“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. 

“Sacred Midwifery: Woman as the First Home”

with Katsi Cook

Thursday,  July 14, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern DaylightTime 

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Drawing from Six Nations longhouse traditionalist oral tradition and matrilineal structures, Elder Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook, director of the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program, will present elements of her visionary perspective on sacredness in birthing– Woman as the First Environment.

“In pregnancy our bodies sustain life. At the breast of the women, the generations are nourished. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of those generations both to society and the natural world. In this way is the earth our mother, the old people said. In this way, we as women are earth.”

The work of the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program elevates the lives, dreams, and voices of North American Indigenous women elders who are working to heal, strengthen, and restore the balance of indigenous communities and the world. Fellowship cohorts are connected knowers and co-creators who are empowered to identify their values, inherent purpose, and experiences in self-determined ways for the sustainability of their people and sacred homelands. They are the courageous matriarchs who are deeply engaged with their communities, building solutions from Indigenous knowledge, wisdom, and practice. Using a narrative construction approach that is threaded through sequential cohorts, this orality-capture process mounts a re-membering from which Indigenous women’s knowledge, wisdom, and practice reflects matriarchal consciousness in intergenerational knowledge transfer. 

Katsi Cook is an Elder Mohawk midwife. She is the founding midwife of the Six Nations Birthing Centre where she grounded midwifery education in Iroquoian cosmology. Katsi is also a co-founder of the National Aboriginal Council of Midwives where she shares her experiences of the implicate world of birth, dream, and ceremony. As director of the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program Katsi serves as ambassador to North American Indigenous women’s leadership circles. Spirit Aligned works to strengthen and empower Indigenous women’s knowledge and wisdom networks. In June of 2022 Katsi will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Toronto Metropolitan University, recognizing her “extraordinary contribution to the betterment of culture, society, and the local community.”

Save these dates for the next ASWM Salons:

August 25, 2022, 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time  
“Thinking Yours Doesn’t Stink: Dis/Respect for Others”
Barbara Mann

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. 

“Three Mesoamerican Feminine Deities Balancing the Universe”

with Verónica Iglesias

Thursday,  June 30, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern DaylightTime 

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This presentation introduces three female deities: Chicomecoatl, Coatlicue, and Uixtocihuatl, and describes how their archetypal energies help the Universe stay in balance: 

• Chicomecoatl  is the deity of corn and maintenance, she is the one who provides the human being with food, she is the one who supports humankind physically. She is the one who gives the human being what she deserves, just for the fact of existing.
• Coatlicue is one of the deities that represents the Mother Earth, she is the energy that creates and destroys, represents the cycles, the roots of the human being on earth, the right to do what makes us happy and to proclaim a space of life and existence in the community. She also represents the indomitable and unpredictable force of nature.
• Uixtocihuatl is the energy of the pleasure of existence. She reminds the human being how important it is to honor the body, its sensations, its desires, its impulses, and always with balance and balance.  She also reminds us that when that human being stops having a pleasant life, she withers, and she stops enjoying her physical existence.

These three deities, when they are present in the daily life of the human being, allow the continuous flow of the energies that sustain the existence of life on the planet.

Verónica Iglesias was born in Mexico City, Mexico. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Library Sciences and a Master’s Degree in Mesoamerican Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). She studied ancestral medicine with different indigenous healers in Mexico, learning about the temazcal, plants, minerals, and rituals and ceremonies. She was initiated as an Ix´Cheel priestess, the Mayan deity of medicine. She is the author of 6 books, two of them about Medicinal Plants. She is co-creator of the Jade Oracle, a deck of 52 cards with Mesoamerican deities and symbols. (These cards are the source of our image for this post.)

Save this date for the next ASWM Salon this summer:

July 14 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. 

“A Conversation: Art, Archetypes, and Tarot”

with Vicki Noble and Lisa Levart

Thursday,  June 16, 2022 at 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time 

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Our Scholar Salons usually feature the work of a single woman scholar. On this special occasion our Salon will be a conversation between two remarkable women who, in addition to their other work, have blended scholarship and arts to create beautiful and memorable divination decks. Vicki Noble is a feminist healer and wisdom teacher, co-creator of the Motherpeace tarot and author of numerous books including Motherpeace, Shakti Woman and The Double Goddess. Lisa Levart is a visual artist/photographer of women and goddess images, nicknamed the “Annie Leibovitz of Goddesses,” whose Goddess on Earth Oracle Deck features 45 portraits of real women portraying the Divine Feminine.

Lisa Levart is a visual artist/photographer whose interest lies at the intersection between fine arts and social engagement. Her subjects are women and how our stories connect us to one another. Her work blends several mediums, including collage, film, multi media, dance and photography In addition to many galleries, Lisa’s work has been mounted in unique environments such as a 4-story installation of photo banners at the Palisades Center Mall, and as an immersive, multi-media installation at The Luna Stage Theater. Her book Goddess on Earth: Portraits of the Divine Feminine (2011), won a Gold Nautilus Book Award and was named one of the 100 Best New Women’s Spirituality Books in 2018. In that year, Lisa and Grandmother Clara Soaring Hawk, Ambassador of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, spoke at the Parliament of World Religions on the topic of using art to build bridges between cultures, and their ongoing collaborative series, “Women of Ramapough Lenape Nation.”

Vicki Noble is a feminist healer and wisdom teacher, co-creator of Motherpeace and author of numerous books including Motherpeace, Shakti Woman and The Double Goddess. She says of her inspiration, “The female lineage from which I draw is a holistic underground stream that runs from the most ancient times when women were unquestioned spiritual leaders and teachers at the center of our human communities.” For decades she has traveled and taught internationally, and her books are translated and published in various languages. Retired from teaching as a graduate professor in two Women’s Spirituality Masters Programs in California, Vicki teaches workshops and speaks in public venues in the U.S. and Europe. At home in Santa Cruz, California, she facilitates private intensive tutorials with women from around the world who come to study Motherpeace Tarot or to learn the Tibetan Buddhist Dakini practices she adapts and creates especially for them. In 2017, Christian Dior licensed the round feminist Motherpeace images for a special “cruise line” of clothing.

Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons this summer:

June 30 2022 3PM  Eastern Daylight Time
“Three Mesoamerican Feminine Deities Balancing the Universe”
Verónica Iglesias

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

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