“Healing the Earth with Traditional Ecological Knowledge”

with Cristina Eisenberg

Thursday,  March 24, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern Standard Time 

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Ecologist Cristina Eisenberg, author of The Carnivore Way: Coexisting with and Conserving North America’s Predators, says of her work, “Mother Earth holds powerful lessons about healing. As a Native American ecologist of mixed heritage, for me these lessons have to do with braiding together Western Science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to find solutions to our most pressing conservation and social justice problems. TEK is based on ancient Indigenous wisdom, which is matriarchal. Today the Western scientific world is learning that this ancient wisdom is the best way to heal the damage we’ve done to the natural world. In this presentation I will share insights from my 25-year journey as an ecologist who has directed a citizen-science global research program. I will share stories about my teachers, the plants, animals, and forces of nature I study as an ecologist, and the lessons they’ve taught me, to illustrate the progress made and the work that remains as we work together to heal the Earth and ourselves.”

Dr. Cristina Eisenberg is graduate faculty at Oregon State University in the College of Forestry. An Indigenous woman scientist, she is the principal investigator on two major on-the-ground projects with First Nations (Alberta, Canada) and Native American (Montana, USA) communities to integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) into plant and wildlife conservation in Western North America. The former Chief Scientist at Earthwatch Institute, she oversaw a global research program focusing on ecological restoration, social justice for Indigenous peoples, and sustainable production of natural resources. Cristina serves on the board of Society for Ecological Restoration, where she chairs the TEK Working Group. She has written two books, The Carnivore Way and The Wolf’s Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades and Biodiversity,  and is at work on two more under contract, one about climate change and wildlife and another about bison conservation.  

Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons this summer:

June 17 2022  3PM Eastern Standard Time
Title TBA
Lisa Levart and Vicki Noble

July 15 2022  12 NOON Eastern Standard Time
“Sacred Midwifery: Woman as the First Home”
Katsi Cook

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

“Religions of the Hearth or Religions of Empire: Desiring Mercy Not Sacrifice”

with Mary Condren

Thursday,  March 10, 2022 at 12 NOON  Eastern Standard Time 

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“In my research of the figure of Brigit, saint or goddess, I have found it remarkable that scholars refer to her traditions as those of the lower orders or the common people. In contrast, the word religion often refers to those worldviews promoting and sustaining the sacrificial social contract, and strategies of colonization. With a view to challenging the violent and radical splitting that pervades Western cultures, this presentation outlines some distinctions between Religions of the Hearth and Religions of Empire.  The aim is to reflect on and elaborate the pre-conditions for responding to the call of the prophets of the major religions who cried out, in no uncertain terms: I desire mercy not sacrifice.”

Dr. Mary Condren was born and currently lives in Ireland. With initial degrees in theology, sociology, social anthropology and religion and society, she was the first graduate of the doctoral program at Harvard University, Religion Gender and Culture. Her thesis was on The Role of Sacrifice in the Construction of the Gendered Social Order and Gendered System of Legitimation. She has taught at Harvard University, University College Dublin, and by invitation, at several other international universities. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where she teaches on the topic: Gender and the Culture of Violence. She is co-founder and director of Woman Spirit Ireland, (1994 –) .

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Save the dates for upcoming spring and summer ASWM Salons:

March 24 2022 3 PM  Eastern Daylight Time
“Healing the Earth with Traditional Ecological Knowledge”
Cristina Eisenberg

June 17 2022 3 PM  Eastern Daylight Time
Title TBA: Art, Archetypes and the Tarot
Lisa Levart and Vicki Noble

July  15 2022 3 PM  Eastern Daylight Time
Sacred Midwifery: Woman as the First Home“
Katsi Cook

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

“The Gift Economy of Mothers and Mother Earth”

with Genevieve Vaughan

Thursday,  February 24, 2022 at 12 NOON  Eastern Standard Time 

REGISTER HERE

 

Patriarchal Capitalism/Capitalist Patriarchy is an artificial and pernicious system that is destroying Mother Earth and her children. We need to return to the deep economy of the human mother, based on the model of unilateral giving to needs, a model that every child has to experience in order to survive. Receiving a unilateral gift is not passive but creative in that the receiver has to use the gift appropriately, learning from this the sensuous reality of the world around her, refining her needs to the gifts that satisfy them. The reception of the gift grounds the mother’s giving initiative in the body of  the child who responds with knowledge and pleasure, so that the trajectory of the gift forms a structure of meaning that continues throughout life and is altered in many ways, a theme with many variations. While many believe that the unilateral gift does not create a positive human relation, the opposite is true. Exchange, quid pro quo is an ego oriented variation on the theme of the gift, which creates adversarial relations and competition that are hallmarks also of patriarchy.

Gen says of the gift model, “Recognizing and validating it puts us in alignment with the Earth and allows the creation of community on that basis. Unilateral gifting has not been seen as structural but  recognizing it in the structure of language as well as of the economy, can restore it to the central place in our lives as the source of shared meaning and reveal a newly understood sense of who we are as an eminently maternal species. In fact, we are ‘homo donans,’ the giving being, not just ‘homo sapiens.’ This is the new/ancient understanding of ourselves and others that we need to counter the  destruction Patriarchal Capitalism has brought and to create healing and peace on a Matricentric Mother Earth.”

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Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:

March 10 2022  12 NOON Eastern Standard Time
Title TBA
Mary Condren

March 24 2022 3 PM  Eastern Daylight Time
“Healing the Earth with Traditional Ecological Knowledge”
Cristina Eisenberg

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

“The Fire of Umai, a call to our sacred Indigenous power”

with Apela Colorado

Thursday,  February 10, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern Standard Time 

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As told in the final chapter of her recently released book Woman Between the Worlds, Apela Colorado, PhD, and a group of healers were hiking a mountain in Kyrgyzstan 12 years ago, passing what appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rubble. To her horror, she discovered that the rubble they were standing on had once been a Temple to Umai (the Earth Mother).

Sacred sites such as Umai and their related stories the world over—particularly those devoted to the Mother—have at best been ignored, at worst destroyed, and many all but forgotten. Hundreds of years of colonization has meant that much of the transmission of cultural practices, particularly those of women, were buried—but not necessarily lost, as evidenced by the Kyrgyz candle ceremony to honor Umai.

 

For 30+ years, global nonprofit Worldwide Indigenous Science Network (WISN) has brought Indigenous and Western science together to preserve and protect Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the carriers of this wisdom for future generations, to protect sacred sites and species, and to help students remember their indigenously and connection to life. WISN’s innovative education programs, networking of Elders and Indigenous Cultural Practitioners, dreamwork and the revival of origin satires, cutting-edge blended Indigenous / Western research, and an Indigenous regranting program have impacted programs at the United Nations, global conservation efforts, Indigenous research, and higher education. 

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Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:

February 24, 2022 at 12 Noon Eastern Standard Time 
Title TBA
Genevieve Vaughan 

March 10 2022  12 NOON Eastern Standard Time
Title TBA
Mary Condren

March 24 2022 3 PM  Eastern Daylight Time
“Healing the Earth with Traditional Ecological Knowledge”
Cristina Eisenberg

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

“Onsite research: Listening to the Land”

with Elizabeth Cunningham

Thursday,  January 27, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern Standard Time 

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Novelist Elizabeth Cunningham will share how her encounters with place shaped The Maeve Chronicles, a series of award-winning novels featuring a feisty Celtic Magdalen. During her twenty years of research and writing, Elizabeth traveled to the Hebrides, Wales, Italy, Israel, France, Turkey, and England. Over and over, she discovered that the land itself has stories to tell to those who will listen: “Deserts are as real as gardens. When I returned home from these pilgrimages and continued to write, my vision was enlivened by the deserts, pavements, gardens, and lakes, mountains, and brothels my Magdalen might have seen with her own eyes.”

In her essay In Search of Real Gardens: A Novelist’s Onsite Research (2012) she recounts this insight rom her travels to Jerusalem: The Anglicans have a rival theory about the site of the crucifixion and locate it outside the medieval walls of the old city. They have a rival tomb also, a real one that dates to the 1st century and is big enough to have housed a small family. Outside it is a real garden where one can imagine Jesus pruning the trees on Resurrection morning, waiting for Mary Magdalen to recognize him. Because it was outdoors and less crowded—or maybe because of all my Anglican ancestors—this site held more appeal than the traditional one. On the Mount of Olives I felt closest to the story. I sat among the lap-like roots of a huge olive tree so old it might have been young when Jesus—and Maeve—walked back and forth between Jerusalem and Bethany.

The author of nine novels and four collections of poems, Elizabeth Cunningham lives in New York State in the valley of the Mahicantuck (the river that flows both ways).  In addition to the four novels of the Maeve Chronicles, she has written The Return of the Goddess, a Divine Comedy, and  All the Perils of This Night,  a “smart and twisted literary thriller.” Her most recent volume of poetry is Tell Me the Story Again. For more about Elizabeth, please visit her website.  (You can also find both Elizabeth Cunningham and Maeve Rhuad on FaceBook.)

Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:

February 10 2022  3PM Eastern Standard Time
Title TBA
Apela Colorado

February 24 2022  12 NOON Eastern Standard Time
“Recent Thinking on the Maternal Gift Economy“
Genevieve Vaughan

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