———————————————————————————————————–

Beata Tsosie-Peña was selected to be a Green For All Fellow Candidate. Candidates participate from around the nation in the Green For All Leadership Academy, which includes a four-day training ranging from media and messaging to the economics of green. They then commit to a nine-month term of service as ambassadors of the movement in their communities. After nine months of organizing educational events and workshops, speaking at conferences, running policy and organizing campaigns, leading community sustainability initiatives, and otherwise serving their communities, Candidates graduate to become Green For All Fellows. Here is a link to a blog she has written as part of her term of service while working for Environmental Health and Justice with Tewa Women United.

Reflections on Environmental Justice from Northern New Mexico Blog by Beata Tsosie

Sign-on and join the Green For All Network

————————————————————————————————————
Seeds of Beauty

Girl Scouts, Tewa Women United pursue beautification projects near City Hall, Española Plaza
By Bill Rettew Jr., SUN Staff Writer
Published::Thursday, March 15, 2012 10:07 AM MDT

With a little help from friends, city land at the Española Plaza and behind City Hall is set to get some sprucing up.

An Española Girl Scout troop aims to plant flowers at an approximately 200-square-foot site near the old post office on the Plaza. A couple hundred yards away near the horno just outside the Misión y Convento, the troop is also planning a new vegetable garden with the hopes that it will feed the needy at the San Martin de Porres Soup Kitchen.

Nearby, on the steep, sandy slope behind City Hall, the nonprofit Tewa Women United plans to plant about 25 fruit trees in newly built terraces.

The City Council unanimously approved both projects Feb. 28.

Beata Tsosie-Peña, program coordinator for Tewa Women United, said the hill will likely contain plants and 4-foot tree seedlings. The new landscaping should prove beneficial in other ways for an area with little rainfall, she said. She said terraces made of wooden railroad ties, rock or masonry could shore up the hillside and prevent erosion.

There are a lot of knowledgeable folks in the agriculture community using such thousand-year-old methods, Tsosie-Peña said.

Community members will also learn while volunteering during the transformation of the now dusty area between City Hall and Valdez Park.

“What’s really exciting is this opportunity for community engagement around traditional dry-land farming methods,” Tsosie-Peña said.

If the soil behind City Hall checks out free of contaminants, following possible testing by students and staff at Northern New Mexico College, the fruit trees could bear apples and other produce available to anyone willing to pick them, Tsosie-Peña said.

“There’s nothing more enjoyable than hanging out under the blossoming trees and eating the unripened and then ripened fruit,” Tsosie-Peña said. “Usually when people plant trees in parks­ it’s just for shade, but landscaping can have many purposes such as providing natural medicine, conserving water, educating the community, and adding to the stainability of the community.”

Local, non-genetically modified trees surrounded by plants on the hillside will benefit the city by controlling erosion while preventing possible structural damage to City Hall, she said.

Tsosie-Peña said the project will also save valuable water, suppress weeds, adjust nitrogen levels and attract beneficial insects.

Ground-breaking is expected in April, with a possible completion date in June or July depending on the strength of financial and volunteer support, according to Tsosie-Peña.

Girl Scout Troop 10454 has ambitious plans for the Plaza.

Troop leader Alisha Duran, along with her 4-year-old daughter and Daisy Girl Scout Melayah Duran, inspected a pair of sites at the Plaza Monday.

Eight members of the troop have set aside time during weekly “Girl Scout Saturdays” to plant flowers in a bid for the girls to earn badges. Marigolds, morning glories and sunflowers will all combine to create a “Daisy Garden,” Duran said.

Alisha Duran’s husband, Lloyd Duran, a manager at the Española Lowe’s Home Improvement store, said the store agreed to supply flowers at no charge for the site near the old post office and Convento on Calle de las Españolas.

Vegetables, including possibly pumpkins, corn, zucchini, jalapeños, carrots and tomatoes will sprout from scout-planted seeds at another similar-sized patch of ground near the Convento, Alisha Duran said.

“This makes me feel really good,” Alisha Duran said. “Española sometimes gets a bad rap. We want people to know that there’s positives for youth.”

Lloyd Duran agreed.

“It’s something good for the youth to do,” he said. “It’s something better for our kids to do than getting in trouble and to help the community look better.”

Organizers from both projects encouraged volunteers or anyone else interested in getting involved to contact them.

To help with the Plaza project, call Vanessa at 983-6339. To pitch in on the City Hall project or learn more about low-rain farming, call 927-1847.

The Plan B pill is legally available over the counter to any woman age 17 or older and to women age 16 and younger with a prescription. It is effective in preventing pregnancy up to 72 hours after intercourse occurs. American women routinely take it following a sexual assault in which pregnancy may occur.

But the Indian Health Service (IHS), the primary source of medical care for women throughout Indian country, does not consistently make Plan B available to its clientele, even though they are among the most likely group of women to be raped in this country. According to the NAWHERC report, more than one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetime. Of Native American girls who have been sexually active, 92 percent reported having been forced against their will to have sexual intercourse on a date.

Why are Native Women being deprived of Plan B?

“There is very little oversight of the Indian Health Service,” said Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the NAWHERC on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Lake Andes, South Dakota. “IHS also leaves too much to the local level, which does not honor the standardized policies and protocols that are mandated by the [Tribal Law and Order Act]. IHS is also leaving the decision of contraceptive choice up to the local level, which means these decisions are often made by the local tribal health boards, and have few or no women serving on them.”

Like other women, Native women who are already marginalized by the tribal health boards are further affected by a raging public debate about Plan B’s availability to young women under age 17. In December 2011, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommendation that Plan B be made available over the counter to all women of childbearing age. Sebelius based her decision on what she considered the potentially harmful effects of Plan B on a young woman’s body. But many politicians and activists, citing the science of the FDA recommendation, accused the Obama administration of caving in to pressure from social conservatives in advance of the 2012 elections.

Plan B, which has no effect on existing pregnancies, is not an abortion pill. Nevertheless, a heated debate fueled by press statements from both HHS and the FDA has ensued. Plan B is currently available to women age 16 and younger with a prescription, yet women in Indian Country 17 years of age and over are still unable to obtain Plan B in the communities where they live.

“Local community members can be influenced by the ‘church’ depending on the area, Oklahoma being the Bible Belt, the South West being the Catholic Church and so on,” Asotoyer says. To escape a kind of tyranny over her own body, a Native woman in need of Plan B on any number of reservations would require the resources to travel 100 or more miles to a pharmacy carrying Plan B. Then she would need an additional $50 to purchase Plan B once she gets there. For Asotoyer, a member of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma living South Dakota, making Plan B available to Native women in the communities where they live isn’t just a legal issue—it’s a human rights issue. “For Indigenous Peoples,” she adds, “it also becomes a violation of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration sets out the individual and collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as their right to health. Article 23 states Indigenous Peoples have the right to be actively involved in developing and determining health, housing and other economic and social programs, affecting them and, as far as possible, to administer such programs through their own institutions.”

Maya Torralba, a Kiowa from Oklahoma and founder of Anadarko Community Esteem Project, says, “The rights of Native American women are never at the forefront of any government policy or legislation.” She suggests that the politicization of the public debate over young women’s access to Plan B diminishes the opportunity for real action in Indian Country. “If we could get political leaders to put aside rhetoric and look at the realities of rape statistics in Indian Country,” Torralba says, “it could potentially end the discussion and create the start of a solution.”

Native women must empower themselves with the facts about Plan B, as Torralba says, to “gain better access to information about the differences between emergency contraception and abortion.” This basic fact-finding will help elevate the discourse and launch a real movement to improve women’s lives.

A rigorous discourse about the inseparable problem of sexual violence in Native communities must also reach critical mass. The high incidence of rape in Indian Country is comparable to that of a war zone; and, for survivors, the complex and severe consequences of rape include Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, a condition commonly associated with war veterans.

This essential discussion has started under the auspices of the NAWHERC. Asetoyer says, “Years ago we started convening groups of Native women in a roundtable setting which are small group that provide a safe place for women to share information that they might not feel so comfortable doing otherwise.” A summary of their discussion of Plan B is available in “Indigenous Women’s Dialogue” report, and includes the voices of Native women who are advocates, health care workers, and ordinary women living in South Dakota, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

About the roundtable discussion, Torralba says, “My experience from this forum was that the participants were strong Native women who have dedicated their lives to working hard for the issues in their communities. What I learned from them is that we, as Native women, need to speak up more and work harder for our daughters and the sanctity of their lives. I speak not only as an advocate, but also a survivor.”

Many of the participants shared personal narratives, stories of their own experiences with, or as rape victims. One of those participants was consultant Pamela Kingfisher, a Cherokee, born to the Bird Clan, who lives in Cherokee County, Oklahoma. Kingfisher praises Asetoyer’s organization for honoring a tradition of female empowerment through female talk: “Native women have utilized our women’s societies to support and discuss women’s issues in this way throughout history. I find it is best to bring a variety of voices to the table in order to get the full picture and hear from many differing perspectives. The NAWHERC is known for their Roundtable discussions. I attended my first one in 1988 and I respect the traditional ways of operating and applaud their continuance and respect, for community women, not just our leaders or media stars.”

The community women at this roundtable expressed the ways socio-political issues impact their personal lives. Kingfisher honors them by remembering her own mother, and she bears witness to the violence Native women experience behind a veil of indifference that renders them invisible.

“Post-colonial, inter-generational traumatic stress,” contribute to the high incidence of rape in Indian Country, she says. “Many of our elders (including my mother) were raised in boarding schools and were sexually abused by Priests and Nuns. These are the only ‘schools’ in America that have graveyards, and with babies in them! The poverty, isolation, depression and alcohol abuse will wear a person down to their base selves and they act out in return. Our people don’t talk about sex, birth control, and predatory actions, so we have generations of secrets and un-educated teenagers having sex and babies. The legal systems on reservations preclude local police, only FBI has jurisdiction, and many of the tribal leaders are abusers, so most rape goes unpunished and not talked about.”

According to Asetoyer, before passage of the TLOA, the FBI didn’t spend resources to investigate rape charges on reservations where there were no forensic witnesses available, and forensic witnesses were not consistently available because the IHS “could take several months to get approval” for the health care provider who conducted the rape exam to appear in court to testify. Even more egregious, according to Asetoyer: rape exams do not consistently take place in Indian Country. Even today, “Due to a lack of resources,” she says, “IHS staff are not trained or do not always have the necessary equipment to do rape exams.”

Without evidence that a rape has occurred, Asetoyer continues, “a lot of cases never end up in court and the perpetrator is left to rape again. Many rapes are committed by non-Indians and the issue of jurisdiction complicates cases even more. Tribes need to have the right to jurisdiction of people that commit crimes on reservations no matter what race they are. In other words, the law protects those perpetrators that are not Indian and prevents Native Americans from the protections of due process.”

Kingfisher adds that reliable protections have never been in place for Native American women. “Rape is a tool of war,” she says. “It was used on us beginning in the 1500’s.” Alluding to the psychological damage that began to manifest, according to Kingfisher, by the mid-20th century, she says, “After progroms of annihilation and assimilation didn’t work, we became our own worst enemies by the 1950’s. This powerful tool took on new meaning to completely powerless and degraded warrior men who had no choice but to become oppressors, as they had been oppressed.”

The battle to make emergency contraception available to the women most in need of it is, according to Kingfisher, “a silent war.” With women who attended their meetings contending with “their families and tribal leaders praying for them because they had come to this dangerous meeting to talk about contraception,” she says incredulously, and tribal leadership reluctant to support “any negative discussions about what goes on… women end up taking the brunt of it all.”

These real women literally, physically, taking the brunt of ignorance, fear, shame, and generations of displacement and loss often don’t even know emergency contraception exists. Kingfisher asserts that when the IHS refuses to stock Plan B—and inform women that this form of contraception is a legal option for them to consider—religion, politics, and patriarchy “get in the way” of women and their right to reclaim their bodies from the rapists who would continue to possess them with an unwanted pregnancy even after the rape has occurred.

The Affordable Care Act guidelines, Asetoyer says, “include women’s preventive services, including FDA-approved contraception methods and contraceptive counseling. If this was being followed Native American women would be receiving Plan B upon request as an ‘OTC.’” But with all the recent public debate surrounding contraception, abortion, and women’s rights, particularly in this election year, the issue of rape and Plan B access in Indian Country has not been part of that mainstream discussion.

“As less than 1 percent of the population,” Kingfisher says, “hidden from sight on remote reservations or in the urban melting pot, we are the forgotten people of this land. America will never fully address the wrongs done to Native peoples in order for them to own this country, so we are the shameful orphans of America. We are reminders of their own ancestors’ inhumanity and America doesn’t know how to begin to heal this wound.”

It is a wound slicing Native women, cutting them from the power to reassert authority over their own bodies following sexual assault, cutting them from their essential selves.

To Read More go to Indian Country Media Network

WINNING STRATEGIES FOR ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION OF RURAL AND INDIGENOUS WOMEN

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012, UNCSW 56

The Women’s Intercultural Network (WIN) invites all NGOs to an interactive Roundtable and Forum on “Winning Strategies for Economic Participation of Rural and Indigenous Women” .

This 4th WINNING STRATEGIES Parallel event convened by WIN and US Women Connect at a UN CSW Session is a follow up to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Women’s Economic Summit (WES) convened by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton in September 2011. This year’s UN CSW theme of ‘Empowering Rural and Indigenous Women’ is a perfect opportunity to engage women who are isolated and left behind in most countries.

Secretary Clinton launched the Women’s Economic Summit as “The Age of Participation” and brought together 800 senior private and public sector players for a dialogue on fostering women’s economic empowerment among APEC economies and formed a set of economic policy recommendations in the San Francisco Declaration.

This year’s WINNING STRATEGIES Forum will expand the WES Declaration globally adding experiences and comments of rural and indigenous women working ‘on the ground’, living with an economy and surviving economic policies they often have no voice in making. They will add a fresh perspective with innovative micro-enterprise models and concepts that are replicable for sustainable growth and prosperity.

We will video tape and post the ‘best practices’ and winning strategies on web media. All women are vital as participants in economic recovery locally and globally.

Panelists:
Olivia Calderon, Moderator, CA Legislative Director New America Foundation, WIN Board of Directors
Dian J. Harrison, Chair, WIN, USA; Advisory Council Kayunga Peace Centre, Republic of Uganda
Marily Mondejar, President, Filipina Women’s Network
Mona Motwani, Human Rights Attorney, Co-Founder, SPARK San
Francisco
Helene Rama Niang, Exec. Director, NGO Network for
Development, Dakar, Senegal
Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, Tewa Women United; Co-Chair US Women Connect

I embraced anger, clung to it. It was my friend, my shield, my protector. It helped me get through the loss of self, of family, of friends, of innocence, of culture…of my spirit. I could not see at that time that as it kept me alive, helped me move in and through the darkness, it was also killing me. Anger, was killing the loving, open, authentic, powerful, cultural being that I was dreamed to be from time immemorial. As I (and you), am the collection, the connection, the vessel in which the breath of the ancestors, the breath of the ancient, the breath of the divine coalesce.

Anger, and anger’s companions of guilt and shame were erasing the ancestral connection to my ability to name me and claim my space, my power. But it was more than this it was a strategic and heinous genocide that spread across oceans, spread across generations, hijacking the consciousness of humanity, masterminded by the Culture of Violence. Whose legacy has been the fragmentation of the spirit of all of us whether we choose to acknowledge this or not. We see it in the manifestation of war, abuse, suicide, substance abuse, corporate greed, the inability to hold space for multiple worldviews, the institutionalization of oppression. How do we uproot the foundation of this country we love and embrace but that is slowly killing us and our Mother, the Earth? How do we uproot the Culture of Violence?

I go back to the ancient knowledge of the ancestors. It comes to what I (YOU) choose to feed, the negative or the positive. It is about healing. It is about the re-claiming and replanting ourselves in the Culture of Peace. It is about letting go and embracing Love, to re-learn how to Love, to feed Love, to grow Love, to be generous with Love to others but most important to self. It is about stepping into our power from a space rooted in spirit. It is about liberating the consciousness of humanity.

Our second convening focused in on leadership, our own leadership and the leadership of the Movement. We were given the definition that Leadership is the ability to inspire and align others to successfully achieve a common goal. In our earlier visioning of the world we wish to live we co-created the image you see below.

We came to call this vision the Beloved Community. What stood out for me was that we saw a space in which everyone has a role and everyone is valued. For me this means that all of us, those in this cohort, you reading this, the young and the old, men and women, ordinary peoples, are Leaders in the co-creation of the Movement of Beloved Communities rooted in the Culture of Peace. We all have gifts and talents and purpose to bring to the Movement. In the act of moving toward Beloved Communities rooted in the Culture of Peace, we naturally move away from a place that allows violence to exist.

These tears that come almost daily when I gather with my cohort family are different from the tears I described earlier. These tears are of happiness. They come from being touched by a power of transformation. These tears come from my heart, my soul. From a sense of fullness, a sense of witnessing Spirit. They come from a sense of coming home, of returning, of dreams fulfilled and the manifestation of Prayers.

“A farmer and a midwife do the same work. We learned midwife­ry from the corn.” These are the words of Katsi Cook, a Mohawk elder, healer, midwife and environmental health re­searcher who visited the Yiya Vi Kagingdi Espanola Community Doulas at Tewa Women United last year. She was part of a panel of traditional birth work­ers that the program hosted so that the doulas and their networks could gain a better sense of how to bring traditional wisdom into their work in indigenous rural communities. Cook spoke of the importance of birth work as an ele­ment of a sustainable community. She said that this work is not only about the reproduction of individual people; it is also about the reproduction of a culture. She taught us that part of working as a midwife or doula is working inside this complexity, weaving together a circle of people and community so that you can build a practice that rises out of the ground from where you are situated. “In the act of growing corn, you begin to feel about corn like babies that are grow­ing,” Cook explained, and she related the gestational cycle of corn to that of a human gestation, and corn’s structure to the body of a woman, the silks, her ova­ries. The “three sisters”- corn, beans and squash — are symbols of women helping each other and working together, an es­sential element of the birthing process. In any discussion of permaculture and sustainable living, we must bring in a discussion of the way we birth the babies in our communities.

Adding more consciousness to the process of pregnancy, laboring and birth has been the goal of the Yiya Vi Kagingdi Espanola Community Dou­las since its inception in 2008. The doulas have had the fortune of being present for the first breaths of many northern New Mexico babies over these two years. “Yiya Vi Kagingdi” is Tewa for “helper of the mother.” A doula is a non-medical labor sup­port person who provides physical, emotional, informational and spiritual support to a woman and her family. The doula joins the family for the en­tire labor and birth and helps support the new mother as she learns to nurse her baby. She visits with families dur­ing the weeks after the birth, offering them support and encouragement.

The program is a community-based model, which means that the women who work as doulas come from the communities in which they serve. They joined with little experience, and through training and practice working with families, they have become in­credibly skilled lay health workers and essential members of the healthcare team in this community. This group of 10 doulas, who are mostly volunteers, have been on call to families and at­tended births at homes or hospitals, wherever their clients chose to deliver.

Kaleo in a cradleboard

From the first visit, the doula begins to cultivate a relationship with her cli­ent, encouraging questions, discuss­ing the realities of giving birth both to a baby and to herself as a mother. Doulas encourage the building of a healthy attachment relationship be­tween mother and baby during the entire pregnancy, and emphasize the importance of connecting to the baby even before the birth. Doulas attend mothers in asking questions to become informed about her upcoming experi­ence. Doulas teach childbirth classes and prepare moth­ers for breastfeed­ing. Doulas are of­ten the first to arrive when a new mother has a worry or needs an extra set of hands with her new baby.

The doulas have truly made a differ­ence in the outcomes for many local babies. Recently the program received a call from a mother who had sched­uled a Cesarean birth. She had already gone to the hospital and was hooked up to IV’s and monitors, preparing to go in for surgery, when suddenly she realized that her baby was not ready to be born. Her doctor supported her decision to attempt to have the baby naturally, and allowed her to go home, under the condition that she call the doula program and get set up with a doula who could support her. That same day, she came in to the doula pro­gram office for an intake appointment, had a quick childbirth class with a few doulas, and two weeks later had her baby with the support of doulas by her side, and a baby who surely was happy to have some extra time to ripen.

Crystal with Graciela

Another young woman came in to the program with no idea what a doula does. She had heard about the pro­gram from a friend, and at first just thought she would check it out, at the very least to see if the program knew of a place to find an affordable crib. She signed up and was set up with a doula who became a really important mentor for her. They built a relation­ship that was very strong, unlike any this young mother had ever experi­enced, and this mother decided that she would only like her doula to be present for the birth. A year and a half later, this mother who never thought she would breastfeed is still breast­feeding her baby and thinks one day she may become a doula herself and work in early childhood. She describes the bond she feels with her baby as a type of love she has never felt in her life before.

The doulas are doing something tre­mendous for this community. They are tending the seeds, carefully and slowly, from which more and more memory can grow. We are only a few genera­tions away from when the people of this land birthed at home with tradi­tional midwifes by their side. It hasn’t been forgotten but we need help with this process of gaining back what has been pushed aside. In Cook’s optimis­tic words, “We are in a moment of re­covery in our communities.”Just like tending our corn, we must tend these new families, water them with sup­port and encouragement, enrich their soil with a trust in their bodies, so that perhaps one day more of our moth­ers will choose to give birth in the old way, to a generation of those who re­member and are remembered.

Hope Logghe

Hope Logghe is a program coordinator for the Yiya Vi Kagingdi doula program and has attended births as a doula for over two years. She was born at home in rural northern New Mexico and aspires to one day become a midwife and lactation consultant in her community. For more information, visit: www.tewawomenunited.org/aboutdoula.htm

Reprinted by permission of Green Fire Times.  Visit the website at: www.GreenFireTimes.com