Peace Radio Interim Edition: April 26, 2020 Earth Day, Covid and Ramadan
Get link
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
Welcome to our 2nd online edition of Peace Radio! We're doing our best. Hang with us please!
Something to listen to to get you in the mood for Peace Radio
with the virtual Peace Babes!
We were safely bidding "until we meet again" to Jill M who tragically had to move to South Dakota but she shall return and Jill W and DJ Sally P will soldier on to bring you all things Peace while we await her return.
Earth Day
I'm opening with something from one of my very top favorite authors, Terese Marie Mailhot. This appeared on Al Jazeera (.com) on Earth Day, April 22, 2020
If the Earth could speak: A cedar tree
I have no human form - though once, we walked like people do. Trees still walk, just slower.
Coastal temperate rainforest in British Columbia, Canada [Getty Images]
I am one of the medicines of the Nlaka'pamux people, of the people living on Seabird Island Band. Some old heads but a little bit of me in their shoes, or make a little tea with me, once a day when there is a virus afoot, for protection, and cynics say that is superstition - not science. I have no human form - though once, we walked like people do. These are stories we hear less now.
When the people harvest bark in the spring - they will do it six-feet from one another, smiling to close the distance. They will make bracelets and weave crowns and headbands and capes to celebrate name-giving and graduations and potlatch, and all the good things coming to the First People: The people who offer before they take, who never forget the medicines, whose practices are called superstitions by their own.
Trees still walk, just slower, please tell them - there is a science to it. I promise.
There was a little girl, this time last year, learning with her auntie how to pick a bough.
"You have to put down tobacco and say thank you and pray before you take something from the tree."
The girl smiled. She was embarrassed to be stumbling as she prayed, as she said thank you to me - and I wanted to say, thank you for carrying on this tradition of wellbeing, of collecting medicine for your auntie, who will put the bough above her door to keep spirits away.
The auntie does not know if the tradition is Nlaka'pamux or Christian, given what white people did to her family, to her culture, to her soul - she does not care, because it is what her grandmother taught her to do, and it is Nlaka'pamux now.
These are matriarch hands on me. Generations of power - of offering - of celebration, and of pain.
A burial is called a planting where we are. This auntie, her mother was planted in a cedar box, carved by one of the men on Seabird - who would not take any money.
My fear, when I saw the beauty of the box, was that it would someday be uncovered by an anthropologist, who would find the mother's bone's remarkable - the box, remarkable, and then nobody would rest - it would all be in some Nlaka'pamux exhibit in Chicago or New York.
But today, she rests.
I am asleep for now, too. I cannot say in my waking hours, I am more lively than I am now - there is spirit in quietude - in receiving and watching. Stillness and observation can inspire. The diamondback rattler, the moment - she was still, before she turned a corner - inspired a girl in her weaving to make the first diamond pattern in a basket. We regale each other and fit together in simple ways. This interconnectedness has worked a long time now.
Forgive me, if I am too relational - to the people I have known for thousands of years. I could tell you about cherry bark or canary grass, how we mingle in baskets to bring water - or I could describe my being verdant, and rusted in the dull reaches of myself. How you cannot run your fingers against the grain of my outer bark or bough. It hurts too much. Elders say, some things are worth hurting for, others are not. Common sense is taught doing practical things, like harvesting my roots for different kinds of baskets - different kinds of legacies I hope will one day not be museum exhibits, but home decor, where kids ask, what is that, auntie?
And someone says: "Your lifeblood. Our whole culture is above the fireplace. You want to go outside, and say thank you?"
How Corona Virus lock downs are showing the world that we CAN decrease pollution and let the wildlife come back a bit, let the children breathe cleaner air:
And a great documentary from Al Jazeera about oil and Alaska in the time of Covid19 https://youtu.be/_mG37AXIFq4
It doesn't want to embed properly so you'll need to link out to it. It's 25 minutes and it is amazing
Here is one of my (Jill W's) current favorite way to support some folks during the epidemic. So many people are out of work especially the self-employed or those who work on contract.
Photo-journalist Daniella Zalcman runs a non-profit to support women and non-binary photojournalists/documentarians. We met while she was working on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation last year. During the Covid crisis, her foundation is supporting many independent photojournalists/documentarians who are unable to travel for work.
Ms Zalcman wrote this up to share with the Peace Radio audience.
Women Photograph is a non-profit working to create a more equitable photojournalism industry — at present, only about 15 percent of working news photographers are women. To that end, we maintain a hiring database and community of roughly 1,000 women and non-binary photographers based in more than 100 countries.
At the moment, freelance women and non-binary photojournalists are being deeply impacted by COVID-19. We have to be out in the world to do our jobs, and with the onslaught of travel bans, quarantines, and event cancellations, almost every independent photographer is losing a significant amount of business income with very little in the way of a safety net. In an informal poll of Women Photograph members, 96 percent of respondents said that they had been financially impacted by the pandemic. A
Creative Industries Federation poll showed that 47 percent of surveyed freelancers had lost 100 percent of their income.
Women Photograph is now operating an Emergency Fund to support women and non-binary news photographers who have lost work and need support, whether that's to cover healthcare, childcare, rent, or professional expenses. In our first cycle, we distributed $30,000 to 72 photographers in critical situations, and are now fundraising for a second round. Thank you so much for your support!
In Minnesota, the call to prayer was broadcast publicly through the air, not the airwaves, for the first time and should continue throughout this Ramadan:
And the Covid, because we can't get away from it. I (Jill W) will intersperse some of the songs on youtube that Sally and I are finding intriguing
The first here is from A Tribe Called Red, a Native American DJ collective. This is from 2016, "Virus." Epidemics are old news in Indian Country:
A few links to how this is going in Indian Country here and Indigenous Country around the globe. Remember, epidemics intentionally spread in the past, often the very recent past, are a common tool of colonialism against indigenous people.
I (Sally P) grew up near Blaine County and remember Sun Valley and Hailey as a couple of interesting small towns. Watched as the area around it turned into a playground for the very wealthy and as working people got pushed farther and farther out to find affordable housing. Covid hit poor people hard. From the article linked above:
"The stereotype of Sun Valley, in and outside of Idaho, is a town dominated by a bunch of rich, white, out-of-state skiers with second homes. But Blaine County is far more than Sun Valley (one of four “major” small towns in the area), and the lived reality of its full-time residents tells a story that will sound familiar to people living in far more dense urban areas. Idaho, as a whole, is 93% white. Yet 48% of school-age children in the Blaine County school district, according to the school board chair, are Latino. Almost half of students in the district qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The county seat of Hailey, population 8,282, ranked ninth in the nation for most severe income inequality in a 2018 study from the Economic Policy Institute."
And more about the economic repercussions of the virus, as it affects low income people. From the Atlantic Monthly:
We Are Living in a Failed State, by George Packer
“When the viruscame here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.”
******************************************************************
Books and Movies!
I (Jill W) nearly forgot. By which I mean I DID forget. Unlike live radio, a blog can be updated.
I'm watching oldies I already know I like. Drop Dead Gorgeous with the young Kirsten Dunst as an ambitious beauty queen in a Minnesota trailer court., Funny and fun. BUT I'm more and more disturbed by the disrespect to those with developmental disabilities so it might be my last viewing. Getting less ignorant as I age I guess.
I'm also watching Mystery Science Theater on youtube. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the little snarky robots and unwilling astronaut mocking bad films. The shorts are nice to put on while I fix dinner.
As for reading. I just finished David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium edited by Jeffrey Jenkins. Anyone who has happened upon the radio show knows I love me some David Sedaris. He keeps diaries. They are not just writings in little locked notebooks, though some are. They are gatherings of scraps and bits and pieces from the world and from his brain. Much like his writing. The covers are collages, paintings, found objects and more. Jeffrey Jenkins is from the same town, same school system, as David but younger. He know the Sedaris family and is now an artist in his own right and somehow convinced David to share 2 score years worth of diarie covers. It is fascinating. There is some artistic analysis of the covers whether found, painted by David, painted by David's partner Hugh Hamrick, or just plain sketch books. As a bonus, there are postcards in the back based on some of the found objects and art in the diaries. It's a new view of one of my favorite authors.
On air we use music to transition to Miriam Kent's time for children of all ages so here's a song that Jill W is liking right now
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Kid Time! With Miriam Kent Earth day to climate justice We went from Earth Day to Global Warming to Climate Change to Climate Justice. And it all began with littering! Going through stuff, I found a year old article from The Nation. "The Nation: The Climate Kids are Coming" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/ Greta Thunberg was leading a global climate uprising at 16 years old. From the article: "the Climate Kids are coming...and they are not in the mood to negotiate" ! March 2019 "10s of thousands of high-school and middle-school students in more than 30 countries plan to skip school to demand that politicians treat the global climate crisis as the emergency it is" Greta "is a charismatic young woman whose social-media savvy, moral clarity, and fearless speaking truth to power have inspired throngs of admirers to take to the streets for a better world and call out the politicians and CEOs who are standing in the way." "the grassroots activist movements they have roused are comprised almost exclusively of teenagers and twentysomethings." "these young fighters are decidedly not your parents' environmentalists: supplicant, 'realistic,' and all too accepting of failure." (MK: I identify with that) at one of their protests a sign demanded "Step Up or Step Aside"! Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez commented, "Climate delayers aren't much better than climate deniers. With either one, if they get their way, we are toast." "The climate struggle is not about having the best science, the smartest arguments, or the most bipartisan talking points. It is about power.." If people are interested, the Time Magazine article about Greta Thunberg is wonderful time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Home learning: Fun with Words! - Start the "look it up" club! MK--this is from my childhood! Words from last Peace Radio Blog look up "isosceles" and "anonymous" - The dictionary game! Look up a word and if there is a word in the definition you don't know, look that up. Keep going! If you get back to the first word you win. - Earth/Globe/World Do these all mean the same thing? -Give dictionaries and thesauruses for gifts -Just what is a "thesaurus"? Look it up! &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Staying Home / Corona Virus Days ...time to look through stuff. MK: here's what I'm doing! Reading articles I'd squirreled away back when (found the Greta Thunberg article!) The notes I put on little scraps of paper, I have time to gather them in journals. Books to read, quotes that inspire me, movies to see, new words to learn, thoughts and inspring people I've heard on the radio. See those favorite movies one more time. Once a week, first thing in the morning I watch a movie with a cup of coffee or tea. I call it "Do a Carol" because I learned this from a friend. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Use your INDOOR gun! MK: This is a teacher (peace sign) pacifist joke! &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& MK picks #2 Book: The Art of Keeping Cool. By Janet Taylor Lisle This won the Scott O'Dell Award. Set in 1942 in a Rhode Island coastal town, full of fear of Nazi submarines off shore. Author: Eleanor Coerr. She is another author, like Eve Bunting, tackling hard truths for kids. Her book "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes" is based on a true story and celebrates the courage that made one girl a heroine in Japan. Song: Habitat Habitat from Dana Lyons' CD "Environmental Songs for Kids". Co-writer John Seed https://youtu.be/23rBjrBWs98 Old Movie: This one is for older kids, say high school age. "Shine" A true story of a young man who defies his father's wishes in order to pursue his dreams. It tells a story of rebellion and of individuality through the eyes of a pianist. PBS has free online and televised programs for homeschooling! Idaho Public TV and that nationwide PBS service has much on offer: https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/homeschoolcollection/ Keep washing those hands!
Bye for now! Miriam! &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
How about a parting shot from John Fogerty and his kids?
We were safely bidding "until we meet again" to Jill M who tragically had to move to South Dakota but she shall return and Jill W and DJ Sally P will soldier on to bring you all things Peace while we await her return.
Bye for now! Miriam!
![Coastal temperate rainforest in British Columbia, Canada [Getty Images]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/4/1/f1f07a0201c94556a858481b10bf34e0_18.jpg "If the Earth could speak: A cedar tree")
Comments
Post a Comment