Dear all,
In the midst of a very cold and snowy February, I’ve found myself cultivating and harvesting some unexpected fruits.
- The seed of a reflection on dandelions grew and ended up being published in Friends Journal, https://www.friendsjournal.org/dandelions-and-domination/ .
- A conversation with my friend George Lakey about the importance of tending to vision grew into an article in Waging Nonviolence, https://wagingnonviolence.org/2021/02/envision-or-perish-why-we-must-start-imagining-the-world-we-want/.
- And a conviction that those who care about climate need to understand economics has generated an online class series for our peer counseling community, starting with a robust and well-received intro with folks from across the world!
I’m reminded of all the different kinds of seeds that are out there, just lying in waiting for the right conditions to sprout and grow.
And here is a reflection that I’ve been holding for a while, as our collective attention has been riveted on the national scene.
Love,
Pamela
Taking and joining
I may have heard of the Navajo in my childhood. I undoubtedly saw images that got lodged in my brain. I do remember, as a young adult, driving through a reservation in the Southwest, and feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur. My most substantial introduction came with a series of mystery novels set in Navajo land. They were well-written, sympathetic, full of details of daily life, and I was captivated.
I had picked up a critical overall perspective on our country’s past and present treatment of its native population as a young adult, but was well past middle age before I decided that more was required of me in this area. I began reading in more depth. Following my sister, I took steps that eventually grew into rich connections and real relationships with members of the Haudenosaunee nation. I started the painful work of confronting my settler identity. I looked for and found ways to engage in the struggle around Standing Rock.
During this time, I picked up a book of short stories set on a native reservation, by an author whose name was familiar, prepared to deepen my experience in yet another way. When something about the tone didn’t sit well I looked him up, to discover that he was of European descent and had chosen the genre for its market appeal. The feeling of violation was visceral. The people whom he claimed to be representing had been used, in a way that turned my stomach. My trust in the integrity of the storyteller had been violated as well. The painful shock of this up close and personal experience with Native cultural appropriation helped me to recognize it in other places and be clear about the harm it caused, whether as a punch in the gut to a Native person or through the insidious distortion of history and reality for the rest of us.
Finding myself with all my pores open to Native experience, a news item that COVID was spreading on the Navajo Nation, and that they were struggling to contain the flow of outside traffic through the reservation, went to my heart. This was at the same time that my partner and I were working our way through an archive of Native films that a friend had shared with us. Three were about the Navajo—a girls’ basketball saga; a coming-of-age story told by a woman who was returning to the reservation in search of her roots; and one with a rich mix of the experience of acting in old westerns, losing a child to missionaries, and the health impacts of uranium mining. Though I could no longer enjoy those well-plotted mysteries set by an outsider in the Four Corners, I was finally getting to see through the eyes of trustworthy sources.
And then two more things happened. I had been getting to know a lovely and passionate young woman, and just as I had found a way to invite her into even closer connection she said that she was heading back to the Navajo reservation to be with her grandfather who was dying of COVID. Within a week I got a message out of the blue from a rabble-rousing friend from my young-adult years who had gone into public health and adventured in Cuba and Guatemala along the way. He was now at the federal Center for Disease Control, working on containing COVID with the health department of the Navajo Nation.
For so many years, my relationship to the Navajo had been all about me. From a mixture of incomplete history, fragmented and romanticized images, and tales of questionable authenticity, I had constructed a story that satisfied my needs for some kind of safe familiarity. While I wasn’t engaged in cultural appropriation for fame or profit, I was essentially a taker.
Now, having immersed myself in Native voices, done some work, and gained the benefits of relationship building closer to home, I was finding my way toward more solid ground. Through the people who shared themselves in those videos, my new friend and her grieving family, my old friend and the health care workers he is getting to know, I could connect with real people, with their love for a real place, with real present-time joys and sorrows. I could hear the echoes from the past, and glimpse a place for me in a future that includes us all.
Kind and nice
Nice is a coating, an armor
It tends to outer things, can soothe or scare.
Who knows what lies beneath?
Kind has a power source deep inside
It pushes out from inner realms
Can pierce through nice.
Dare to Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Zero Waste
The roots of Zero Waste in Europe were in Capannori, a town of 46,700 in Northern Italy. After a successful citizen-led movement against a proposed incinerator, the town committed in 2007 to send zero waste to landfills by 2020. Residents were consulted door to door; bins, bags and composting kits were provided; a new tariff on measured waste was introduced; composting, recycling, reuse and upcycling were encouraged; disposable diapers were subsidized; milk was provided direct from farmers with almost all customers providing their own containers; cloth shopping bags were distributed to all households; the use of disposable cutlery was halted in schools and other government settings.
With this proactive, holistic approach and the involvement of residents in all stages of policy development, the municipality now has one of the highest waste segregation rates in Europe, with 82% of its waste sorted. The money city council has saved on waste recycling has been spent on a reduction in waste tax per capita and building a composting plant, and new workplaces have been created in the region. Everybody benefits: the cheapest waste for buyers, municipalities and the environment is that which is never created. Today hundreds of European municipalities are following the example of Capannori.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/waste/ten-zero-waste-cities-how-capannori-inspired-other-european-municipalities-on-zero-waste-68623
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The city of Paris, France, is launching a new participatory budgeting project that will allow 25% of the city’s budget from now until 2026 to be decided with citizen input. https://citymonitor.ai/government/civic-engagement/how-paris-participatory-budget-is-reinvigorating-democracy?
Tribal biologists have confirmed that chinook salmon are spawning in the upper-Columbia River system in Washington state for the first time in 80 years.
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/salmon-spawn-again-on-colville-tribes-sanpoil-river/?
Love,
Pamela
Taking and joining
I may have heard of the Navajo in my childhood. I undoubtedly saw images that got lodged in my brain. I do remember, as a young adult, driving through a reservation in the Southwest, and feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur. My most substantial introduction came with a series of mystery novels set in Navajo land. They were well-written, sympathetic, full of details of daily life, and I was captivated.
I had picked up a critical overall perspective on our country’s past and present treatment of its native population as a young adult, but was well past middle age before I decided that more was required of me in this area. I began reading in more depth. Following my sister, I took steps that eventually grew into rich connections and real relationships with members of the Haudenosaunee nation. I started the painful work of confronting my settler identity. I looked for and found ways to engage in the struggle around Standing Rock.
During this time, I picked up a book of short stories set on a native reservation, by an author whose name was familiar, prepared to deepen my experience in yet another way. When something about the tone didn’t sit well I looked him up, to discover that he was of European descent and had chosen the genre for its market appeal. The feeling of violation was visceral. The people whom he claimed to be representing had been used, in a way that turned my stomach. My trust in the integrity of the storyteller had been violated as well. The painful shock of this up close and personal experience with Native cultural appropriation helped me to recognize it in other places and be clear about the harm it caused, whether as a punch in the gut to a Native person or through the insidious distortion of history and reality for the rest of us.
Finding myself with all my pores open to Native experience, a news item that COVID was spreading on the Navajo Nation, and that they were struggling to contain the flow of outside traffic through the reservation, went to my heart. This was at the same time that my partner and I were working our way through an archive of Native films that a friend had shared with us. Three were about the Navajo—a girls’ basketball saga; a coming-of-age story told by a woman who was returning to the reservation in search of her roots; and one with a rich mix of the experience of acting in old westerns, losing a child to missionaries, and the health impacts of uranium mining. Though I could no longer enjoy those well-plotted mysteries set by an outsider in the Four Corners, I was finally getting to see through the eyes of trustworthy sources.
And then two more things happened. I had been getting to know a lovely and passionate young woman, and just as I had found a way to invite her into even closer connection she said that she was heading back to the Navajo reservation to be with her grandfather who was dying of COVID. Within a week I got a message out of the blue from a rabble-rousing friend from my young-adult years who had gone into public health and adventured in Cuba and Guatemala along the way. He was now at the federal Center for Disease Control, working on containing COVID with the health department of the Navajo Nation.
For so many years, my relationship to the Navajo had been all about me. From a mixture of incomplete history, fragmented and romanticized images, and tales of questionable authenticity, I had constructed a story that satisfied my needs for some kind of safe familiarity. While I wasn’t engaged in cultural appropriation for fame or profit, I was essentially a taker.
Now, having immersed myself in Native voices, done some work, and gained the benefits of relationship building closer to home, I was finding my way toward more solid ground. Through the people who shared themselves in those videos, my new friend and her grieving family, my old friend and the health care workers he is getting to know, I could connect with real people, with their love for a real place, with real present-time joys and sorrows. I could hear the echoes from the past, and glimpse a place for me in a future that includes us all.
Kind and nice
Nice is a coating, an armor
It tends to outer things, can soothe or scare.
Who knows what lies beneath?
Kind has a power source deep inside
It pushes out from inner realms
Can pierce through nice.
Dare to Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Zero Waste
The roots of Zero Waste in Europe were in Capannori, a town of 46,700 in Northern Italy. After a successful citizen-led movement against a proposed incinerator, the town committed in 2007 to send zero waste to landfills by 2020. Residents were consulted door to door; bins, bags and composting kits were provided; a new tariff on measured waste was introduced; composting, recycling, reuse and upcycling were encouraged; disposable diapers were subsidized; milk was provided direct from farmers with almost all customers providing their own containers; cloth shopping bags were distributed to all households; the use of disposable cutlery was halted in schools and other government settings.
With this proactive, holistic approach and the involvement of residents in all stages of policy development, the municipality now has one of the highest waste segregation rates in Europe, with 82% of its waste sorted. The money city council has saved on waste recycling has been spent on a reduction in waste tax per capita and building a composting plant, and new workplaces have been created in the region. Everybody benefits: the cheapest waste for buyers, municipalities and the environment is that which is never created. Today hundreds of European municipalities are following the example of Capannori.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/waste/ten-zero-waste-cities-how-capannori-inspired-other-european-municipalities-on-zero-waste-68623
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The city of Paris, France, is launching a new participatory budgeting project that will allow 25% of the city’s budget from now until 2026 to be decided with citizen input. https://citymonitor.ai/government/civic-engagement/how-paris-participatory-budget-is-reinvigorating-democracy?
Tribal biologists have confirmed that chinook salmon are spawning in the upper-Columbia River system in Washington state for the first time in 80 years.
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/salmon-spawn-again-on-colville-tribes-sanpoil-river/?
In a global first, women will make up half the constitutional convention to write Chile’s new constitution.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/30/chile-voted-write-new-constitution-will-it-promise-more-than-government-can-deliver/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/30/chile-voted-write-new-constitution-will-it-promise-more-than-government-can-deliver/
Illinois is poised to become the first state in the country to completely end the use of cash bail, with a law passed by the state legislature that is expected to be signed by the governor into law.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/money-bond-pretrial-fairness-freedom-incarceration-jail-illinois
Resources
Finding Steady Ground
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources from my friend Daniel Hunter
Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
Money and Soul
My new book (based on a pamphlet of the same name) available via QuakerBooks or other on-line distributors.
("If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.")
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
Finding Steady Ground
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources from my friend Daniel Hunter
Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
Money and Soul
My new book (based on a pamphlet of the same name) available via QuakerBooks or other on-line distributors.
("If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.")
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
