If Grandmothers Ruled the World
Grandmothers Counsel the World - Indigenous Elder Women Speak
This review was originally published on Women Day By Day - it is used with permission.
Grandmothers Counsel the World (Indigenous Women Elders Offer Their Vision for Our Planet) by Carol Schaefer
Published by Trumpeter Books (Shambhala Publications), 2006.
$18.95 – 160 pages
ISBN 1-59030-293-1
“What would the world be like if our grandmothers were in charge?”
Ponder that. It’s the first line of the introduction in Grandmothers Counsel the World (Indigenous Women Elders Offer Their Vision for Our Planet). I’m disappointed the project that spawned the book is not widely known. It’s further disappointing that the book has come quietly upon the scene with no fanfare and little notice. I can’t even remember how I stumbled upon it, but I’m happy I did. This is, for one thing, a song of the value of age and experience. It’s also a poem to the strength and resilience of women of every age.
We’re told at the front of the book that an ancient prophecy is being fulfilled: “When the grandmothers from the four directions speak, a new time is coming.” The fulfillment began in 1986 with a sacred fire outside the U.N. Building, ignited by a chief of the Iroquois Nation. From that fire, a torch was carried, the story goes, through 62 countries in 86 days by runners. The fire now resides in New Mexico, continuously burning. It traveled once more in 2004 to spark the meeting of 13 grandmothers, called “keepers of their tribe’s teachings from original times.”
Muddled up in this modern folk story are allusions to 9/11 and the new millennium, though chronology, as I read it, doesn’t mesh without vivid imagination. No matter. Elder women coming together to change the world is long over due. Men have been in charge for a long time. We’re in a mess. I like to think these grandmothers have the power to bring change. I think we all do, and if the women who speak in Grandmothers Counsel… encourage us to take back our individual power and create a new world, I’m for it.
Reading this is a calmative. The women’s stories are warm and personal, the photographs compel us to think deeply about beauty, about how lives might be lived better, and what would happen if. A deep lesson lies within the book – when everyone benefits, the individual benefits more.
Nothing in this story is new. We know that life is difficult and sacred. Our genetic memory clues us to a world of spirits, even if it’s deep inside each person. No one is unaware that there has been a corruption of human spirit. Overlook the hammering in the introductory and explanatory pages.
Author Carol Schaefer, well-known journalist, tries hard, maybe too hard, to write beautifully. Schaefer has written two other books, one fiction, one non-. This time, at least, she seems as conscious of her own prose as she is of the natural beauty of the ideas before her. The text-book sort of environment she chucks us into from the first is mildly annoying. We need the background to understand how the grandmothers came together and what they’ll do next. But her explanatory writing is something like Oliver Stone’s directing. We get it way early. The feeling is a little like being in a closed space with a woman wearing too much of a beautiful perfume.
Once I got through the obvious and over-stated, the indigenous women’s voices drew me in, making me hungry for more. Schaefer seemed to relax, intruding less. I liked her better when she stepped back and allowed it to unfold.
They speak of things that matter in everyday life and yet hugely impact our world. They speak of reciprocity to balance nature – how ritual and ceremony, no matter the genre, create energy for such reciprocity. Their stories remind us of the healing power of nature and the value of traditional healers. Simplicity is a constant theme.
We get to look into these women’s simple lives, each of them dedicated to nurturing and protecting their people. Each of them has faced adversity larger than what many are asked to overcome. We read about women overcoming alcoholism and drug addiction. We’re shown abject poverty and what it’s like to reach rock bottom. And we learn what one has to do to climb back and then go higher.
Grandmother Flordemayo, a Mayan, tells us women will walk with power. “We have an incredible journey and responsibility as women….We must learn to stay balanced in the moment.” I’ve heard modern, sophisticated mental health professionals say nearly the same thing. Then they go on to another pontification, but, refreshingly, Flordemayo explains how to achieve that balance.
Yupik grandmother Rita, from the Artic Circle believes we choose our parents before we are born and our learning begins in the womb – the epitome of life-long learning and something to think about. When people come to her for healing, her approach is wonderful, “The secret is, I don’t know anything. All I know is I am Rita Pitka Blumenstein. I am your friend, I am not sick, not sad, not angry. What about you?”
They speak of excesses and the modern addiction to “bigger is better.” Picture city folk bent on camping out and communing with nature. There has to be a camper, lots of supplies, and the obligatory bonfire. Tree limbs, indeed, whole trunks are piled high, the whole thing is torched and everyone stands back, out of harms way.
One grandmother ponders why non-native people build huge fires that make them all stand apart from each other. Native peoples build small fires that draw everyone together.
I heartily encourage you to add this book to your library, if you can find it. It’s beautiful to look at and inspiring to read, the perfect thing for winter evenings by the fire, or summer leisure on the front porch. It’s a great read-aloud. A bringer-together of people. A reminder.
Will Grandmothers Counsel the World bring about world peace? Not in our lifetimes, I fear. But the idea of elders gathering to collect their wisdom and experience is right. Compiling, for our children, the body of what we’ve learned as we struggled through life and what our elders told us of theirs, is right. It’s been done through all the ages. The grandmothers remind us we’re mandated to treasure our collective past and learn from it.
Nothing astonishingly new, but a great deal to be remembered and reborn.
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