Matrilineality

When you've grown up in a patrilineal tribe--where are family name comes from the father and ancestry is traced back through your father's fathers, it's difficult to imagine another way.  Before the progenitors of the sky gods of three major religions, Muslim, Christian and Jewish conquered the Druids throughout the Roman Empire, supplanting the ancient tribal modes that covered most of today's Europe, evidence shows that those people practiced a different form of counting ancestry resulting in a different relationship between the genders.

Matrilineality has been practiced by native Americans in the Eastern U.S. for millennia and still is practiced today. Many tribes on the rest of the continent still practice their ancestral matrilineal form of culture.

Matrilineality is NOT the reverse of patrilineality, where women rule and men are subservient.  In matrilineal cultures today and historically, the relationship between men and women is finely balanced, resulting in true gender equity.  Haudenausaunee/Iroquois and Lenape are two large nations of Original People who have lived a matrilineal culture for literally thousands of years.  And still do today.

It's difficult for those of us raised in a patrilineal tradition to imagine a tribal culture where one's ancestry is counted through generations of mothers, where not only your name comes from your maternal line, but also your clan, your property, your heirlooms, ceremonies and regalia, and stories.  This contemplation leads me to sympathize with friends who come from slavery and thus call themselves Miriam X and Malcolm X.  Sometime in the hoary past, before the Roman conquest cut down our sacred groves and drove our governance underground, those of us from European stock had clans.  We knew both our maternal and our paternal lines.  And no, I don't know how the Druids calculated family lines, whether through the paternal or maternal.  I only know that Celtic forms of governance gave women power that patrilineal systems do not. Do I need to state the obvious?: women have been chattel under those three religions named above.  One of my early poems begins: "I will never stand in public again and pray to He Who..."  Thus I have been a practicing pagan for decades, drawing on the worship of the Mother passed down through my maternal lines, after I tossed the dross of Catholicism aside.

I am struck by the courage of my native American friends in the west engaged in the process of restoring their language and cultural practices after near-term histories of loss and trauma through massacre, rape, disease, and bounties on renegades, and children being fostered in white institutions.  Those of us from European and continental traditions have to use inductive reasoning to discover cultural truths, like clans, lying buried in our genetic codes for so long.

Inductive reasoning moves from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories. This is sometimes called a “bottom up” approach. The researcher begins with specific observations and measures, begins to then detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative hypotheses to explore, and finally ends up developing some general conclusions or theories.

 Vision quests and a lifetime of inductive reasoning--working from results ("Here is what I have, what does this imply?"), sifting through assorted facts and pieces to work toward that a-ha moment: I know what my family clan used to be (still is) because I have done the work, collected evidence, and am arriving at certainty first about myself, and then about other family members.

"Do you know whether your people are matrilineal or patrilineal?" I asked one clanmother of a tribe from Northern California. (The term "clanmother" might not even be applicable to western tribes, for instance, being a term used among eastern native tribes.)She paused.  "I think matrilineal," she said.  Probably someone in the university knows.  Or an answer lies in anthropological recoreds.  When I look at the structure of the hunting and gathering tribes from the Bay Area, I see the hallmarks of gender equity: division of labor, shared decisionmaking. It is possible that a third alternative exists to patrilineality and matrilineality perfected by hunter-gathering tribes.

 I simply can't wait any more time to publish this inquiry; my first acquaintance with the term came from a graduate school reading of Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State with its chapter on the Iroquois matrilineal system.  It hit me in the solar plexus; I have been collecting evidence since then and I turned 70 this year.  Let this statement attract more information.
How does matrilineality work in terms of governance? The influence of white men and the chauvinism of patrilineality has shifted the original structures somewhat. I suspect both men and women among the Lenape and Haudenausaunee have had to defend and fortify their ancestral ways against the corporate influence of the BIA and Federal Government.

I know that wellmeaning Quaker men in the nineteenth century did a world of harm to the matrilineal Lenape and Haudenausaunee when they tried to make these people over into their own likeness, to make them more acceptable to the powers in Washington who held both the purse strings and treaties. As a condition of being liaisons to Washington, they insisted that native men farm, when the entire system of matrilineality is based on women's relationship to the land.  That is to say, both farming and wildcrafting were entirely women's province.  The farming that was done was as noninvasive a way as tradition had long prescribed, with mounds for growing the Three Sisters of corn, beans and squash.  They tended the wild to harvest nuts, herbs, roots and berries. They carefuly managed the material world for optimal sustainable results for basketmaking and pottery. Artifacts like decorated fancy dress regalia and moccasins for dances and ceremony as well as cradle boards are handed down through the generations through the maternal line.

The Quakers used their influence and power to insist that men do the actual farming in straight rows and with iron plows and thus, unintentionally broke the culture at its very source, violating women's elemental relationship to the land and men's role within that as Chiefs and hunters.
If our European ancestors thought they were adapting the Iroquois Confederacy for framing the US Constitution, as we were taught in elementary school, they had it wrong too.  All women and men are created equal in a matrilineal society.

Chiefs represent the interests of the tribe to the outside world.  Chiefs are elected and removed from office by the Women's Council elders, the clanmothers.  Men sit in their Council and Women in theirs.  Each Council deliberates until consensus is reached...which can take a long time, but if you are planning for eight generations out, time is relative.  "We discuss an issue three times," my friend Hitakonanolax says. "If we still can't come to consensus after the third time, we bury it."

You don't have to imagine European women's chagrin on understanding the lofty position of respect and power women hold in a matrilineal society.  In her book Sisters in Spirit, my friend Sally Roesch-Wagner has documented the influence Haudenausaunee clanmothers had on early feminists which lead directly to The Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls.  European women may have hoped for more independence when they crossed the ocean with their husbands and worked beside them to create a new life of opportunity, at considerable cost to them: the loss of their homeland, ancestral ties, identity, language.

European women could be beaten by their husbands with impunity.  They couldn't own land.  If a man died or divorced his wife, she had no rights to their children. Wealth a woman brought into the family from her family became her husband's.

Today, a native woman can divorce her husband by putting his shoes outside the door.  A man who would beat, abuse or humiliate a woman would be severely reprimanded or--in the case of recidivism--put out of the tribe or in older days, put to death.  If he were a chief (and this still happens today) he would be removed from office by the clanmothers, the matrons, and possibly the Grand Council of Chiefs as a mark of their support for the Women's Council decision, though--so far as I know--the Councils of Chiefs have no veto power over the Women's Council and the clanmothers.

"Why is this so important to you?" a friend of mine who is both native American and Hispanic asked.

By mindlessly adopting a partrilineal model of tribalism in the 1960's, radicals with their sights set on social change doomed their outcomes from the beginning. In the Black Power movement, Digger and other anarchistic movements, and the American Indian Movement (depending on whether the tribes involved were matrilineal or patrilineal!)-each of which invested in communal living and shared dcisionmaking--women's memoirs of those time record similar results: men spoke with the loudest voices, men who were abusive of girls and women were not brought into line, women were rarely given positions of power, even AFTER the gender equity of SDS, and women were often subtly silenced, all the air being sucked out the room when they rose to speak.

Native groups who came from a matrilineal tradition fared better in the Sixties; men and women worked together on the barricades in Akwesasne/Mohawk battles and, I am told, at Pine Ridge for instance.

I love being in the company of my Lenape tribesmen and women.  As an elder woman, I am among the most honored people in the tribe or band.  Young men jump to their feet to offer me a seat.  They listen carefully to what I have to say.  I am among the company of my elder sisters to be first in the food line. Contrast that to the value of a woman past childbearing age in a western patrilineal culture where I am the least valued member of the community, so nearly invisible that I have to reintroduce myself repeatedly to men in my age group everytime we meet, and identify myself as the mother of one of my daughters, for instance, or the wife of my husband, though I have advanced degrees, books and credits to my own name.

Recent research into the "grandmother factor" which shows that children around the world raised in a household with the close proximity of a maternal (not paternal, interestingly) grandmother are more likely to survive their childhood has brought this question of the value of a woman elder back into public discourse in the mainstream culture.

But I don't want to have to argue my rights and value at this point in my life.  Why should I?  It's been a couple decades since I was adopted into the Big Horn Lenape Band.  Using inductive reasoning, I am concluding that I cannot say whether I carry native American bloodlines: the focus of my intellectual curiosity and comfort level with my native brothers and sisters, the subject of my books, my value system, the proximity of my own homelands and roots in European countries where my families are still the aboriginal people, the inductive way I came to conclude that I have Jewish bloodlines.  All these lines of inquiry lead me to assert that anyone who has a family tree in this country from before the US Civil War must be agnostic on this question whether one has native American bloodlines.  The frequency of European men marrying native women, the long  history of those alliance particularly between the French and Dutch with the Eastern tribes, the propensity of families to "bury" their knowledge of native women in the family tree, and finally our patrilineal way of accounting for lineage, all lead me to be agnostic on the question of whether I have native American blood.  Finally, even if I never find the entrypoint of native bloodlines into my family tree, I refuse to dishonor that (possibly) woman who enriched my bloodlines with hers by categorically denying that I have native blood.

Humanifesto #3

"Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar was the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm would take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 was simply the day that the calendar went to the next b'ak'tun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date on which the calendar will go to the next piktun (a complete series of 20 b'ak'tuns), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, will be on October 13, 4772."  Wikipedia 
The next b'ak'tun will be complete in 134 years on 2146 when our great great grandchildren will be elders.

Doing the math: Destiny Kinal


The redistribution of wealth--or rebalancing of abundance--happens best at the local level.  Each planning and action group has to decide for themselves what their area of influence is.  This geography or sphere usually defines itself: local, regional, watershed, or common ground, the "fit" has to be right, with a commonality of mutual identification that makes sense to all those in the group, along a spectrum from those who resist sharing, through those who have more than enough and are willing to share, to those who don't have enough, to those who are barely surviving.

Diggers in the Sixties had Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco as their immediate sphere of influence for action.  Everyone living in the Haight self-identified as a Digger.  In that overripe consumer culture coming out of the Fifties, Diggers found their mission moving food being thrown away as less-than-ideal in the Produce Markets at the docks to the parks adjacent to The Haight. These gratifying actions led easily to free stores, free medical clinics, job banks.  A flat leadership structure was idealized and realized, where leaders had no visibility (except among themselves).  Their hearing--perhaps made keen by political acumen (SDS, YSL, SNCC, Black Panthers, AIM)--was pitch perfect, their ears tuned to what was thought on the streets. Until Time Magazine commodified what was occurring, a melange of people--skewed to the young but including older politicos and beatniks, across socioeconomic and racial divides--converged to experience and invent the countercultural.

Perhaps too much is made of the fact that this was all bathed in the friendly light of psychedelics until the harder drugs of speed and heroin made inroads.  it was going to take quite a lot, it turns out, to unplug all the wiring of the industrial revolution  and the economic polarization that began to occur with the loss of common lands and the guilds, and the rise of pernicious entitled capitalism.

The U.S Civil War put paid to any decent alternatives that we had evolved as an agricultural craftspeople.  The real experiment in counterculturalism began in the later Sixties when people moved out of the cities into the countryside, organizing themselves in small clusters, or common points of reference flung across the country, usually around at-scale watersheds, to invent what came next.

Fast forward to the turn of the Millennium and--only recently--a new Mayan calendar cycle.  Pernicious capitalism has become toxic globalization, though this western value of limitless profit has always been toxic to indigenous people.

Forget the "precautionary principle," capital only needs to show the potential size of a market to get the green light on any number of destructive products, masquerading as necessary and desirable social contributions, from GMO's, to drones, to smart fabrics, to petroleum-based poisons, to continuous war, to interplanetary mining operations.  The exploitation of resources--including indigenous people and the minerals resting in the soil of their reservations--make anything and anyone fair game.

Luckily, countercultural principles are still operating in their yeasty semi-invisible way at the local, regional, food and fibershed grassroots level.

Take a group here in the East Bay across from San Francisco.  Planting Justice has trained themselves in permaculture, adapting ancient principles of gardening and growing food that are not very labor intensive once the structures are set in place.   Permaculturists bring fertile "food forests" and the commons back into our lives.  Planting Justice charges reasonable rates to plan and plant food forest in yards to people who can afford it, then use that money to teach inner-city kids how to plan, plant and maintain food forests in schools, social clubs, and community gardens.

Of course the Bay Area has been blessed with the vision of Alice Waters, the grandmere of the paradigm-tipping la nouvelle cuisine and more recently Edible School Yards. A scant decade after Alice's contributions of influence, capital, and hands-on involvement, every school in the greater Bay Area has both a school garden and a cooking curriculum.

Like articulating our ancient relationship to our watershed which defines us as a culture (Berg, Dasmann, House et al), bioregionalism spread quickly across the country and now across the world.  Alice Waters' rehydration of local seasonal food, simply prepared, and her message that spawned the Edible School Yard movement is sweeping our continent even in areas not blessed with California's twelve month growing season.

Now watch it happen with Fibersheds.  Taking back our millennial relationships to fiber, to cloth ourselves in a non-toxic way, Fibershed (Burgess, Kahn et al) is spreading across North America. 

When these movements meet those where the ancient strongholds of "homelands that feed and clothe us" are still indigenous, what will happen?  It's pleasurable to imagine an overflowing of spontaneous joy and celebration as indigenous populations from Lithuania to Ulan Bator, from Senegal to Lake Titicaca, find fellowship with us in resisting the forces of globalization that mean to unravel their cultures, "same as it ever was," since 1492 and before.

Back to Planting Justice and young people who resonate to their Robin-Hood ways to rebalance resources, shifting from those willing to share their abundance to the needy--how Diggerish!

Within the loose population of the now-aging Diggers, a movement has caught fire to redistribute resources among the group (in size anywhere from a couple hundred individuals, to associated groups numbering perhaps a thousand, and on out in circles of correspondence.)  Called Diggerbread, this group proposes to do at a small scale what is being increasingly called for in the larger population.

The redistribution of wealth is not a sly infiltration.  The term has brought Republican ire down on our seated president Barack Obama.  Capitalists everywhere, those feathering their lofty nests at the expense of an underclass and middle class, are reacting as one would expect a sleeping citizen to react when wakened by the cry of "Fire!  Fire!"

Softening the terms to "rebalancing abundance" removes the whiff of Marxist revolution from the necessary process.  Diggerbread willingly aggregates both cash and other resources from those who self-identify as having enough, to those in the community who don't have enough, a sharp, pointed, snowballing condition as one ages in poverty.

Among the loosely-defined DIgger population, somewhat atomized over the last thirty years of diaspora as everyone spread out to apply our core values in as many milieu, a lack of regard for money or material comforts too often has resulted in individuals finding themselves isolated and living off the threadbare social safety net: social security, no dental care, Medicare A but not B for hospitalization, perhaps food stamps.

In particular, men and women who have been called to lead large social changes in restoration, indigenous rights, quality of universal education, inner city regeneration, and a host of anti's: globalization, GMOS, nuclear
energy, for instance, have found themselves at the other end of dazzling careers, with books, accomplishments and awards aplenty, but no pension to make their elder years secure. Simply having been salaried for serving as an executive director, field project manager or social entrepreneur in the last quarter of the 20th century in many fields of social change was a mark of distinction.  Enough of a distinction to make your contribution, make a difference in your field, raised principled children and see one's life work flow into a society that values you in your elder years, yes?  Not necessarily so.

Hence Diggerbread.

It's my observation that while talent, brains and intellect are evenly distributed in the population--particularly in a population like the United State whose rich store of genetic material from all over the world, calls to those who myopically see only opportunity when they contemplate immigration--the laws of karma or chance (call fortune what you will,) are unevenly distributed.

I fell in love with a song-and-dance man who happened to be a radiologist. Others inherited family wealth or education.  Still others, with extremely fortunate blends of gifts and character traits, made careers that paid out
handsomely. Often women, particularly single women with children, made careers out of necessity.

Take away my doctor husband and I wouldn't have been able to write my novels without also having to teach.  I feel my novels are important examinations of what values and practices we left behind as a society in that "vast cemetery of forgetting" (MIlan Kundera.)  Take away my doctor husband and I wouldn't have been able to practice my community organizing skills learned in Johnson's War on Poverty and SDS' initiatives to stop the War in Vietnam and bring our soldiers home. I have applied these skills for the last thirty years in the poor rural area we live in on the NY/PA border.  Take away my doctor husband and I would be trying to live on less than $1000/month in social security, might become a burden on my daughters as my health deteriorated, given the capitalist-imposed fraying safety net for the poor, widowed, orphaned, returning vet, and undereducated and underemployed of all stripes. 

People say: give yourself more credit!  But life has a way of pulling us along on its tides, surprising us when we are marooned on the shores of being elder in a society that doesn't value its elders.

Oh yes, I likely would have found a way.  I have my education, the broadening experience of travel, my core values from radicalization in the early Sixties, fermented in a nutritious brew in the counterculture, values too strong to be coopted by my decade of making a living and building a resume while a single mom.

Diggerbread calls upon us to magnetize around those values which we have been practicing and refining all our adult lives.  We are proposing a Third Act for those of us who forged our common values in our youth as a First Act, who went out into the world and applied them in broader contexts as a Second Act.

For many, whose names we honor, the mere act of recognizing the immensity of what we had set ourselves "counter" to, required some pain relief to go on.  Deaths from overdoses of heroin in particular claimed many of our best and brightest, while the War in Vietnam and drive-by shootings in the inner city and wholesale incarceration claimed more. Alcoholism and despair on pitifully poor reservations, the privations of the elders reduced to witnessing the wholesale destruction of their sons and daughters...I could go on and on.

We have come through that Second Act in which we had to fight the Enemy toe-to-toe.  We have come out on the other side, with casualties.  We have to honor our dead, our wounded.  We have to work on restoring the health and wellbeing of those who have paid an unjust bill for their contributions in the Second Act.  (Treyvon's mother!) 

And then we have the privilege of contemplating what is left for our Third Act as our children and their children gather themselves for the next fifteen years, in which time, scientists say, the fate of our homelands, our planet, will have been decided.

We have time to rebalance resources, to take care of each other.

If the Mayans are among the ancient timekeepers we can trust because of their timepiece's duration, we are at the beginning of another b'ak'tun of 134 years.  Next piktun (20 b'ak'tun) will occur on October 13, 4772, by Long Calendar accounting, 2760 years into the future.  Are we capable of demonstrating that we can plan eight generations out like the indigenous peoples of this continent urge?

Neither we nor our children will be alive at the end of the next b'ak'tun in 2146.  But our great grandchildren will be, just as we are here as spokespersons for our great grandparents who struggled through the years of the Civil War and early Petroleum Age.

Calendars imply the possibility of improvement, of moving social change forward to the new dream that Thomas Berry has urged us to articulate.

In the next fifteen years, the potential energy of our coming together again, may have generated an evolved set of living principles as powerful as "free", as potent as watershed and fibershed ar proving to be as units of organizing.  We have to give ourselves permission to generate fresh philosophies for action in our perilous times, building on the old ones from the First Act...but not using the old ones as creeds to bind us from considering actions we experimented with and refined in the Second Act.  We are the products of both our First Acts and our Second Acts. 

Pharaoh!  (Our own hierophants living in our brains and our histories of ourselves, our critics, our fearful selves, our reptilian brains.)
Set us free!-- to discover the next thing, to become that thing and model it for the larger culture. 

The next fifteen years may be all we elders have of productive contribution to society in our own limited lifetimes.  Let's spend that largesse together, freely, without stint, without cropping our own momentum. Do we trust ourselves enough to continue forward together?

Textile & Dye Tour in Oaxaca on International Women's Day

I spent women's day evening in Tehuantepec, the capital of the infamous Tehuana women, among matrilineal  people who speak Zapotec.

The legendarily ballsy Tehuana women, from whom Frida Kahlo sprang, had several parades last night: one where hundreds of women dressed all in white marched for peace apropos of the violence against women in the world, in Mexico and here in the Isthmus.

The other--as the sun set over this town, making the huge gilt statue of an unnamed woman glow from the rooftop--brought women out in their traditional glamour, known all over the world through Frida's style, into the street carrying large painted papier mache stars on sticks, while their skirts flowed in the wind around them. Their hair braided with flowers and bright cloth, short bicolored huipils/blouses like the Zapotec state flag adorning their torsoes, they chatted excitedly among themselves, heading for an unknown destination, while a band led the way and insectlike open-framed personal vehicles brought up the rear.

At dinner, our group of eight women and one man discussed the state of women's rights and questioned our amiable and amused waiter about how gender equity in Tehuantepec has shifted over time.  In the market, Tehuana women--depicted in murals covering the restaurant walls, their arms and legs firmly planted akimbo--sell the produce.

Our guide asked him for us: what do the men do?

He said that up into the 18th century, men tended and harvested the garden and orchards.  Then, while large extended families covered child rearing, the forces of capital organized food production and distribution centrally, upsetting the balance. Studying what has eroded or obscured matrilineal practices in cultures close at hand, like the Haudenausaunee and Zapotec, gives our ongoing drive for full women's rights and gender equity with men definition and insight.

Uncovering the roots of matrilineality, which produces true gender equity where it is found (most notably among the Haudenausaunee/Iroquois in the US), allows us to connect with authentic equity practices that the macho marriage of church and capital have tried to obliterate.

Patrilineality has  produced one unified social form across the planet:  the enslavement of women, the loss of our rights.  It is time for women and men of conscience to call for the end of patrilineal practices--the real villain, globalization, capitalism, and colonialism being manifestations--with one unified voice.  As my husband says, patrilineality is just a way for men to keep the mothers of their sons under their thumbs, assuring their own paternity.

Sic Transit Gloria: a eulogy for Peter Berg, the father of bioregionalism

Sic transit gloria: And so passes one of the most intriguing, profoundly influential men I have met in my life.

I first met Peter Berg in the spring of 1967 at the Digger's Free Store in the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco, where radical politics met the counterculture.

My daughter Gilian and I lived on the Panhandle on Oak. I was 24. I waited table nights at the Committee, a comedy club in North Beach. Days, I worked as an entry-level garmento at Alvin Duskin, which made mod-inspired dresses at affordable prices. Our working group was planning a free city event and I was assigned to line up some free bands. Those were the days when everyone knew everyone in San Francisco, at one or two degrees of separation at most.

Susquehanna flood, community organizing--underwater in East Sayre

photo: yournewsnow

My partner in Reinhabitory Institute, Judith Thomas, was visiting the Penn-York Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area. I had told her my valley was a bioregionalist’s dream: in two states and three counties, between the Susquehanna and the Chemung Rivers. this community refers to itself as “The Valley,” and has a culture everyone who lives here understands. Judith was visiting here for a handful of days to let me take her on a tour to help her understand this community where I have been organizing for the past 26 years. Our organization is in the earliest stages of starting Project GROW! to involve young people from both sides of the border to learn how to grow and process food, an art form that was widely practiced in East Sayre and throughout the Valley until just a decade ago.

My reading & discussion of Burning Silk at Riverrow bookstore in Owego on January 15

A reading of Burning Silk by Destiny Kinal at Riverrow Bookshop in Owego Sunday January 15th, 2011 morphed into a discussion of the Persephone myth, a natural midwinter theme dealing with the maladies of SADD, depression, and loss of community.

The discussion ranged further into the coming hard times that many are anticipating, not only from the economic downturn, but also from the collapse of our environment as global climate change proceeds: how do we prepare for these changes?

Participants pointed out that hard times are already afflicting those at the bottom of the economy, those who have depended on the underground economy to survive. Two individuals volunteered that they had just lost their jobs because their companies moved to China, a job one of them had held for 16 years.

Persephone, the story goes, the daughter of Mother Earth or Ceres, was abducted and dragged into the underworld by Pluto. The world went into an endless winter as Ceres mourned. The animals sent a delegation to Pluto to negotiate for Persephone's return. A deal was struck: Persephone could return to the surface of Earth if she ate nothing for an entire year during her stay in the underworld.

At the end of the year, Persephone ate three pomegranate seeds. Thus, a new deal had to be made: Persephone returns to the surface in the spring and summer while in the fall and winter, she remains in the underworld. In this way, not only were the season explained by our ancient forebearers but also death and the consequences of our mortality.

Medicine man of the Lenape Big Horn Band, David Chamberlain, told a myth from his people of horned serpents who live in the underworld, whose ill effects are released when the earth is pierced too deeply. A similar story of an abduction of a human girl by the horned serpents is told by the Lenape as well. Chamberlain, known as Hitakonanulaxk in Lenape, is the author of The Grandfathers Speak: Tales of the Lenape People. The book is available at SRAC on Broad Street in Waverly.

John Doscher of Lockwood, NY, and author of a body of work studying the possibilities of a sustainable society, read three poems on the subject of loss and transformation.

Michael Sean O'Dwyer (Kane) of Waverly and Addison NY read from his recently released book, A Voice in the Wilderness, on his hike from Florida to Canada on the Appalachian Trail, during which time he naturally reflected on the state of the world. O'Dwyer/Kane read passages describing that winter of the soul we call despair as well as thoughts on organizing and strengthening community locally.

The group seemed to agree that the biggest challenge we face now is the disintegration of community, so necessary to organizing to meet hard times prepared. The theme of knowing how to grow your own food and preserve it came up repeatedly.

Destiny Kinal spoke about the metaphor of metamorphosis from a worm to a winged thing, that lies at the heart of Burning Silk, her novel about the alliance between French Huguenot silkmakers and their native American neighbors in southern Pennsylvania in the 1830's.

Burning Silk, the first novel in the Textile Trilogy, will be followed in 2012-13 by Linen Shroud, which--continuing the story of the Duladier and Montour families in their march toward modernity--takes place during the US Civil War.

Riverrow Bookshop, which is run by John Spencer, one of Owego's community development entrepreneurs, together with his daughter Laura, features an entire section at the front on regional authors. The basement of the bookstore, organized by subject and genre, is a treasure trove for book collectors.

The organizers of the reading will be meeting to decide whether the Persephone midwinter reading should be an annual event, open to regional writers to read from their work on these themes: the psychological trips to the underworld that afflict us humans at this time of year and the prospect of coming hard times. How can we prepare ourselves for a possible collapse that many scientists and social prognosticators are predicting?

Call Destiny Kinal at 510-701-8909 or 607-565-8475 or contact the Reinhabitory Institute online at info@sitiotiempopress.com if you would like to comment on the event and continue the discussion on the importance of community in weathering hard times.

The Big Daddy of all the Book Fairs: Frankfurter Buchmesse

As a spanking new press with one publication--Burning Silk, my first novel in the Textile Trilogy--and another in the pipeline, going to Europe to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a case of the intent of our grasp exceeding our reach.

The Set-Up
But since I was already going to be in Europe as a presenter at an academic colloquium on The Woodstock Years, 1965-75 at Le Havre University, and had exchanged my home in Berkeley for ten days in a canal house in Amsterdam to work on and research my second book, Linen Shroud, we decided to attend the Frankfurter Buch Messe, where the greatest cost was the hotel room (178 euros/night for a hostel.)

Scale
Reportedly 20K book professionals participate in what is styled as the world's biggest book fair. Does this include the 10K members of the press? It certainly doesn't include the public whose number reportedly swell into six figures.

Gratefully, Not Everyone Speaks English Yet…

And if they do, they often prefer to converse in their own language. My former neighbor and friend in Berkeley Inke Schwab, who had returned to her native Germany four years earlier, responded to my offer of a shared adventure. Inke, being trilingual, proved to be an immense asset in negotiating the complexities of the fair, a challenge not only linguistic but also deeply cultural.

Proximity to the Past
On Monday and Tuesday, we drove up into the hills 100 kilometers beyond Frankfurt into the Vogelsberg--as dotted with windmills as a Miyazaki fantasy film--where my relations through my immigrant great grandmother still live in our ancestral village. In Rebgeshain, perhaps three hundred households, people are most likely to marry someone from the village or from the next village. (This observation gives rise to the aphorism: Die besten stecken findet man in der hahesten hecken [sic] which translates loosely: If you're looking for a walking stick, find it in your own hedge.) This accounts for the remarkable fact, as my German friends tell me, that my first letter addressed to this family ten years ago, bore on the envelope only a century old photo of the original house, the family name Ruppel and the village name. It had arrived safely to tell of my impending visit.

In the intervening decade, our family genealogist Bill Sackinger from Alaska, fluent in German, had visited annually to cement relations and comb through church records. This would be my second visit, announced long distance by a German friend who referred to me as the "instigator." I carried a secret weapon this time: Inke Schwab.