Special Accommodation: To request an accommodation for a disability or language interpretation for yourself or for clients please call (206) 684-4514 by August 13th.
Six clock hours will be available through Seattle Public Schools ($2 per clock hour)
Keynotes:
Spero Manson, PhD, (Pembina Chippewa), Distinguished Professor, directs the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health in the Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado Denver. His programs include 8 national centers, entailing research, program development, and training among 102 Native communities, spanning rural, reservation, urban, and village settings.
Ben Danielson, MD, Medical Director, Odessa Brown Children's Clinic, Seattle. Dr. Benjamin Danielson joined Seattle Children's Hospital in 1995. He has been the medical director of Odessa Brown Children's Clinic in Seattle since 1999, and he holds the Janet and Jim Sinegal Endowed Chair for the Odessa Brown Children's Clinic. The clinic has been an active part of Seattle's Central District since 1970.
Join QPOC and Friends as we dance, dance, dance from
8pm - midnight
@ Hidmo (2000 S. Jackson)
Saturday, August 21st
$5-$7 requested donation, no one turned away
ALL proceeds benefit the API Safety Center's
Queer Network Program
Brought to you by....
Asian Pacific Islander Women & Family Safety Center
APIWFSC organizes to create a stronger community of Queer & Ally Asian/Pacific Islanders and People of Color in order to decrease sexual assault, domestic violence, & human trafficking in our communities. We recognize the need to build communities that embrace our full selves, and we exist as a service to you.
If you are concerned about any of these issues, want to learn more or get involved let us know:
The NW Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian & Gay Survivors of Abuse
The Northwest Network increases our communities' ability to support the self-determination and safety of bisexual, trans, lesbian, and gay survivors of abuse through education, organizing, and advocacy.
We provide support and advocacy for LBGT folks of all genders who are surviving intimate/partner and dating violence. We are leather and kink friendly.
*** Please pass on to anyone you think would be interested *** Hello Queer & Trans People of Color!!! We are happy to Invite you to
THe EpiC SummEr QTPoC Retreat
AUGUST 20th-22nd, 2010
Location: INDIANOLA, WA
(on the peninsula) address will be given upon registration
We would love for you to join us for a cooperative rejuvenating and healing weekend. We are pooling our skills and resources to create a time and space for us to recharge.
Our vision includes YOU, your beautiful bodies, brains, and your participation in this lovely weekend extravaganza.
The Deets
FoOd Our goal is to be able to provide full and nutritious meals that are nourishing and delicious for the entire weekend. We’ll try to provide organic veggies, gluten-free and dairy-free options. We are outreaching to several local farms and collecting donations. We are also putting a call out for donations from your garden as well as anything else you may be able to contribute. We would especially love your help with teas, honey, agave, and some of the more expensive condiments.
hEaliN’ Reiki, guided meditation, yoga, Tarot readings, sound healing, good food, beautiful company, idyllic scenery, jam sessions (bring your musical instruments!), AND whatever else you want to offer that is healing to you. One-on-one healing sessions and group classes will be offered as well as some learn-with-us workshops.
lOdgiNg There are 3 Beds, plenty of floor space, and camping space available. We will be providing childcare and organizing rideshares to get people there. There is space for approximately 18 people. Accommodations will be given out on a first-come first-serve basis with ultimate priority given based on ability. We expect that many people will not be able to participate in the whole weekend but please don’t let that stop you from coming. Just let us know what you need and together we can find the best solutions for any situation.
Our intention has been to support each other in taking good care and being well. So please bring yourself, your skills and whatever financial support you can to realize this vision. We are serious about the power of collective healing through learning and experience in community. AND having a goodass time!!!
Please reflect on your resources, time, energy when considering how much to contribute for three days of fabulousness, healing, and skill sharing. Contributions can be: foods, money, skills, energy, conversation, and love. To offset some costs, we’re asking for a donation of $0-30 for the weekend. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. So please bring yourself your skills and whatever financial support you can to realize this vision.
SAY YES CuZ YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!!! RSVP to Christine Guiao at christineguiao@gmail.com, then go and fill out the Doodle survey: http://doodle.com/pxrqav8iit23syxq. And please indicate any dietary restrictions.
*Recognizing that there is also a recent film of the same title about Natives in Brazil who steal organs from turistas (including an effort at those of the gorgeous Olivia Wilde from House), I'd like to state, right off the bat, this review is not of THAT Turistas, but the OTHER one. Cheers!
Last Wednesday, my mother and I went to see Alicia Scherson’s Turistas at SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival). Like my beautiful mother, the very talented Scherson is of the beautiful urban Santiago de Chile. In all honesty, this was our first SIFF film viewing (ever), so that experience in and of itself was quite interesting (i.e. why was there one woman wo-manning the will call/ticket purchase counter while five stood at the door of the theatre handing out voter forms?).
It is the cultural experience of seeing my first film of the motherland (the land of my mother) that I would like to speak about.
Turistas stars the hilarious and talented (alright, as well as insanely beautiful) Aline Küppenheim (how are these for "common" Latin@ names so far?). Like me, Aline is fair-skinned with brown hair (unlike me, she is very skinny!). I was thrilled throughout watching the film to see so many Latin@s who do not fit the stereotypes so tightly clung to in the United States. Latin@s with all colors of skin, hair, and eyes; speaking in a variety of accents and languages, and holding positions from biochemist to park ranger.
Carla meets a new friend!
Turistas follows the often slow-paced adventures of Carla (Aline Küppenheim) after her husband leaves her at the side of the road in a rural area when she steps out to pee (yes, there is a story there and a reason--whether good or bad, you must decide for yourself). While looking for a bus to take back to Santiago, Carla meets up with a young Norweigan man named Ulrik, who is a bit confused about his sexual orientation. The two end up at the amazingly lovely Siete Tazas (Seven Cups) National Park, where they camp among some strange company, a has-been singer of a park ranger, two eccentric look-a-like cousins, and a number of wild creatures demonstrating the chaos and beauty that is nature.
I was lucky enough to see the film at a showing that the director also attended, and a brief Q and A followed the film. One of the points that Scherson made during this time was the sad reality that the park’s eponymous Siete Tazas were destroyed by the February earthquake. The Siete Tazas are a group of seven waterfalls that have served as the park’s main attraction; since February, they have completely dried up.
Siete Tazas before and after
I wish that I could better articulate this experience and actually offer an unbiased review of the film. Turistas as a whole was undoubtedly witty and eccentric, two excellent qualities, in my opinion. Yet, I could not help but become almost entirely focused on the details, getting hints of the lost motherland, comparing ideas in the film with what I have heard from my family. One of the strongest themes that has stayed with me was the manner in which the main character so easily accepted her companion’s sexual confusion—she did not seem to care whether he was gay, straight, or bi, except as pertained to her own pleasure. I have been told so many times that queerness is equated with child molestation in Chile, yet this director, at least, remained far more open-minded in her analysis.
Certain other things stuck in my mind—avocados on hot dogs, free camping, bright ID cards. The manner in which the director simultaneously demonized the construction site tearing down the park while acknowledging its own mechanical beauty. The recognition that there is some beauty in destruction.
“White women fear their children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against them, women of color fear their children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and White women will turn their backs on the reasons the children are dying.”- Audre Lorde
While the approaching warm weather brings to some dreams of rest, fond nostalgia for childhood adventures, and the season of a slower pace, the first songs of the summer bird can be a death knell to the mother of a child of color. For with the heat comes the promise of repose from the heat, found through the participation in water-based sports and other activities.
With the usual warnings, cautionary tales, and kindly meant advice, I would like to offer a brief public service announcement regarding indoor and outdoor swimming venues, and highlight the dangers the season presents for young children of color.
Drowning has been a method of killing intertwined with the violent oppression of people of color for centuries. The cruel stories of watery murders sit fixed within our weaving herstories. From the 132 enslaved Africans of the Zong sacrificed to the sea in 1781 to the recent purposeful sacrifice of New Orleans’ 98% Black Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina. In the mostly unseen sub-sections of our nation’s newspapers, there sit thousands of stories of “illegal immigrants” seeking lives free from the oppression of NAFTA found drowned in the waters surrounding the United States. Many victims of the various U.S. “military interventions” throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have fled their war-torn country in makeshift vessels, often fated to drown in unfamiliar waters. Yet the primary manner in which this drowning manifests today seems even further invisibalized.
According to a 2009 study at the University of Memphis, “drowning is a leading cause of death for children ages 5-14 in the United States, and the inability to swim is one of the most often cited reasons why children drown.” Yet, as alarming as this statistic is on its own, the stress of this issue is further complicated by the reality that Black children are 3 times more likely to be killed from drowning than their White counterparts. In Washington, while 7% of children identify as Asian American, they account for 18% of deaths by drowning, the highest of any racial group in the state (Bock). According to the Center for Disease Control, the fatal drowning rate for Native children is 2.2 times higher that of White children. A 2006 study in the American Journal of Public Health surveyed the deaths of youth between the ages of 5 and 24 by drowning; 47% were Black, 33% were White, and 12% were Latin@.
Paula Bock of the Seattle Times offers a series of reasons as to why this racial disparity exists, including the following rationale: “Families, in general, hand down recreation through the generations.” In consideration of the reality that people of color have been and continue to be (see video below- note use of word "complexion") denied access to public swimming facilities, and the poor quality of waters in the lifeguard-less segregated swimming pools that eventually did emerge for the use of people of color, to what extent can swimming be viewed as an intergenerational pastime within communities of color? The reasoning is simple: how can I learn to swim from my people, those from whom I can achieve new skills most comfortably and inexpensively, if they were not given access to swimming places in which they might have learned the skill in their own childhoods?
According to the aforementioned University of Memphis study, “70% of white and Hispanic children of non-swimmers do not swim themselves; for black children the correlation is 91.”
The question thus becomes, who will teach our kids to swim?
If a child is lucky, she has access to a program like Make a Splash, a “national child-focused water safety initiative” with a mission to teach “minority youth” how to swim. If she’s really lucky, her guardian/s can afford to pay for lessons at her local YWCA. If she’s really really really lucky, she is able to attend a well-funded school where swimming classes are included in the P.E. curriculum.
In her essay “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” the fantastic Audre Lorde discusses how the loss of our children is the most violent oppression that women of color face today. Historically, we have been robbed of our children through forced sterilization and abortion. Indigenous children have been kidnapped be raised in state-run “boarding schools.” This theft and spiritual murder takes a more sinister, surreptitious turn in our present situation, it is ever-present but far less visible; Lorde explains: “violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us” (119).
In Latin@ culture, there exists a myth surrounding a woman referred to as La Llorona, the crier, the weeper. The most popularized story in U.S. society tells of a woman scorned by her lover, the father of her children. This woman, in a Medea-like rage, drowns her children, before taking her own life, and is left to search for her children as a spirit until the end of days.
Mural of "La Llorona" by Juana Alicia, San Francisco, CA
This story was revisited and reconsidered by a wonderfully talented Chicana professor with whom I had the pleasure of studying at Seattle University. She asked us to read the story in consideration of themes such as those addressed in Toni Morrison’s seminal novel Beloved, in which the titular child is slaughtered by her mother when she and her family are about to be discovered as runaway slaves. Why would a sane woman really kill her children?
It seems that only situations murder our children. In the case of La Llorona, we may more realistically imagine that her children were spared through death rather than be allowed to fight as child soldiers in one of the many U.S.-funded Latin American civil wars. The only option remaining when a child is to be taken, the parent deported, and culture forcibly removed through a cruel foster system.
The ghost of La Llorona is more present than ever in our problematic present, wailing for the children she has been lost in an inherently racist and cruelly apathetic environment. The children are dying, oftentimes within the womb of the mother hyperactively stressed from the terror of living while continuous oppressed (Allers). A beautiful post on the Womanist Musings blog asks “Who Will Love the Black Child?” “Whiteness would love to see us cast aside our babies,” this La Llorona weeps, “They are our future and the best of us flows within their tiny beating hearts.”
Saluja, Gitanjali, et al. “Swimming Pool Drownings Among US Residents Aged 5–24 Years: Understanding Racial/Ethnic Disparities.” American Journal of Public Health 96.4 (2006): 728-733. 1 June 2010. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16507730
This meeting was held on Saturday, May 29, 2010 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Seattle, Washington
Agenda:
Debrief From Tuesday
Collabing with main campus/other UWB programs such as MAPS
End of vear- video and potluck (next year)
Website/discussion board
Open-blog, group closed
Becoming a club- “undermining our street cred”
Goals
Blog
Ideas to Reflect Upon:
Why is it that the pain of people of color is looked at in certain ways- when our bodies are in that space, how we are viewed, and how that is looked at and put on display?
The separation of issues- disconnect between what the dominant culture recognizes as oppression through the readings, but not connecting it with the real world, therefore the problem is about “us” without any accountability to their own action.
Official Club Status:
Email S. to ask to become our advisor.
Recognizing the problem of “official-izing,” losing our street cred as an organization for radical women of color—but buying into the model for now to better reach young women of color—becoming known
Submitting origin story versus constitution—if that fails, then submit constitution—trying to undermine the process.
Goals:
Creating a space on the UWB campus that allows female graduate students of color to network.
Creating a graduate-undergraduate mentorship program
Discuss current issues that graduate students of color, particularly women of color, face in the academia
Sharing different growing experiences
Solidarity
Recognizes ways in which oppression manifests within the classroom
Safe space
Having an outlet to share those experience and gain further insight- get advice for dealing with such issues from peers/mentors
Collaborate between programs and among campuses
Process for Becoming a Known Collaborative Space on Campus:
Became an “official” club--list of goals, mission, partnerships, course of action, faculty advisor, status as a club
Send information to programs for inclusion in newsletters for fall
Pick date of first event- welcoming new grad students of color- Friday Oct 8- doing it on campus for space- happy hour
I ask you all to take a few moments this Memorial Day and watch the video embedded above, in which photographer Aaron Huey asks us to give recognition to the blood of Native soldiers and civilians spilled in the creation of the United States. Memorial Day often sees tribute paid to the American soldiers who have died in service of the U.S. government, yet little attention is given to the soldiers whose lives were lost in battles for survival against U.S. soldiers.
In his memoir, Black Elk reflects on the Wounded Knee Massacre, the turning point in Native history, which saw the transformation of all Native people into prisoners of war:
…it was all over.
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.
And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,- you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead (207).
Some further memories of the Wounded Knee Massacre are remembered in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:
We tried to run, but they shot us like we were a buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children (444). -Louise Weasel Bear
I was running away from the place and followed those who were running away. My grandfather and grandmother and brother were killed as we crossed the ravine, and then I was shot on the right hip clear through and on my wrist where I did not go any further as I was not able to walk, and after the soldier picked me up where a little girl came to me and crawled into the blanket (444). -Hakiktawin
I also ask that you consider the plight of the Nez Perce, who, after choosing to flee their land in hopes of escaping the brutal attacks and repeated broken treaties of the U.S. government, were pursued and systematically slaughtered while trying to escape to Canada. The path that these exiles traveled has become known as the Nez Perce Trail. The efforts of Chief Joseph and the remaining 431 Nez Perce were ended in 1877 at the Battle of the Bear Paw, in which an armed civilian makeshift militia fought and lost against U.S. army soldiers. The battle took place just 40 miles from the Canadian border.
This short video offers a brief history of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce:
I will conclude with Chief Joseph’s speech of surrender to General Howard, words which I hope express the importance of remembering the legacy of Native soldiers:
Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Tu-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
Works Cited
Black Elk, Nicholas. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Ed. John G. Neihardt. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1979.
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Owl Books, 1970.
Chief Joseph. “Surrender at the Battle of Bear Paw.” Chinook, Montana. 5 Oct. 1877.
Please comment! Say, "really, you think they gonna fund you with sass like that?" Particularly in light of the readings this week for BCULST 502 (most came from INCITE!).
Also, we need a name. All the naming we've done for this group so far can easily be changed. Cheers!
Constitution
Article I: The official name of this campus organization shall be the University of Washington Bothell Graduate Women of Color Collective (GWoCC). This group shall be affiliated with the Women of Color Collective (WoCC) on the UW Seattle campus.
Article 2: The purpose of this organization is to create a space both online and on-campus for community building and a sense of belonging among graduate women of color. The women in this collective will furthermore act as a support network and group within which to speak of issues pertaining to being a woman of color in the academia, and will purposefully seek to act as mentors for undergraduate women of color considering graduate school.
Article 3: Membership in this organization will be limited to current graduate women of color, though further collaboration will be actively sought to include graduate men of color, undergraduate women of color, and other women graduate students.
Article 4: As an egalitarian organization, no hierarchical system of governance shall be put in place. The founding members will take responsibility for organizing events and furthering the organization’s cause throughout the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years.
Article 5: See Article 4 for information pertaining to practices of governance suggested but refused as per the mission of this organization.
Article 6: Due to the both internet-based and in-person nature of this collective, regular meetings will not be scheduled. The group shall attempt to meet in-person at least once a month, but expects that these meetings will become more frequent in Fall 2010. Any member may call a meeting and there is no minimum for number of students who need be involved.
La Sebastiana is the vacation home of Chileno poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Pablo Neruda. It is located on the sea, amid the many colored buildings in the town of Valparaíso, Chile. While Neruda loved to visit Valparaíso to escape the political tensions of the capital, he had a difficult time finding a house to meet all of his artistic requirements. It would have to be "far from everything, but next to transportation," "light but firm," "original but comfortable," and "lonely, but not too much."
Finding no house that was wholly satisfactory, Neruda purchased La Sebastiana, settling for something that was cheap instead. He then spent the next three years creating of this house the beautiful home that would become a staple in Chilean poetic imagination. On completion of his home, Neruda wrote the poem "To La Sebastiana," which included the lines:
I built the house.
I made it first out of air. Later I raised its flag into the air and left it draped from the firmament, from the stars, from clear light and darkness.
As the child of a Chilena immigrant to the US in the wake of Chile's sad history in the 70's and beyond, La Sebastiana and the poetry of Pablo Neruda have felt like my links to the motherland. With a lost sense of belonging in a country that seems to grow ever more resentful of people of the Latin races, I look to La Sebastiana and wonder if it might be the home I have sought since childhood. With its strange configuration of structure, color, stairs, and greenery, it seems so purposefully out of place- so perfectly out of place.
Neruda was not himself well or widely accepted, yet he did not hide himself or make attempts to "fit in." I hope that I can learn from his life this quality of self-acceptance, peace, internal beauty, catharsis through creativity, and general disregard for the unwarranted ill opinions of others.
La Sebastiana Amanda Martin Sandino
I can imagine the waves keeping a steady tempo in (they come) and out (they go) and I inhale, sigh deeply, keep the pace within me ocean smells connecting memory to dream
All this talk of basements, hidden rooms, secrets and banishment You were never illegal to me You were a house you touched the sky with finger ripples and whispered into the unseen ears of rain-filled clouds You were thousands of colors, clashing against yourself and you were a thousand words “solitario, pero no demasiado” “lonely, but not too much” in a kingdom by the sea
I can imagine you sitting by the window on the highest floor You look out at the harbor, at the ships And imagine mermaids thrown from the sea You see in the void The eyes of some lost lover ¿Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos? waiting for years that go by slowly like an age of war the sound of the clock the heartbeat of your home, your heartbeat the rhythm of disappointment
To me, you were and are, in your death, my pride, my nationalistic fervor the lost motherland you are la Sebastiana a stranger a translation an unknown home searched for in translation or somewhere among those thousand steps within your skyscraper of a house sitting beside the stretching Pacífico
