“Thinking Yours Doesn’t Stink: Dis/Respect for Others”

with Barbara Mann

Thursday,  Aug. 25, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern DaylightTime 

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In Native North American tradition, tales of the Woman Who Married the Bear go back at least to 14,000 BP, but the story shifted with cosmic events, not the least being the comet swarm and strike of 12,900 BP, which brought on the Younger Dryas or Little Ice Age, 12,900 to 11,600 BP. Between megafauna and large, lethal humans with different DNA invading the original peoples of America and a suddenly hostile climate, the tale shifted. After “the stars fell,” it moved from a gentle story of seasonal renewal following movements in star world, to a desperate story of survival in a frozen earth, launching the new murder: hunting. If the old story was a tender romance of protection and continuance, then the revised story was one of protocol violations occasioning frightening new challenges. Throughout, bears are heavy sky-earth potencies that shape-shift into gorgeous human men to woo human women; bear husbands read and create people’s thoughts, far-see, and foretell the future. Bear wives now transform completely into bears, themselves, hunting down the hunters.

This topic is but one of many explored in Barbara’s forthcoming book with co-author Kaarina Kailo, The Woman Who Married the Bear: The Bear Spirituality of Ancient Foremothers.  This work surveys Indigenous traditions across the global north, including North America and Eurasia, stretching back to 15,000 BCE and reaching forward into historical times. The authors trace matriarchal traditions of Women marrying the Bear, with caves as wombs; water as earth’s amniotic fluid; and birth-renewal as the point of thanksgiving connecting “Bear-Women” spirits to elemental forces. The book offers interpretations of this earliest known Bear religion in its original form and in its permutated patriarchal form, when it was reduced to a survivalist hunting relationship. (Watch for a release date in late 2022.)

Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is Professor of Humanities, University of Toledo, Ohio, USA. She is the author of fifteen books including  Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: Traditional Native American Spirituality (2016) and President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain (2019). For twenty-five years, Barbara was the Speaker and/or Northern Director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio.

Save these dates for the next ASWM Salons:

September 8, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“Women’s Drumming Traditions: Medicine, Magic and Metaphysics“
Ubaka Hill

September 22, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“Fact-checking Feminism (The Haudenosaunee Influence) ”
Sally Roesch Wagner

October 6, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-Dual Matrix ”
Monica Mody

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.