PROJECT PROGRESS

We are now transferring our blog and the rest of the project to WWW.TRUTHINPROGRESS.COM. Please join us there!

Memories of a segregated Dallas

We’ll be in Dallas tomorrow. Tammye Nash at the Dallas Voice posted some of Gil’s memories of living in a segregated Dallas.

via Instant Tea » Blog Archive » Memories of a segregated Dallas.

Instant Tea Blog from Tammye Nash, editor, Dallas Voice

Truth in Progress arrives in Dallas on Thursday, Feb. 4th!

via Instant Tea » Blog Archive » Truth in Progress coming to Dallas.

TRUTH IN PROGRESS GOES TO DALLAS

You are heartily invited

 to attend the celebration

of the birth of a new multi-media project

Truth in Progress: Conversations in Mixed Company

Where: First Unitarian Church of Dallas, 4015 Normandy Avenue

When: Thursday, February 4, 2010, 5-7 p.m.

Cost: No cost to get in, no cost to get out, but if you want to leave a check or cash in between, that’s certainly acceptable. (Truly, your presence and added zeal fuels the work!)

Okay, What-in-the-world: Truth in Progress: Conversations in Mixed Company is a three-year multi-media project exploring issues of race, sexual orientation, and religion with some gender and age thrown in with a heavy dose of humor. The straight black male older retired black civil rights “foot soldier” Rev. Gil Caldwell and white younger lesbian author sometimes-an-activist Marilyn Bennett Alexander are instigating this project that will involve an interactive web site, print publication, and documentary film. They’re looking especially at the black civil rights movement and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT alphabet soup) rights movement, and, girl (or, boy), all sorts of people don’t like that. The conversation will be going to various cities significant to both movements to film interviews and stories in these locations and stir discussion. Excerpts of these images are what will appear on TruthInProgress.com and later in full form in the final documentary.

Why you: You’re the interactive part, we want to create a conversation larger than what Gil and Marilyn are having and that’s going to take getting the word out about the project, especially at this point, the blog and video elements on the web. Yes, we are raising money, but don’t let that stop you if your budget is tight right now. Really, you can totally nod your head that night and give at another time.

Now what: A RSVP to mbennetta@gmail.com would be lovely or tell the person who gave you this invitation, BUT it’s not necessary. Come on that night and surprise us!

JAIL TO JAIL

Gil and I bonded when we were arrested together by the Cleveland police in 2000 for civil disobedience. Last Wednesday, January 13, we returned in a manner of sorts. We held our first public gathering for Truth in Progress at Helena’s Myrna Loy Center, which was at one time the Montana territorial jail, and until the 70′s was the Lewis & Clark County Jail. It’s been transformed into a performing and media arts center, and last week our fundraising reception was held in the art gallery in the center. Through generous support of the crowd gathered, we raised $2,800. We also had two days of productive work, meeting with almost the entire production team (Tonya Easebey, Steffen Rasile, Krys Holmes, Travis McAdam, and Larissa Barry), filming out in the midst of the  spectacular Montana landscape, and introducing Gil and his wife Grace to Helena and vice-versa.

On result was an article in today’s Helena Independent Record. Check it out at http://www.helenair.com/news/article_ec007a82-03ff-11df-b862-001cc4c03286.html.

Next stop is Dallas. We’ll be at the The Task Force’s Creating Change Conference and holding a fundraising reception on Thursday, Feb. 4, 5-7 pm, at First Unitarian Church located at 4015 Normandy Avenue. Would love to see you!

Marilyn and Gil

Truth in Progress Awarded $15,000 Grant

We have very good news to share: The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation awarded (thru our fiscal agent Montana Human Rights Network) Truth in Progress multi-media education project a $15,000 grant. This is thrilling news, as you can imagine, and we wanted to share it with you right away.

We are moving forward in the new year. Thank you all for your wonderful support!

Please save these dates:

We will be having a fundraising reception in Helena on Wednesday, Jan. 13, 5-7pm, at the Myrna Loy Center. Gil and Grace will be in town!

For the Texans, we will be having a fundraising reception in DALLAS on Thursday, Feb. 4th. More details to follow in coming weeks.

ALSO, check out this feature article on our video production coordinator Tonya Easbey at

http://helenair.com/entertainment/yourtime/article_d7962d40-eae0-11de-aa4f-001cc4c03286.html

13 Thanksgivings

Dear YS, 

I have reached the conclusion that Thanksgiving is not only a “politically correct” holiday, it is also, gender, race, regionally, religiously, economically and patriotically “correct.”

What does your EB (Elder Brother) mean? Most, maybe all of our national holidays, have a gender, racial, regional, religious, economic or patriotic, particularity, but Thanksgiving is inclusive, some would say democratic (Avoid confusing that with the political party that has that name). It is available to all of us, and shuts nobody out.

Therefore, I wish that all of our soon-to-be many readers, will have the best Thanksgiving ever! Most of us have discovered that in the midst of some of our most distressing, disturbing and painful moments, when we have been able to acknowledge that there are still things for which we can be thank-full, a ray of sun breaks through and we can smile for a moment or two or more.

 What do you think? 

 EB

 Dear EB,

 I’m pretty sure that the American Indian perspective on Thanksgiving would not deem it very “correct.” For that first feast with the pilgrims (though they weren’t exactly on a holy pilgrimage) signaled the beginning of the end of their way of life, connection to and ownership of the land, and instead of blessing opened the floodgate of physical, spiritual, and cultural abuse.

 Your letter motivated me to search the internet for different perspectives. I’ve pulled some quotes from longer essays and articles and included the links to the sites below. What strikes me is that we cannot speak for another’s experience, but there is truth in your words of finding something to be thankful for in the midst of chaos, desperation, injustice, and pain. There we can find a shared, universal road to survival when we give voice to our particular gratitude (not, “you should be thankful that…”).

 May we make room to hear each other’s prayers of thanks, what has come before and can come after.

 Yours truly, with thankfulness,

YS

 “In 1789, President George Washington issued a Thanksgiving decree ordering a national observance Nov. 26. The tableau entrenched in the American imagination of feasting pilgrims and compassionate New England Indians who saved newcomers from starvation is absent from the executive proclamation. Rather, Washington, like others before him, asked that Americans “[acknowledge] with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness…’

 We know that Indians and newcomers, or “visitors” as one elderly Northwest Coast Indian woman calls non-Natives, shared meals. When not feasting, however, colonizers — Spanish, French, English, other Europeans, and finally the United States — in the name of the Doctrine of Discovery, papal legal reasoning, and Manifest Destiny carried out inhumane acts of violence against scores of Indian people, villages, and tribes…

 The Doctrine of Discovery imposed a kind of order on the parceling of Others’ lands during the discovery era. Native resistance was met with swift and violent death, deceptive paper signings, and vague explanations about God’s will. But the Doctrine remains the underlying principle that governs U.S. policies toward Indian tribes today, and its tenets have shaped persistent American attitudes and actions toward Native people.”

Jacki Rand (Choctaw) is a UI associate professor of history.

http://www.dailyiowan.com/2009/11/20/Opinions/14514.html

“What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities. By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way “for a better growth,” meaning his people.

In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil.

I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.

Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.

 Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.

 And the healing can begin.”

 Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux works with the American Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal. http://www.purewatergazette.net/nativeamericanthanksgiving.htm

 “As she often does at this time of year, Richmond was explaining the origins of Thanksgiving from a Native American point of view — how the so-called “First Thanksgiving” was actually part of a much larger cycle of Native American thanksgiving festivals and how roast turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie probably weren’t on the menu. (Instead, the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag dinner guests most likely sat down to a meal of venison served with dried corn and fruit).

 But it was a number that Richmond had used — 13 — that really piqued the youngster’s interest.

 ‘I told them that Native American groups like the Wampanoag often celebrated many different thanksgivings, sometimes as many as thirteen,” Richmond says. “And this young boy really thought that was strange. I think he had this image of a bunch of people sitting around eating turkey and watching football thirteen times a year — which, of course, would be pretty strange.’”

http://www.projo.com/lifebeat/content/wk-thanksgiving-redux05_11-05-09_9SG98RE_v16.217fc50.html

Truth in Progress in the News

From this week’s Windy City Times:

http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=23521

Mother Wit

Dear Readers:

A friend of mine, Pat Schneider is a gifted writer and teacher of writing who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Years ago I was one of the Campus Ministers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Pat has edited a book titled; In Our Own Voices, Writings by Women in Low-Income Housing. At the beginning of the book, she has these words from Muriel Rukeyser; “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open”.

Marilyn and I have shared with each other and with our readers, “important truths of our lives”. It is my hope that our efforts at truth-telling will be not only be interesting to the reader, but will also encourage others to expeience the liberation that comes from personal “truth telling”.

I write with some frequency about my maternal grandmother, “Mama Irene”. She was filled with the folk wisdom she gained in her native South Carolina. We call that wisdom, Mother Wit. One of her “sayings” speaks a simple truth that we all know, but need to remember and remember: “There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it doesn’t behoove any of us to talk about the rest of us.”

I am not a fan of the bashing directed at either Barack Obama or Sarah Palin. I admit that I am closer to agreeing with the vision and worldview of President Obama than I am to that of Sarah Palin. But the bashing that both of them receive, violates the truth of Mama Irene. There is good and less-than-good in Palin and Obama and some of the crticisms of both of them give the impression that the critics are without flaws. We know this is not true.

I received a bit of criticism when I wrote something that expressed appreciation for the support that former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife have given to their daughter Mary and her partner Heather Poe and their child. But I am consistent in my efforts to follow the wisdom of Mama Irene and so I end this writing with the following announcement:

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne Cheney, welcomed their seventh grandchild, Sarah Lynne Cheney, Wednesday, November 18, 2009. She weighed 6 lbs, 14 oz. Her parents are the Cheney’s daughter Mary and her partner, Heather Poe.”

Congratulations to all!

Elder Brother, aka EB

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ALL!

The NBC Today program this morning, had a marvelous story about a little girl who wrote love notes to her family as she was wrestling with terminal brain cancer. They found her notes in various places throughout the house. This is a Love Note from 2 people who love each other in a very special way. We are different, but we are one. Today is OUR birthday, October 28th. I/we send this birthday note to you. But you must figure out our differences:

One of us is old, the other not-so-old,

One of us is female, the other male,

One of us is white, the other black,

One of us is gay, the other straight,

One of us is deeply involved in the United Methodist Church, the other not,

One of us is called, Younger Sister, the other Elder Brother. We have been arrested together, and we have written numerous e-mail letters to each other that you must read! We have a very special project in the works that you can help fund.

Happy birthday from us to you on Our birthday !

EB & YS or should it be, YS & EB