My Grandpa Knew That

"FACING THE FACTS


If there are energy shortages, individuals will have water problems.
If there is ecological damage, individuals will have water problems.
If there are economic crisis, individuals will have water problems.
If there are computer glitches, individuals will have water problems.
If there is political turmoil, individuals will have water problems.
If there is war, individuals will have water problems.


Almost anything that happens in the future can result in questionable availability of fresh water. This is not just an environmental problem. The continued pollution of the atmosphere, the surface and subsurface of the earth is not the only cause for alarm about availability of fresh water. Water availability to individuals is dependent on every other social system being in place, stable, healthy and at peace. It is inevitable that we will experience failure of one or more of these systems at some point in the future."
-from the Garbage Warrior's website: www.earthship.net


On Wednesday, the 18th of Nilch'ih Ts'ósí, we went to a class at our local nursery. We signed up for a Rain Barrel class; it was renamed "Winter Tasks: Water and Lighting." The class leader, from the Urban Farmer Store, introduced the theme reminding us that winter requires us to alter our behaviors: our plants need less water and we have more dark, less light, daily. We are entering our rain season: November to March.


Most rain is directed off roofs directly into sewage drains which empty into the bay and the ocean. The city of San Francisco has begun a program to encourage people to divert their drains into rainwater harvesting systems. They are even offering rebates. We received handouts and a very brief demonstration. It's really quite simple. In San Francisco (and many municipalities) we water with potable water that comes pressurized, with energy added to it. Every drop of rain water saved, reused or diverted back into the aquifer reduces the water, energy and chemicals used to treat stormwater, and transport potable water from the reservoirs. Keeping this relatively clean (rain) water out of the sewer system is easy. San Francisco only gets a one inch rain twenty times a year. Every 1,000 square foot home, during a one inch rain, could store 620 gallons of rainwater.


The Urban Farmer Store has manufactured rain barrels from reused olive barrels. They are available for purchase. With the city rebate it's quite inexpensive to install barrels at home. You will need a little sweat equity. Other sleeker and larger barrels are available from other manufactures, at a higher cost, but the point is how easy and inexpensive a basic system is to set up. If you can't use your harvested water (you have no garden, or your architecture makes it impossible), you can at least let it drain slowly (soak in) and replenish the aquifer.


San Francisco has very few permeable surfaces, even less than Manhattan.


After a discussion of permeable pavers and rain gardens one of the participants asked, "When will I make my money back?"


The leader responded: "That's like listening to music and asking when am I going to get my return on this purchase?"


Nothing will allow a people to go beyond a third or fourth year drought; as they enter the fifth and sixth year, they will give up their hope for rain.


During this last "storm" (Friday, the 20th) I heard many complaints about the rain. The best one being that it would interrupt someone's granddaughter's soccer game. When this grandma was told that the storm was fast moving and would surely be gone by Saturday she was relieved, briefly, until she realized it would probably make the field soggy. That doesn't top my favorite complaint: I can't wear flip flops. (But that leads to an entirely different discussion of shoes and why the very population that forced hard soled footwear on us now refuses to wear them.)


Many thinkers are blaming our current environmental problems on an idea that humans "just couldn't handle the transition from being hunter-gathers to high technology."


Scholars have tended to view us (American Indians) as a people who lack technology and architecture. But Daniel Wildcat, a Yuchi of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and co-director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center, offers a more nuanced understanding of our relationship to technology.


In Power and Place he writes: "It appears natural selection has not selected us for a particular niche or place on the planet, but has selected traits that have allowed human beings, with the use of technology, to adapt to different places and environments on our Mother Earth.


Central among those traits is our sociability or social nature. . .our physiological awkwardness dictates a necessity for toolmaking and manipulation absent among other animal species. This is less a sign of human superiority than a sign of biological difference. In my mind this explains why in our traditional indigenous ways of speaking and praying we so often describe ourselves as pitiful beings. Humans depend on many good relations and relatives to live and survive in this world—hardly superstition, just ecological fact. Nature, nurture, and technology are intimately connected."


As we enter this yearly ritual of excessive consumption (Thanksgiving till Christmas) I want to highlight the fact that our (world) economy is based on severed relations. Simply ask yourself where your electricity or water come from, who sewed your underwear, or where your last apple was grown and what was the name of the individual who picked it.


In Slow Money, Tasch writes: "By prioritizing markets over households, community, place and land, the modern economy does violence to the relationships that underpin health and that give life-sustaining meaning—family relationships, community relationships, relationships between consumers and producers and between investors and the enterprises in which they invest, relationships between companies and the places in which they do business, relationships to the land and in the soil. Such relationships are attenuated, or in the extreme, deracinated, by the modern, global economy."


We can start simply by shaping our lives to the patterns of the earth not "the market." Detailed knowledge of the earth's patterns is precisely what we find in the oral tradition and tribal languages of indigenous peoples; this knowledge has been handed down for generations. For many, though, this will mean a new beginning, shaping daily life, including the care and construction of home, first by addressing how they are using and treating dirt, water, human waste, sun and wind.


Michael Reynolds, the Garbage Warrior, creator of the Earthship calls for "direct living," building the mechanism for "taking responsibility for what happens beyond the reach of our fingertips. Light switches and faucets" into each home he builds whether it is on Pine Ridge, Nogales, or Andaman Island India.


The land has a rhythm, if we step in time. We can be dancing in a house of beauty.

My Grandpa Knew That

Never Forget.

I received an email, announcing the arrival of 700 Marines in New York on November seventh, from my cousin. Her son is a Marine; he has served two tours of duty in Iraq, and she is proud.

We have a long history of fighting for our homelands. My uncles escaped service because, like their father, both were alcoholics and color blind; but my cousins served: Cipriano Montes (World War II), Gilbert Tamayo, Bobby Tamayo, and Frank "Babe" Rodriquez (Vietnam).

My cousins' email proudly announced, in blue boldface size 16 font: It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center. It is the fifth in a new class of warship—designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft.

Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, LA to cast the ship's bow section. When it was poured into the molds on Sept. 9, 2003, "those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence," recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. "It was a spiritual moment for everybody there."

Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the "hair on my neck stood up. It had big meaning to it for all of us, " he said. "They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back."

The email concluded with this request: Please keep this going so everyone can see what we are made of in this country! Blessed are those who have one hand held by God and the other held by a friend!

I keep asking myself who could think of this.

Never Forget.

The official US Navy sight says the Commissioning Ceremony of PCU New York (scheduled for November 7th, 2009 at the Intrepid Museum Pier 88 South, Pier 86 North NYC, NY), "is the occasion when the ship will 'Come Alive" and the New York becomes USS New York.

When the ship was Christened, on the first of March, 2008, in Avondale LA, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England offered the follow "remarks:" "These three ships (USS Arlington, USS Somerset, the USS New York) stand for 'life, liberty. . . and the pursuit of all who threaten it' and will ensure that we never forget. . . 11 September 2001."

President Bush, the born again, inspired the ship's motto "Strength forged through sacrifice. Never Forget." when he visited the Pentagon on September 12, the day after the towers were struck down. He told those at the meeting, "I will never forget." And he continued by going around the room, looking at each person, his eye to theirs repeating, "never forget."

During the ship's Christening England went on to say, "Ultimately what will win the war on terror—like the cold war—are the choices people make, whether the terrorists' path of violence, or the far better path of Peace, Democracy, and Development."

Never forget language.

Never forget the way we live matters.

I still cannot fully comprehend this Frankenstein project: transforming the refuse of the Twin Towers into a war ship, Christening this weapon, and then bringing it to life in a public ceremony.

Everyone knows the Marine's motto: When it absolutely has to be destroyed over night.

Never forget our genocide is not complete.

The earth is our mother. She sustains us and any livelihood founded on her destruction is unequivocally self annihilating. Contemporary society is very pleased with itself, extolling the superiority of its skill set and the victory of technology over hunting, gathering and agrarian lives.

Deloria and Wildcat remind us that our ancestors judged their spiritual and intellectual development when "people could recognize an imbalance and address it as a society of interrelated people."

The attack on the Twin Towers clearly reflected an imbalance.

In his book Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered, Woody Tasch asks his readers to commit to a few basic ideological truths: "We need to discover ways of thinking and speaking that can put economics in its place. . . In our devotion to money, market, and machine, we are destroying not only the fertility of the soil, but the fertility of our imaginations."

Slow Money as a philosophy offers a redress to our current imbalances by non violent action. These non violent acts are a greater threat to this nation than any weapon yet manufactured by the US Military because they place the relationships between people, plants and animals at the center of all thought and all activity.

Tasch continues: "Advocacy revolving around agrarianism and around appropriate scale and appropriate technology. . . are part of the broader historical movement toward the possibility that one day, non-violence might trump violence as an organizing principle for the affairs of man."

Never forget: We are children of earth. Who are they?

My Grandpa Knew That

Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, in his first book, Banker to the Poor, writes, "Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all."

Poverty is often thought of only in terms of cold hard cash, or in recent times, the quicksand of credit. But I grew up with Dolly and her coat of many colors, and "I knew I was rich." It is precisely this wealth, of spirit and dissent, that has and continues to inform my work (as a wife and as a writer) today. My greatest failing, as a writer, has been my inability to offer a distinctive and unambiguous explanation of my understanding of poverty and wealth.

I am beginning this series for that sole purpose.

In July I came across Christopher Ketcham's Article on Daniel Suelo, the sadhus who has lived without money for the last 10 years, residing just north of Monument Valley, in the caves outside of Moab. My first feeling on reading this article was "this is what they want you to believe" that you've got to live in a cave if you want to live outside this economy. I thought it was nothing more than a propaganda leaflet in the "you can't ignore the economic realities" machine. The same machine that ignores the environmental and colonial realities so intimately shaped by said economy. As the web leads you to click on and click off, I did.

I have been reading Yunus's work, after it was introduced to me by Woody Tasch, the author of Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Reading Tasch's book is what made me decide to quit writing For Future Reference in favor of My Grandpa Knew That; at least once on each page I would hear myself screaming "Shicheii, bil bééhózín." (More on Slow Money coming.)

Working through K'é and For Future Reference I have tried to unravel the negative feedback system many of us (land based people) find ourselves in: we are rich, in knowledge, but this knowledge has become worthless in what is known as The Market, and more perniciously, it is becoming worthless to many of us, in what we know of ourselves and our minds. Many American Indian political and educational professionals are responding to the abject poverty in both reservation and urban communities in ways that leave the heart of our nations (our knowledge and expertise) behind.

There are economic realities and we cannot ignore them. But these realities do not form or result from an isolated universe, as a sort of Merry-Go-Round we either have a ticket to ride, or not.

I reread Ketcham's article on Suelo and want to point out this passage: "In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribes people in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. 'It looked,' he says, 'like money was impoverishing them.'"

The idea that money could be impoverishing is significant. We must take it seriously without being flip or ignorant about homelessness, nutrition and health care.

"The economy" is a cultural framework with undeniable consequences on our daily lives, but it is also a fabrication. We do not need to accept the rules as they are laid down for us.

Yunus writes:

"Experts on poverty alleviation insist that training is absolutely vital for the poor to move up the economic ladder. But if you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty."

I do not believe that keeping our focus on moving up the economic ladder is the best approach, but his point about "retaining the returns of our labor" is clearly true. If we can refocus our attention to the land, and land based communities, consequently redefining capital, and the control of capital, we might be able to make some of the many changes essential for our survival.

Deloria and Wildcat, in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, describe an Indian Metaphysics, offering it as a way of approaching solutions to our contemporary problems. This metaphysics uses an indigenous knowledge base as its point of origin: dirt, water, people, plants, animals and the relationships between these beings as recorded in our languages, ceremonies, games and material culture.

I begin here, in the dirt, with the people.

The title for this series is inspired by Duane BigEagle's poem, My Grandfather Was A Quantum Physicist.