Suppressed Histories Archives
Winter 2006-2007 Newsletter

This year ends with lots of activity, including booking shows for 2007. Plans are already set for a trip to Glastonbury, England in late July to present at the Goddess Conference. I'm looking for other possible venues for presentations in Europe. Some women in Germany and Italy are interested ...I'd love to connect with women in Spain or France, too, where I would be able to present in their language. And in Latinoamérica. Suggested contacts for bookings around the US are also welcome.

And donations! are much needed (scroll down for the hows). Top priority is for a slide scanner to digitize images, and if possible a digicam, for:

DVD production
The effort to produce the Women's Power DVD continues, but some tech issues with iMovie have to be resolved. If you or someone you know has expertise in this program, especially around handling photos, tech advice would be welcome.

A new clip is up! a prelude to the Women's Power DVD !
(Look for the play links beneath the logo at the top of the home page.)

I can't wait to get back to work on making a movie out of this material, once I resolve the problems with iMovie. It's going to go way beyond the slideshows. More DVDs of Woman Shaman, Mother-Right and Gender Justice, Patriarchies, Witches and Pagans, and other shows will follow.

Additions to the SHA website
Be sure to look around if you haven't visited for a while. The Articles page has been redone, and a new book excerpt added to the Secret History of the Witches page. My review of Robin Briggs' much-acclaimed (and problematic) Witches and Neighbors has gone up on the Articles page (scroll down to Reviews). I've begun work on a much-requested bibliography page, and also started a Spanish version of the site, with part of the catalog and an article now online.

New Suppressed Histories presentations premieried on Nubia; The Aztecs; Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia; and Ancient Arabia, as well as an expanded version of Suppressed Histories: Japan. Interest in the Canaanite and Hebrew Goddess presentation continues to be high, with showings in Long Beach, Northampton MA, and at New College of California in SF. Woman Shaman also had multiple showings including a workshop at the Goddess Temple of Orange County. Women's Power showed at the Center for Hawaiian Studies in Honolulu, at Mount Holyoke College, and the Women's Well in Massachusetts.

The Suppressed Histories Series went on the road
to Massachusetts (twice), to southern California (twice), to Honolulu and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I did a weeklong series of shows and also spoke at the Global Justice Conference, presenting Rebel Shamans: Indigenous Women Confront Empire. This new show premiered at the National Women's Studies Association conference, which was held here in Oakland CA, making it possible for me to present. (Read more about SHA events in 2006.)

In California
I presented Sacra Vulva and The Names of Devi at the annual Pantheacon in San Jose. (And will be back in 2007 with The Old Goddess and Woman Shaman; come visit Nava and me at our art booth there.) For the sixth year, I co-taught the spring course Rites and Symbols of Female Spirituality at JFK University with Arisika Razak, and guest-lectured at New College of California and the California Institute for Integral Studies. I also showed Mother-Right and Gender Justice to a joint session of classes at Berkeley High School. The last show of many sponsored by Change Makers for Women (Oakland, CA) was bittersweet, coming just before the closing of this feminist bookstore.

Nuggets uncovered this year
My reading on southeast Africa has turned up powerful stories about women oracles and rain shrine priestesses in Malawi, as well as matrilineal descent systems in the region. These have been under steady pressure since the explosion of slaving in the early 1830s. Isabel Apawo Phiri [see sidebar] explains how the enslavement of female captives degraded women's status even within a matrilineal/matrilocal culture. It heightened the privilege of husbands with access to enslaved concubines, and propelled a new model of servile marriage into a culture previously free of such ideas. These trends were exacerbated by the influence of both Christian missionaries and colonialists and Islamic traders and rulers, as well as invasions by patrilineal Nguni people from the south.

Beyond those sobering realities, Phiri documents women's religious and leadership in the proto-Chewa period (900-1480) and afterward. In central Malawi a line of female oracles called Makewana presided at the central rain shrine. Oral traditions of the powerful Banda clan say "that their ancestors were ruled by a female ritual leader called Mwali." In the south, too, the Mang'anja had numerous rain shrines under the leadership of priestesses. As chieftaincies rose, this female authority was disrupted to some extent, notably with the rise of the M'bona prophet-- but he too was succeeded by female "spirit wives." Around this time, in the 1600s, a new movement arose in central Malawi led by the prophetess Mangadzi. She gave her name to a new line of seeresses at sanctuaries. Chiefly women also performed ceremony in the villages, leading prayers and pouring libations.

This knowledge supplements what I had already found on shamanic priestesses in Zimbabwe. They include the foundational shrine priestess Kasamba and the Shona line of lion oracles that can be traced back over five centuries to Nehanda. She founded a sanctuary in the high rocks of Mazoe in northern Zimbabwe. In the 1880s the current Nehanda led the first Chimurenga defending the country against Cecil Rhodes and the English colonizers. The Rebel Shamans presentation tells her story.

For the vast Pacific region, I had the good fortune to visit the home of Marion Kelly, a scholar of Hawaii (see sidebar for her book on sacred hula) who was one of the founders of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaii. What a library she has. I found sources highlighting the strong position of women within the matrilineal/local Chamorro culture of Guam. As Charles Beardsley put it back in 1964: "In general women probably held greater authority in the Chamorro social pattern than in almost any other known aboriginal society in the Pacific."

I also got to look at Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-Lore (1917) one of the early collections of primary-source traditions. One account from Maui gives a unique perspective on the authority of Hawaiian women. It tells how the prophetess Pao is consulted by the chief Kihapiilani who has been exiled by his elder brother. Before he can set out on a long journey, he must first get his wife's permission to leave: "As soon as he was allowed to go [!] Kihapiilani started for Waikapu where the prophetess [ke kaula wahine] by the name of Pao was living." Before his arrival, Pao predicted to her entourage that a chief was coming to petition her for assistance. Later in the story, the chief's sister prevailed upon her husband to assist him in his war against an oppressive older brother. "At this, Umi decided that he must obey his wife's demand and so he gave his consent."

There's lots more, but I am going to hold off so it can be published in a more organized form. This is just a taste to whet your appetite.

Please consider supporting The Suppressed Histories Archives
I can't emphasize enough how needed contributions are right now. Everything is on the cusp, about to break through, but still a cliffhanger in funding terms. The Archives receives no grants or institutional support, so please contribute what you can. It's easy to donate on the SHA home page using PayPal (link on the left) or direct donations made out to Max Dashu can be mailed (see below for address). Many thanks to those who have already made donations.

Tax-deductible donations
to the Archives can be made via our fiscal sponsor, Sinister Wisdom, the eminent lesbian journal. Checks must be made out to Sinister Wisdom, but make sure to put Suppressed Histories in the memo line (lower left hand corner) -- so that they know it is for the Archives and not SW itself. (If you want this deduction for 2006, send it right away, so I can get it to the fiscal sponsor in time for them to deposit it before New Year.)

If you don't need the tax deduction, please make checks out to Max Dashu. Either type of donation can be mailed to Max Dashu, PO Box 3511, Oakland CA 94609.

One more fund-raising idea:
I am looking for a quality gallery for an exhibit (and hopefully sale) of my paintings, including the Wisdom Scroll, Harinda BaRozwi, Womb Healing, Banshee Fountain, and others. Not least, the Lifegivers of Tahuantinsuyu, a large oil painting of women from the four quarters of South America. You can see and order reproductions of my art here.


Secret History of the Witches
is waiting for some free time to finish up edits and bibliographical checks of Vol I, so it can get published at last. I need time to write! (which translates to: money to live on for a couple months of concentrated work). Some 1300 pages of manuscript are written; they just need to be worked into final form. And a promising lead for publication has appeared. Now I'll have to get serious about learning InDesign.

This year, excerpts from Volume III were published online at Matrifocus, from chapters on The Old Goddess, Stone-Raising Spinners, and The Tregenda of the Witches.

Matrix Cultures: in the web of life
Is taking longer than anticipated to manifest, again because of the economics of time, rent, and bills. There's a big box of research notes and texts waiting to be woven into written word. Some sample tastes are online, and more is written but not yet poured into web pages: great stuff on Nubia and Kordofan, Vietnam and Taiwan, and the Seri in Sonora, Mexico. It's coming...

Accepting applications for SHA interns!
To assist with scanning, slide photography, mounting and labelling. The process of cataloguing the Archives' massive slide collection continues. The long-range goal is to get every image entered into a searchable database, so that information can be accessed by date, country and region, and by categories such as shamans, elders, rebels, writers; or manuscripts, statues, temples, ceramics and symbols.

Gifts?
Prints, notecards and magnets of Max's art are available by mail order, and we now accept credit cards over the phone. See the art site here. We have Amazons for Peace and Justice magnets, and soon Tshirts, and other new magnets.

Our silver-on-black T-shirts are almost sold out. As of this writing six are still available, in M, L and XL only. They read: The Suppressed Histories Archives: Real Women, Global Vision. (See a picture.) You can order online with PayPal, first come first served, at $20 each, plus $3 shipping (US; inquire about rates for other countries). New T-shirt designs are in the works.


Special thanks go out to:
First, to those who donated to the Archives this year. For generously hosting SHA shows, to Sarah Cohen of Change Makers and to artists Briana Kaufmann and Peter for at their studio.

Thanks to Bridget Webb and Anniitra Ravenmoon (check out her Luscious Butz large-size pants on the Nubian Divas site) who produced SHA events at the Goddess Temple in Irvine CA and Long Beach Womanspirit.

Thanks to Gariné, Jen and the women of Rain and Thunder Journal, and to Joann Lutz, for hosting events in Northampton, Massachusetts, and to Edith and Jane at Women's Well in West Concord, as well as Susan Foster in Andover.

Thanks also to Laney Goodman and Terry Rivera Piatt for permission to use Serpent Mound Chant in the prelude to Women's Power. It comes from their CD Blue Moon (follow the link at top of this page). Also, thanks to Susan Levinkind and the women of Sinister Wisdom Journal for our fiscal sponsorship.

As always, thanks to Nava Mizrahhi, for her deep support and the sacrifices she makes for this work.

For justice and peace

Max Dashu
Suppressed Histories Archives, Oakland CA

The 2005-2006 Newsletter is online here.

The 35th Anniversary Newsletter of the Archives is online here.