Visual presentations by Max Dashu: featured in 2014
Rebel Shamans: Women Confront Empire
Priestesses, diviners and medicine women stand out as leaders of aboriginal liberation movements against conquest, empire, and cultural colonization. This visual presentation looks at how Indigenous and Diasporic women draw on their cultural traditions to resist colonization. More >
Testimony of the Image
Stunning cultural treasures you've never seen before: the female monoliths of Ethiopia and Italy; the rock murals of Zimbabwe, Baja California, the Sahara and the Kimberley; in the ceramics of Nok and Ife and Jamacoaque; Cretan and Harappan seals, Chinese and Nigerian bronzes, and stone sculptures of Illinois, Nigeria, and Vietnam. More >
Patriarchies: a global view of women's oppression
What is patriarchy, in all of its structures of lordship, how did it come into being, how is it enforced, and by whom? how resisted? how do systems of male dominance relate to conquest, enslavement, colonization and class structures? How is opposition suborned through divide and conquer? More >
Female Icons
Wars of interpretation have raged over the ancient female figurines, their cultural meanings and uses. We look at the range, similarities, and distinct cultural styles of the iconic woman, and consider what female symbolism might have signified within cultural context, and how it relates to women's embodied experience. More >
Woman Shaman: the Ancients
An unprecedented survey of seers and medicine women in the cultural record—in rock art, sculpture, ceramics, seals, bronzes, and codices, drawing back the veil that obscures our view. See women making ceremony in the rock art of the Sahara, southern Africa, Spain, and Baja California; in Aztec codices, Chinese bronzes, and Indus and Cretan seals. More >
Female Rebels and Mavericks
Audacious women who break the rules: adventurers, witches and wantons, heretics, lesbians, women who pass as men, daredevils, free-thinkers, radicals, insurgents, and visionaries. A global spectrum of valiant and defiant women. More >New shows added:
Witch Hunts
The early modern witch-hunt Terror was the crucible of modern "Western Civilization." It had a profound impact on women's status -- and bodies, speech, mobility, sexuality. The witch craze was escalated through torture trials, targeting females, the old, disabled, queer, poor, and minorities as "devil-worshippers." More >
Witches and Pagans
The spiritual heritages of pagan Europe: wisewomen, healers, seers, enchantresses and nightfarers. Women’s sacraments of spinning, weaving, herbcraft, divination, sacred dance and incantation. Fatas, faeries, and the “good women who go by night” with the Old Goddess: Diana, Holle, Nicnevin, Abundia, Andra Mari, Perchta. More >
All titles are live visual presentations. 90 minutes, with extra time
for discussion and questions (60-minute version also available).
Requirements: digital projector, cables, screen, mic
"We can't afford to overlook the importance of knowledge as power, and culture as a medium that propagates values and behaviors, that interprets the world to us. Those who have withheld knowledge about women's power, as well as the vast diversity of cultures that have existed on this planet, understood that demoralizing women would make it easier to subordinate us. If you can't conceive of being free as a woman - or as any other oppressed group of people - how are you going to sustain the hope and courage and effort necessary to create change? Beyond that, we need to be able to envision how things might be different, as Indigenous cultures, especially the mother-right cultures, can teach us. Ways of doing things differently, egalitarian ways that respect everyone, that live by values that revere the entire web of life." --Max Dashú
For descriptions of more Suppressed Histories presentations,
see the current catalog of digital presentations.Suppressed Histories Archives | Articles | Woman Shaman DVD
