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An Indigenous People's HIstory of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the U.S. empire.

In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by U.S. Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." [Publisher's description.]

Interview with Author

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Thanksgiving: "It Has Never Been About Honoring Native Americans" on Democracy Now! on Nov. 29, 2016.

Excerpt
The excerpt below "Redskins" (from Chapter Four: Bloody Footprints) is useful for teaching about the #ChangetheMascot campaign regarding the Washington football team and other sports mascots.
Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations. During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670's, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.

Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. "In the process," John Grenier points out, "they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities." Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization - destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging and scalp hunting-became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century.

Reviews

A must-read for anyone interested in the truth behind this nation's founding. -Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, Jicarilla Apache author, historian, and publisher of Tiller's Guide to Indian Country

This may well be the most important U.S. history book you will read in your lifetime. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz radically reframes U.S. history, destroying all foundation myths to reveal a brutal settler-colonial structure and ideology designed to cover its bloody tracks. Here, rendered in honest, often poetic words, is the story of those tracks and the people who survived - bloodied but unbowed. Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians. -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

ISBN: 9780807000403 | Beacon Press

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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States - Zinn Education Project

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Book - Non-fiction. By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 2015. 312 pages. Four hundred years of Native American history from a bottom-up perspective.

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Salt of the Earth directed by Wim Wenders

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I have known Sebastião Salgado's work for almost 25 years. I'd acquired two prints, a long time back, which really struck a chord with me and moved me. I framed them, and ever since, they have hung over my desk. Inspired by these photographs, I visited an exhibition called At Work soon after that. Ever since then, I've been an unconditional admirer of Sebastião's work, even though I only met the artist in person five or six years ago.
What was the catalyst for the project THE SALT OF THE EARTH?
We met in his Paris offices. He took me on a visit round his studio, and I discovered Genesis. This was an exciting new departure in his work, and as always, a project of huge scope that would unfold over a long period. I was fascinated by his involvement in his work and his determination. Then we met again, and we discovered we both love soccer, and we started talking about photography in general. One day, he asked me if I would be interested in accompanying him and his son Juliano on a journey without any precise goal on which they had started out, and for which they thought they needed another point of view, that of an outsider.
Once you'd decided to co-direct the film with Juliano, Sebastião Salgado's son, did you have to resolve any problems? The sheer volume of material, or the choice of photographs? Beyond the sequences of Juliano filming his father, did you fall back on any other archival footage?
The biggest problem was, in fact, the abundance of material. Juliano had already accompanied his father on several trips around the world, o there were hours and hours of documentary images. I'd planned to accompany Sebastião on at least two"missions" - in the great north of Siberia and in a balloon expedition over Namibia - but we had to cancel that because I fell ill and couldn't travel. So instead, I started to concentrate on his photographic work, and we recorded several interviews in Paris. But the more I discovered his work, the more questions I had. And of course, I had access to a plethora of archive images.
Your presence in the film is warm and discreet: where and when did the interviews with Sebastião Salgado take place? And what governed the choice of photographs that you discuss together?
During the first interviews I appeared on camera. But as our conversations progressed, I increasingly had the feeling I should disappear, and that I should give the whole space over to Sebastião and, above all, to the photographs. The work should be left to speak for itself. So I had the idea of a directorial approach using a sort of dark room: Sebastião was in front of a screen, looking at the photographs, whilst answering my questions about them. So the camera was behind this screen, filming through his photographs - if that's how I can put it - thanks to a semi-transparent mirror, which meant that he was looking at the same time at his photographs and the spectator. I thought it was the most intimate setting for the audience to hear him express himself and at the same time discover his work. We more or less cut out all the "traditional" interviews, of which only a few bits remain. But they turned out to be a great preparatory stage for our sessions in the "dark room". We chose the photographs together, and those choices were mainly dictated by the stories that Sebastião told me, and which are in the film. We had hours and hours of rushes at our disposal.
Did you encourage him to comment on his photographs by taking him back to the time and place where they were taken? A Brazilian gold mine, famine in the Sahel, the genocide in Rwanda, and so on. They are, for the most part, tragic images. Did you ever find them "too beautiful", as some have reproached him?
In the "dark room", we ran through Sebastião's entire photographic oeuvre, more or less in chronological order, for a good week. It was very difficult for him - and for us too behind the camera - because some of the accounts and journeys are deeply disturbing, and a few are genuinely chilling. Sebastião felt as if he was returning to these places, and for us, these internal journeys to the heart of darkness were also overwhelming. Sometimes we'd stop and I had to go out for a walk to get a bit of distance on what I'd just seen and heard. As for the question of whether his photographs are too beautiful, or too aestheticized, I totally disagree with those criticisms. When you photograph poverty and suffering, you have to give a certain dignity to your subject, and avoid slipping into voyeurism. It's not easy. It can only be achieved on condition that you develop a good rapport with the people in front of the lens, and you really get inside their lives and their situation. Very few photographers manage this.

The majority of them arrive somewhere, fire off a few photographs, and get out. Sebastião doesn't work like that. He spends time with the people he photographs to understand their situation, he lives with them, he sympathizes with them, and he shares their lives as far as possible. And he feels empathy for them. He does this job for the people, in order to give them a voice. Pictures snapped on the hoof and photographed in a "documentary" style cannot convey the same things. The more you find the right way to convey a situation in a convincing way, the closer you come to a language which corresponds to what you're illustrating and to the subject in front of you, the more you make a real effort to obtain a "good photo", and the more you give nobility to your subject and make it stand out. I think that Sebastião offered real dignity to all those people who found themselves in front of his lens. His photographs aren't about him, but about all those people!
Did you work from a script for SALT OF THE EARTH, or was the film structured during editing?
I jotted the main outline of the film down on paper, and in the end, the "dark room" was a conceptual device, but overall, as with any documentary, you have to try and shoot footage in the moment and not miss what's happening in front of you because of some prior decisions. That was specially the case when I went to Brazil and I filmed Sebastião and Lélia (his wife) in Vitória, the city where they live, or inside the Instituto Terra: I had to let myself be guided by the unexpected and be ready to shoot images on the spot. That's the other aspect of my contribution to this film: seeking to draw a link between the Salgados' extraordinary "other life" and the photographic body of work. In a way, their ecological commitment and their efforts to regenerate the tropical Atlantic Forest are, in my opinion, as important as Sebastião's photographs. As a result, I felt that we were making two documentaries at the same time, which we then had to edit into a single film.
The documentary offers the portrait of a man and brings to life his work. It also offers a touching study of the father-son relationship. Was this dual undertaking obvious from the start?
Yes, from the outset, our film had several dimensions. The father-son relationship was also clearly part of it from the start. It could have turned out to be a pitfall for the film, and I think that the Salgados - father and son - were right to bring me in to avoid any risk of that happening. But ultimately, it's a very moving side of the film.
One of Salgado's trademarks is his exclusive use of black-and-white. Does he explain this? In your own films (KINGS OF THE ROAD, the perception of our world by the angels in WINGS OF DESIRE, THE STATE OF THINGS), you use it to great effect: did this bring you closer?
Yes, I can totally identify with his use of black-and-white. What's more, the part of the film that I filmed myself is also in black-and-white so that it sits better alongside his photographs. At one point, we touched on this question in our interviews. But we ended up not keeping that segment in the final edit. I felt that this aspect of his work could be understood without needing any additional explanation.
Photography is something you have in common, since you yourself are known and acknowledged as a photographer (and like Salgado, a long-standing fan of the Leica), and many of your movie characters (Philip Winter in ALICE IN THE CITIES, Tom Ripley in THE AMERICAN FRIEND, or Travis in PARIS, TEXAS) have a link with photographs or photography. Did Salgado know your work the way you knew his?
Sebastião took quite a lot of photographs while we were filming, including of the crew. So I might have the honor of appearing in some of his photographs. But I don't think he knows my films as well as I know his photographs, which was the very reason behind me making this film. He was the subject of my film, and not the other way around.
Throughout the film, the presence, and the importance of his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, in the life and work of Salgado is tangible. Did she play an active part in the making of THE SALT OF THE EARTH?
They've been working together for 50 years. Lélia brings a real energy to Sebastião, which he needs for his works and his exhibitions, and they undertake his biggest photographic projects together. As such, it was obvious that she too would appear at the heart of the film. She's an amazing woman, very strong, very forthright, honest and adorable. And very funny. The Salgados do laugh a great deal!
The last part of the film is an unexpected journey, at the same time intimate and powerfully ecological: the Salgado family's return to the family ranch in Aimorés in Brazil. A breathtaking landscape devastated by deforestation, and the Salgados' incredible gamble - as we see, already starting to pay off - of replanting two million trees. For Salgado the man and for the photographer of the most dramatic human conflicts, could we speak of a happy ending?
From the start, it seemed essential for us to take into consideration the fact the Salgados have another life besides photography: their commitment to ecology. And from the outset, I knew that I had to tell two stories at the same time. One could say that the reforestation program they have set up in Brazil, and the near-miraculous results they have achieved, concluded in a happy ending for Sebastião, after all the misery he has witnessed and the depression into which he slipped when he came back from Rwanda for the last time, and after the unbearable episodes that he has lived through. He not only dedicated his latest monumental work, Genesis, to nature, but one can also say that it is nature which allowed him to not lose his faith in mankind.

Interview with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado

You were born in Paris 40 years ago. You are a film and documentary maker, and your first short film, SUZANA, made for Arte, dealt with the use of anti-personnel mines in Angola. That could easily have been a subject your father tackled...
That's true. I was 23 then. At the time, I was about to become a dad for the first time, and I absolutely had to work. So I quit studying law, having realized that sitting behind a desk is not for me. As a young child, I already knew my father had a fantastic profession; he traveled the world, he was at the center of crucial events. There were always people at our house who had come to talk about these events. I listened to them, and without really realizing it, I developed an interest and a passion for geo-political affairs at a very young age. I wanted to go out an get to grips with the world, and without knowing exactly how, try to communicate what I was going to learn and discover. I started to work for Canal+, and for the Brazilian channel Globo. I made my first short film, SUZANA, in 1996, whenI went with my father to Angola, but we weren't often together there. He took photographs, I filmed, and from that moment on, I understood that we were going to travel in different worlds. I then went to Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, and Brazil, where I took the opportunity to spend some time with my grandfather on his ranch. He was 96 at the time. I filmed him, and yes, he appears in SALT OF THE EARTH. As a child, almost subconsciously I wanted the same kind of life as my father. He was often absent, coming back from dangerous countries, heading off to denounce injustices, and so on. To me, that was a "normal" lifestyle. With all due modesty, and in my own way, I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
Did your father encourage you in the early stages?
Yes, with fantastic confidence, maybe close to recklessness. For example, he thought my plan to head off alone to Afghanistan was great! For her part, my mother was very worried, but since she had chosen to put up with my father's perilous trips to theaters of war, and to be in denial of the danger, she accepted it. I was very lucky to have been able to start my career as a documentary maker very young, and to have fulfilled this. My father, that distant hero, when he was home, our relationship wasn't always easy. From my adolescence, there was a distance between us. I pursued my path, I made some more documentaries, and then I moved to London to go to film school. It was at that point that our paths really went their separate ways. When, in 2004, he embarked on his latest long-term project, Genesis, this quest for unspoilt paradises which took up eight years, he suggested that I accompany him. I was reticent; I didn't know how my work would fit in with him. But our first trip turned out to be incredible.

It took us to Brazil, to the heart of Amazonia, some 300km from the nearest town, to meet an isolated tribe, the Zo'é, with whom we stayed for a month. These are people who still live in the Paleolithic era. I experienced that as a privilege, a moment suspended in time. And a dialog formed between my father and I; or rather, reformed. We then went to Papua New Guinea, to Irian Jaya, to stay with another isolated tribe, the Yali, then to an island in the Arctic Circle, Wrangel, home to walruses and polar bears. During these journeys, we talked about a lot of things which we'd never talked about before, and that's when I found a clear purpose to the footage I had been filming since I started accompanying him. When my father saw the first raw edits I had done with those pictures, he got very moved, to the point of having tears in his eyes.
Was that when you had the idea that an outsider's point of view should be added to your own to flesh out the film?
That process was already underway. There were already films on Sebastião, and films about other photographers. But it seemed to me that making a film about a photographer had its limitations: a man prepares to take a photo, and the story is over when the photo is taken. Except that he takes a second one, then a third, and so on. So in my opinion, it wasn't the right approach. This film should come out of Sebastião's own story: from his experiences, that few people have shared; from the fact that for 40 years he found himself in extreme situations, that he has witnessed humanity confronting some terrible events. It would be through exploring his story, his memories that we would come to pose this question: what changes a man? What changed in Sebastião Salgado? I knew the answer. I'd seen him live with Indians and the Papuan people. He sees people and does not judge them. He puts himself on the same level as them, no doubt because he too comes from a tiny, very violent village in a remote part of Brazil, cut off from the world. I think the people he photographs are sensitive to the benevolence of his viewpoint.

I think about what happened between Sebastião and them before and after taking the photographs, and how these exchanges can nourish us. Yes, even us, in our privileged and indifferent societies. That was the film. But for it to take shape, we needed someone other than me, less involved than I am, to speak freely to Sebastião, to tackle what should be the core of the film. In other words, to show the evolution of his gaze over the years, everything that we could learn from his career, in a militant way - I know he doesn't like that word - as he becomes increasingly aware that his photographs can, to some extent, change things for the people he photographs.
Is that when Wim Wenders became involved?
Wim Wenders was the ideal person. He already knew Salgado's work; they had already met a few times. At the time, Wim was already nursing the idea of making a film about Sebastião. We saw each other a lot, we talked a lot, and it was quite natural that we decided to make this film together. Not only did he understand the project, but he immediately adhered to it and was totally committed to it. It was really wonderful to see this man respecting the intimacy of this project, but adding a host of essential elements, bringing his own particular sensitivity, his own talent in terms of images.
How did you divide up the work?
I showed Wim what I had filmed during the trips with my father, and explained how I felt these images had to be linked to Sebastião's trajectory so that we could learn from his testimony, his memories, the situations in which he had found himself. This discussion resulted in the emergence of the structure of our film, but for my part ... I was incapable of having the necessary distance to achieve this. Wim Wenders was now there to pull together this story of a man who had grown weary of the suffering he had photographed, who himself bears the scars of what he has seen and experienced, and who said: "After years working in refugee camps, I had seen so much death that I felt myself dying." To begin with, I thought that Wim and my father would sit either side of a little table and would talk. Not so. Working with a great artist like Wenders changes things, and the idea he came up with to confront Sebastião visually with his memories is much more ingenious. At the end of these very fertile confrontations, we shut ourselves away in the editing room for a year and a half. That enabled us to eliminate certain complicated narrative threads, and to be more simple and direct.
Susan Sontag spoke of the "inauthenticity of the beautiful" in Salgado's work. How do you respond to that?
There are two aspects to Sontag's reproach: the supposed fascination with poverty - or death, in fact - that the photographer felt, and the fact that the subjects are not identified, unlike the photographer, who is revered at their expense. In her critique, Sontag also denounces the cynicism of the media that commission and publish these photographs. I think it's very unfair to associate Salgado with all that. He would spend several weeks, even several months in countries that were often torn apart, which he was drawn to by his urge to bear testimony. He needs to create a relationship with the person he's going to photograph, and says that it is the subject who ends up "giving" him the photo. The emotion, the empathy guide him. I think that comes across very well in the film.
Your mother, Lélia, was 17 when she met your father. She has always been the fixed point in his life. How far was she involved in THE SALT OF THE EARTH?
Lélia did not get directly involved in the film, and in a way, you could say that Sebastião wasn't involved either! They put their faith in Wim and me. Lélia and Sebastião is a long story; they have always taken their decisions together, and THE SALT OF THE EARTH belongs to both of them.
What did the return to the family ranch represent for you, given the huge rehabilitation project for its environment which is underway? A mission? A utopia? A future?
Nobody could believe it, me less than anyone given the state of the ranch and the desolation of the surrounding landscape. To begin with, it was a modest project, the idea being to replant a few trees around this childhood house where we would return on vacation. But my parents are clearly driven by something, and once again, they threw themselves into it body and soul. The project, which was supposed to remain on a family scale, suddenly became a monumental ecological undertaking: "OK, we're going to replant the whole forest." They set up the Instituto Terra, which has become the leading employer in the region. They have already planted out 2.5 million trees on my grandfather's former ranch, which is now an ecological reserve, and another million more on the surrounding land. It's an insane project, huge and magnificent.
You are preparing your first fiction feature film. Can you talk about it?
It is set in Brazil, in Sao Paulo. It's at the writing stage, but I can tell you it will be a psychological thriller built around a powerful theme in Brazilian society: upward mobility.

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I have known Sebastião Salgado's work for almost 25 years. I'd acquired two prints, a long time back, which really struck a chord with me and moved me. I framed them, and ever since, they have hung over my desk. Inspired by these photographs, I visited an exhibition called At Work soon after that.

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Crystal Ball by Prince

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Abstract: The Art of Design

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Abstract: The Art of Design | Christoph Niemann: Illustration | FULL EPISODE | Netflix

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Tower and Dungeon:

A Study Of Place And Power In American Culture

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Tower And Dungeon: A Study Of Place And Power In American Culture.

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AbeBooks.com: Tower And Dungeon: A Study Of Place And Power In American Culture.: 154 pages. Softcover. Good condition. POLITICS. Goes a long way toward a political and historical resituating of the discourse on the cultural functions of space. Links the politics of subjective lived space to the vision of a geography of emancipation.

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Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Marie Brown

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Fighting multiple forms of state violence is exhausting, especially when considering the decay of our environment. But author, activist and doula adrienne maree brown says that we can still find hope and love amid the despair that surrounds us every day. In her new book, " Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good," released today (February 26) by AK Press, she draws from Black feminist luminaries to teach us how embracing what brings us joy is central in organizing against oppression.

"Pleasure Activism," which builds on brown's earlier book, " Emergent Strategy," includes essays, reflections, excerpts and poems from writers and activists such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Joan Morgan, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Sonya Renee Taylor. A self-proclaimed "pleasure activist," brown also channels her own journey, from her time as an organizer with the Harm Reduction Coalition, a sex columnist for Bitch Media, and as a queer Black woman discovering the joys of intimacy, sex and what she calls "radical drug use."

Throughout the book, "hot and heavy homework" assignments invite the reader to tap into the full spectrum of our erotic and emotional needs. For example, there are exercises in masturbating, taking nude selfies and consenting to sex with another person. She also highlights the many ways that people of color, sex workers, disabled people and queer, trans and nonbinary people have been denied joy-and why we must center their pleasure as an organizing principle. "Feeling good is not frivolous," brown writes. "It is freedom." Colorlines spoke with brown about why self-love, healing and harm reduction are neccesary for collective liberation.
How do you define pleasure?
The definition of pleasure, as I use it, is about happiness, joy, contentment and satisfaction. I definitely have people look at me when I start talking about the idea like, "So just pure debauchery, that's what you're saying. It's just pure escapism." And I'm like, "No, it's about pure aliveness and actually being present for the world around you." I often quote the Zapatistas who say, "We're trying to build a world in which many worlds fit." In order to do that, we need to feel what our goals and needs are inside of that world on an individual level and on a collective level. I don't think we can really feel for the collective if we can't feel ourselves.
How can we use pleasure as a strategy?
The first thing is to read Audre Lorde's " Uses of the Erotic." She makes a really strong case for how pleasure can help us heal from oppression. Reclaiming our full erotic aliveness is a core piece in recovering from acts of oppression and marginalization. If you don't make that initial connection, it's really hard to not see pleasure as a guilty thing [you're] doing on the side.
You had a sex column for Bitch Media and you included a few of those essays in the book. What has it been like to be so candid with the public?
There's tons of people of color who are thinking about pleasure, but a lot of it stays out of the public sphere. After I started talking about these things publicly people would slip up to me and be like, "Hey, I really want to talk about that," in these very private conversations. Then, when we do get to experience pleasure, a lot of times it rides the same line as capitalism. If you are super successful and fall within norms and certain privileged areas, only then you get to experience pleasure. That's been a big thing I've been trying to push back on.
How do you convey pleasure for people of color?
It's not an accident that on this land, Black people have been told, "You're 3/5 of a person." If you don't feel like you're fully human, then where in that are you supposed to believe you have access? When your people are [living with the effects of genocide], as Indigenous people are, where are you supposed to find pleasure? For me it's about reclaiming what I believe is our birthright. And it's not enough to do it on a personal level. What does it look like on the collective level for us to feel like we all have access to lives that are fulfilling and satisfying?
What does pleasure look like when you're a survivor of sexual violence and trauma?
A lot of it is realizing that it's not your fault and what happened to you [is] not the purpose of your body on this earth. Your purpose is not to please others-to please a man or to please someone who is older than you. You have a purpose unto yourself to find and reclaim.

[It's also] having community, having other people around who you can [join in] ongoing, powerful and honest conversations about the healing process. You don't have to be ashamed to say, "I was with a lover yesterday and I felt triggered by something that happened years ago. And it's not their fault." It helps so much to not be in your head going through the experience of being a survivor. It takes community to figure that stuff out. When we isolate ourselves, it leads to poor decision-making, repression, self-harm cycles and abusive relationship cycles. There's also a lot of healing that has to happen at the level of the body. I'm a teacher in somatics and I feel like that's one of the main places that I have been able to drop in and be like, "How do I feel?"
How do somatics relate to healing and finding pleasure?
Somatics means the body in its wholeness. It's an act of studying what helps the body move through trauma, recover from harm and actually feel in an authentic way. It's about being an authentic person that's actually congruent, which means the face you show to the world is actually congruent to who you are inside. Much of what we get trained to do in the wake of trauma is to hide our feelings and deny that we're feeling. A lot of it is really retraining and giving yourself permission to be the most intact version of yourself that's available.
What I got is that being in tune with yourself allows you to know what your body actually wants in certain moments, like when you're consenting or when something actually brings you joy.
The core of somatics is a practice that says you have a center that lives inside of you and is a sacred space. It's a place that you can return to. And the goal of your life is not to get to a place where you feel calm all the time. It's getting yourself to where you can feel whatever is actually happening in real time and then define how you want to organize yourself around it. That's the part I hope a lot of people are able to practice.
You spent some time working at the Harm Reduction Coalition as an organizer, and you dedicate a whole section of the book to what you call "radical drug use." What can a harm reduction approach teach us about pleasure activism?
There are two major aspects of it that are crucial. One, rather than aiming for abstinence, we aim to reduce the harm that comes from engaging in whatever substances or sexual practices that we enjoy doing with our bodies. The other aspect is not denying the impact of living in a harmful, traumatizing world. We judge [people who use drugs]. We persecute them and lock them away instead of just saying that the world is really difficult to navigate, that it's hard to keep your head above water, to feel powerful, to feel like you know yourself. Instead of judging when people find some substance or some way to get there, my thing is, "How do we make that as safe a journey as possible?"

[In the book] I talk about my use of ecstasy for a period of time. Using ecstasy really helped me get in touch with a part of myself that I hadn't been able to access up until that point. I knew also that I was going through some depression and I was really struggling with finding happiness on my own. That medicine really helped me move through it. Now, therapists are actually using [ecstasy] more intentionally with clients to help them have those experiences of joy, pleasure and release. I love that [in] harm reduction everything is set up by the person who is using. There's a ton of self-determination and community determination, as opposed to telling someone what is the right path for them. When we talk about the kind of liberation we want in the liberated world of the future, I want a space where there's a ton of agency. Harm reduction is one of the ways we get there.
What advice would you give to someone who is starting to form an intimate relationship with themselves and discovering what brings them pleasure?
First I would say, "Yay! I'm glad you're beginning this path." A couple of basic practices are getting really in touch with your body, literally feeling your body more, masturbating more, learning what gives you pleasure just from your own touch. I'm a huge fan of documenting yourself in certain ways, not for the public, not for posting anywhere, but just documenting, "Here's what I look like." There's a lot to be said about learning how to turn yourself on and training yourself on the [decolonizing] aspects of pleasure. If most of the pornography and the media images [tell us that] what's desirable is a skinny White woman, then you have to really learn how to see yourself. Maybe you fit that image, but the majority of people don't. So it's figuring out, "Well how do I fall in love with the body that I was given? How do I understand that it's a place for pleasure and it's a place for power?" I think journaling is also a good go-to. Throughout the book there's a lot of "hot and heavy homework" that's stuff like, write about yourself being naked, explore it a little bit.
How can pleasure help us build what you describe as "communities of care"?
One of the [essays] that speaks to this is from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. She talks a lot about the pleasure of intimacy where you don't have to hide your needs if you're not feeling well or if you need some kind of support. I think about that echoing back to what Octavia Butler constructed in almost every one of her books, how these various communities basically were communities of care. People were coming in, usually in a sort of apocalyptic situation, and having to figure out, "How do we attend to someone's needs? How do we make whatever we have enough? How do we know if we're free or not free?" To me, that's a big piece of it.

In order to feel pleasure, you have to feel the whole breadth of your emotional spectrum and how to communicate [your] needs. There's an aspect of it that's also about surrender. If you orient [the world] around a collective community of care, then there's plenty of stuff [available] if we know how to share it. A lot of pleasure activism is also leaning into the simple pleasures of existing, right here, right now. I think communities of care are the future for our species. And I just hope that we don't have to go down the most apocalyptic world to get us there. Although, that's what history seems to indicate. But, we'll see.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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In 'Pleasure Activism,' Adrienne Maree Brown Dares Us to Get In Touch With Our Needs

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Fighting multiple forms of state violence is exhausting, especially when considering the decay of our environment. But author, activist and doula adrienne maree brown says that we can still find hope and love amid the despair that surrounds us every day.

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Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro by Gloria Anzaldua

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Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality

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Written during the last decade of her life, Light in the Dark represents the culmination of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's mature thought and the most comprehensive prese

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The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

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It's easy to be hyperbolic when praising novels: every promising new author's work is described as a "future classic." But last week, fantasy author N.K. Jemisin became one of a handful of authors to win the Hugo award for Best Novel two years in a row, first for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, then for its 2016 sequel The Obelisk Gate. After reading the final book in the trilogy, The Stone Sky, I think it's likely that she'll do it again next year. The book is a phenomenal end to one the greatest works of fantasy literature ever put to page: the Broken Earth trilogy
There are some spoilers ahead for the entire trilogy.
The Broken Earth trilogy is set on a massive continent called the Stillness, in a far-future Earth wracked with periodic disasters known as Seasons. These Seasons aren't just bad storms: they're massive, apocalyptic events that last for generations, reshaping the world and its inhabitants. Those who survive huddle into Comms, protected communities that try to wait out the destruction, then crawl out and rebuild civilization before the next event. There are also remnants of an advanced civilization that persist throughout the destruction: giant, floating crystals called Obelisks.

Among the survivors of humanity are "orogenes," individuals who can draw incredible magical power from reservoirs of the Earth. But while these orogenes serve a useful purpose for society, their training and treatment is brutal. They're taken from their homes as children and brought to the Fulcrum, an order that trains and certifies them under the supervision of yet another order, known as the Guardians. When the Seasons come, they're often singled out for death from Stills, their non-magical counterparts.

Jemisin sets up a fantasy world unlike any other that I've read, blending together fantasy and science fiction in this far-future Earth, and building up a magical system based around the forces of geology: indeed, the name orogene comes from the word orogeny, the process of mountain-building. Once they complete their brutal training, orogenes draw their power from the Earth's crust, and are sent to where they're most useful: quelling Earthquakes to trying and hold off the start of the next apocalyptic Season. As someone who grew up with a deep appreciation for rocks, and later studied geology, seeing magicians deal with the Earth as a dynamic object is a real treat to behold. And while epic fantasy often deals with titanic periods of time, Jemisin is the first author I've come across who truly understands the sheer scale of time when it comes to geology.

The Fifth Season is all about establishing this world and its norms. It opens with the start of a new Season, when a woman named Essun comes home to discover that her husband murdered their infant son and vanished along with their daughter. Jemisin weaves this story with two others: a young girl named Damaya who's just been sent to the Fulcrum, and a woman named Syenite who's about to leave for her first mission. The narrative shifts between first, second, and third perspective, and by the end of the book, Jemisin provides a neat revelation: each character is the same person, at different points in her life.

By telling parts of the story in the second person perspective, Jemisin puts the reader in her character's shoes

These perspective shifts effectively place the reader into Essun's shoes, conveying her grief, anger, and triumph firsthand, rather than observing from the sidelines in a third-person perspective, or having the character tell you events in the first person. It's a monumentally difficult task (and the shifts in perspective do mean that the The Fifth Season takes some getting used to), but it's an incredibly effective tactic, allowing Jemisin not only to tell you the dangers of marginalization, enslavement, or oppression, but to let the reader experience it all through through the eyes of her characters.

Where the first novel introduces the world, The Obelisk Gate tears it all down, as the Season hits and Jemisin goes full apocalyptic. After the events of The Fifth Season, Essun is still searching for her missing daughter. When she falls in with a community of survivors, she learns that this Season wasn't inevitable or even natural: it was a deliberate effort by a former partner, who was mortally wounded seeking a way to end the seasons once and for all. But as Essun looks for a way to save the world, Jemisin jumps to the perspective of her daughter Nessun - who is just as powerful as her mother, and believes humanity should be burned to the ground for the injustices against her and her family. The story sets a collision course between the two women, who must grapple with what it means to hold power in a world of desperate people.

By the time The Stone Sky begins, Essun and Nessun are both traveling to the far side of the Stillness, where they can call the moon back in order to stop the cycle of Seasons - ensuring humanity's survival on a peaceful planet, or its extinction in a perpetual apocalypse. Meanwhile, Jemison finally pulls back the curtain on the civilization that created the Obelisks, whose pursuit for power nearly destroyed the world, and flung the moon off into the depths of space.

The story is all about who hold power and how society uses the people it marginalizes

At its core, the Broken Earth trilogy is a story about who holds the power in this world, and how society uses and profits off of those that it marginalizes, as well as the destruction that absolute power can mete out. In The Fifth Season, Jemisin lays out an ambitious narrative in an amazingly complex and vivid world, with a story that addresses systemic problems with oppression and power - points that are all too relevant in 2017. There are plenty of novels that deal with heady, important, and relevant issues, but what really makes this trilogy stand out is how Jemisin plays with language to put the reader into the perspective of those who are at the receiving end of society's ill intentions.

This continues into The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, each of which convey enormously complicated stories between events separated by distance and time, all coming to a single, pivotal moment at the end of the trilogy, where the fate of the world balances on the relationship between a mother and daughter. It's a moment that left me sitting at the edge of my seat while I read, and Jemisin absolutely nails the ending by showing off a world changed for the better by the character's actions.

Epic fantasy literature often feels as though it's the byproduct of works like The Lord of the Rings, which plays with its characters in terms of absolutes: a small party bravely venturing forward in the face of absolute evil. Jemisin's vision of the world here is nuanced, with some characters upholding an oppressive system with the best of intentions, or others going to desperate measures to simply survive to see another day. The result is a story that tells a deeply human story of flawed characters working to not simply survive, but the lengths that they need to go in order to change a world that is literally and figuratively broken.

Excitingly, it looks as though we're going to see a bit more of this trilogy: Deadline announced that TNT is developing the first novel for a potential series from the producer behind Syfy's Helix, CBS's Sleepy Hollow, and Fox's 24: Legacy. I found myself wondering what this trilogy might look like if given the prestige TV treatment, and while it would be a tall order, it's a project that I'd love to see done right.

Every now and again there comes a work that seeks to redefine the face of genre literature, from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness to William Gibson's Neuromancer. With the Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin has made a place for herself among these greats, pulling off a landmark story that blends fantasy, science fiction, and post-apocalyptic tropes.Finishing The Stone Sky left me utterly breathless by the scale and scope of what Jemisin accomplished in these three books - narratively, technically, and thematically.
Photrography by Andrew Liptak / The Verge

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N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy is a triumphant achievement in fantasy literature

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It's easy to be hyperbolic when praising novels: every promising new author's work is described as a "future classic." But last week, fantasy author N.K. Jemisin became one of a handful of authors to win the Hugo award for Best Novel two years in a row, first for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, then for its 2016 sequel The Obelisk Gate.

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The Known World by Edward P. Jones

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Prior to the Civil War, some free black people owned slaves. Author Edward P. Jones picked up on that little-known fact and has written a vivid first novel that looks at slavery through a different lens. On Morning Edition, hear an interview with Jones and a review of The Known World.

"A sprawling story built around a morally bankrupt social institution," The Known World is "a meditation on entrenched evil," reports Martha Woodroof, of member station WMRA.

Jones collected two shelves of books about slavery, but never got around to reading them. Still, the author was able to use his imagination, and stories he had heard growing up, to make his characters come alive. "I decided the people I'd created were real enough and I had just accumulated enough information about what the world was like in the South before 1865 to allow me to lie and get away with it," he says.

Jones' novel has won critical acclaim for its unique and imaginative nature and is a finalist for this year's National Book Awards. In a review for Morning Edition, Price Cobbs says The Known World "plausibly evokes how slavery made victims of both blacks and whites and still haunts the historical memory of America."

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Prior to the Civil War, some free black people owned slaves. Author Edward P. Jones picked up on that little-known fact and has written a vivid first novel that looks at slavery through a different lens. On Morning Edition, hear an interview with Jones and a review of The Known World.

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The Resisters by Gish Jen

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President Warren G. Harding once urged the American people to "strive for production as Babe Ruth strives for home runs."

In Gish Jen's inventive but muddled dystopian novel The Resisters, production is no longer the problem, though home runs are still in demand. In the country Jen calls "AutoAmerica," AI and automation have created such a glut of stuff that the underclasses exist to consume - "[n]ot that charges of underconsumption couldn't be fought in the courts," Jen writes. "This was AutoAmerica, after all."

Living on water or swampland, they receive basic income and endless free food, which contains a sedative, a "mood-and-mind mute that amounted to a love sap" meant to curb population growth.

The privileged are called the "Netted" and are "angelfair" land dwellers, while the rest, known as "Surplus," comprise the "coppertoned," the "odd-bodied," and the "odd-godded."

"It's like Jim Crow gone digital," explains one character.

The novel's protagonist, Gwen, is coppertoned, Surplus, and gifted with a ferocious pitching arm. Recruited to play in the Olympics against "ChinRussia," AutoAmerica's geopolitical foe, Gwen is offered the chance to become a member of the elite caste. The book's main moral question is whether "resistance" is worth giving up the opportunities of Netted life.

Gwen's ethical deliberations are obscured by the fact that Jen tells the story from the point of view of her lackluster father, Grant. Half of the book's action takes place out of his sight, and is laboriously constructed in letters home, speculation, and, finally, a bug he plants on Gwen when she goes away to university. As a result, Gwen has little interiority.

Gwen's resistance has all the heft of a "Nevertheless, She Persisted" coffee mug.

The contours of Gwen's "resistance," too, are fuzzy. Mostly, she seems to take part in various pleasant activities: knitting, gardening, baking, pitching in an underground baseball league. These activities seem intended to suggest a form of resistance. But it seems closer to the habit, in sectors of the modern left, of pretending that lifestyle or consumer choices (farmer's markets, yoga) are meaningful political actions, so long as they are done with the right intention. Gwen's resistance has all the heft of a "Nevertheless, She Persisted" coffee mug.

There is a better model in Gwen's lawyer mother Eleanor, who sues the government for human rights violations. But Gwen's own actions never attain the same moral stakes, and the novel's ethics ultimately feel confused.

There is another problem: baseball. Over the past century, it has provided an endlessly flexible metaphorical vocabulary for almost every aspect of American life. The allegory is so apt, Jen could almost have made her heroines bake apple pies (they also bake apple pies). But baseball is also a real sport, and The Resisters finds no tactile joy in it, nothing that would call up glove snaps, bat cracks, or the smell of grass. The games themselves feel interminable, metaphorically weighted but bloodless. (It seems pedantic, too, to note that Jen seems confused about when foul balls count as strikes).

Jen will occasionally write a perfect sentence: "Her head curved back down, her attention contracting so exactly to the size and shape of her screen that it was as if someone had selected 'Attention' and then hit 'Fit to screen.'" But more often, the internet language feels artificial: Would teenagers really consent to calling texts "GreetingGrams"?

Jen's most perceptive points come out in worldbuilding. This dystopia was not the result of some cataclysmic event like an invasion or a coup, but rather of millions of individual trade offs - convenience for privacy, or wealth for the environment. The citizens of AutoAmerica gradually gave up freedom, privacy, and the natural world in order for life to go a little more smoothly. "...[N]o one would have chosen the extinction of frogs and of polar bears, or the decimation of our pine and spruce forests...And yet it was something we humans did finally choose," Jen writes. It's a stark condemnation for a novel so curiously invested in letting its characters off the hook, so long as they're cheering for the right team.

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'The Resisters' Could Use A Little More Resistance

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President Warren G. Harding once urged the American people to "strive for production as Babe Ruth strives for home runs." In Gish Jen's inventive but muddled dystopian novel The Resisters, production is no longer the problem, though home runs are still in demand.

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Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Krista Tippett, host: "Why is the world so beautiful?" This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes, "Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language." An expert in moss - a bryologist - she describes mosses as the "coral reefs of the forest." She opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate.

Robin Wall Kimmerer: I can't think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It's always the opposite, right? What we're revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory, and we're at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.

[ music: "Seven League Boots" by Zoe Keating]

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Ms. Tippett: Robin Wall Kimmerer is a professor of environmental biology at the State University of New York and the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She works with tribal nations on environmental problem-solving and sustainability. Part of that work is about recovering lineages of knowledge that were made illegal in the policies of tribal assimilation which did not fully end in the U.S. until the 1970s. Robin Wall Kimmerer's grandfather attended one of the now infamous boarding schools designed to "civilize" Indian youth; and she only began to learn the Anishinaabe language of her people as an adult. We spoke in 2015.

Ms. Tippett: I'm just so intrigued when I look at the way you introduce yourself. It will often include that you from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, from the bear clan, adopted into the eagles. I'd love for you to just take us a little bit into that world you're describing that you came from, and ask, also, the question I always ask: what was the spiritual and religious background of that world you grew up in of your childhood?

Ms. Kimmerer: I'd like to start with the second part of that question. I was lucky enough to grow up in the fields and the woods of upstate New York. I was lucky in that regard, but disappointed also, in that I grew up away from the Potawatomi people, away from all of our people by virtue of history, the history of removal and the taking of children to the Indian boarding schools. And so, in a sense, the questions that I had about who I was in the world, what the world was like, those are questions that I really wished I'd had a cultural elder to ask, but I didn't, but I had the woods to ask. And there's a way in which just growing up in the woods and the fields, they really became my doorway into culture. In the absence of human elders, I had plant elders instead.

Ms. Tippett: And it sounds like you did not grow up speaking the language of the Potawatomi nation, which is Anishinaabe, is that right?

Ms. Kimmerer: That's right. Yeah, the language is called Anishinaabemowin. And the Potawatomi language is very close to that.

Ms. Tippett: I was intrigued to see that mention somewhere in your writing that you take part in a Potawatomi language lunchtime class that actually happens in Oklahoma, and you're there via the internet, because I grew up, actually, in Potawatomi County in Oklahoma. And having told you that, I never knew or learned anything about what that word meant, much less the people and the culture it described.

Ms. Kimmerer: That is so interesting to live in a place that is named that. This is the ways in which cultures become invisible and the language becomes invisible. And through history and the reclaiming of that, the making culture visible again, to speak the language in even the tiniest amount so that it's almost as if it feels like the air is waiting to hear this language that had been lost for so long. So it delights me that I can be learning an ancient language by completely modern technologies. Sitting at my office, eating lunch, learning Potawatomi grammar.

Ms. Tippett: So when you said a minute ago that you spent your childhood, and actually the searching questions of your childhood somehow found expression, and the closest that you came to answers, in the woods. And it seems to me that that's such a wonderful way to fill out something else you've said before, which is that you were born a botanist, which is a way to say this, which was the language you got as you entered college at forestry school at State University of New York.

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. There was no question but that I'd study botany in college. It was my passion. Still is, of course. But the botany that I encountered there was so different than the way that I understood plants. Plants were reduced to object. What was supposedly important about them was the mechanism by which they worked, not what their gifts were, not what their capacities were. They were really thought of as objects, whereas I thought of them as subjects. And that shift in worldview was a big hurdle for me in entering the field of science.

Ms. Tippett: One way you've said it is that that science was asking different questions, and you had other questions, other language, and other protocol that came from indigenous culture. There's one place in your writing where you're talking about beauty. You're talking about a question you would have, which is why two flowers are beautiful together. And that that question, for example, would violate the division that is necessary for objectivity. But then, you do this wonderful thing where you actually give a scientific analysis of the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which would be one of the critiques of a question like that, that it's not really asking a question that is rational or scientific. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Ms. Kimmerer: I do. I do exactly.

Ms. Tippett: Flesh that out, because that's such an interesting juxtaposition of how you actually started to both experience the dissonance between those kinds of questionings and also start to weave them together.

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes, it goes back to the story of when I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school.

Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn't going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there's a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it's a matter of aesthetics and it's a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they're so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another.

So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that's a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that "Why is the world so beautiful?" is a question that we all ought to be embracing.

Ms. Tippett: Now, you did work, for a time, at Bausch & Lomb after college. You went into a more traditional scientific endeavor. I wonder, was there a turning point, a day or a moment where you felt compelled to bring these things together in the way you could, these different ways of knowing and seeing and studying the world?

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. I think the place that it became most important to me to start to bring these ways of knowing back together again is when, as a young Ph.D. botanist, I was invited to a gathering of traditional plant knowledge holders. And I was just there to listen, and it was such an amazing experience. Four days of listening to people whose knowledge of the plant world was so much deeper than my own.

Ms. Tippett: And were these elders? Were these indigenous teachers?

Ms. Kimmerer: They were. Their education was on the land and with the plants and through the oral tradition. But I just sat there and soaked in this wonderful conversation, which interwove mythic knowledge and scientific knowledge into this beautiful cultural, natural history. And, for me, it was absolutely a watershed moment, because it made me remember those things that starting to walk the science path had made me forget, or attempted to make me forget. And I just saw that their knowledge was so much more whole and rich and nurturing that I wanted to do everything that I could to bring those ways of knowing back into harmony.

Ms. Tippett: You said at one point that you had gotten to the point where - you were talking about the names of plants. "I was teaching the names and ignoring the songs." What do you mean by that?

Ms. Kimmerer: One of the difficulties of moving in the scientific world is that when we name something, often with a scientific name, this name becomes almost an end to inquiry. We sort of say, well, we know it now. We're able to systematize it and put a Latin binomial on it, so it's ours. We know what we need to know. But that is only in looking, of course, at the morphology of the organism, at the way that it looks. It ignores all of its relationships. It's such a mechanical, wooden representation of what a plant really is. And we reduce them tremendously if we just think about them as physical elements of the ecosystem.

[ music: "All Things Transient" by Maybeshewill]

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today I'm with botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. She writes books that join new scientific and ancient indigenous knowledge, including Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass.

Ms. Tippett: So this notion of the earth's animacy, of the animacy of the natural world and everything in it, including plants, is very pivotal to your thinking, and to the way you explore the natural world, even scientifically, and draw conclusions, also, about our relationship to the natural world. So I really want to delve into that some more. You said that there's a grammar of animacy. Talk about that a little bit.

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. This comes back to what I think of as the innocent or childlike way of knowing. Actually, that's a terrible thing to call it. We say it's an innocent way of knowing, and, in fact, it's a very worldly and wise way of knowing. That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today's children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than ten plants. That means they're not paying attention.

In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an "it." And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an "it," that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn't tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it's the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as "it." In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as "it"s.

Ms. Tippett: So living beings would all be animate, all living beings, anything that was alive in the Potawatomi language.

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. Absolutely.

Ms. Tippett: And inanimate would be, what, materials or...?

Ms. Kimmerer: You raise a very good question, because the way that, again, Western science would give the criteria for what does it mean to be alive is a little different than what you might find in traditional culture, where we think of water as alive, as rocks as alive. Alive in different ways, but certainly not inanimate. Generally, the inanimate grammar is reserved for those things which humans have created.

Ms. Tippett: OK. Like the table, something like that?

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes, exactly. Right, yes.

Ms. Tippett: And I have to say - I'm sure you know this, because I'm sure you get this reaction a lot, especially in scientific circles - it's unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable in Western ears to hear someone refer to plants as persons. It's unfamiliar. Does that happen a lot? Is that kind of a common reaction?

Ms. Kimmerer: Sure, sure. Scientists are very eager to say that we oughtn't to personify elements in nature for fear of anthropomorphizing. And what I mean when I talk about the personhood of all beings, plants included, is not that I am attributing human characteristics to them, not at all. I'm attributing plant characteristics to plants. Just as it would be disrespectful to try and put plants in the same category through the lens of anthropomorphism, I think it's also deeply disrespectful to say that they have no consciousness, no awareness, no being-ness at all. And this denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself.

Ms. Tippett: That's interesting.

Ms. Kimmerer: Yeah. I can't think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It's always the opposite, right? What we're revealing is the fact that they have extraordinary capacities, which are so unlike our own, but we dismiss them because, well, if they don't do it like animals do it, then they must not be doing anything, when, in fact, they're sensing their environment, responding to their environment in incredibly sophisticated ways. The science which is showing that plants have capacity to learn, to have memory, we're at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah. Here's something beautiful that you wrote in your book Gathering Moss, just as an example. "The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet, yielding to a soft, green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces grain by grain, bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents." That's so beautiful and so amazing to think about, to just read those sentences and think about that conversation, as you say.

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. And it's a conversation that takes place at a pace that we humans, especially we contemporary humans who are rushing about, we can't even grasp the pace at which that conversation takes place. So thinking about plants as persons, indeed, thinking about rocks as persons, forces us to shed our idea of the only pace that we live in is the human pace. It's, I think, very, very exciting to think about these ways of being which happen on completely different scales, and so exciting to think about what we might learn from them.

Ms. Tippett: You make such an interesting observation that the way you walk through the world and immerse yourself in moss and plant life - you've said you become aware that we have some deficits compared to our companion species. I sense that photosynthesis, that we can't even photosynthesize, that this is a quality you covet in our botanical brothers and sisters. [ laughs]

Ms. Kimmerer: [ laughs] It's true.

Ms. Tippett: Take me inside that, because I want to understand that.

Ms. Kimmerer: I do. I have photosynthesis envy. The ability to take these non-living elements of the world, air and light and water, and turn them into food that can then be shared with the whole rest of the world - to turn them into medicine that is medicine for people and for trees and for soil, and we cannot even approach the kind of creativity that they have.

Ms. Tippett: One thing you say that I'd like to understand better is, "Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language." So I'd love an example of something - what are the gifts of seeing that science offers, and then the gifts of listening and language, and how all of that gives you this rounded understanding of something?

Ms. Kimmerer: What I mean when I say that "science polishes the gift of seeing" brings us to an intense kind of attention that science allows us to bring to the natural world, and that kind of attention also includes ways of seeing, quite literally, through other lenses - that we might have the hand lens, the magnifying glass in our hands that allows us to look at that moss with an acuity that the human eye doesn't have so we see more. The microscope that lets us see the gorgeous architecture by which it's put together, the scientific instrumentation in the laboratory that would allow us to look at the miraculous way that water interacts with cellulose, let's say. That's what I mean by "science polishes our ability to see" - it extends our eyes into other realms. But we're, in many cases, looking at the surface. And by the surface, I mean the material being alone.

But in indigenous ways of knowing, we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. And that's really what I mean by listening. By seeing that traditional knowledge engages us in listening. And what is the story that that being might share with us if we know how to listen as well as we know how to see?

[ music: "Causeway" by Ryan Teague]

Ms. Tippett: After a short break, more conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer. Subscribe to On Being on Apple Podcasts to listen again and to discover produced and unedited versions of everything we create.

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today I'm with botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. She's a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and she joins scientific and indigenous ways of seeing in her research and in her writing for a broad audience. We're exploring her sense of the intelligence in life we are used to seeing as inanimate. She says that as our knowledge of plant life unfolds, human vocabulary and imaginations must adapt.

Ms. Tippett: Let's talk some more about mosses, because you did write this beautiful book about it, and you are a bryologist. And so that's a specialty, even within plant biology.

Ms. Kimmerer: Within botany.

Ms. Tippett: And also I learned that your work with moss inspired Elizabeth Gilbert's novel The Signature Of All Things, which is about a botanist. I learned so many things from that book. It's also that I had never thought very deeply about moss, but that moss inhabits nearly every ecosystem on earth, over 22,000 species, that mosses have the ability to clone themselves from broken off leaves or torn fragments, that they're integral to the functioning of a forest. I mean, just describe some of the things you've heard and understood from moss.

Ms. Kimmerer: Thank you for asking that question, because it really gets to this idea of how science asks us to learn about organisms. Traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them. And when I think about mosses, in particular, as the most ancient of land plants, they have been here for a very long time. They've figured out a lot about how to live well on the earth, and, for me, I think they're really good storytellers in the way that they live. An example of what I mean by this is in their simplicity, in the power of being small; mosses become so successful all over the world because they live in these tiny little layers on rocks, on logs, and on trees. They work with the natural forces that lie over every little surface of the world, and to me, they are exemplars of not only surviving, but flourishing by working with natural processes. Mosses are superb teachers about living within your means.

Ms. Tippett: And you say they take possession of spaces that are too small - other plants are excluded from those spaces, but they thrive there.

Ms. Kimmerer: That's right. Mosses have, in the ecological sense, very low competitive ability, because they're small, because they don't grab resources very efficiently, and so this means that they have to live in the interstices. They have to live in places where the dominant competitive plants can't live. But the way that they do this really brings into question the whole premise that competition is what really structures biological evolution and biological success. Because mosses are not good competitors at all, and yet they are the oldest plants on the planet. They have persisted here for 350 million years. They ought to be doing something right here. And one of those somethings, I think, has to do with their ability to cooperate with one another, to share the limited resources that they have, to really give more than they take. Mosses build soil, they purify water, they are like the coral reefs of the forest, they make homes for this myriad of all these very cool little invertebrates who live in there. They are just engines of biodiversity. They do all of these things, and yet, they're only a centimeter tall.

Ms. Tippett: [ laughs] Right. Another point that is implied in how you talk about us acknowledging the animacy of plants is that whenever we use the language of "it," whatever we're talking about - well, let's say this. We don't call anything we love and want to protect and would work to protect "it." That language distances us.

Ms. Kimmerer: It certainly does. And the language of "it," which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can't help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature. And by exploit, I mean in a way that really seriously degrades the land and the waters, because, in fact, we have to consume. We have to take. We are animals, right? But that, to me, is different than really rampant exploitation. But this is why I've been thinking a lot about: Are there ways to bring this notion of animacy into the English language? Because so many of us that I've talked to about this feel really deeply uncomfortable calling the living world "it," and yet, we don't have an alternative, other than "he" or "she." And I've been thinking about the inspiration that the Anishinaabe language offers in this way and contemplating new pronouns.

Ms. Tippett: You've been playing with one or two, haven't you?

Ms. Kimmerer: I have. I've been thinking about the word "aki" in our language, which refers to land. And there's a beautiful word - "bimaadiziaki," which one of my elders kindly shared with me. It means "a living being of the earth." But could we be inspired by that little sound at the end of that word, the "ki"? And use "ki" as a pronoun, a respectful pronoun inspired by this language as an alternative to "he," "she," or "it," so that when I'm tapping my maples in the springtime, I can say, "We're going to go hang the bucket on ki. Ki is giving us maple syrup this springtime." This, then, of course, acknowledges the being-ness of that tree, and we don't reduce it to an object. It feels so wrong to say that.

And I have some reservations about using a word inspired from the Anishinaabe language, because I don't, in any way, want to engage in cultural appropriation. But this word, this sound, "ki," is, of course, also the word for "who" in Spanish and in French. It turns out that, of course, it's an alternate pronunciation for "chi," for life force, for life energy. I'm finding lots of examples that people are bringing to me where this word also means a living being of the earth.

Ms. Tippett: That's really interesting.

Ms. Kimmerer: The plural pronoun that I think is perhaps even more powerful is not one that we need to be inspired by another language, because we already have it in English, and that is the word "kin."

Ms. Tippett: That's the plural of "ki"?

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes, "kin" is the plural of "ki." So that when the geese fly overhead, we can say, "Kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon." So that every time we speak of the living world, we can embody our relatedness to them.

Ms. Tippett: Sustainability is some language we use about the world we're living into or need to live into. And I sense from your writing and especially from your indigenous tradition that sustainability really is not big enough, and that it might even be a cop-out. You didn't use that language, but you're actually talking about a much more generous and expansive vision of relatedness between humans and the natural worlds and what we want to create.

Ms. Kimmerer: I am. I agree with you that the language of sustainability is pretty limited. If something is going to be sustainable, its ability to provide for us will not be compromised into the future. And that's all a good thing. But at its heart, sustainability, the way we think about it, is embedded in this worldview that we, as human beings, have some ownership over these, what we call, resources, and that we want the world to be able to continue to keep - that human beings can keep taking and keep consuming.

The notion of reciprocity is really different from that. It's an expansion from that, because what it says is that our role as human people is not just to take from the earth, and the role of the earth is not just to provide for our single species. So reciprocity actually kind of broadens this notion to say that not only does the earth sustain us, but that we have the capacity and the responsibility to sustain her in return. So it broadens the notion of what it is to be a human person, not just a consumer. And there's such joy in being able to do that, to have it be a mutual flourishing instead of the more narrow definition of sustainability so that we can just keep on taking.

Ms. Tippett: I keep thinking, as I'm reading you and now as I'm listening to you - a conversation I've had across the years with Christians who are going back to the Bible and seeing how certain translations and readings and interpretations, especially of that language of Genesis about human beings being blessed to have dominion - what is it - "to have dominion and subdue the earth," was read in a certain way and a certain period of time by human beings, by industrialists and colonizers and even missionaries, so there is language, and there's a mentality about taking that actually seemed to have kind of a religious blessing on it. And now people are reading those same texts differently. Do you ever have those conversations with people? Because the tradition you come from would never, ever have read the text that way. So culturally, we are incrementally moving more towards the worldview that you come from.

Ms. Kimmerer: I think that that's true, and I think that that longing and the materiality of the need for redefining our relationship with place is being taught to us by the land, isn't it? We've seen that, in a way, we've been captured by a worldview of dominion that does not serve our species well in the long term, and, moreover, it doesn't serve all the other beings in creation well at all.

So we are attempting a mid-course correction here. And I think that it's really important to recognize, that for most of human history, I think the evidence suggests that we have lived well and in balance with the living world. And it's, to my way of thinking, almost an eyeblink of time in human history that we have had a truly adversarial relationship with nature.

Ms. Tippett: It seems to me that this view that you have of the natural world and our place in it, it's a way to think about biodiversity and us as part of that, but reciprocity, again, takes that a step farther, right?

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. The idea of reciprocity, of recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us is, I think, a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. Some of our oldest teachings are saying, what does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift. And if one of those species and the gifts that it carries is missing in biodiversity, the ecosystem is depauperate, the ecosystem is too simple. It doesn't work as well when that gift is missing.

Ms. Tippett: Here's something you wrote. You talked about goldenrods and asters a minute ago, and you said, "When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response."

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. And I think of my writing very tangibly as my way of entering into reciprocity with the living world. It's that which I can give and it comes from my years as a scientist, of deep paying attention to the living world, and not only to their names, but to their songs. And having heard those songs, I feel a deep responsibility to share them, and to see if, in some way, stories could help people fall in love with the world again.

[ music: "Bowen" by Goldmund]

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today I'm with botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Ms. Tippett: You remain a professor of environmental biology at SUNY, and you have also created the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. So that's also a gift you're bringing. You're bringing these disciplines into conversation with each other. I wonder, what is happening in that conversation? How is that working, and are there things happening that surprise you?

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes. What we're trying to do at the Center For Native Peoples and the Environment is to bring together the tools of Western science, but to employ them, or maybe deploy them, in the context of some of the indigenous philosophy and ethical frameworks about our relationship to the earth. One of the things that I would especially like to highlight about that is I really think of our work as, in a sense, trying to indigenize science education within the academy. Because as a young person, as a student entering into that world, and understanding that the indigenous ways of knowing, these organic ways of knowing, are really absent from academia, I think that we can train better scientists, train better environmental professionals when there's a plurality of these ways of knowing, when indigenous knowledge is present in the discussion.

We have created a new minor in indigenous peoples and the environment, so that when our students leave and when our students graduate, they have an awareness of other ways of knowing, they have this glimpse into a worldview which is really different from the scientific worldview. I think of them as just being stronger and have this ability for what has been called "two-eyed seeing," seeing the world through both of these lenses, and in that way, have a bigger toolset for environmental problem-solving.

So much of what we do as environmental scientists - if we take a strictly scientific approach, we have to exclude values and ethics, right? Because those are not part of the scientific method. There's good reason for that, and much of the power of the scientific method comes from the rationality and the objectivity. But a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can't just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics. That's not going to move us forward.

Ms. Tippett: I know this is a fairly new program, but I wonder, are you seeing students take up this task of creating synergy? I think you've used the word "symbiosis," or this two-eyed seeing. Are you seeing results that are interesting about how people are applying this, or where they are taking it? Or is it just too early for that?

Ms. Kimmerer: Well, it's too early to see it, I think, in those scientific and professional metrics, if you will. But what I see is that the students who have become acquainted with these ways of knowing are the natural disseminators of these ideas. They tell me that when they are taking their other classes in conservation biology or wildlife ecology or fisheries, they now feel like they have the vocabulary and the perspective to speak up and say, well, when we're designing this salmon management plan, what is the input of native peoples? How will their traditional knowledge help us do better fisheries management? The invisible knowledge of traditional knowledge has become visible and has become part of the discourse.

Ms. Tippett: In your book Braiding Sweetgrass, there's this line: "It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness." [ laughs] And you talk about gardening, which is actually something that many people do, and I think more people are doing. So that's a very concrete way of illustrating this.

Ms. Kimmerer: It is. In talking with my environment students, they wholeheartedly agree that they love the earth. But when I ask them the question of "Does the earth love you back?" there's a great deal of hesitation and reluctance and eyes cast down, like, oh, gosh, I don't know. Are we even allowed to talk about that? That would mean that the earth had agency and that I was not an anonymous little blip on the landscape, that I was known by my home place.

So it's a very challenging notion, but I bring it to the garden and think about the way that when we, as human people, demonstrate our love for one another, it is in ways that I find very much analogous to the way that the earth takes care of us, is when we love somebody, we put their wellbeing at the top of a list and we want to feed them well. We want to nurture them. We want to teach them. We want to bring beauty into their lives. We want to make them comfortable and safe and healthy. That's how I demonstrate love, in part, to my family, and that's just what I feel in the garden [ laughs], as the earth loves us back in beans and corn and strawberries. Food could taste bad. It could be bland and boring, but it isn't. There are these wonderful gifts that the plant beings, to my mind, have shared with us. And it's a really liberating idea to think that the earth could love us back, but it also opens the notion of reciprocity that with that love and regard from the earth comes a real deep responsibility.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah. What is it you say? "The large framework of that is the renewal of the world for the privilege of breath." I think that's right on the edge.

Ms. Kimmerer: Yes.

Ms. Tippett: I'm thinking of how, for all the public debates we have about our relationship with the natural world, and whether it's climate change or not, or man-made, there's also the reality that very few people living anywhere don't have some experience of the natural world changing in ways that they often don't recognize. And in all kinds of places with all kinds of political cultures, where I see people just getting together and doing the work that needs to be done, and becoming stewards, however they justify that or wherever they fit into the public debates or not, a kind of common denominator is that they have discovered a love for the place they come from. That that they share. And they may have these same kinds of political differences that are out there, but there's this love of place, and that creates a different world of action. Are there communities you think of when you think of this kind of communal love of place where you see new models happening?

Ms. Kimmerer: There are many, many examples. I think so many of them are rooted in the food movement. I think that's really exciting because there is a place where reciprocity between people and the land is expressed in food, and who doesn't want that? It's good for people. It's good for land. So I think movements from tree planting to community gardens, farm-to-school, local, organic - all of these things are just at the right scale, because the benefits come directly into you and to your family, and the benefits of your relationships to land are manifest right in your community, right in your patch of soil and what you're putting on your plate. Just as the land shares food with us, we share food with each other and then contribute to the flourishing of that place that feeds us.

Ms. Tippett: I want to read something from Braiding Sweetgrass. You wrote, "We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we'll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow."

That's one of the hard places this world you straddle brings you to. But, again, all these things you live with and learn, how do they start to shift the way you think about what it means to be human?

Ms. Kimmerer: The passage that you just read, and all of the experience, I suppose, that flows into that has, as I've gotten older, brought me to a really acute sense, not only of the beauty of the world, but the grief that we feel for it, for her, for ki. That we can't have an awareness of the beauty of the world without also a tremendous awareness of the wounds. That we see the old growth forest and we also see the clear cut. We see the beautiful mountain and we see it torn open for mountaintop removal. So one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn.

[ music: "If I'd Have Known It Was the Last (Second Position)" by Codes in the Clouds]

Ms. Tippett: Robin Wall Kimmerer is the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. And she's founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her books include Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

Staff: On Being is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Mariah Helgeson, Maia Tarrell, Marie Sambilay, Erinn Farrell, Laurén Dørdal, Tony Liu, Bethany Iverson, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Profit Idowu, Casper ter Kuile, Angie Thurston, Sue Phillips, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Damon Lee, and Jeffrey Bissoy.

[ music: "Hill of Our Home" by Psapp]

Ms. Tippett: Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing our final credits in each show is hip-hop artist Lizzo.

On Being was created at American Public Media. Our funding partners include:

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And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education.

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Robin Wall Kimmerer - The Intelligence in All Kinds of Life

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The problem with calling another living being "it." Photosynthesis envy. The renewal of the world for the privilege of breath. Mosses as a celebration of the power of smallness. The science of why goldenrod and asters look so beautiful together.

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Revolutionary Mothering Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens and Mai’a Williams

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What does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to mother? What does it mean when we talking about mothering as a verb, and not just in its noun form?

Mai'a Williams, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and China Martens, have co-edited an anthology, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, asking these very questions.

Revolutionary Mothering explores what does it mean to mother, especially what does mothering mean to those of us who mother on the margins, mothers of color, poor mothers, immigrant mothers, queer mothers, teenage mothers, single mothers. Those of us who do not fit into the mainstream, ideal, white, heterosexual, middle-class idea of what it means to mother.

It asks what does it mean to mother when mothering is not simply taking care of one's children, but it also means building community and ensuring survival for the future generation. A future generation that will hopefully continue the community's resistance against the destructive powers-that-be. Whether those powers be corporate, state, colonial, patriarchal, racist, homophobic, etc.

More Radical Reads: Mixed Mama Blues: My First Year of Protective Motherhood in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter

What does it mean to be a mother of color in a society that tells us that 'welfare mothers' are ruining the economy; 'immigrant mothers' are destroying the nation; queer mothers are tearing apart the definition of 'family'; and single mothers can only raise violent predators?

(Transcript below)

Inspired by the texts and activism of radical women of color feminists from the 1970s and 80s, Revolutionary Mothering posits that mothers are not the cause of these social ills, but that mothering is the solution to many of the global and local destruction that is occurring at this moment. Mothering, the act of radical care-taking and supporting life, is fundamental to community building and key to creating community resilience, that supporting radical mothering work is supporting the creation of not only healthy and vibrant children, but revolutionary communities of love.

In this video, the editors and a couple of the contributors come together on the Laura Flanders show to talk about revolution and mothering, love and hope, community and liberation.

More Radical Reads: Navigating Mother's Day When You Don't Have a Mother

Are you looking for ways to practice radical self-love, so that you can better support your children and/or your community? Check out our webinar 10 Tools for Radical Self Love to aid you on your journey to radical self-acceptance and compassion.
(Feature Image: Black and white photograph of a person with long dark hair, carrying a child wearing an oversized baseball cap. Source: Johnny Silvercloud)
Transcript:

Alexis: The potential for the word mother comes after the m. It is the space that other takes up in our mouths when we say it. We are something else. We know it from how fearfully institutions wield social norms and try to shut us down. We know it from how we are transforming the planet with our every messy step toward making life possible. Mamas who unlearn domination by refusing to dominate their children. Extended family and friends. Community care givers. Radical child care collectives. All of us breaking cycles of abuse by deciding what we want to replicate from the past and what we urgently need to transform. We are m othering, mothering ourselves.

Laura Flanders: That was Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This week a special mother's day edition of the Laura Flanders show and Alexis is our guest host, taking us on a journey to explore revolutionary mothering. She is a self-described queer black trouble maker and black love evangelist. So who better than Alexis Pauline Gumbs, she is the author of spill fugitive scenes coming later this year from Duke University Press.

Alexis: Hi, I'm Alexis Pauline Gumbs, guest host this week on the Laura Flanders Show, where we will be discussing Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. A new book I edited with China Martens and Mai'a Williams. I'll be speaking to the editors as well as the contributors, Cynthia Dewi Oka and Victoria Law.

Cynthia: when 3 feet of sunshine missing two front teeth

asked me why do we need revolution

all i had was a grenade in my mouth.

i held him for a while and watched him draw

clouds and trees and ladybugs and a house

filled with everybody he loves

when was the last time we put to image

what we thought the world should be

when did it become enough to know

how to promptly explode

i said to him he was much better equipped

to figure out the revolution than his mama

that if i don't he's got to disarm this bomb

and throw it out the window

cause the revolution is not about self-defense

it's about self-creation, it's about seeing farther

than the walls directly in front of us

and my six-year-old has got a head start.

Alexis:
I wrote haikus drawing from the words that these brilliant revolutionary mothers used in pieces they wrote in the book as one way of introducing them ... of course you should google all of them ... to get the full genius but this is just a way to bring us in.

For Mai'a: Not cute or tidy. Glimpses of revolution. Every single day.

For China: Tall and graceful tree. Sacred nature of writing. Leaving quilted words.

For Cynthia: This self-creation. Reclaim our generations. Encumbrance throws down.
And for Vicky: We all are welcome. Enough passion for again. The world is transformed.

So those are 17 syllables from each of these writers and the anthology Revolutionary Mothering. Obviously you want to read all of the syllables because they're amazing, and as we bring this Revolutionary Mothering genius in, I just wanted to ask each of you to invoke somebody whose not here in the studio with us but who, to you, represents revolutionary mothering. If you want to shout out their name, and maybe how they taught you what revolutionary mothering might be. Why don't we start with you Cynthia?

Alexis:
Okay so the first thing that I wanted to ask is if you could each evoke somebody you want to shout out right now who is not here with us in the studio, but who represents revolutionary mothering to you. If you could say their name and what they have taught you about what revolutionary mothering is, that would be great. Let's start with you Cynthia.

Cynthia:
I am going to shout out Joy Harjo. She is a Native American poet and artist and storyteller and musician. I think the best thing she has taught me about revolutionary mothering is the bridging work that she's willing to do cross-culturally for us ... Many many social barriers. I feel like she has crossed oceans in the ways that she's been willing to allow me to reach her and for her to reach me. So Joy Harjo.

Mai'a:
I was actually sort of weighing this for a second. But I think Assata Shakur and I think because of the level of sacrifice that she gave. It is one thing to mother a child and one thing to mother a revolution and to make the level of sacrifice that you cannot even be with your child for a good part of their lives

China:
My grandmother, Elsie [inaudible 00:08:33] because she was so fierce and she was my first babysitter

Alexis:
Thank you.

Vikki:
I think for me it's a woman who has some [inaudible 00:10:08], a woman named Carmen Rubio who is a Lower-East Side housing activist, squatter, tenant's right organizer ... And when my daughter was first born, kind of took us both under her wing and showed us what revolutionary mothering could be from someone who made a deliberate choice to never have her own children, but was involved in my daughter's life, was involved in the life of so many children in her building, in her neighborhood ... It started a community garden specifically for children ... And this idea that mothering isn't just biological, but that it could be part of the community.

Alexis:
Y'all are so brilliant. I love that we have people who have helped mother literary movements, you have mother political movements who have mothered us and who have mothered along side of us ... I think that that's really beautiful. And one of the things I know that one of our intention was explicitly with this book is to make some of those actions that ... They may be in the home, they may be in movements that information about them is suppressed [inaudible 00:11:09], they may be in writing letters to other authors, mentoring other authors, and they may be in the archive ... Joy Harjo is someone you see writing letters of encouragement to other woman writers of color over and over again. And that's a form of mothering, but only those writers see it and then the nosy people go in the archive for that stuff.

Another story ... one of the things we wanted to make visible with the book is ... Well what would the impact on the world be if the implications of those actions that are often known about only by the few people, even though it saves those people's lives ... What if those were known on a larger scale. And what would we say witnessing those actions from the inside of those actions on a greater scale. So the next question I wanted to as you all is if you knew everyone in the world was going to be impacted by something you know is true about revolutionary mothering, what would you want them to know. And don't worry, you can tell them again. But if you knew that everybody was listening ... Let's imagine that they are. What would you say that they should know about the fate of the planet, on the scale of our species, about the implications of revolutionary mothering.

Mai'a
I think I would say that ... And I think that I've said it before, I think it's tattooed to me the amount of times I've said it ... Is that we are not the ones destroying the Earth. I think that to me is ... I think that there's a lot of... I mean you can talk about the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, you can talk about the welfare mothers, immigrant mothers, you can talk about how poor mothers are always the ones who are castigated, and there children of course because all they can do is give birth to quote on quote "more problems" that they are also blamed for. Everything from the economic crisis to the environmental degradation ... I always want to be like we are not the ones who are destroying this Earth.
You know the 2008 Wall Street crash did not happen because of mothers. We are not the one's who have been pumping poisons into the Earth for the last 150 years. Especially, we are the ones standing on the front lines, we are the ones who are the most impacted by these horrible decisions, we are the ones who are actually at the first place for having to deal with it. You know these are the reasons that black women have an infant and maternal mortality rate that's somewhere between 2 to 4 times higher than other people in the country. We are not the ones who are destroying the Earth, we are the ones who one, are the most impacted and we are two, the ones who are creating the systems and communities and the ecologies that are actually going to save this Earth if anything is going to.
So if I can say that, if I can just get that into everybody else's head to trust mothers and to trust us build communities and stop blaming us and punishing us and taking away resources from us to be able to do really basic life-giving work. I think that would be excellent.

Alexis:
Yes it would. Awesome. Other folks, what would you say?

Host:
What would you say, Vicky?

Vicky:
I would agree with China that it's not revolutionary mothering. It's not biological so we need to recognize it. It happens all over. It's crucial. It's doable. You don't have to say, "Well, I'm not a mother" or "I'm not a parent" or "I don't have children." It's something that anyone can do and it's this revolutionary act of being in community and being a part of a community. It's not an isolated nuclear family instance that some people supposedly choose to be a part of and some people choose not to be.

Host:
Yeah. What would you add, Cynthia?

Cynthia:
Kind of building off of everyone, I think there is no movement without mothering. I think that it's really, really important for organizers, for thinkers, for scholars, for cultural workers struggling for change in this country, in the world, to really recognize that we need the buy-in and we need the centrality of people who are caregivers and it's not an option, actually, because you cannot sustain your movement without that practice, without that expertise, and without people training other folks inside of the movement to become proficient at mothering. To be able to do that with each other and to kind of ... It really is the practice of continuing. Transformation doesn't happen ... It doesn't happen like that. Like we wish. But it doesn't. This reiterative way. It happens in kind of the mundane repetitions. It actually doesn't happen in the giant eruptions.
Those giant eruptions can signal that there are major issues at stake, major rifts at stake, but how we actually pivot from that is in daily practice and that is nowhere better embedded and better established than in mothering practice. I feel like it is imperative for movements to really take that seriously. You won't exist without mothers.

Host:
Absolutely. Those people who are going to make t-shirts to fundraise for the revolutionary mothering tour, we are not the ones destroying the planet, we are everywhere, we are everyone, there's no movement without mothers. Those are all great t-shirt ideas. I'm just letting whoever is watching know that.
The last question I was going to ask actually draws on what you were saying, Cynthia, about those intimate mundane moments where this revolutionary work is always happening. I just wanted to ask if y'all would be generous enough to share something that you've learned in the intimate space of mothering your children. Something that your child has taught you recently that is transforming the way that you think now. Could we start with you, Vicky?

Vicky:
My daughter is now 15. What I've learned over and over and over is that even though she's a teenager, which means she's developing her own personality and she is her own person, every thing that we've done together has been like ... Has built a foundation. Like, for the things she believes, the way that she acts, the way that she reacts to injustice, and it may not necessarily always be what I would do, in my very correct, political way, but I can see the ways in which she has taken in those values and how she acts upon them.

Host:
Cynthia, what's something that you've learned recently?

Cynthia:
Something I've learned recently from my son who is ... He's turning 13 this year. I'm very proud of him. He wants to be a musician. Very recently he successfully crowd-funded nearly $1500 in order to purchase a mellophone, which is, essentially, a French horn for marching band, because we couldn't afford it. What I learned from him, watching him in the past few years is ... I think in particular mothers have been so deeply conditioned to not want things, right? To feel like when we want things it's wrong or it's indulgent. I learned from him that we should want things, that we should follow our passion, that we should involve other people in the pursuit of that passion and that we should take pride in the things that we are passionate about. That seems so simple but it was a very difficult lesson to learn.
I was a young mom. I had my son when I was 17. The messaging that I heard from all around me, I had to hide my pregnancy the whole time I was pregnant, was be ashamed of who you are. Be ashamed of ... I still have questions and worries about showing up at public events for my son because it's ... You're always like, "Really? He's your son?" I don't know. "How old were you when you had him?" That's always the first question that happens. After you answer that question all of the judgments that come after, right?
I think he has been so open and brave about who he is and I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes on being strategic and naming the things that you want because that's something I've seen from him that at every stage of his life he'll be like, "These are my goals now. These are my goals now. This is the person I want to be." He's always identified that. It took me a long time to answer the question, what do I want?<

Host:
Right. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Beautiful.
I think ... I mean, I already said you all are brilliant but you can never say it too many times. I think that there are going to be a lot of people watching this who are getting affirmation from what you've shared already. Certainly, from what you've shared in the book about their revolutionary mothering work and whether that work is showing up, or those revolutionary mothering actions are showing up in organizations or in their families or really with their work to re-mother themselves and to think about how that could operate revolutionary. I think a lot of people are going to identify with some of the things that you've shared. I wanted to ask you to speak ...
We are still speaking to each other but if you could offer a one-sentence affirmation for somebody who might be watching this who might want affirmation to take them through, something they could put on their mirror, and see themselves through that affirmation as opposed to through the different judgments that we talked about, through the oppressive narratives that we talked about earlier. Something to displace that. What would you say to that? To one person. One person who is wanting to sustain their revolutionary mothering work.

China:
that you are perfect. That's the ultimate mothering, the ultimate look of love,

Host:
Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you for that. What would you say, Cynthia?

Cynthia:
I would say when you think you are empty, you are not.

Host:
Yes. What about you, Mai'a? What would you say as an affirmation?

Mai'a:
I think I already said it. I think I said I would get it tattoed which is we are just not the ones destroying the Earth.

Host:
What about you, Vicky? What would you say as an affirmation?

Vicky
What you're doing, no matter how small it seems, is actually really important.

Host:
Thank you all so much for your generosity, for your brilliance, for transforming every positive and negative experience that you've had into wisdom that is shareable in the form of this moment, this show, but also in the form of the book and if folks want to find out more about Revolutionary Mothering you can go to This Bridge Called My Baby dot wordpress dot com. See where we're going to be on our national tour and find out more about the book itself. You can also see more at Laura Flanders dot com.

Heavy Swimmers
For Ebony Wilkerson
a black mother who drove herself
and her children into the Atlantic Ocean
saying she was taking them all to a better place.
i.
how can I protect them
says the pregnant mother
three children behind her
brown as ever
minivan plastic
right handed lever
we will be okay
as long as we're together
she drives out of town
and then drives to her sister
to dodge all the demons
that twist her and twist her
Ibo ungrounded
the people could fly
not in a Honda Odyssey
but she had to try
and as soon as the rubber
sank into the surf
all the ghosts grabbed the wheels
and said
yes yes
that works
come home
and the sea floor scattered
the large and smaller bones
of all those other mothers
who didn't swim
and their kin
ii.
is the walk on water gene
recessive
regressive
repressed by the stresses
of modern minivan life
a passed on secret
activated by a serums
in the heat of the blood
of abused wives
and what is the crazy part
to believe the weight of metal and plastic can float
to remember what it feels like
to be shackled in a boat
or to think there is a better place
underneath
or across
some way to get back
when we're lost
iii.
mom is crazy
they tell the police
she's trying to kill us
have you ever felt that?
the most scared I've ever been in my life
is in the back seat
of an SUV driven by my mother in rage
I have known
she could kill us all
with the same thick wild determination
she used to get us here
all this huge car metal
and no way to escape
the hurricane cycles of abuse
the repeated betrayals
single mother broke breadcrumbs
breed real demons
that are not us
and they don't stop screaming
it's just that most days
something else is louder
call it love
or inertia
or luck
have you ever seen a woman drive
like capitalism is chasing her
off the edge of herself
kids in the back
purse in the front seat
i have
and I am a pretty strong swimmer
but still
i was in a car
when i first heard your name
nowhere near the beach
and i had to pull over
iv.
how many women have wanted to take their jewelry off
dive back in
take their children with them
to where everything
is eventually warm enough
big enough
deep enough
to save us
if you listen
to everything
the ocean has to say
how can you stand it
how can you stay
heavy swimmer
bodies remember
wet dark places
that held us
when we were ready
to transform
gut brave enough
to breathe a different way
v.
Ebony you almost made it
but your body brought you back
and the tourists saved the children
and now you are just as black
and wearing orange
in gray rooms where they test your pee
for the alcohol level of cough medicine
is someone sending you books
by Toni Morrison
by Kate Chopin
Ebony you are not the only woman
crazy enough to remember
that some days we just cannot
we cannot live here
we cannot give our babies
to this world that eats our bones
like centuries of salt
and I am sending love
to the South Carolina centuries
that protected the part of you
that hears the ocean
and believes there has to be a better place
even if neither of us can see it
from here right now
and to your babies
who survived
they will one day
understand Host: Thank you all so much for your generosity, for your brilliance, for transforming every positive and negative experience that you've had into wisdom that is shareable in the form of this moment, this show, but also in the form of the book and if folks want to find out more about Revolutionary Mothering you can go to This Bridge Called My Baby dot wordpress dot com. See where we're going to be on our national tour and find out more about the book itself. You can also see more at Laura Flanders dot com.

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Revolutionary Mothering: Love By Any Means Necessary

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What does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to mother? What does it mean when we talking about mothering as a verb, and not just in its noun form? Mai'a Williams, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and China Martens, have co-edited an anthology, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, asking these very questions.

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Pa'lante by Salomón Beda

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Salomón Beda- Pa'lante (Lyric Video Oficial)

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The Wild Braid by Stanely Kunitz

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NPR coverage of Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects On A Century In The Garden by Stanley Kunitz, Genine Lentine, and Marnie Crawford Samuelson. News, author interviews, critics' picks and more.

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The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

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THE MISTS OF AVALON By Marion Zimmer Bradley. 876 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $16.95.

OF the various great matters of Western literature - the story of Troy, the legend of Charlemagne, the tales of Araby - none has more profoundly captured the imagination of English civilization than the saga of its own imperial dream, the romance of King Arthur and the Round Table. Two national epics, Spenser's ''Faerie Queene'' and Tennyson's ''Idylls of the King'' - one Elizabethan and one Victorian, both dedicated to reigning queens - recreated the enchantments of Arthur to anatomize the British Empire in different ages. This legend has always proved capacious enough for less august modes too: spoofery from Chaucer to Mark Twain, love poems, operas and in our time the vast multivolume novels of Mary Stewart and T.H. White, whose ''Once and Future King'' even made it to Broadway as ''Camelot.''

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

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The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

When things feel dark, it can be all the more important to seek out and recognize joy. The writer Ross Gay spent a year doing that. Starting on his 42nd birthday, he wrote an essay every day about something delightful - nicknames, fireflies, reckless air quotes. He collected about 100 of those essays in "The Book Of Delights," and this seems like a good moment to rebroadcast our conversation about that book from early last year.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

ROSS GAY: Well, one of the things that I realized is that - in the beginning, I thought, oh, man. I'm going to, like, have to look around, like, be, like, really attentive.

SHAPIRO: Just scrounge for delights.

GAY: Yeah, scrounge for delights. Yeah. And then, like, a couple of weeks in, maybe a month or so in, I started to be, like, taking notebooks of, like - that was delightful. That was delightful. That was delightful. That was - so, like, accumulating all of these. You know, I have an essay called "Stacks Of Delights" or something like that.

SHAPIRO: Oh, right - where you're like, clear the decks. You're like...

GAY: I have to clear the deck.

SHAPIRO: I have too much of a backlog.

GAY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was something. Like, my sort of attention got cultivated.

SHAPIRO: When you spent that little time every day focusing just on that thing that made you feel love, delight, did it affect the rest of your day?

GAY: Absolutely. I mean, the thing that I also discovered in the course of writing this is that so much of what, to me, sort of inspired or uncovered or unveiled delight was so often personal interactions. So I became acutely aware that delight is sort of a manifestation of interdependence.

SHAPIRO: Yeah.

GAY: You know, like, the simple and the subtle and the almost accidental - but that's the wrong word - kindnesses that we're constantly in the midst of.

SHAPIRO: Like, one of them that you write about is a high-five from a stranger.

GAY: Totally.

SHAPIRO: You want to read an excerpt from that?

GAY: Totally.

(Reading) So I settled into a coffee shop, took my notebooks out. And I was reading over these delights, transcribing them into my computer. And while I was working, headphones on, swaying to the new De La Soul record - delight which deserves its own entry - I noticed a white girl. She looked 15 but could have been, I suppose, a college student, standing next to me with her hand raised. I looked up, confused, pulled my headphones back. And she said, like a coach or something, working on your paper? Good job to you - high-five.

SHAPIRO: (Laughter).

GAY: (Reading) You better believe I high-fived that child in her pre-ripped Def Leppard shirt and her itty-bitty Doc Martens, for I love - I delight in - unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers. What constitutes pleasant, it's no secret, is informed by my largish, male and cisgender body, a body that is also largish, male, cisgender and not white. In other words, the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal. We should all understand this by now.

SHAPIRO: I feel like I get to know you so well reading this almost more than I would if I read a memoir or an autobiography because it's like, I don't need to know where you went to high school...

GAY: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: ...Or what your passions were as a kid. I know that you love working in your garden. I know what preoccupies your thoughts. It feels very intimate.

GAY: Yeah. I think the dailiness of it makes it like that. You do something every day, and, like - and it's small and sort of apparently or previously insignificant things that - boom - you get the chance to meditate on, you know?

SHAPIRO: Yeah.

GAY: I have this one in my book about bindweed, and bindweed...

SHAPIRO: Which is a terrible...

GAY: Yes.

SHAPIRO: ...Plague...

GAY: Yes.

SHAPIRO: ...In a garden. People hate it.

GAY: And I'm like, well, I got to go for it, you know? I can't stop thinking about bindweed.

SHAPIRO: Will you read a little bit of that one?

GAY: Yeah, totally. It's - "Bindweed: Delight?" is the title.

SHAPIRO: Question mark.

GAY: Yeah (laughter).

(Reading) There are gardeners reading this who are likely thinking that if I try to turn bindweed - that most destructive, noxious, invasive, life-destroying plant - into a delight, they will bind me and pour glyphosate down my throat. That might be overstatement. All the same, it is a cloying glass-half-full-ness (ph) to wrangle bindweed into a delight, though I am going for it shortly after having spent about 20 minutes pulling it from my newly planted mound of five sweet meat squash - yes, sweet meat - try to say that without smiling - out near the woodpile. Already coming up in that mound is all the buckwheat and clover I planted, which, along with the hopefully soon-to-be thorough coverage of the sweet meat foliage, might crowd out the bindweed. You are right to observe in me the desire not to live with bindweed, which does not in the least negate or supersede my desire to make living with bindweed - which I do - OK.

SHAPIRO: It occurred to me that you started writing these essays in August of 2016. So the book includes the presidential election, the inauguration - huge, news-dominating events. And you're writing about a hummingbird or a pawpaw patch.

GAY: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: I can imagine those huge events in the news that were so dominating so much of our attention might not have caused you a lot of delight.

GAY: Oh, God. Yeah, exactly. And I think, again, that's something that sort of shows in the book. Like, you can see that pull to sort of, like, get completely floored. And I think it's an interesting tension to be like, I'm trying. I'm trying to keep the light. Like, this is my focus right now. This is my discipline.

SHAPIRO: Will you read from one of these essays, called "The Sanctity Of Trains"?

GAY: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: You write about how people leave their bags unattended, trusting that nobody will take them. And then this is the conclusion of that essay.

GAY: Yeah.

(Reading) I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that's really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives - our social lives - we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding doors open, offering elbows at crosswalks, letting someone else go first, helping with the heavy bags, reaching what's too high or what's been dropped, pulling someone back to their feet, stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog, the alternating merge, also known as the zipper - this caretaking is our default mode, and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise - always.

SHAPIRO: That second always made me wonder if you're convincing or reminding yourself of something you don't always feel.

GAY: Reminding - I think reminding for sure.

SHAPIRO: How often do you need that reminder, that second always?

GAY: Often. And, you know, thankfully, I have beloved friends. You know, I have reminders. And I feel like part of this thing, this project of this book, is training myself that the reminders are everywhere.

SHAPIRO: So you wrote the last of these essays in August of 2017. It was your birthday, just as it was when you started this project.

GAY: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: And then what happened?

GAY: I think I sort of felt like this is something that I'll be doing in one way or another for the rest of my life.

SHAPIRO: Do you mean in a literal, practical way, like continuing to write these essays?

GAY: Well, not continuing - necessarily continuing to write these essays. But this book sort of really helped me to clarify that my objective in my work is to sort of study joy, complicatedly. But that sort of impulse to try to identify what it is that connects us and what it is that is evidence of our interdependence - that's the thing I'm curious about and how my work and how my looking can help to sort of grow that. And I feel like that's something that I sort of was able to articulate in this book. And so, you know, the next books I'm working on - already, I have a couple of books that I'm working on - I can see - like, oh, OK. You're studying how we can love each other better.

SHAPIRO: Ross Gay's new collection of essays is called "The Book Of Delights." It's been great talking with you. Thank you.

GAY: It's been good talking to you. Thank you.

SHAPIRO: That's the writer Ross Gay in a conversation that we first aired in February of 2019.

(SOUNDBITE OF STRFKR SONG, "KAHLIL GIBRAN")

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Encore: Ross Gay Writes 'The Book Of Delights'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: When things feel dark, it can be all the more important to seek out and recognize joy. The writer Ross Gay spent a year doing that. Starting on his 42nd birthday, he wrote an essay every day about something delightful - nicknames, fireflies, reckless air quotes.

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Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller

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Learning Lessons From Inspiration, Despite Complexity, In ‘Why Fish Don’t Exist’

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Former NPR journalist Lulu Miller was inspired by a scientist who started again when his life’s work was destroyed. Now, she writes about what she can take from his story, even when it’s not all good.

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"We Shall Be Known by MaMuse

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Queen Sono

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The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

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Like many others, I'm celebrating Mother's Day with my family this weekend. The following weekend, I'm attending a significant birthday party. Priya Parker would have strong opinions about these events. In "The Art of Gathering," she sets out to invigorate the way we meet - at birthdays, weddings, funerals, negotiation tables and elsewhere. Trained in conflict resolution, Ms. Parker has worked on issues including the fate of NGOs in Zimbabwe and the peace process in the Middle East. On a more personal level, she has helped friends with questions about how to sit shiva or throw a dinner party. Much of Ms. Parker's advice is provocative, sometimes counterintuitive, with chapter titles like "Cause Good Controversy" and "Don't Be a Chill Host." ("Many people who go to the serious trouble of hosting aspire to host as minimally as possible," she writes. "But who wants to sail on a skipperless ship?") Below, she discusses Martha Stewart's "greatest crime," how not to end an event and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?
It wasn't one moment per se, but many over a period of time - every time I was at a dinner party with amazing people who would go home after a beautiful night of food having never connected in a meaningful way, or at a meeting with attention paid to the whiteboards or the PowerPoint font but not to gripping people or reminding them why they do the work they do. I kept thinking, all this time and effort was clearly put into these gatherings. So what is actually happening and why aren't we connecting?

I like to tell people that Martha Stewart's greatest crime wasn't insider trading, it was telling a generation of hosts that gathering is about fish knives, flowers and canapés; that if you get the things right, magic will happen. One of the documents I found that illustrated this for me was a party-planning guide on Stewart's website. It's a 29-item checklist and only three of the items focused on people. I wanted to write a book that shifted the focus away from the crudités and on to what actually creates magic between people.

I learned so many amazing things from the people I met with. I interviewed over a hundred gatherers - my language, not theirs. I talked to a very thoughtful dominatrix, and from her I learned how important it was to create space for people to show a different side of themselves, sometimes a darker side. A pair of Buddhist monks taught me that it's essential to make your gathering decisively end rather than peter out. We plan when something will stop from a time perspective, and we hope the striking of the clock means it's over. But studies show that the beginning, the end and the peak experience is what most people remember. There are a lot of things you can do to close an experience, from reminding people of what happened, to connecting them one last time, to making them think about how they want to re-enter the world. But don't end with logistics; for example, saying, "Thank you all for coming, your coats are in the checkout room and the last shuttle is waiting outside to take you to the airport." It's not that you don't have to convey that information; just don't do it as the last thing.

In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
The book I wrote is radically different. I started writing a book that told the stories of the gatherers I interviewed, about their lives and backgrounds and what led them to gather in the way they do. When I met the dominatrix, a lot of the talk was about her childhood, and a lot of the first draft was about that. I shared this with a friend, and he was fascinated by the story, but he was irritated that I couldn't tell him how it related to his life. I think in trying to avoid this book being a cheap how-to, I didn't give people enough information.

And as I started to meet more people who were rethinking what a gathering has to look like, I was surprised at the fields that were doing it. For example, a courtroom in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, that paused to ask, What is the purpose of court? And they radically redesigned the courtroom proceedings.

Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
My mentor Hal Saunders. He helped draft the Camp David accords. My training is a process called sustained dialogue, which he started. I met him when he was in his late 60s, early 70s, and even then he was this giant in the field of diplomacy. But he deeply, deeply listened to and was curious about young people. He was obsessed with the technology of group relationships. The reason he influenced me so much is because I never knew that was a thing. I thought it was just like water. He tried to study and break down and codify and organize the dynamics of group relationships. He believed that relationships are something you can transform, which is what he did. He made me realize that making a career out of trying to transform groups is not only an O.K. thing but it touches every part of our life.

Persuade someone to read "The Art of Gathering" in 50 words or less.
If you're secretly insecure about convening, if you feel disconnected at work, if you wish you and your friends had more meaningful conversations, this book can help you. Life is too short to gather in the old Martha Stewart way. Welcome to the new rules of gathering.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Turning Routine Meetings Into Memorable Events

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Like many others, I'm celebrating Mother's Day with my family this weekend. The following weekend, I'm attending a significant birthday party. Priya Parker would have strong opinions about these events. In "The Art of Gathering," she sets out to invigorate the way we meet - at birthdays, weddings, funerals, negotiation tables and elsewhere.