NASW Advocacy

I found this article last night and encourage everyone to read it and pass it on.

As folklorists, we too are community organizers. Some of us may be overt activists and some of us not. But we are all community service workers, and I believe we can not stand for having those in power mock our democratic struggle. I encourage everyone to talk to your family, your neighbors, your friends, about the importance of community work. We can not afford a leader in office who does not understand the value of everyday citizens working for change. It’s unacceptable.

GOP Mocks Public Service

According to Democracy Now!:
Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were arrested on suspicion of rioting, a felony. While the three have been released, they all still face charges stemming from their unlawful arrest. Kouddous and Salazar face pending charges of suspicion of felony riot, while Goodman has been officially charged with obstruction of a legal process and interference with a “peace officer.

You can read the original report here.

Here is an update with video of arrest.

See also an earlier report about the 300 arrested during the peace protests at the RNC here.

According to the publisher’s website, the project was sponsored by an anonymous donor who had attended some of Zinn’s lectures at Boston University in the 1970s and recently watched You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, a movie about Zinn’s life. He found Zinn’s work so compelling and important, he wanted to make sure it was available to students of all ages.

In response to the failings of most middle and high school history books he notes that are written in such a way that students do not recognize our our human potential in history making. He writes: “Everything in history once is happens looks as if it had to happen exactly that way. We can’t imagine any other. But I am convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable.”

I will post more when I finish the book.

Has anyone else read the teaching packet or know of any teachers using it in the classroom?

For more information about Howard Zinn, you can visit his personal website.

Up the Ridge is a one-hour television documentary produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999 Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ’s for the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program in Whitesburg, KY when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region’s newest prison built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates. Filming began that year and, though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.

For more information and to watch the trailer go here.

Appalshop is looking for volunteers willing to show the film in their homes or communities. If you are interested in doing this go here and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Visiting the Native American Museum was an amazing experience. I had chills as I wandered in and out of the rooms. I could have spent days there. The museum was so alive, so fluid, so filled with voices. There wasn’t just one story being told, but instead a multitude of stories were being told at the same time, thus creating in the viewer the occasional feeling of sensory overload. There were videos playing; exhibits seemed to run together; objects at times felt almost crowded in their display cases. The museum exists in direct aesthetic opposition to our nation’s dominant museum norms and, because of this, tells a story that is non linear and, in my opinion, focused on human rights, human potential and resistance. At every level it is a museum about Native American life not just in the past, but Native American life today and the many dreams for tomorrow.

Some day I would like to write more about the museum experience and the different ways in which it made me really believe that museum exhibits can be places of interactivity and dialog. I have been to lots of museums, but nothing has quite ever moved me, or spawned such inner and outer dialog, as this one. If you have not been, I highly, highly recommend it. Give yourself a whole day to soak it all in. I think this kind of multi-level storytelling and viewer interaction is a perfect example of what museums have the power to do. They are not there just to show. They also have the potential to generate dialog and to remind us that stories overlap. Stories are messy. They also have the potential to transform.

I am curious. Other people that have been through the museum (folklorists or non)–can you share your thoughts?

Started in 1983, this organization was one of the founders of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions ), and safegaurds seeds native to Native American communities in the southwest. What’s even more amazing is not only do they safegaurd the seeds, they also maintain what they refer to as a Cultural Memory Bank. Their website explains it this way:
“In the late 1990s, NS/S undertook to expand our seed bank efforts to include a cultural component, integrating cultural information – the agricultural practices, stories, songs, and recipes associated with specific crops in the seed bank – with our existing database of collection information. In effect, we would combine the geneticist’s concern for conserving unique traits of a crop with a folklorist’s concern for conserving oral history about the crop.”

Creating the Cultural Memory Bank was not a part of the original plan. According to their webpage, they actually set out to interview elders and share this information with those outside of the community. But in conducting the interviews with elders, they soon began to realize that this traditional knowledge was desperatly needed within the community as well. So they began documenting the stories of the elders in the community for the younger generations. One of their first projects was a student-centered CD-Rom focusing on Navajo agricultural traditions. Their work in documenting the community for the community is ongoing.

Additionally, anyone can order the seeds and try them out. In fact, if you plan on growing the seeds you can also become a part of the Gardener’s Network where you provide feedback and share your experiences about growing the seeds.
Gardener’s Network

A Model for Human Rights Education
In preparation for a grant writing project for Kentucky Remembers!, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what makes education human-rights based. What is human rights education anyway? Human Rights education is not just about the subject matter. It’s also about the approach. In other words, it’s not just about the kind of knowledge that’s being shared but also how that knowledge is being shared. I am constantly on the lookout for education programs that connect human stories with our daily lives and help us connect our daily lives with others daily lives. Stories that teach us how to take care of our fellow humans, take care of the land, take care of ourselves.
What I like most about the mission of this project is its ability to be intrinsically open and forever ongoing. For example, the goal of keeping a cultural memory bank is not just about the past. It’s about the future. And why just save the seeds for the communities from which they came? Instead, they share these seeds with anyone who wants to grow them.

I think, ultimately, what human rights education is about is making connections between ourselves, our community, and world. But for human rights education to be sustainable it has to not just teach us what those connections are, but also provide insight and inspiration which can in turn lead us as humans to to be more diligent in understanding how these connections fit together and to begin to look for these connections on their own.

I think a big part of what human rights education is teaching and learning how to always be asking, ‘how do these things work together?’

What do you think?

I am learning more everyday about the importance of eating locally grown food, especially food grown from heirloom seeds (a catchall term for seeds that have not been genetically modified). A few recent conversations with a close friend who is involved with Slow Foods and the Fayetteville Farmers Market reminded me about how I have been wanting to post some information about a great place to get heirloom seeds in Arkansas.

Heirloom seeds produce food that tastes much better, has a wider variety, and a higher nutritional value that genetically modified seeds. But that’s not the only reason to invest in growing them and/or support farmers who sell them. Heirloom seeds and the farmers that grow them operate in direct opposition to major corporate seed/pesticide companies like Monsanto and Dow. Huge companies like Monsanto and their non-diversified seeds that produce sub-par vegetables have purposefully put generations of small, local farmers out of business both in the United States and around the world. They have polluted our food sources and water sources with chemical fertilizers and made it so that farmers have to produce food on a mass scale if they want to make a living at farming.

To make matters worse, these genetically modified seeds and their vegetable offspring have little power to withstand changes in climate, new strains of disease and other such instabilities.

In fact, if you begin looking deeper into the information about food shortages around the world, you will discover that one of the problems creating these shortages can be traced back to the lack of crop diversity and mass-scale farming created by major seed/chemical companies like Monsanto.

In short, I think heirloom seeds are (or at least potentially are) radical little specks of plant and animal resistance to a cooperate owned food system that pits urban dweller against rural farmer and creates environmentally stupid situations like shipping in tomatoes from Florida even though we can grow them just fine right here in Arkansas. I think also ties in with the injustices that happen every day at meat and poultry processing plants across our state.

I just recently found out about the Northcentral Arkansas Heirloom Seed Shop and Food Bank when trying to hunt down some heirloom seeds in Arkansas. What I find so potentially wonderful and amazing about this place is not do they sell heirloom seeds; they also operate a food bank to help bring a sustainable solution to food insecurity in Northwest Arkansas. It’s one of those ideas that is so creative and ingenious because it makes so much common sense.

This is a direct and regional solution to the low nutritional deficit, food insecurity, and instability caused by genetically modified crops, and this Seed shop and foodbank seem to be addressing that link in a practical, solutions-based manner.. I am curious about how things are working out for them and once I get a chance to learn more about the operation I will post some more information.

The website has information about the difference between heirloom and hybrid seeds, the importance of getting away from genetically modified food, and an online catalog from which to order seeds.

They also have a blog about the Foodbank. It has not been updated in a while, but it still has some interesting information.

I am in the midst of writing a post about what I have been learning about the importance of growing our own food and the heirloom seeds and who this all relates to folklore and a food culture of social action. But I wanted to make sure to get this information up now.

If you want to learn more about the fight against Monsanto in particular, go here: Millions Against Monsanto.

If you want to learn more about the importance of heirloom seeds, Barbara Kingsoliver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life has some great information, especially chapters three and four.
The book also has a website
If you have any other reading suggestions, please let me know!

Also, I would love to hear if anyone has ever been out to the seed shop, knows anyone who saves/grows heirloom seeds, or any other related comments.

While listening to a recent radio segment on Air America’s State of Belief (one of my new favorite radio shows), I heard about the National Religious Campaign to End Torture. This month churches around the nation are hanging banners that announce their belief that torture is not a political issue but a moral issue.

For more information or to order a banner for your organization, visit their site:
National Religious Campaign to End Torture.

The intersection of faith and social justice is particularly interesting on both a very personal gut level and on a folkloric one as well.
I am curious–from a folklore and belief perspective, what would Don Yoder and Primiano make of this campaign and this larger intersection between belief and action toward political change?

Arkansas Post Office Mural Project

The webpage is currently under construction, but still contains helpful information. I discovered that the Dardanelle post office mural was created by an artist who was originally from Armenia.

This mural plays important role in my life. I can remember my mother pointing out the artwork to me when I was a small child and telling me about my grandparents (her parents) who, just like the people in the mural, had picked cotton in the Cardon Bottoms.

I am currently beginning preparatory work for a radio piece about Dardanelle’s mural and what it means to those who live here. I am in search of personal stories and any deep background information that might be related. If you have any ideas, comments, suggestions, please let me know!

I will be updating this entry as the research continues.

See also:
“Off the Wall: New Deal Post Office Murals” by Patricia Raynorhttp://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/resources/6a2q_postalmurals.html