Theresa Bear Fox, a Native American singer-songwriter from the Mohawk Nation, grew up on the Akwesasne reservation, located in upstate New York and Canada. Theresa (“Bear”) has been writing and producing her songs and making singing appearances with women’ singing groups, both locally and internationally. Her travels have taken her to California, New Paltz, New York City, Newtown and the Six Nations Territories.
“Bear’ and the women of Kontiwennenhawi
When Bear gets an idea for a song, she is usually near water like a river or stream. Water has so much power and as she sits by it, a melody will come to mind and she isn’t able to do anything else until she writes those words to that tune. “Many of my songs are medicine, and when I sing, sometimes it’s with other women in various communities,” said Bear. “I feel that women have to deal with so much in life, we carry a very heavy load all the time. My hope is that the songs give them strength and use the music to help them heal.”
Our gratitude to the Worldwide Indigenous Sciences Network for the grant support for Theresa’s appearance at the Awards Luncheon.
I was born in the Southern Hemisphere, a white European girl-child, in a land colonized by my people, who had long forgotten their own Indigenous heritage. The Land was no longer a sacred entity for them – it was a place where one travailed, and from which one would be saved eventually by a father god whom they believed in. Most of the texts and graphics explaining the Cosmos to me and all, were drawn from the Northern Hemisphere perspective: Moon in her phases were “backwards”; Sun’s daily movement from East to West was described as being “clockwise”, which it wasn’t; the seasons in the stories were always at odds with real experience. This was never regarded as important enough to mention, yet deep within me there was scribed the cosmic essence of disregarding one’s senses. And then there was the thing of being female, which exacerbated this sense of being “other”, and not worthy of mention. I and many of my Land, were perhaps some of Earth’s most alienated of beings.
From this base I searched for Her, and sought relationship with my place, who was revealed quietly in the Sun and deep dark night sky, and the red soil, which I as a country girl was touched by.
This presentation is an introduction to the PaGaian Cosmology which I authored, and practiced, and documented in doctoral work: and published as a book in 2005. It is a religious practice of seasonal ceremony based in a synthesis of Western scientific understanding of the unfolding Cosmos with female metaphor or the sacred. My new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony documents this poetic ceremonial process practiced over decades, as I and others engaged in it. We were making a world (which is what “poiesis” means), a creative context in which She could be expressed and heard. This ceremonial practice is based in the Seasonal Moments of Earth-Sun relationship of the Old European indigenous traditions: that is, specifically the Solstices, Equinoxes and cross-quarter transitions.
Dr. Glenys Livingstone
Glenys Livingstone Ph.D. is the author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, which fuses the indigenous traditions of Old Europe with scientific theory, feminism, and a poetic relationship with place. This book was an outcome of her doctoral work in Social Ecology.She was born and lives in country Australia, where she has facilitated Seasonal ceremony with an open community, taught classes, and mentored apprentices. Her education has included an M.A. in Systematic Theology and Philosophy from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, within which she also learned liturgical practice at the Jesuit School there.
Her new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony documents the synthesis of her work over the past decades. She is the author of the children’s book My Name is Medusa, and co-editor of the anthology Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom. Glenys has contributed to eleven other anthologies, including Goddesses in World Culture edited by Patricia Monaghan (2011), Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble (2015), and Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture, edited my Mary Ann Beavis and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang (2018). In 2014, Glenys co-facilitated the Mago Pilgrimage to Korea with Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang. She teaches a year-long on-line course “Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis in the Wheel of the Year” for both hemispheres. Her website is http://pagaian.org.
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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:
Thursday September 21 at 3 PM Eastern Time
“Shapeshifting Lands of Lāhainā, Maui: Mo’o and Moku’ula”
with Mehealani Ahia
Upcoming Salons are on September 21, October 5 & 19, November 2 & 16.
The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.
Scholar Salon #56 is a special presentation byMaría Suárez Toroto discuss her underwater archaeology program in Costa Rica and to celebrate the birth of a new collaborative project. She has invited two partners to discuss this exciting interdisciplinary effort to combine principles of archaeomythology with the investigation of shipwrecks–and identity– in Costa Rica and in South Africa. To our knowledge, this is the first time that these concepts of archaeomythology have been applied to a myth-making program of citizen science like Maria’s underwater archaeology work with young adults.
Dr. María Suárez Toro
María Suárez Toro (Puerto Rican and Costa Rican), “feminist, teacher, activist, writer, fisherwoman and scuba diver,” is the co-founder of Ambassadors of the Sea in Costa Rica’s Caribbean. As research coordinator of its community underwater archaeology program, she works with young people searching for identity in a project stewarded by citizen scientists, through their exploration of sunken slave ships. The project researchers are Afro and native youth, the direct inheritors of the legacies of untold stories of their coastal communities. Maria has created a literary and mythic ancestral Yoruba character, Tona Ina, “sea light” in Yoruba. Tona Ina is the storyteller who recovers the cultural stories and the mythologies found in the wrecks being researched.
Dr. Joan Marler
Joan Marler is the executive director of the Institute of Archaeomythology who earned her doctorate in Philosophy and Religion and Women’s Spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. She is the editor of The Civilization of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas and the Journal of Archaeomythology, among other publications, and has authored numerous articles on archaeomythological themes. Her collaboration with María Suárez Toro applies the interdisciplinary nature of archaeomythology to include the multi-generational underwater excavations of possible slave ships discovered off the coast of Costa Rica, linking scientific studies of ongoing archaeological discoveries with the deep memories of afro-descendent communities residing along the coast.
Aaniyah Martin
Aaniyah Martin is a South African graduate student in the caring of the hydrocommons and marine environment in post apartheid South Africa, addressing the injustices of apartheid legacy and co-creating care for the hydrocommons. “It is now 30 years after democracy in South Africa, yet the history and legacy of apartheid continues and has an effect on Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC) by excluding them from the ocean and other spaces. Her ancestors were brought to the Cape as slaves from Indonesia in the late 1600s. Her walking and swimming takes place along the False Bay coastline of Cape Town, which is the city where she was born. The False Bay coastline is “laden with stories, both shared and erased,” and Aaniyah’s research focuses on re-telling and re-mapping stories that have been forgotten.” Her study is also being informed by a recent visit to Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean where she met María Suárez Toro and Tona Ina in the “diving with a purpose” youth project where she learned a Caribbean pedagogy about connecting ancestry to present day search and research about sunken ships of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Scholar Salons are a member benefit of ASWM. Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:
Salon 57 : September 7, 2023, 6 PM Eastern Time
“A PaGaian Cosmology: Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis” with Dr. Glenys Livingstone
Upcoming Salons are at 3pm Eastern Time, on September 21 (Hawaiian mythology) , October 5 (Artemis), October 19 ( Wheel of the Year), November 2 (Kurdish Shahmaran) & 16 (Legacy of Lydia Ruyle).
TONA INA (“Sea Light” in Yoruba), is a contemporary African, matriarchal, archetype, created in 2015, in order to tell stories about connections between the waters of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast and “the deepest roots of identity, ancestral knowledge, and interactive symbiosis of our species as nature.” As the ancestral storyteller, she brings forth hidden historical facts about slavery and predatory patriarchal practices. Tona Ina also speaks for the women, giving voice to their tenacity as the “vital reserves” of our species; it is the women whose holistic thinking supports alternative paradigms such as the maternal gift economy.
African descendants and Bribri/Cabécar native pobladoras claim to see a light in the darkest nights in Punta Cahuita in the Cahuita National Park. In the sea waters near that Point, Afro-descendant and native scuba diving youth are researching two shipwrecks that may have been slave ships. This underwater archaeology project is recovering the history of the place and its people, as well as encouraging divers researching their own identities. By adding the perspective of archaeomythology, we can reclaim myths that are born through the interaction between ancient knowledge and memory, and also highlight present day responses from community members.
Dr. María Suárez Toro
Author Dr. María Suárez Toro is member of Centro Comunitario de Buceo Ambassadors of the Sea, director of Escribana feminist media, member of the Maternal Gift Economy Network, Diverse Women for Diversity, the Association of Women Writers in Costa Rica and now of the Association of Women and Mythology. Maria is the author of many books, the latest two being “Tona Ina: La Misteriosa Cueva de un Pez León en Cahuita” and “Tona Ina: La Luz en el Mar Caribe”, both published by the University of Costa Rica in 2017 and 2021.
Maria’s discussion will include remarks from MSc Aaniyah Martin from South Africa and Dr. Joan Marley from the United States to explore the significance of creating a present day ancestral storyteller.
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Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:
Salon 57 : September 7, 2023, 6 PM Eastern Time
“A PaGaian Cosmology: Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis” with Dr. Glenys Livingstone
Upcoming Salons are on September 21, October 5 & 19, November 2 & 16.
The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.
Traditional midwives have assisted in births throughout human history. Yet the deep knowledge of these women is discounted, and they may even face persecuted by modern medical institutions. Steph Smith’s remarkable documentary “GIVE LIGHT: Stories from Indigenous Midwives“ links their stories across continents and in widely varied communities. In penetrating interviews, nine indigenous midwives from five continents discuss the benefits and challenges to their profession. GIVE LIGHT examines traditional midwifery, juxtaposed with modern obstetrics, to bridge the gap between traditional wisdom and modern technology. In this Salon Steph reflects on the journey of meeting and listening to these inspiring practitioners, and of creating and funding this courageous film to honor their work.
Filmmaker Steph Smith
Steph Smith, filmmaker based in New Orleans, works as an independent director, cinematographer, and editor. In October 2020, Steph was accepted into the Sundance Co//ab with the emphasis on GIVE LIGHT. Her work has been invited to screen in Spain, France, Greece, Mexico, Sweden, England, Greece, South Africa, Nigeria, Mozambique, Portugal, Philippines, and USA.
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Save this date for the next ASWM Salon:
July 27 2023 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time
Tona Ina, the Yoruba “sea light”: Community Archaeomythology in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean with Maria Suarez Toro
The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.
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