Restoring Women to Cultural Memory

uncovers the realities of women's lives, internationally and across time, asking questions about patriarchy and slavery, conquest and aboriginality. About mother-right, female spheres of power, indigenous philosophies of spirit-- and the historical chemistry of their repression. Even more important, their role in resisting oppression.

A global perspective on women’s history offers fresh and diverse conceptions of women's power, as well as of men and gender borders. It overturns stereotypes of race and class, and the structures of domination that enforce them. It digs under the usual story of lords and rulers, looking for hidden strands, and reweaves knowledge from the divided fields of history, archaeology, linguistics and folk tradition.

So we cast a wide arc, looking for patterns and gaps and contradictions which, where vested power interests are at stake, are trigger points for controversy. Some of the flashpoints are women's power; neolithic female figurines; gender-egalitarian mother-right cultures; patriarchy; witch-hunts; "heresies" such as goddess veneration or shamans; and the rise and fall of empires, including the doctrines of supremacy and inferiority that prop up all systems of domination.

http://www.suppressedhistories.net/

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Priestesses, diviners and medicine women stand out as leaders of aboriginal liberation movements against conquest, empire, and cultural colonization.

Spiritual spheres of power have been a crucial staging area for women’s political leadership and for challenging systems of domination on many levels, including the battleground of culture.







Teresa Urrea, la Santa de Cabora

"Do you wonder why the tribe fights the forces of such a government? My poor Indians! They are the bravest and most persecuted people on earth! They will fight for their rights until they win or are wiped out. God help them! there are few of them left." --Teresa Urrea, la Santa de Cabora

Teresa was arrested and forcibly deported for her activism by the dictator Porfirio Diaz,who called her "the most dangerous girl in Mexico." She went on with her political organizing, and co-authored El Plan de Tomóchic, which denounced the genocide of the Yaqui Nation, urged restoration of the Liberal Constitution of 1857, and called for abolition of "all laws or social practices that maintain inequality based on gender, race, nationality or class."

http://www.suppressedhistories.net/catalog/shamanliberators.html

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