“Of Golf Courses and World Heritage Sites“

with Dr. Barbara Mann

Thursday,  July 25, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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In 2023, UNESCO announced that the “Newark Earthworks,” a major collection of Tsalagi (“Cherokee”) sacred mounds dating back at least 2,000 years, sitting southeast of Columbus, Ohio, is now a World Heritage Site. This was a stunning development, given that the Moundbuilders Golf Club has sat atop these mounds since 1911.

The Native American Alliance of Ohio had fought for over forty years to protect the mounds, as golfers chunked up and sent pieces of them flying with every swing of their clubs. The mounds were built by women, bringing basket loads of soil from their home sites and mounding it up to solar and earth coordinates, so as to enable the Breathmen to read the equinoxes, solstices, and standstills of the moon.

The Mounds’ establishment as a World Heritage Site finally helped Ohio Indians kick the golfers off the mounds. The full significance of this new status becomes clear only once the Indigenous significance of the mounds, their shapes, locales in relations to one another and the landscape, and their mediation of Breath/sky and Blood/earth is understood.

“Of Golf Courses & World Heritage Sites” goes into the details of the mounds, their Indigenous meaning, their desecration, and finally (finally!) their recognition as a treasure from antiquity. 

Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Humanities, Jesup Scott Honors College, of the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio, USA. Including encyclopedias and bibliographies, she  has produced seventeen books and over 500 articles. Her latest work is The Woman Who Married the Bear (Oxford University Press, August, 2023) co-authored with Finnish scholar Dr. Kaarina Kailo. Mann’s most recent monographs include President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain; Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America; The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Settler Advance; Daughters of Mother Earth; and Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (Lang, 2000, 2004, 2006).

A Bear Clan, Ohio Seneca, community recognition, Barbara is the co-director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio. She lives in her Ohio homeland on the tail (western tip) of Lake Erie where she works for the rights of the people indigenous to Ohio, living in Ohio. (“Erie” is Seneca for “panther.” The Lake is a “water panther,” an important spiritual potency.)

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Watch our Newsletter for announcements about upcoming Salons in our Autumn Series.

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

“Harriet Tubman and the Combahee Raid“

with Dr. Edda Fields-Black

Thursday,  July 11, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Time  

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Harriet Tubman’s legendary life is widely known: escaping enslavement, leading others to freedom via the Underground Railroad, and tirelessly fighting for change. But a crucial chapter often overlooked is her daring Civil War service as a spy for the US Army, detailed in Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black’s groundbreaking book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.

A direct descendant of a soldier who fought in the raid, Dr. Edda Fields-Black unveils Tubman’s command of spies and pilots and intelligence gathered from freedom seekers, which led to a raid that liberated 756 enslaved people from bondage on seven rice plantations. It was the largest slave rebellion in US history. Through unexamined documents, she brings to life the Combahee River Raid and the untold stories of those freed, their resilience, and the lasting impact of Tubman’s heroism.

Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and has written extensively about the history of West African rice farmers, including in such works as Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. She was a co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.  She has served as a consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s permanent exhibit, “Rice Fields in the Low Country of South Carolina.” She is the executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a widely performed original contemporary classical work by celebrated composer John Wineglass.

Edda Fields-Black is a descendent of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, South Carolina; her great-great-great grandfather fought in the Combahee River Raid in June 1863. Her determination to illuminate the riches of the Gullah dialect, and to reclaim Gullah Geechee history and culture, has taken her to the rice fields of South Carolina and Georgia to those of Sierra Leone and Republic of Guinea in West Africa.

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Watch our Newsletter for announcements about additional Salons in our summer series.

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

“Women, arts and love“

with Guadalupe Urbina

Thursday,  May 30, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Time  

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BLUE AUGUST: To my country and her people

August, the thirty first,

in the train, going home

the window turns into night

the clouds appear as mountains

in this land of plains and water.

I yearn for you,

blue tropics of rain,

fireflies,  frogs,

little ripe guava,

cascading Reventazón,*

chorequita** from the ground,

moonlight savanna

I yearn  for you. . .

 

*River  **local fruit

Join us in this Salon as Lupe shares her music and paintings, and engages us in conversation on the love for the earth, women, and traditional wisdom.

Guadalupe Urbina  is internationally known for her work as a singer and songwriter, and as a researcher of the oral tradition of her Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. To tell her story of identity and culture,  she has ventured into painting, children’s stories and poetry as another extension of her musicality. She is an activist for the rights of women and girls, for Earth Rights. She is the founder of Casa Madremonte, an independent center dedicated to art, agroecology and spirituality inspired by the rainforest. She has published four books and recorded ten albums.

Guadalupe has performed in diverse venues in the three Americas, Europe and Central Africa, such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes or the Centro Cultural de la Villa in Madrid, the Hot Brass and the Maison de l’Amerique Latine in Paris, the Demba Diop Stadium in Senegal, Biarritz Film Festival, a One Woman Show in New York, and the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in Canada. And of course at many theaters, squares, streets, community halls, cafes and World Music festivals.  She has received awards from the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid, the América Prize from Radio France International, and the Association of Authors and Composers of Music  ACAM has awarded some of her works; the album Trópico Azul de Lluvia in 2001, special recognition for her work compiling oral tradition in the album “Sones Afromestizos de Amor y de Humor” in 2018. She received the Reca Mora Award for a life dedicated to music in 2021 and the Song of the Year award for her song “La Cumbia de la Niña” in 2023.

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With gratitude to our presenters and volunteers, we are taking a break in offering Scholar Salons until later this year. Watch our Newsletter for announcements about the next series. 

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

“Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico“

with Jamie Figueroa

Thursday,  May 16, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Time  

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In her memoir, novelist Jamie Figueroa excavates her roots from her childhood, cutting into them across generations and unearthing them on the island of Puerto Rico, the homeland of her Taíno ancestors.  As a child, the author first understood herself as a member of a “feminine collective” that contained her mother and her two older sisters, even as they all rode the roller coaster of her mother’s history of trauma, emotional unpredictability and dependency, and her series of marriages to white men.  Jamie chronicles her journey through her work in the healing arts, the ending of her own marriage to a white man (“a hand-me-down version of one of my mother’s”), and the practice and profession of writing and teaching. Addressing  Puerto Rico’s complicated relationship to the mainland U.S., she explores its nuances, along with associated topics of race, internalized colonization, and assimilation.

“Her exceptional command of her craft builds narrative tension while granting force to the way her personal history mirrors geopolitical devastation and imbuing her voice with the power of one no longer unclaimed by, but ready to lay claim to. Mother Island is a searching and lyrical memoir packed with nuance and depth.” (Starred Kirkus Review of Mother Island, Nov 28, 2023)

Join us in this Salon as Jamie reads from her memoir and engages us in a deep conversation on the themes of her work and her writing process.

Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Jamie Figueroa’s mixed-race Puerto Rican heritage of Black/Indigenous/Spanish drives her fiction and creative nonfiction themes. As a woman of color from the Caribbean diaspora, she writes into the complexities of a multi-faceted identity. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award. Jamie is on faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, The New York Times, and The Boston Review, among others. MOTHER ISLAND was named among the LA Times “6 books to shake off colonialism and rethink our Latino stories.” Jamie Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time

with Guadalupe Urbina, singer-songwriter/poet/artist/activist

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

“Moving from Lateral Oppression to a Culture of Kindness“

with Sherri Mitchell

Thursday,  May 2, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Time  

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“In this Salon we will look at shifting from lateral violence to lateral kindness as an expression of an emerging cultural paradigm. Lateral kindness is the reclamation of our pre colonial cultures and authentic identities, where care for one another was central to our survival and wellbeing. Respect is a key tenet to all healthy and intact cultures across the world.”

Sherri Mitchell -Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset, is an Indigenous attorney, activist, and author from the Penobscot Nation. She is an alumna of the American Indian Ambassador Program and the Udall Native American Congressional Internship Program. Sherri is the author of Sacred Instructions; Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change and a contributor to more than a dozen anthologies, including the best-seller All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis and Growing Up Native in America.

 Sherri is the Executive Director of the Land Peace Foundation, an educational organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of the Indigenous way of life and environmental equity and justice. She has worked with some of the largest NGO’s in the world on decolonizing relationships between Peoples and lands.  She currently serves as a Trustee for the American Indian Institute, an Indigenous Advisory Council member for Nia Tero’s Indigenous Land Guardianship Program, and a board member for the Post Carbon Institute.  Sherri is the recipient of several human rights and humanitarian awards, and her portrait is featured in the esteemed portrait series, Americans Who Tell the Truth. She is also the convener of the global healing ceremony – Healing the Wounds of Turtle Island, a gathering that has brought together more than fifty-thousand people from six continents to focus on healing our relationships with one another and with our relatives in the natural world.

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Save these dates for these upcoming ASWM Salons:

Thursday, May 16 , 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time:

with Jamie Figueroa, “Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico”

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Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time

with Guadalupe Urbina, singer-songwriter/poet/artist/activist

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.