July 2023 - Carolyn Gage

Tags

Published on

July 30, 2023

Anna Politkovskaya: A Meditation in Courage

In Memoriam Women's History

Originally published in off our backs women’s newsjournal, vol. 37, no. 2/3, 2008, Washington, DC.

Anna Politkovskaya was murdered last week [October 7, 2006]—executed, actually. Someone followed her into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, shot her four times: twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and a final shot to the head. The pistol, its serial number filed off, was left next to the body, the sign of a contract killing.

Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist whose fearless, behind-the-scenes coverage of the Chechen war had exposed human-rights abuses in Russia’s southern province of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have been killed during two Kremlin campaigns. She documented not only the brutality of the conflict, but also the massive corruption and moral corrosion that was occurring at all levels and on both sides. She was not afraid to name names, and, on at least one occasion, to print the official’s phone number, inviting her readers to register their disgust personally.

In the months before her murder, she had been focusing on the Moscow-backed, Chechen Prime Minister Ramsan Kadyrov. In fact, just two days before her murder, on Kadyrov’s thirtieth birthday, she made him the subject of her last radio interview. The date was significant because it marked the day Kadyrov met the age eligibility requirement to stand for the post of president. Politkovskaya was well-aware of this fact and of his aspirations when she chose to accuse him of torture.

"Right now I have two photographs on my desk. I am conducting an investigation about torture today in Kadyrov’s prisons, today and yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi [members of Kadyrov’s personal militia] for completely inexplicable reasons and who died… " (Politkovskaya/ RFE)

At this point, the interviewer suggested that perhaps these were individual cases, representing only a small percentage of abuses. Politkovskaya responded in no uncertain terms:

"I’d like to call attention to the fact that we talk about “individual cases” only because these people aren’t our loved ones – it’s not my son, my brother, my husband. The photographs that I’m telling you about, these were bodies that had been horribly tortured. You can’t reduce this to a small percentage—it’s an enormous percentage." (Politkovskaya/ RFE)

Politkovskaya was as unequivocal regarding the Chechen prime minister:

"Kadyrov is the Stalin of our times. This is true for the Chechen people. He’s a coward armed to the teeth and surrounded by security guards… Personally I have only one dream for Kadyrov’s birthday: I dream of him someday sitting in the dock, in a trial that meets the strictest legal standards, with all of his crimes listed and investigated."(Politkovskaya/ RFE)

Was Politkovskaya’s assassination a response to this broadcast? Certainly she had been aware of the danger. Kadyrov had publicly vowed to murder her. According to her, “He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman.” (Hearst) But journalism is a dangerous profession in Russia. Twenty-three journalists had been killed there between 1996 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least twelve have been murdered in contract-style killings since Putin came to power. (AP)

Her unfinished, final article was published a week after her murder by the biweekly, independent Novaya Gazeta, her paper for the last seven years. The story included testimony from a Chechen torture victim and still photos from a video, which, according to the paper, said showed Chechen security forces beating two young men, apparently to death.

The mystery is not so much that Politkovskaya was killed, but where she found the courage to continue working in the face of so much danger. After all, she had been receiving death threats since 1999, when she first began documenting human rights abuses in Chechnya. (WiPC) Members of her family had been threatened. A few months before her murder, unknown assailants tried unsuccessfully to break into a car her daughter, Vera, was driving. As the obituary in the Guardian comments,

"She had already used up several of her nine lives as a reporter. She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape, kidnapped, and poisoned by the FSB [former KGB] on the first flight to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004… Her husband left her. Her son pleaded with her to stop. Her neighbors, cowed by the attentions of the FSB in an upmarket street in central Moscow, shunned her."(Hearst)

Who was this woman Anna Politkovskaya? Where did she find her courage? Was she super-human, immune to threats of torture and death?

Certainly, she could have chosen a different life. Born in 1958 in New York, the daughter of United Nations diplomats from the Ukraine, she had a privileged background and dual citizenry. After graduating from Moscow University in 1980, she wrote for the national daily Izvestia before switching to the smaller, independent presses. She had a husband and two children. Never envisioning herself as a war correspondent, Politkovskaya stated, “I was interested in reviving Russia’s pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya.” (Hearst)

Her first book, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, published in 1999, told horrifying anecdotes of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Russian military. This was followed three years later by A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, where Politkovskaya continued to put a human face on the horrors of war. Her latest book, Putin’s War: Life in a Failing Democracy, was published last year. According to The New York Times, it was “a searing portrait of a country in disarray and of the man at its helm.”

But professional drive cannot explain the courage of Politkovskaya. There must have been something more, something deeper.

There are some clues in her account of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2003, when renegade, Chechen hostage-takers, requested her as a negotiator. They had seized a theatre and were holding 850 people hostage. Unlike the sparse and impersonal accounts of her torture in 2000, this report is surprisingly subjective:

"Doctor Roshal went with me. I do not remember how we made our way to the front door. I felt very scared… “I am Politkovskaya, I am Politkovskaya,” I yell. Slowly I climb the stairs on the right. The doctor says he knows where to go. The lobby upstairs is very quiet, dark and scary. “I am Politkovskaya,” I yell again. At last, I see a man… He shows no signs of aggression toward me, but he is very hostile toward the doctor. I wonder why. To be on the safe side, I try to defuse a situation that is getting very tense.

'So, doctor, you are trying to make a name for yourself?' the masked man keeps mumbling. But the doctor is seventy years old. He has already achieved so much in his life that he does not have to think of making a name for himself. His career is quite accomplished.

That is what I try to point out, and a heated exchange of words follows. I understand that I need to cool it off or else. I have an idea of what 'or else' means.

The masked man steps aside and keeps mumbling, 'Why did you have to point out that you treated Chechen children, doctor? You, doctor, single out Chechen children. Do you mean to say that we are a species apart, that we are not human?'

This is a familiar tune. I have to interfere because I cannot stand this any longer. 'All people are the same. They have the same skin, bones and blood,' I say.

Suddenly this simple thought has a peace-making effect. My legs turn to water and I ask for permission to sit down on the only chair in the middle of the lobby… I stop shaking for a while." (Politkovskaya)

Ultimately, the only thing that she was able to negotiate was permission to bring some water and juice to the hostages who had neither eaten nor drunk in two days. Early the next morning, Russian special forces stormed and gassed the theatre, killing forty-two of the hostage-takers and 129 hostages.

But what her account demonstrates is that, shaking and barely able to stand, she was human and terrified. At the same time, she could not ignore the verbal harassment of her companion on this dangerous and humanitarian mission. In what might seem to others a minor point under the circumstances, she is scrupulous about setting the record straight, and in doing so, recovers her spiritual poise. Her focus is on the suffering of those caught in the middle of the conflict, the hostages—and especially the children. But her sympathy for the hostages does not keep her from quoting with empathy her captors’ words, “You never give our children any food during mopping operations, so let yours suffer, too.” (Politkovskaya)

That was the power and the genius of Potlitkovskaya—her ability to hold onto the larger context of governments, political parties, military campaigns, while at the same time focusing on the often-contradictory details of individual experience and accountability. It was this focus on the immediate suffering, the outrage of the moment, that was the hallmark of her journalism—and possibly the secret behind her tremendous courage.

References:

Associated Press. “Russian Reporter Killed in Moscow.” 7 October 2006
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061007.wrussian- journo1007/BNStory/International/home

Hearst, David. “Anna Politkovskaya: Crusading Russian Journalist Famed for her Exposés of Corruption and the Chechen War.” The Guardian 9 October 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1890838,00.html

Maineville, Michael. “The Silencing of Anna Politkovskaya.” Spiegel Online 13 October 2006 http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,442392,00.html

Politkovskaya, Anna. “Inside a Moscow Theater with the Chechen Rebels.” International Women’s Media Foundation, http://www.iwmf.org/features/anna

Politkovakay, Anna, interviewed by RFE/RL. “Russia: Anna Politkovskaya’s Last Interview.” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty 9 October 2006 http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/fc088b08-0cbd-4800-b2ff-f00f5494fa5e.html

Smith, Becky. “Independent Journalism Has Been Killed in Russia.” The Guardian 11 October 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1896806,00.html

Writers in Prison Committee, International PEN. “International PEN Statement on the Murder of Russian Writer and Journalist, Anna Politkovskaya.” International Freedom of Expression Exchange 7 October 2006 http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/78140
Published on

July 26, 2023

A Lesbian Take on "The Bonobo Sisterhood"

Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History Reviews

"The Bonobo Appropriation." There, I fixed it.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, a new book by Diane L. Rosenfeld.

I'm not happy with it. Read on...

The book is a passionate plea for women to model ourselves after the bonobos, a species of great apes. They are the last of the great apes to be scientifically described, because they weren’t recognized as a separate species until 1929. The bonobos began to get a lot of press during the Second Wave, because, unlike females from other species of great apes-- including humans, the bonobo females are empowered. They are not stalked, threatened, battered, raped, or murdered by the males. Their culture and their species are peaceful.

Dr.Rosenfeld, founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, rightfully identifies the bonobos as a species from whom we have much to learn. In fact, she urges women to be “bonobos,” to hear the “bonobo call” of our sisters in distress, to subscribe to the “Declaration of Unified Independence from Patriarchal Violence” and the “Preamble to the Bonobo Sisterhood Constitution.” The entire book appears to be an homage to female bonobos and a call to us humans to reverse our evolutionary course away from the path of the patriarchally violent chimps and in the direction of the bonobos.

Rosenfeld’s credentials on the subject of violence against women are impressive: She was the first Senior Counsel in the Office on Violence Against Women at the United States Department of Justice, and before that she was an Executive Assistant Attorney General at the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She’s got a law degree the university of Wisconsin and a secondary law degree from Harvard. Her research areas include “Title IX and campus sexual assault prevention and response; prevention of intimate partner homicide; and addressing commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls.”[from the Harvard Law website]

She has spent a long time studying what happens to us, and she has spent a long time studying the jurisprudence that enables perpetrators and betrays us into their hands over and over. I am, frankly, in awe of her focus and her activism.

What I am not in awe of is her appropriation of the bonobo. Her book is, frankly, homophobic. What sets these female apes apart from all the other great apes is their sexuality. Take a look:

“More often than the males, female bonobos engage in mutual [that is "same-sex"] genital-rubbing behavior, possibly to bond socially with each other, thus forming a female nucleus of bonobo society. The bonding among females enables them to dominate most of the males. Adolescent females often leave their native community to join another community. This migration mixes the bonobo gene pools, providing genetic diversity. Sexual bonding with other females establishes these new females as members of the group.” [Wikipedia]

And how did this amazing adaptation arise, you ask? Well...

“Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo 'is maybe half' that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is 'three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks.' In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, ‘which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement;’ he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice ‘about once every two hours’ on average." [Wikipedia]

Tribadism once every two hours, all day, every day. Females across the board preferring sex with each other to sex with males. Every two hours. Yeah, that would definitely change the culture, not to mention the course of history.

Dr. Rosenfeld makes absolutely ZERO mention of bonobo sexuality, except to note that the females, as a result of their remarkable sisterhood, have empowered themselves to have sexual autonomy. In other words, she puts the cart before the horse and then eliminates the horse altogether.

Understandably, that cart is not going anywhere.

Without female-to-female sexual bonding there is no bonobo sisterhood, no powerful alliance to counter male aggression, no acceptance of females into new tribes, no intergenerational female bonds.

Her omission is no oversight. It flies in the face of primatology and common sense. This evolved, large, frontally-located clitoris is the engine that drives the female bonding. In fact, primatologist Franz de Waal notes in his book Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist that the levels of oxytocin, the “love drug,” are higher in the urine of female bonobos after sex with another female... higher than after sex with males. Enhanced oxytocin production has been seen as a hormone to facilitate childbirth, but it is probable that it significantly enhances bonding.

Dr. Rosenfeld wants to have her cake and eat it. She wants the bonobo empowerment, but she wants it to happen in heteropatriarchy. In fact, she wants it to prop up heteronormativity. She wants to lift up the culture of bonobos as a model for human culture. She wants to write a best-selling book on the thesis that all women need to do is understand the potency of female bonding in order to emulate it. She doesn’t want to have to lose any readers by bringing up the persistent, round-the-clock, same-sex, genital activity that is the single most obvious, unique, and prominent behavioral trait of the female bonobos.

Because if she did, she might have to acknowledge that this same-sex activity among females, most notably among lesbians, does indeed lend itself to unique female bonding. Lesbian history shows us over and over how lesbian women have confronted males, established alternative all-female institutions, led the fight for feminist social reforms, and developed counter-cultural narratives to challenge the patriarchy.

Dr. Rosenfeld would have her readers believe that the bonobos were a species whose females achieved autonomy through mystically evolved feminist brains instead of enormous clitorises. She wants us to believe that heterosexual women can train themselves to think like them, and form alliances as enduring and as powerful as theirs just by using their heads.

This attitude is hugely disrespectful to the millions of women across the millennia who have not wanted to be terrorized and abused. Every woman knows that it is males who perpetrate and aggress against us and against our children, especially our daughters. If the solution was as simple as reading a book about the power of female alliances, I’m sure that book would have been written in hieroglyphs and those alliances would have been made centuries ago.

There is another omission in Rosenfeld’s book. She fails to note that even though chimp culture is patriarchal and the male chimpanzees will attack and batter female chimpanzees, there are no records of the males murdering the females. In fact, humans are the only great ape species that murders its females. After all, how anti-evolutionary can you get... murdering the mothers of the tribe? So, how is it that the chimps don’t murder the females?

Well... Chimpanzees are sexually segregated. The males prefer the company of males, and the females prefer the company of females. Females do not go off with male partners and live in isolation with them. The females stay together, raise their offspring together, and sleep together within earshot of each other. When they do mate, it is in the open and in daylight, where other chimps can witness and intervene.

But the female bonding of the chimps is not mentioned either. Advocating separatism would certainly alienate a heterosexual readership participating in a culture of monogamous pair-bonding.

The solution to male violence against women is not cherry-picking primate outcomes and mistaking them as starting points. The solution is not as simple as “sisterhood.” If she had consulted with lesbians, studied our sexual bonding and alliances, she would have understood that our culture constitutes a resistance movement. It comes at a price.That price is precisely the stigma that Rosenfeld hopes to avoid with the unscientific omissions in her thesis.

I am reminded of the fable of the drunk person who is looking for their lost keys under the lamppost, when they dropped them somewhere in the dark. Rosenfeld’s search is a cheerful one, and positivity abounds. Lots of light. This won’t be hard at all. We just need to wake up to this new idea. But the key to solving male violence lies outside the glow of the heteronormative, patriarchal lamppost. I would submit, considering the bonobo example, that heteronormativity is itself a patriarchal concept. Historically, it has never worked in our favor. The key to female autonomy lies in the culture and history of lesbians. The bonding is in the body, and it always will be.

Rosenfeld is extremely knowledgeable about the laws that hold women back. She advocates for changes in the laws around self-defense that acknowledge the patriarchal threats to women, that give us the right to participate in collective self-defense. She advocates for changes in conspiracy laws that acknowledge the ways that male alliances enable large-scale sexual abuse. And finally, she advocates for believing women as credible witnesses.

And yet she gaslights her readers, throwing lesbians under the bus, and arguing for the "logic of the bonobo sisterhood," when that very logic rests on a foundation of immediate gratification: seeking maximum sexual pleasure and finding it with other females. The bonobo alliances are effect, not cause.

Rosenfeld has an whole section on the subject of compliance sex, excoriating it and expressing a longing for a social system that precludes unwanted sex. The sad truth is that her book is itself an artifact of compliance sex culture.

Self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians. Alliances to protect women and children? Collective self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians in any reform movement for women. Check out our history with female-only educational institutions, with the WAVES and the WAACs (female-only military branches), with the battered women's shelters, the rape crisis lines, the suffrage movement on two continents. Refusal of compliance sex? We are the champions. In fact, our resistance to unwanted sex is the source of our stigma. The very stigma that this book so rigidly and so glaringly enforces.

The Bonobo Sisterhood is a Trojan horse of a book, and I am calling the author to account for her damaging, disingenuous, homophobic, science-denial omissions and her appropriations.
Published on

July 25, 2023

Remembering Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010)

Civil Rights In Memoriam Women's History

Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Summer 2010, Northampton, MA.

“Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.”--Wilma Mankiller

Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nations died on April 6, 2010. She served as their Principal Chief from and 1985 to 1995.

Her story contains and reflects the history of her people, retracing archetypal paths of displacement and homecoming. And her story is the story of a powerful woman—negotiating motherhood and intimate partnerships in a patriarchal landscape, meeting and overcoming resistance to serving in a leadership position. It is also a story of a person living with disabilities, both congenital and accident-related. Mankiller’s lifework was a steady demonstration of what could be possible, for an individual, for a community, for a nation. As her best-selling autobiography emphasizes, political and personal resistance require an understanding of place, knowledge of one’s history, spiritual roots, and a love of one’s people.

Mankiller’s father was Charley Mankiller, a Cherokee, and her mother, Irene, was of Dutch-Irish descent, but acculturated to Cherokee life. She had ten siblings and grew up on her father’s allotment, near Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma. She remembers her first ten years at “Mankiller Flats” with affection. She and her siblings would walk three miles each way to school, but, in Mankiller’s words, “I didn’t know the difference between being poor and having money until one day at school. A little girl… saw my flour-sack underwear while we were in the outhouse. She ran and told some other girls, and they all teased me about it. That was really the first time I had any inkling we were different.”

In 1950, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) came up with a plan for dealing with what they termed “the Indian Problem.” This new policy, ominously called “termination,” had been hatched by Dillon S. Myer, the then-commissioner of the BIA. His credentials for the job? He had been the director of the Japanese War Relocation Authority that, during World War II, had implemented the internment of Japanese-American citizens in camps in California. As Mankiller notes in her autobiography, “The Cherokees and other native tribes should have recognized that the assorted Trails of Tears of our ancestors served in large part as models for the removal of the Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americas in the 1940’s.”

On August 1, 1953, Congress adopted a resolution making Indians “subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States…”

This policy became the excuse for breaking up Native communities and putting tribal lands, no longer non-taxable, on the market. Mankiller’s family was offered the option of “relocation” to a large, urban city. Her father, having been taken from his home as a boy and forced to attend an Indian boarding school, was reluctant to leave his land, but eventually became persuaded that moving to San Francisco would offer a better future for his children.

Mankiller remembers this government facilitated relocation as her own personal “Trail of Tears”—referring to the infamous forced relocations from 1831 to 1838 of five autonomous tribes living in the Deep South. Four thousand of the 15,000 “relocated” Cherokee died from exposure, starvation, and disease during this forced march to Oklahoma.

“No one pointed a gun at me or at members of my family. No show of force was used. It was not necessary… I learned through this ordeal about the fear and anguish that occur when you give up your home, your community, and everything you have ever known to move far away to a strange place. I cried for days, not unlike the children who had stumbled down the Trail of Tears so many years before. I wept tears … tears from my history, from my tribe's past. They were Cherokee tears.”

The better life that the Mankillers had been promised turned out to be low-paying factory jobs and housing in an urban ghetto. Feeling neglected by her parents, who had their hands full supporting the large family, Mankiller became a rebellious teenager, running away to her grandmother’s ranch near Modesto. She had to run away five times, before her family finally allowed her to stay. She credits her year on the ranch as a turning point in her life, where she took an active role in the farm, shadowing her tough and outspoken grandmother.

At the end of this year, she moved back in with her family, who were now living in Hunter’s Point, an area near the shipyards that had been settled by African American families fleeing the Dust Bowl. By 1960, Hunter’s Point was a neighborhood filled with racial tension and gang violence. Mankiller writes how her years on these “mean streets” began to shape her perception of the world: “The women are especially strong. Each day they face daunting problem as they struggle just to survive. They are mothers not only of their children, but of the whole community.”

After high school, Mankiller moved in with her sister, taking a job as a clerical worker. She met an Ecuadoran student from an aristocratic family, and after a dizzying summer courtship, they flew to Reno to get married. Mankiller was seventeen. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter, and then two years later, she had a second daughter. She began to take classes at a community college and then, through a minorities educational opportunity program, she entered San Francisco State University. By the mid-1960’s the Bay Area was exploding politically and culturally. Mankiller describes taking her daughters to Haight-Ashbury: “…I think the people of the Haight had to be as curious about us as we were about them. My daughters wore shiny patent-leather shoes and little-girl dresses, and I looked like what I was at the time, a young housewife who liked to observe… but was unwilling to get fully involved.”

What changed all that was the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in the fall of 1969. The island had been occupied briefly five years earlier by a group of Sioux, as a symbolic act of reclamation. In a hundred-year-old Sioux treaty, the US government had agreed that any male Native American older than eighteen, whose tribe had been party to the treaty, could file for a homestead on abandoned or unused federal property. As the island had been declared surplus federal property since the closing of the penitentiary in 1963, Native American activists were claiming their right to take possession.

In October 1969, a fire of suspicious origin gutted the American Indian Center in San Francisco. In an act of protest, fourteen Native Americans landed on Alcatraz and claimed it in the name of “Indians of All Tribes.” Within a day, the Coast Guard arrived to escort the protesters off the island, but ten days later, nearly a hundred activists returned—this time with provisions, and the occupation lasted for nineteen months. During this time, Mankiller would visit the island with her daughters, running support for four of her siblings and their children who had joined the protest. In her words, “The occupation of Alcatraz excited me like nothing ever had before. It helped to center me and caused me to focus on my own rich and valuable Cherokee heritage.”

Mankiller was also feeling the effects of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and against her husband’s wishes, she bought herself a car and began driving to tribal events up and down the coast. She took a job directing the Native American Youth Center in East Oakland and began volunteering with the Pit River people in Northern California, helping them with their fierce battle to regain tribal land from a utility company. Meanwhile, her brother Richard had gone to Pine Ridge and participated in the shoot-out at Wounded Knee.

Mankiller separated from her husband and moved with her daughters to Oakland. Her husband, after picking up nine-year-old Gina for a trip to the circus, informed Mankiller that he would not be returning her. After an agonizing year of separation, he finally brought Gina back, and Mankiller, afraid that he would try to abduct her daughter again, decided it was time to go home to Oklahoma.

“I looked to the east, where the sun begins its daily journey. That was where I had to go, not to heal for a few weeks after a marital squabble, not to lay a loved one to rest and then leave again—I had to go back to stay.”

She finished her degree in social work and was hired to work for the Cherokee Nation as an economic stimulus coordinator. Her daughters were adapting to their new school, Mankiller was building her home on ancestral lands, and everything seemed on track—and then tragedy struck. She was in a car accident that crushed her face, her legs, and broke her ribs. Worst of all, her best friend had been the driver of the car that hit her, and she had not survived her injuries. The accident required two months’ hospitalization and seventeen surgeries, and it became another turning point.

Having come so close to dying—“walking into the spirit world,” as she put it—Mankiller began to turn toward the Cherokee spiritual path, seeing herself as “the woman who lived before and the woman who lives afterward.”

Shortly after this, she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis and underwent surgery for removal of her thymus. Drawing on the strength of her ancestors and of present-day Cherokee medicine people, she regained her health, returning to her work “with a fury.” She founded the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department and managed the self-help construction project of a sixteen-mile water pipe that revitalized an impoverished Native community.

The project affirmed her belief that the Cherokee people had the capacity to solve their own problems, and it also brought her together with the man who would become her life partner and best friend—Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who worked with the tribal Housing Authority.

In 1983 she was asked to run for deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Stunned by the sexism she encountered, Mankiller was accused of being an affront to God, and of making the Cherokees a national laughingstock. She even had foes within her own campaign, but she managed to win the election. In 1985, when the Principal Chief was called to Washington, she inherited his office for the remainder of his term, and then ran on her own for Principal Chief and was elected for two more terms. The Cherokee Nation membership is currently 290,000, making it the second largest tribe in the country, after the Navaho. Mankiller was not only the principal guardian of Cherokee tradition and customs, but she managed a budget of seventy-five million dollars. She saw that much of this income went into health care, education, and job training.

Mankiller had been diagnosed in her twenties with polycystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that ran in her family, and in 1990, she underwent an operation to replace one of her affected kidneys. Her brother Don was the donor.

In 1995, she made the decision to retire from public office, but she remained a force in tribal affairs, offering counsel and mediation. Later she taught as a guest professor Dartmouth College. In 1998, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Mankiller’s health problems continued to escalate, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer and lymphoma. In 2010, the cancer metastasized to her pancreas, and she died on April 6, at the age of sixty-four.

Mankiller wrote, “Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we’re either visionaries, ‘noble savages,’ squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We’re very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.” Her courageous life of leadership and activism has given the world a visible alternative to the racist stereotypes.
Published on

July 24, 2023

Terri Lynn Jewell: In Memoriam

Civil Rights In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History Reviews

Originally published in Womanist Theory and Research, Spring/ Summer 1996, Athens, GA and and off our backs, May 1996.

Terri Lynn Jewell 1954-1995

Terri Lynn Jewell, a self-described "Black lesbian feminist poet and writer," died on Sunday, November 26, 1995, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jewell's work has appeared in more than 300 publications, including Sinister Wisdom, Woman of Power, Sojourner, Kuumba, The American Voice, Calyx, The African-American Review, and The Black Scholar. Her writings have also appeared in the anthologies Riding Desire and A Lesbian of Color Anthology. Her calendar of Black women's history, Our Names are Many, is scheduled for publication by Crossing Press in 1996, and at the time of her death she was editing a collection of Black lesbian poets.

Jewell was the editor of The Black Woman's Gumbo Ya Ya (Crossing Press, 1993), an anthology of quotations by Black women. In her introduction, she writes: "This collection was born out of my personal need for affirmation as a Black woman. I needed a coping mechanism for the growing conservatism in this nation... We are all here, calling out to and reaching one another, gathering at one another's feet and sharing the sustenance that has kept us alive and moving in the directions we must go."

The quotations she selected are a testimonial to the values she expressed in her life and in her writing:

"There's nothing neat and tidy about me, like a nice social revolution. With me goes a mad, passionate, insane, screaming world of ten thousand devils
and the man or God who lifts the lid off this suppressed world does so at his peril." - Bessie Head

"From my own study of the question, the colored woman deserves greater credit for what she has done and is doing than blame for what she cannot so soon overcome." - Fannie Barrier Williams

"... victory is often a thing deferred, and rarely at the summit of courage...
What is at the summit of courage, I think, is freedom. The freedom that
comes with the knowledge that no earthly power can break you; that an
unbroken spirit is the only thing you cannot live without; that in the end it is
the courage of conviction that moves things, that makes all change possible." - Paula Giddings

"The woman who takes a woman lover lives dangerously in patriarchy."
- Cheryl Clarke

"If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of black women - and this accounts for their lack of recognition - it is this: their literature is about black women; it takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written." - Mary Helen Washington

"Being a black woman means frequent spells of impotent, self-consuming
rage." - Michele Wallace

"... I know that we must reclaim those bones in the Atlantic Ocean... All those people who said "no" and jumped ship... We don't have a marker, an
expression, a song that we all use to acknowledge them... we have all that
power that we don't tap; we don't tap into the ancestral presence in those
waters."- Toni Cade Bambara

"A Home where we are unable to voice our criticisms is not a genuine Home.
Nor is a genuine Home one where you assimilate, integrate and disappear.
For being invisible is the same as not being at Home. Not being at Home
enough to be precisely who you are without any denials of language or
culture."- From the Introduction to Charting the Journey

"I am both Black and a woman... And yet I am continually asked to prioritize my consciousness; is race more important; is gender more important? Which is more severe, etc.? The fallacy lies not in struggling with the answer, in trying to figure out which is the correct answer for the group at hand, but the fallacy lies with the question itself."- Patricia Hill Collins

"We exist as women who are black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle - because, on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world."- Michele Wallace

"... right to life is not inherent, but is by grace of... an enemy. I think that
those who so loudly proclaim perfect freedom call out triumphantly before
being out of the difficulty."- Mary Shadd Cary

"Homophobia divides black people as political allies, it cuts off political growth, stifles revolution, and perpetuates patriarchal domination."- Cheryl Clarke

"Manasa lambda manify: atao mafy, rovitra; atao malemy, tsy afa-tseroka." (Like washing thin fabric: wash it hard and it will tear; wash it gently and you will not get the dirt out.) - Malagasy proverb

"One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female. A Black feminist analysis has enabled us to understand that we are not hated and abused because there is something wrong with us, but our status and treatment is absolutely prescribed by the racist, misogynistic system under which we live."- Barbara Smith

"After distress, solace." - Swahili proverb
Published on

July 23, 2023

Marilyn Monroe's Shoes

Child Abuse Rape Women's History

Originally published in Matrifocus: Cross-Quarterly for the Goddess Woman, Beltane 2006, vol. 5-3.

Marilyn's scarlet satin, rhinestone-encrusted stilettos by Salvatore Ferragamo. Selling Price: $48,300

Much of what the media portrays as women's sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder. Marilyn Monroe's seductive behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a captive child appeasing an adult perpetrator than those of a grown woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction. And, indeed, why wouldn’t they?

The pop cultural icon for female heterosexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage. Eleven foster homes. One orphanage.   By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse. Her mother? Mentally ill and committed to an asylum. Shortly after Marilyn’s fifteenth birthday, her legal guardian Grace McKee brokered a so-called marriage for her. In other words, Marilyn Monroe was legally prostituted as a teenager. Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead. Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband (Joe Dimaggio) “Pa,” and she called third husband (Arthur Miller) “Pops.” Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.

But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality. What does it say about popular culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal, incest survivor with dissociative identity disorders — a woman who was raised homeless, abandoned by one female guardian and prostituted by another?   Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality existed independent of her personal history — that it was not intimately connected with behaviors learned during a childhood in which she was perpetually at the mercy of strangers, and that, rather than being an attribute of empowerment, it was more the strategy of impotence?

What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value. Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe’s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified they feel.

Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men. The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?   The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child.

At a recent auction of her personal belongings, a pair of Marilyn’s rhinestone-encrusted, stiletto-heel pumps was sold for $48,000.   A high price to pay for shoes, but cheap compared to the cost of walking in them.
Published on

July 23, 2023

A Poem for Rachel Crites

Child Abuse In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History

Copyright 2007 Carolyn Gage
Originally published on the Ugly Ducklings Campaign Website, 2007

The Virginia Medical Examiner ruled on Monday, [February 5, 2007] the two missing Montgomery County girls died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and it was an act of suicide.

... there were no empty bottles of pills or alcohol, but investigators did find the keys turned in the “on” position and the car had run out of gas.

He said authorities later found the bodies of two females in the car's front seats.

Loudoun County investigators confirmed early Saturday that the victims were Rachel Samantha Smith, 16, of the 14000 block of Platinum Drive in Potomac, and Rachel Lacy Crites, 18, of the 600 block of Gate Stone Drive in Gaithersburg.

The two went missing Jan. 19. ---MyDeathSpace.com

And she said,
“Wherever I end up laying . . .
I want to stay with my true love . . .
With my true love . . .
Next to her.”

She said:

“This is my choice.”
She said.
“This is my choice.”
“I’m sorry.”

And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry.

I’m sorry for every sorry time you had to hear “gay” like it was something
         bad.
I’m sorry for every sorry time they called you dyke and didn’t mean that you
         were fierce, and strong, and true to loving women.
I'm sorry for the sorry Catholic church that called you a sinner.
I’m sorry for all the sorry teachers who never taught you how natural, how
          normal it is for women to love women and for girls to love girls, and
          that many of the most brilliant, most daring, most courageous women
          in history were lesbians.

I’m sorry.

And if it was up to me,
I would bury you,
Bury you with your true love,
And her with you.

And I’m sorry for the suffocation
That had nothing to do with CO2.
And I’m sorry for the long, slow freezing
That had nothing to do with temperature.
And I’m sorry they took so long,
Took too long,
To locate you.

Because they’ll never find you now.

And if it was up to me,
I would bury you,
Bury you with your true love,
And her with you.

And on the stone, I’d carve
Your last words
In deep granite gashes,
Too deep to wear away,

Those sorry words
You left
To a sorry world
Rachel, I would carve,

“I’m sorry.”

Tags

Anna Politkovskaya: A Meditation in Courage

A Lesbian Take on "The Bonobo Sisterhood"

Remembering Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010)

Terri Lynn Jewell: In Memoriam

Marilyn Monroe's Shoes

A Poem for Rachel Crites