. Archivos latinoamericanos de nutrición 54 (1): 36–44.
  10. Guevara-Cruz, Martha et al. 2012. A dietary pattern including nopal, chia seed, soy protein, and oat reduces serum triglycerides and glucose intolerance in patients with metabolic syndrome. The Journal of nutrition 142 (1): 64–69.
  11. Gutierrez, Miguel Angel. 1998. Medicinal Use of the Latin Food Staple Nopales: The Prickly Pear Cactus. Nutrition Bytes 4
  12. Barakat, Lamiaa A A, and Rasha Hamed Mahmoud. 2011. The antiatherogenic, renal protective and immunomodulatory effects of purslane, pumpkin and flax seeds on hypercholesterolemic rats. North American journal of medical sciences3 (9): 411–17.
  13. Huang, Yun, and Lei Dong. 2011. Protective effect of purslane in a rat model of ulcerative colitis. Zhongguo Zhong yao za zhi = Zhongguo zhongyao zazhi = China journal of Chinese materia medica 36 (19): 2727–30.
  14. Huang, Zhiliang, et al. 2009. Total phenolics and antioxidant capacity of indigenous vegetables in the southeast United States: Alabama Collaboration for Cardiovascular Equality Project. International journal of food sciences and nutrition 60 (2): 100–08.
  15. Shobeiri, S F, et al. 2009. Portulaca oleracea L. in the treatment of patients with abnormal uterine bleeding: a pilot clinical trial. Phytotherapy research: {PTR} 23 (10): 1411–14.

Luz Calvo is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal State East Bay.  After their breast cancer diagnosis in 2006, Calvo became interested in food justice activism.

Catriona R. Esquibel is an associate professor of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. Esquibel started writing about ancestral foods after she and Calvo ate verdolagas at her father’s morada on Good Friday in Holman, New Mexico.

Comment(s):

  1. Elena Gutierrez  September 11, 2012 at 5:46 PM

    Verdolagas grow in the sidewalk cracks here in Chicago and I have more than once excavated and cooked them with friends. We get a few stares but they are so yummy and worth it! Thanks too for these references- not I can show my mom the “proof” that nopales really will help her diabetes. Excited to hear about your further works in this area.

  2. Theresa (Mujeres Talk Co-Moderator)  September 12, 2012 at 12:33 PM

    When my dad became diabetic i started looking into healthier traditional foods and yes, nopales are, indeed, good for diabetes! Luz and Catriona, thank you for sharing some of this exciting new work, and your emphasis not on the pricey and expensive and hard to find ingredients but on the readily available and traditional prepared in healthy ways. I am curious if anyone has done studies on the practices of keeping milpas that are mentioned in fiction that describes early and mid 20th century Chican@ life and health.

  3. Dianna Ching  November 21, 2012 at 5:06 PM

    I want to get rid of my tummy fats but I can’t deprive myself on foods so I never considered diet. But this one sounds so easy so I think I’ll give it a shot. Instead of having a liposculpture right away, why not try this. Thanks a lot!

Learning from Mexican and Native Women

August 20, 2012

Photo Credit: Pepe Rivera. Taken June 26, 2011. From Flickr.

Photo Credit: Pepe Rivera. Taken June 26, 2011. From Flickr.

By Theresa Delgadillo

Yesterday, as I continued my work on translating an oral history interview from Spanish into English, I was struck by something that this particular participant in the project said – as I often am in this work. I’ve had the honor of interviewing some very wise and determined Latinas in the project that I began in 2008 to collect the oral histories of Latina leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These are some very interesting women! Fortunately, I am near the end of the editing and looking forward to sending it off the publisher soon. To get back to my point: my interviewee, commenting on the social customs of Mexico and the U.S., says at one point, “There it is the same as here, exactly the same as here. The only difference is that there is still a fiction that in Mexico it’s different.” She was talking about the acceptability of divorce, but it resonated with me on other levels, such as the changes in daily life, work and environment, partially because there was some interesting news from Mexico recently in the The New York Times about a group of indigenous women in Cherán, Michoacoán, who mobilized against armed illegal loggers and are now defending their town from violence and their forest from deforestation. To readers of Latina/o literatures, or literature about migration, the name Cherán might be familiar, since it was one of the sites of migration to the U.S. portrayed in Ruben Martinez’s Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail(2001). The August 2, 2012 article by Karla Zabludovsky titled “Reclaiming the Forests and the Right to Feel Safe,” describes the events in Cherán and the women’s actions as “extraordinary” as it details their effectiveness. Motivated in part by the loss of the beautiful forest that was once their patrimony, a loss that must be visible to them on a daily basis, the women see themselves acting not only for themselves but for future generations. When I read it, I wondered, and not for the first time, if Luis Urrea’s novelInto the Beautiful North (2009) hadn’t come to life – because this is not the first instance in recent years of Mexican women taking the lead to end violence and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, New York State is set to join the ranks of states allowing fracking. In an August 19, 2012 CBS News Report, “New York State to Allow Fracking,” Jeff Glor’s article notes that the process of fracking releases dangerous contaminants that have high potential to endanger air and water supplies, yet quotes local farmers who need the money. The women of Cherán, Michoacán, also need money to live and they are supported in part, according to the article, by remittances from residents who have migrated to the U.S., yet it seems they are living in the aftermath of a disastrous environmental decision and working to make it right. Like the people of Cherán, Michoacán, Mexico, we face some very difficult decisions in these energy-gobbling times, and we might consider what we can productively learn through a comparative perspective that doesn’t consign indigenous women to a lost past, but instead examines the experience of both residents and migrants from particular regions about what doesn’t work – because as my interviewee says: “There it is the same as here, exactly the same as here. The only difference is that there is still a fiction that in Mexico it’s different.”

Theresa Delgadillo is on the faculty at Ohio State University.

  1. María Antonietta Berriozábal  August 20, 2012 at 4:27 PM

    Dear Theresa:

    I find your work fascinating. I am a lover of oral history. Next month my book, María, Daughter of Immigrants, will be published. The first chapters include the stories that my parents told me as a child. With just their stories – no genealogical searches for me – I was able to share the story of my great grand mother and grandparents going back one hundred years. That is rather astounding. To think that these women can share a story, you chronicle them and one hundred years from now someone will be sharing them.

    Another reason for my interest in your work is that in 1995 I attended the Fourth World Conference on Women in China as a member of the US delegation. During the conference I met with women from Central America and some from Peru. Some could not even speak Spanish. They spoke their native dialects, but they had leaders who had learned Spanish and they were our interpreters. One of the reasons they had gone to the Beigjing conference, through great sacrifice, was to tell their stories of how their ancestral lands were being taken by businesses. It is the same story that continues to this day of multi-national corporations raping the environment in other countries so they can provide goods and food for the developed countries like the US and others. But the women were fighting; they were organizing and using their voices. I found it interesting that the leaders of the movements, at least of the ones I met, were mujeres. They wore their colorful clothing almost as the shield of warriors.

    In any event, I appreciate what you are doing very much.

    Sincerely,

    María Antonietta Berriozábal
    San Antonio, Texas

  2. Theresa (Mujeres Talk Co-Moderator)  August 20, 2012 at 6:14 PM

    Dear María Antonietta,

    I am looking forward to reading the preview of your book that appeared in Frontiers, and to your new book. Please send us an announcement for it as soon as it appears. My project was motivated, too, by the desire to record and share the life stories of Latinas whose experiences don’t appear elsewhere.

    Research in the U.S. has shown that indigenous migrants to the U.S. from Latin America often face difficulties precisely because of the language assumptions that you noted in your experience. Despite language differences, we are all struggling with the same difficult questions about how we use our natural resources.

    Thank you so much for your comments and encouragement, and thank you for sharing your work.

    Take care, Theresa

  3. Lourdes Alberto  August 28, 2012 at 8:31 PM

    In reading this post I am reminded that indigenous people think of themselves as planetary citizens–they fight for their people, their cultures, their history, but also all of our well-being and that of future generations.
    As an indigenous person myself (Oaxaqueña), I struggle with my own part in the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources.
    You know, three seasons ago I started growing a garden with the goal of eventually meeting all of my family’s summertime food needs. It was so fulfilling, so liberating, so unexpected. I know now that my challenge is to remember and live the knowledge my grandparents left me about the land, about plants and about the importance of well-being. As you mentioned, there are tens of thousands of indigenous people from Latin America in CA. Growing up we had an informal plant co-op/exchange. Someone would manage to bring over a plant, flower, hierba, from Oaxaca and we would literally share cuttings–yerba santa, varieties of avocado, ruda. It was amazing! A kind of urban indigenous transnational environmentalism!

  4. Theresa (Mujeres Talk Co-Moderator)  September 3, 2012 at 5:25 AM

    Dear Lourdes,

    It’s good to hear from those that grow gardens for sustainability, and I appreciate the work you’ve put into this important task for three seasons, which, as you say, is a combination of memory work, and living a connection to others and growing food. Thank you for your beautiful note!

    Take care, Theresa