Friday, March 27, 2025 at Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ
Unilateral Giving and Receiving from the Template of the Web of Life
Our panel brings together several strands of women’s thinking and experience regarding the maternal gift economy of humans and the maternal gifting and giftedness of nature. In order to heal the huge environmental and ethical rifts that are endangering life on Earth, a shift is necessary towards the understanding of the human as a maternal species, homo donans, the gifting being as opposed to homo sapiens, a knower in denial of the maternal paradigm or homo economicus, a creature of patriarchal capitalism.
Nané Jordan affirms placental ecologies of the mother, Margarita Rosa Tirado
describes living in communication with her ecological preserve in Colombia and,Areeya Marie Sharpe will offer desert stories with sound and postures to open us to new thinking, Genevieve Vaughan discusses the economic and
psychological reasons for the plunder and objectification of Nature.
Dr. Nané Jordan is a community-based scholar, birth-keeper, artist and mother of first-generation Irish-Canadian descent on Turtle Island. Nané is devoted to decolonizing, eco-matrifeminist, birth-gifting streams of community care. Holding a doctorate in Education, an MA in Women’s Spirituality, and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship with the University of Paris 8, she publishes widely while working as an Aboriginal Infant Development consultant on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples.
Rev. Areeya Marie Sharpe is a Priestess, Interfaith Minister, US military veteran, Artist and Chef who has worked on Visual and Sacred Sound Art projects, Large Themed Prop Construction and in Private Chef venues for over 20yrs, serving Las Vegas NV and several other locales around the world. She creates recipes of visual/sound art, prayerFull cuisine and sacred scent
honoring the earth, sacred sites and ceremonies. Areeya is the current Resident Priestess at the Temple of Goddess Spirituality Dedicated to
Sekhmet outside of Las Vegas.
Margarita Rosa Tirado Mejia is an environmentalist and founder of La Rosa de los Vientos (Rose of the Winds) nature reserve in Boquia, Salento, Colombia. La Rosa de los Vientos is in an environmentally devastated area and her work focuses on social regeneration of the land. Her special focus is the endangered wax palm, the national tree of Colombia.
Genevieve Vaughan is an independent researcher who has been working on the idea of the maternal gift economy as an alternative to Patriarchal Capitalism for more than half a century. She created the multicultural all-woman activist Foundation for a Compassionate Society (1987-2005) and the network: International Feminists for a Gift Economy (2001 –ongoing). She founded the Temple of Goddess Spirituality dedicated to Sekhmet in Cactus Springs, Nevada (1992 – ongoing). Her books are For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange (1997), Homo Donans (2006) and The Gift in the Heart of Language: the Maternal Source of Meaning (2015). She has edited three anthologies and has written three children’s books. She is the mother of three daughters and lives part time in Italy, part time in Austin,Texas.
Read all about the ASWM Conference and register here.