Healing America’s Narratives: The Power & Paradox of Silence

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, specifically in the context of what may serve the healing process moving forward. The book is available.]

In “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde wrote that “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”¹ Millions of voices have been silenced over hundreds of years by America’s narratives and collective Shadow. Yet, the mystical branch of every wisdom tradition and the deepening evidence of true science are increasingly clear that silence — becoming aware of, working with, and quieting our incessant mind chatter, and regularly retreating from the noise of our human-made infrastructure — is good for us and allows us to hear, see and feel more deeply. Each is true and necessary. Preventing the external silencing of any voice and encouraging and choosing the intentional silencing of our interior and exterior noise are necessary for individual and societal health.

The United States’ external attempts to silence others is clear whether we look at the histories of women, Native Americans, and African Americans, or the attempts to impose our will and way of life on the people of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, among others. Despite formal statements regarding the freedoms of speech, the press, and assembly, also known as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, both formal and informal behavior and the nature of many of our systems and institutions at worst limit or deny these freedoms and at best make them inconvenient for selected people at specific times and in specific places. Revisit the links at the beginning of this paragraph for some examples.

On the other hand, the prospect of intentionally choosing silence (and its sibling, stillness) remains and may be becoming increasingly counter-culture, in cities for sure, but even in rural and suburban areas — anywhere people choose to be at the mercy of phones and apps, and yes, that includes the apps that invite us to engage stillness, silence, and meditation. Try the following suggestion the next time you eat a meal or snack alone in a quiet space (if it’s rare for you to eat in a quiet, private place, perhaps give yourself a brief opportunity to try this). It’s especially effective if what you’re eating is crunchy and requires robust chewing.

About halfway through a mouthful, simply stop chewing, and sit with the stillness and silence that remain for 10–15 seconds (or longer). Perhaps close your eyes. Simply notice how this feels, then begin chewing again. Stopping virtually any activity for a brief time period may bring you a similar experience.

Because of the expectations, speed, and noise that are common in American culture, getting still and silent may feel uncomfortable because of the apparent rewards for getting things done, getting them done quickly, and letting others know you got it done. Less apparent, research-based rewards for practicing stillness and silence, however, can positively impact blood pressure, heart rate, muscular tension, and the ability to focus attention (see resources below).

Your homework:

Notice and speak out against the inappropriate silencing of others.
Give yourself the gift of practicing silence and stillness every day — even for just a few minutes.

_____

Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Sister Outsider, (Crossing Press, 1984), 41; and The Cancer Journals, (Penguin, 2020/1980), 13. The essay appears in both volumes.
Some resources (among many) regarding the benefits of intentional silence:

An Ode to Silence: Why You Need It in Your Life

And how to find more of it Silence. Some of us welcome it. For others, the thought of sitting in silence is enough to…

health.clevelandclinic.org

https://hbr.org/2021/07/dont-underestimate-the-power-of-silence

The power of silence: 10 benefits of cultivating peace and quiet

We live in an increasingly noisy world. The constant drone of traffic, household appliances, music, television and…

www.happiness.com

How Listening to Silence Changes Our Brains

Quiet is increasingly scarce in the modern world. But growing evidence shows that we need it for our health and…

time.com

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/family/2021/09/shh-how-a-little-silence-can-go-a-long-way-for-kids-mental-health

Healing America’s Narratives: Background and Foreground, Context and Content

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Chapter Eleven (So, Now What?”) of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

In the context of the history¹ of the United States, of the nation’s collective national Shadow and state of affairs in the third decade of the twenty-first century, and our reflections on who we are, the stories we tell and embrace, who and what we impact or impacts us, what we might be missing, who our people are, our inevitable death, and how we’re in relationship with all of this, what might we do individually or collectively in order to engage this healing and Shadow integration? Good question. Thanks for asking.

Our exploration of this question in forthcoming essays will necessarily revisit some concepts and practices that we’ve already acknowledged (cultural givens, skillful means, healthy development, intentional practice, silence, openness, truth, and love) as well as some that we have not explicitly addressed, such as resistance, trauma, self-discipline, self-compassion, empathy, and community.

In preparation for what’s to come, as you read this now, consider the previous paragraph and get a sense of — perhaps write down — one or two (or more) of the concepts and practices listed that you feel you would like to work or play with and develop further, and one or two that you feel you are in a good place with — that don’t need your immediate attention. Feel free to add your own if there’s something in your awareness that’s not listed above. And you can always change your mind and revise your list.

Another way to do this, which I find more challenging, is to prioritize the list: #1 would be what you feel you’d most like to work or play with and the final item you list would be what you feel is in pretty good shape right now. Again, none of this is etched in stone; just playing with the list might bring an insight. Stay open and curious.

Be kind to yourself.

_____

¹The brief histories explored in the book include women, Native Americans, African Americans, the Vietnam War, and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — all in the context of the book’s title and subtitle.

Healing America’s Narratives: I Am Going To Die

Posted on April 13, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

Photo ©by Philippa Rose-Tite on Unsplash

We’re returning to Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives after our departures in the previous two posts — the inevitability of the current state of the country and the apparent belief, shared by both Democratic and Republican leadership, that they need never-ending millions of advertising dollars in order to win elections and defeat each other (for the good of the country).

“I am going to die” is the fifth of six statements and questions that frame Chapter Eleven, which explores some approaches to manifesting the book’s title — Healing America’s Narratives. The statement is ‘simply’ an acknowledgment of what is — what’s true — that given enough time, we all die. No one knows how, when, or where, but with each breath we take, we get closer to our final breath.

Our responses to the some of the earlier questions and statements from Chapter Eleven inform how we might respond to this acknowledgment of our mortality. If who we think we are is simply an assembly of flesh, bone, instinct, thought, and mood — nothing but separate animated objects with a few shared traits and some noticeable differences — then the horrors of the histories of women, Native Americans, African Americans, the Vietnam War, the post-9/11 war on terror, and other significant histories, while still horrific, make sense in an ignorant, arrogant, fearful, bigoted, violent kind of way.

If, however, we all share an origin, a common ancestry — whether through a religious or a scientific story — and if we each have a unique ecological niche — our ultimate place in the world, our Soul, expressed through mythopoetic identity as a one-time-only manifestation of Spirit, All That Is, God, Source, Ground of Being — then it becomes a tad more difficult — it makes no sense at all — to proclaim the supremacy of any race, to declare you’re either with us or you’re with the enemy, or to in any way dehumanize others. The stories we choose about who we are, really, make a difference.

Each of us has our own dying and death stories. If we’re lucky we get to bury our parents and older siblings, our grandparents, aunts and uncles, and others from the generations that precede us. Some of these deaths, while sad, are expected and feel natural; sometimes they are unexpected and feel tragic. What is the story each of us tells, what is the story that you choose to tell, about the inevitability of death? As Mary Catherine Bateson told us, “The choice you make affects what you can do next.”¹

The late surgeon and author, Sherwin Nuland, wrote that death results “all too frequently [from] a series of destructive events that involve…the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity,” and that he had not “seen much dignity in the process by which we die.” Nuland, however, complemented his surgeon’s intimacy with the sterility, knowledge, precision, life, and death of the operating room with his philosopher’s view and his poet’s heart. “The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it,” he told us.²

If you want a dignified death, your best bet is to live a dignified life. If you want a dignified country, your best bet is live, and help others live, a dignified life by coming to terms with things as they are, being the change you want to see in the world, and at the very least, doing more good than harm through your words and actions.

_____

Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life,” Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal. Eds. Charles & Anne Simpkinson, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42–43.
Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die, (Knopf, 1993), “all too frequently…,” xvii; “The greatest dignity…,” 242.

Healing

America

Narrative

Healing America’s Narratives: Who Are My People?

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

Who Are My People?

In the perfectly integrated, comprehensive, inclusive, and balanced universe in which most of us do not (think we) live, we can hear the mystical cheerleaders’ rhythmic, enthusiastic, and obvious response echoing around the arena: EV-ree-one! Where most of us do think we live, it can be helpful to have a sense of who our people are — not in the unhealthy us-against-the-others sense that governs most finite games, but in the sense of realistically assessing how and with whom I might do the most good in the world as it is, with what I have to offer, without harming others, to the benefit of the whole shebang. Taking care of my, or our, little niche is often the best way to serve the greater good.

Often, the answer to this question lies not in some definitive choice we make but in our authentic attention to the intersections of who we think we are, the stories we choose, the impacts we both have and receive, and what we are able to uncover and own that we previously had not seen. While “my people” may be superficially identified, or at least narrowed down, through blood, geography, and chronology, they are inevitably found and known through experience, belief, and worldview. They include those I learn from and learn with and those who learn from me — whether the learning emerges in the classroom, on the street, at the checkout counter, in the healthcare office, at work, or at the kitchen table. Consider the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, as his writing led him into “contact with more human beings”:

“I had editors — more teachers — and these were the first white people I’d ever really known on any personal level. They defied my presumptions — they were afraid neither for me nor of me. Instead they saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured and harnessed.”¹

The friends we choose and who choose us in childhood and adolescence, the groups we align with when we choose a craft, profession, or area of study (or one chooses us), and the individuals in our chosen craft, profession, or discipline towards whom we gravitate may provide insight and evidence about, but don’t necessarily define, “our people.” Many folks will come, stay for a while and go; others will come and stay. We begin to recognize some who stay, and even some who go, as our people.

As tempting as it can be to espouse an all-of-us perspective and claim everyone as our people (as those mystical cheerleaders did above), if we’re operating primarily from a Body-Mind identity, it is difficult to embody and live up to that claim — despite its value and attractiveness. Better to live in a healthy embodiment of who our people truly are right now, than to delude ourselves with an espoused, but not yet embodied and lived, self-aggrandizing claim.

Still, part of our intentional practice might be to “act as if” all humans are our people and to see how such practice impacts our sense of self, our beliefs about others, and our behavior.

_____

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (One World-
Random House, 2015), 62.

Healing America’s Narratives: Everything Is a Story

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

Some of the story sources that inform Healing America’s Narratives

Everything Is a Story

Note your immediate response to this premise. Is it, ‘What do you mean — please explain?’ or, ‘Bullshit…?’ or ‘Du-uh, tell me something I don’t already know?’ Perhaps it’s ‘Thank you for confirming what I was beginning to see?’ Is it something else entirely? Whatever it is fine — it’s your story about the suggestion that everything is a story. Consider that if your response was in the general area of Bullshit.

The cultural givens handed down by our parents and earliest communities and experiences are stories. As (or if) we grow up, wake up, clean up, and show up, some stories hold up and some don’t. Sometimes the givens that don’t hold up were false when we received them and sometimes they were true — as far as anyone knew at the time — but the larger, always evolving community of truth learned more and disproved them when new evidence was found.¹ Doctors no longer recommend smoking cigarettes as a way to relax. Planet Earth is no longer considered the center of the universe.

The stories we choose to believe and tell, as well as the stories that choose us, are powerful. Being in the position to choose our stories and not be chosen by them carries power. Mary Catherine Bateson encourages us to exercise this power:

“…think about the creative responsibility involved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one is true and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context…. The choice you make affects what you can do next.”²

So, let’s be thoughtful about the stories we choose to tell about who we (think we — and they) are. The choices we make and the stories we tell matter.

Consider the specific stories that inform(ed) your cultural givens. What holds up? What’s the most recent revision you’ve made, or that was made for you, where revision actually means re-vision — to see again? Look at the sweeping revisions, many ongoing, in the earlier essays in this series, and the specific, personal revisions shared therein, such as Robert McNamara’s ‘re-visioned’ view that owned the extent to which he and the other architects of the Vietnam war misjudged, underestimated, failed, and did not recognize a long list of people and ideas.

Such seeing again is never easy and always valuable when it moves the seer toward a more comprehensive, inclusive view. Malcolm X’s life stands as an exemplar of re-visioning. Two of his major re-visions — becoming a Muslim and joining the Nation of Islam while in prison and then leaving the Nation of Islam while remaining a Muslim after his 1964 Hajj — follow the developmental trajectory from a focus on me to a focus on us to a focus on all of us. In each case he changed his name and publicly recognized and owned his seeing again.³

How we tell our stories is as important as which stories we tell. Focus only on what’s wrong and get an “illness” story. Open up to the possibilities of moving through and beyond what’s wrong and tell or write a “healing” story. Adults model both of these for children: if the child who falls down the stairs and breaks an arm is confronted with parental overwhelm, blame, anger, and fear, an illness story emerges in which stairs are dangerous and the child is careless or clumsy; if the child is met with parental support, concern, acceptance, understanding, and love, a healing story emerges in which accidents can happen, stairs are useful and fine and best engaged with care, and the child is curious and open to experience.

Illness stories limit us, narrowly focus on a sense of wrongness, keep us stuck, and can reinforce trauma; healing stories open up the context in which we understand what happened (wrongness may be relevant, but not primary), they can expand and free us, and they can contribute to trauma recovery. Because they focus on what’s wrong, illness stories are often tidy, brief, stagnant, partial, and consistent. Because they emerge through and invite increasingly larger contexts, healing stories are often messy, ongoing, progressive, comprehensive, and paradoxical. Explore your stories. Be kind to yourself.

Writing can be engaged as a powerful process⁴ that helps open us up to increasingly larger contexts that allow us to see and feel as others see and feel — to go beneath all the individual differences, see another soul just like ourselves, and at the same time deeply understand and embody those differences. Going one step further, learning to embody and tell or write someone else’s story, both helps us understand the other and often provides clarity into our own narrative.⁵

Finally, if I’m truly playing an infinite game,⁶ some questions may arise at the intersection of “who am I, really?” and “everything is a story.” Try these questions on for size: Without the stories I hold and that hold me, who am I, and what’s true in this moment? Who am I and what does this moment offer without my story/ies? Ram Dass’s channels four and five point toward a prospective answer. John Tarrant, in Bring Me the Rhinoceros, put it this way:

“Everyone knows that some events are just bad and make you sad or angry, and some are good and make you glad. Yet what everyone knows might not be true. For example there might be a certain coercion to the attitude that weddings must be happy, funerals have to be sad. It could prevent you from meeting the moment you are in. What if events don’t have to be anything other than what they are?”⁷

We owe it to ourselves and each other to create and tell our stories with care.

__________

1. See Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution, 2021) for an expansive and passionate exploration of his book’s title and the “community of truth.”

2. Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life,” Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal. Eds. Charles & Anne Simpkinson, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42–43.

3. M.S. Handler, “Malcolm Rejects Racist Doctrine,” New York Times, October 4, 1964, https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/04/archives/malcolm-rejects-racist-doctrine-also-denounces-elijah-as-a.html; Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, (New York: Ballantine, 1992).

4. James Pennebaker has led the way in decades of research that back this up. See his Expressive Writing: Words that Heal, co-authored with John Evans, (2014); and Opening Up: The Healing Power of Emotions (1990), among others. See also John Fox’s Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making, (1997). There are many more resources available.

5. See Marra, Enough with the Talking Points, (2020), 79–82 for more on truly embodying another’s story. For a deeper dive into telling another’s story as if it were our own, see the work of Narrative 4, which uses “story exchange” to help young (and old) people develop empathy. (Some meeting “icebreaker” exercises skim the surface of this experience: two strangers briefly share who they are and then introduce each other to a group — speaking in first-person, as if they are the person they’re introducing. Narrative 4 goes deeper): https://narrative4.com/.

6. Inspired by James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (Free Press-MacMillan, 1986). An infinite game is one in which the goals are to invite everyone to play and to keep the game going. A finite game is one in which the goal is to limit the players, win, and end the game.

7. John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, (Shambhala, 2008/2004), 113.

Healing America’s Narratives: An Overview

Posted on February 16, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay breaks from those that precede it and offers a “one-stop” overview of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now Available]

Healing America’s Narratives presents the case that the mood of the United States of America in the third decade of the 21st century is inevitable when considered through the intersection of the lenses of history, developmental psychology, politics, and spirituality. Our current dysfunction, while worrisome, is not surprising.

More to the point, the nation is cursed and blessed with competing (not just different) narratives that, even at their most oppositional, share aspects of a collective Shadow — that which is denied, repressed, unknown, or unacknowledged, and projected onto others. America’s specific Shadow elements include ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, bullying, violence, greed, excess, and untrustworthiness — each of which is present in varying degrees throughout history, amid current events, and across the political spectrum. These elements arise historically and currently through an unhealthy manifestation of masculine energy and a virtual absence of healthy feminine energy.

The book’s title and subtitle posit that in order to heal these narratives, Americans will have to recognize, own, and integrate our individual and collective Shadows. To heal, as used here, means coming to terms with things as they are — that is, accepting what is true, even if we don’t like it or we disagree with it. Healing begins when I accept that I just broke my arm (rather than railing against how it happened); curing or fixing commonly takes place with the help of an orthopedic surgeon. Each has its place.

In order to authentically heal it’s important that each of us comes to terms with our cultural givens and the extent to which we have accepted, revised, discarded, or developed beyond them. “Cultural givens” refers to the view of the world given to us during our earliest years by family, community, schooling, and religion, or lack thereof — all within the context of the time and place of our birth. In order to become healthy adults, it’s necessary to question what we’re given as kids, and then choose to accept, revise, or discard it based on our own direct experience of the world.

This questioning can be exhilarating at best and terrifying at worst. Paying attention to several qualities can help us as we question. Briefly:

Skillful means invites the mechanic to tighten the bolt just enough without stripping the threads, and the surgeon to make the incision just deep and long enough (and on the correct patient). It requires us to interact with children in developmentally and chronologically appropriate ways.
Development, as used here, reminds us that how we view the world impacts what we see and how we see it. Here’s some developmental shorthand: it’s all about me; it’s all about my group(s); it’s all about all of us (humans); it’s all about all that it is (the planet and beyond). To make this even more fun, each of those four ways of seeing can manifest in healthy or unhealthy iterations.¹ Each successive view interprets a given event from an increasingly inclusive, comprehensive, and complex perspective.
Intentional practice reminds us that habitual thoughts and behaviors impact who and how we are. It makes sense to intentionally practice who and how we want to be.
Seek the broadest, deepest view available in any given set of circumstances (or at least when it makes sense to do so). Why would you choose to be narrow and shallow in your perspective?²
Honor the power and paradox of silence. Silencing the voices of others is a time-tested tool of oppression; intentionally practicing silence for oneself is often at the heart of insight, growth, and transformation.
Truth, in a given moment, is fact- and evidence-based and separate from opinion and how evidence is interpreted. In the words of Parker J. Palmer, over time, “Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter conducted with passion and discipline.”³
Love is perhaps the most powerful energy we know. In the book, love has the following traits: “the joyful acceptance of belonging”; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”; and the absence of fear.⁴

Evidence of America’s Shadow elements is provided in chapters three through ten of the book. Deciding which evidence and how much of it to present was a challenge. Chapters three through seven, respectively, provide very brief, selective histories of women; Native Americans; African Americans; the war in Vietnam; and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — each of which deserves (and gets elsewhere) more attention than it gets. The rationale for these choices is provided in the book. Chapter Eight provides additional examples of Shadow, every one of which also deserves more attention than it gets. Chapter Nine brings Shadow into our current century in an exploration of polarized, woke, and cancel cultures, and Chapter Ten argues that the 45th president of the United States personally embodies all nine Shadow elements.

Chapters eleven and twelve begin the process of exploring ways out of our current mess, and will be sampled in more detail in forthcoming essays.

So, the book explores nine elements of America’s collective Shadow through selected historical and developmental perspectives on the nation’s 246 years of existence. The exploration is presented through the author’s (my) particular worldview, which is made clear in chapters one, eleven, and twelve. It is not (obviously) an exhaustive history of the country or a final word on any of the narratives it explores; it is an evidence-based exposition of America’s competing narratives and collective Shadow and a guidebook for those interested in healing the narratives and integrating the Shadow.

It’s definitely not for the closedminded and probably not for the faint of heart.

_____

¹The “developmental shorthand” (me; my group(s); all of us (humans); and all that it is (the planet and beyond) are explored more deeply in the text and the endnotes. Regarding healthy or unhealthy manifestations, none of these views is right or wrong; rather, when healthy, they are increasingly inclusive, balanced, and complex. These four are significant reductions of what’s available to humans.

²Also developed further in the text and endnotes, this broadest, deepest view is based in Ken Wilber’s work, and includes considering individual values, beliefs, and behaviors; collective (relational/cultural) values and beliefs; and the natural and human-made environments, systems, and infrastructures within which we live and upon which we have impact.

³Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, (Jossey-Bass, 1998), 104.

⁴ “the joyful acceptance of belonging,” Br. David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the Heart of Prayer, (Paulist, 1984), 167; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 81; and “the absence of fear,” based on Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles, in her A Return to Love, (HarperPaperbacks, 1993).

Healing America’s Narratives: Trails of Tears and Broken Treaties

Posted on November 15, 2022 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this post is adapted from Chapter Four of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (Now Available)]

Some five-hundred-plus years ago, European explorers began bumping into land masses now known as South, Central, and North America and the islands of the Caribbean. The indigenous inhabitants of these areas include the Taíno, Aztec, Lakota, Yucatán, Iroquois, Inca, Nez Perce, Huron, Apache, Cherokee, Navajo, Olmec, Inuit, Toba, Quechua and Chibcha, among many, many more.

These peoples had been on these lands for some 10,000 to 20,000 years when the English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French met, interacted with, and eventually colonized them.¹ Slaughter, rape, removal, and betrayal often characterized the colonization process, which in contemporary parlance is a literal cancelation of people and culture. The invaders interpreted what was different as “lesser” (or, as some might say today, not “woke”) and perceived the unfamiliar humans as “innocents,” “savages,” or both.

A pattern emerged: arrival, intrusion, violence, commerce, acquisition of land through treaty, and acquisition of more land through violence and treaty betrayal. As more Europeans arrived or as something of value was discovered in or on the land, the Europeans and then the Americans broke treaties and took what they wanted.

In his enforcement of the 1830 “Act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi,” Indian killer, slaveowner and president, Andrew Jackson, promised that “There, beyond the limits of any State, in possession of land of their own, which they shall possess as long as the Grass grows or water runs. I will protect them and be their friend and father.”² Estimates put the total number of humans removed during the 1830s at around 100,000, with 15,000 deaths along the way.³ Said differently, an infant, a child, a woman, or a man was forced to leave home 100,000 times and travel hundreds of miles in horrible conditions. More specifically, some 2,858 refugees were forced to travel some 1,200 miles by steamboat and some 12,496 were forced to travel by foot and wagon for 2,050 miles over three different routes.⁴ Their friend and father didn’t protect them.

That’s a synopsis of one example. Here’s a list of several more, among many: the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 (broken amid a gold rush shortly after it was signed); the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and the retaliatory 1866 Fetterman Massacre; the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 (broken in 1874 with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, and again in 1877 with the Congressional “act to ratify an agreement with certain bands of the Sioux Nation of Indians and also with the Northern Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians” in direct violation of Article XII of the 1868 treaty, effectively taking the Black Hills without consent of 75% of adult male Indians).⁵

By 1890, the 60 million acres of the Great Sioux Reservation, as identified in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, had been reduced to about 22 million acres in 1877 due to government’s and prospectors’ interest in gold and other minerals, and then further reduced to 12.7 million acres through the Dawes (General Allotment) Act of 1887. The Dawes Act ended the tribes’ communal holding of land and allotted set acreage to individual Indians, who were required to farm the land for twenty-five years. Any land that was not so allotted would be sold to the public.⁶

Less than thirty years after the 1890 slaughter of some 150 children, women, and men at Wounded Knee, Choctaw men whose parents and grandparents had been removed from their land in the 1830s enlisted to fight in World War I and became the first “Code Talkers,” using their native language so enemy spies could not understand messages. Some thirty-three tribes, most famously the Navajo, would similarly serve in World War II.

Fast forward to 1980: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that in 1877 the U.S. government had in fact illegally taken the Black Hills in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The ruling upheld a 1979 Court of Claims decision that called on the U. S. to pay $17.5 million plus 5% annual interest, which at the time totaled about $106 million. The Sioux refused to take the settlement, which is now worth more than $1 billion, asserting that the land was never for sale, that money was not just compensation, and that the value of the gold, timber, and other resources removed from the area is significantly greater than the money offered.⁷ The issue remains unresolved in 2022.

_____

1. Adam Rutherford. “A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas.” Atlantic. October 3, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/a-brief-history-of-everyone-who-ever-lived/537942/. Accessed March 8, 2021. The article is adapted from Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes. New York: The Experiment, 2017.

2. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present, (Harper Perennial, 1999/1980), 133–34.

3. Elizabeth Prine Pauls, “Trail of Tears,” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Trail-of-Tears, Accessed February 10, 2021.

4. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, (W. W. Norton, 2020), 280.

5. Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Article XII: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/fort-laramie-treaty#transcript

6. Miles Hudson, “Wounded Knee Massacre,” Encyclopedia Britannica, December 22, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/event/Wounded-Knee-Massacre Also: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Dawes General Allotment Act,” Encyclopedia Britannica, Dec. 4, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dawes-General-Allotment-Act. Accessed April 23, 2021.

7. Numerous legal, historical and journalistic sources exist for this story. See Kimbra Cutlip, “In 1868, Two Nations Made a Treaty, the U.S. Broke It and Plains Indian Tribes are Still Seeking Justice,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 7, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1868-two-nations-made-treaty-us-broke-it-and-plains-indian-tribes-are-still-seeking-justice-180970741/; and Tom LeGro, et al. “Why the Sioux Are Refusing $1.3 Billion”, PBS News Hour, August 24, 2011, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/north_america-july-dec11-blackhills_08-23 Accessed May 4, 2021.

Healing America’s Narratives: Fear of the Feminine & the Subjugation of Women

Posted on October 26, 2022 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay is adapted from Chapter Three of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (October 2022)]

True for a boy as well, a girl born in 1774, 1862, 1917, 1963, 1971, 2001, 2017, 2022,* or any other year received cultural givens and expectations that were unique to the time, place, and familial, ethnic, racial, and financial circumstances of her birth and childhood. That she was born a biological female provided an additional given that would impact what was expected of and available to her.

While an investigation of any aspect of our collective national Shadow discloses disturbing manifestations of what we refuse to see in ourselves, the fear of the feminine and the subjugation of women are both disturbing manifestations and foundational elements of America’s Shadow. More to the point, it is the persistent absence of the qualities of the healthy feminine, further undermined by the relentless presence of the qualities of the unhealthy masculine, that encourages and amplifies and may very well be the primary cause of America’s collective Shadow. Specifying “healthy” and “unhealthy” above is essential to this argument.

The feminine, as used here, tends more toward a concern with care, embrace, collaboration, mercy, and compassion, among other traits; the masculine tends more toward a focus on rights, independence, individualism, justice, and wisdom. While this not an exhaustive list, notice that each tendency, whether it’s considered feminine or masculine, can be beneficial in its healthy manifestation and that all of them are descriptive, not prescriptive: we can observe them, but we’re not suggesting that any woman or man is “supposed to” embody the respective feminine or masculine tendencies in a certain way.

While the historical subjugation of women is visible to any honest person who is willing to look, the fear of the feminine manifests in less obvious ways. This essay posits that those men who primarily manifest unhealthy versions of masculine traits like rights, independence, individualism, justice and wisdom — which historically have resulted in dominance over, violence against, and subjugation of women and others — often fear healthy feminine traits like relationship, care, mercy, and compassion as emasculating rather than integrating. More specifically, cisgender, heterosexual males who historically have been conditioned to “be men” (i.e. stereotypically unhealthy masculine) experience both a strong attraction to the power of the feminine in women and a fear-of-emasculation-based aversion to the feminine in themselves. They mistake healthy feminine-masculine integration as emasculation, which terrifies them, so they subjugate what they fear.

The white, British, Christian, male founders and earliest leaders of the United States were captives of their cultural givens (as we all are of our own). Their Bill of Rights did not explicitly demonstrate any care about or for women; their Declaration of Independence did not embrace women; their proclamations of freedom and justice for all included no mercy for women, and the significant wisdom inherent in the Constitution they framed lacked compassion for women. These statements are true as well for the Africans they kidnapped, brought here, and enslaved, for their enslaved descendants, and for the native peoples whom they betrayed, expelled, and slaughtered.

And, yes, it’s easy to look from the third decade of the twenty-first century with the benefit of much of what these founders gave us and invited us to subsequently discover and amend, and point out where we think they came up short. They had the benefit of neither the documents they created nor the learnings from subsequent fits and starts of implementing those documents, as we do, in our 246 years of history. Their documents remain remarkable; their human shortcomings were real. Both are true. We have progressed in our movement toward equality for women; we still have a long way to go. Both are true.

*Selected (among many) years that directly or indirectly impacted the lives of girls and women:

1774: two years before the nation’s ‘birth’;
1862: the Emancipation Proclamations & three years before the Thirteenth Amendment freed enslaved women (and men);
1917: three years before the Nineteenth Amendment would give women the right to vote;
1963: two years before the Voting Rights Act would begin to enforce the Nineteenth Amendment, especially in the former slave states;
1971: a year before Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 would make it illegal to discriminate based on sex in any educational or federally funded program;
2001: the September 11 attacks impacted the direction of the country for women, girls, men, and boys;
2017: a record number of women decide to run for Congress, and most of them win in 2018, many in response to the behavior of the U.S. president;
2022: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York continues her efforts, begun in 2013, to change the way sexual assault cases in the U.S. military are adjudicated.

“Enough with the…Talking Points” Chapter One: Who (You Think) You Are – The Culture Thing

Posted on July 1, 2020 by Reggie Marra

In this interview, Reggie and Kent explore the role of “cultural givens” in how we engage in conversation.

“Enough with the…Talking Points: Doing More Good than Harm in Conversation” Chapter 1 – Kent Frazier interviews Reggie Marra.

Click on the book for a direct link to Amazon.

Grave & Goofy Poems: Narrative Healing in Uncertain Times – Episode 5

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Reggie Marra

Welcome back!

In this 20-minute episode we’ll explore metaphor and simile – using comparison to explore one thing in terms of another. Toward that end, we’ll take a look at poems by Billy Collins and Jack Gilbert.