Circa 1928.

Andy Smith is a Cherokee woman, a co-founder of Women of All Red Nations (W.A.R.N.) and is active in the anti-sexual assault movement. This article appeared in the Winter 1991 issue of Women of Power. Other versions have appeared in various places. It is hoped that those of male gender reading this do not feel excused because it speaks only to “feminists” and white women. This version was written for a feminist publication; however, Ms. Smith did not intend to exclude anyone.
Source

The New Age Movement has sparked new interest in Native American traditional spirituality among white women who claim to be feminists. Indian spirituality, with it’s respect for nature and the interconnectedness of all things, is often presented as the panacea for all individual and global problems. Not surprisingly, many white “feminists” see the opportunity to make a great profit from this craze. They sell sweat lodges or sacred pipe ceremonies, which promise to bring individual and global healing. Or they sell books and records that supposedly describe Indian traditional practices so that you, too, can be Indian.

On the surface, it may appear that this new craze is based on a respect for Indian spirituality. In fact, the New Age movement is part of a very old story of white racism and genocide against the Indian people. The “Indian” ways that these white, New Age feminists are practicing have little grounding in Native American reality.

True spiritual leaders do not make a profit from their teachings, whether it’s through selling books, workshops, sweat lodges, or otherwise. Spiritual leaders teach the people because it is their responsibility to pass what they have learned from their elders to the younger generation. They do not charge for their services.

Indian religions are community-based, not proselytizing, religions. There is not one Indian religion, as many New Agers would have you believe. Indian spiritual practices reflect the needs of a particular community. Indians do not generally believe that their way is “the” way, and consequently, they have no desire to tell outsiders about their practices. A medicine woman would be more likely to advise a white woman to look into her own culture and find what is liberating in it.

However, white women seem determined NOT to look into their own cultures for sources of strength. This is puzzling, since pre-Christian European cultures are also earth-based and contain many of the same elements that white are ostensibly looking for in Native American cultures. This phenomenon leads me to suspect that there is a more insidious motive for white “feminists” latching onto Indian spirituality.

When white “feminists” see how white people have historically oppressed others and how they are coming to very close to destroying the earth, they often want to dissociate themselves from their whiteness. They do this by opting to “become Indian.” In this way, they can escape responsibility and accountability for white racism.

Of course, white “feminists” want to become only partly Indian. They do not want to be part of our struggles for survival against genocide; they do not want to fight for treaty rights or an end to substance abuse or sterilization abuse. They do not want to do anything that would tarnish their romanticized notions of what it means to become an Indian.

Moreover, white women want to become Indian without holding themselves accountable to Indian communities. If they did, they would have to listen to Indians telling them to stop carrying around sacred pipes, stop doing their own sweat lodges, and stop appropriating our spiritual practices. Rather, these New Agers see Indians as romanticized gurus who exist only to meet their consumerist needs. Consequently, they do not understand Indian people or our struggles for survival, and thus they can have no genuine understanding of Indian spiritual practices.

While New Agers may think that they are escaping white racism by becoming “Indian,” they are, in fact, continuing the same genocidal practices of their forefathers/foremothers. The one thing that has maintained the survival of Indian people through 500 hundred years colonialism has been the spiritual bonds that keep us together. When the colonizers saw the strength of our spirituality, they tried to destroy Indian religions by making illegal. They forced Indian children into white missionary schools and cut their tongues if they spoke their native languages. Sundances were made illegal and Indian participation in the Ghost Dance precipitated the Wounded Knee massacre. Our colonizers recognized that it was our spirituality that maintained our spirit of resistance and sense of community. Even today, Indians are the only people in the United States who do not have religious freedom. This was made clear when the Supreme Court recently ruled that the First Amendment does not guarantee our right to use peyote in sacred ceremonies.

Many white, New Age “feminists” are continuing this practice of destroying spirituality. They trivialize Native American practices so that these practices lose their spiritual power. They have the white privileges and power to make themselves heard at the expense of Native Americans. Consumers like what many of these white writers have to tell them and do not want to become concerned with the facts presented by Native Americans. Our voices are silenced, and consequently, the younger generation of Indians who are trying to find their way back to the Old Ways become hopelessly lost in this morass of consumerist spirituality.

These practices also promote the subordination of Indian women to white women. Many white “feminists” tell us how greedy we are when we don’t share our spirituality, and that we have to tell them everything they want to know because prophesies say we must. Apparently, it is our burden to service white women’s needs rather than to spend time organizing within our own communities.

The New Age movement completely trivializes the oppression that we, as Indian women face: that Indian women are forcibly sterilized and are tested with unsafe drugs such as Depo-Provera; that we have a life expectancy of forty seven years; that we generally live below poverty level and face a seventy-five percent unemployment rate. No, ignoring our realities, the New Age movement sees Indian women as cool and spiritual and therefore, available to teach white women to be cool and spiritual.

This trivialization of our oppression is compounded by the fact that, nowadays, anyone can be Indian if she wants to be. All that is required is that a white woman be Indian in a former life or that she take part in a sweat lodge or be mentored by a “medicine woman” or read a “how to” book.

Since, according to this theory, anyone can now be “Indian,” the term “Indian” no longer refers only to those groups of people who have survived five hundred years of colonization and genocide. This phenomenon furthers the goal of white supremists to abrogate treaty rights and to take away what little we have left by promoting the idea that some Indians need to have their land base protected, but even more Indians [those that are really white] have plenty of land. According to this logic, “Indians” as a whole do not need treaty rights. When everyone becomes “Indian” it is easy to lose sight of the specificity of oppression faced by those who are Indian in this life. It is no wonder we have such a difficult time getting non-Indians to support our struggles when the New Age movement has completely disguised our oppression.

The most disturbing aspect of these racist practices is that they are promoted in the name of feminism. Sometimes it seems that I can’t open a feminist periodical without seeing ads with little medicine wheel designs promoting white “feminist” businesses. I can’t seem to go to a feminist conference without the only Indian presenter being the woman who begins the conference with a ceremony. Participants feel so “spiritual” after this opening that they fail to notice the absence of Indian women in the rest of the conference or that nobody is discussing any pressing issues in Native American communities. And I certainly can’t go to a feminist bookstore without seeing books by white women promoting Native spirituality. It seems that, while feminism is supposed to signify the empowerment of all women, it obviously does not include Indian women. If white feminists are going to act in solidarity with their Indian sisters, they are gong to have to take a stand against Indian spiritual abuse.

Feminist book and record stores selling these products, and feminist periodicals should stop advertising these products. Women who call themselves feminists should denounce exploitative practices where ever they see them.

Many white feminists have claimed that Indians are not respecting “freedom of speech” by demanding that whites stop promoting and selling books that exploit Indian spirituality. However, promotion of this material is destroying freedom of speech for Native Americans by ensuring that our voices will never be heard. Furthermore, feminists already make choices about what they will promote. I haven’t seen many books by right-wing fundamentalist women sold in feminist bookstores, since feminists recognized that these books are oppressive to women. It is not a radical move to ask that white women extend their feminist concerns to include Indian women. The issue is not censorship; the issue is racism. Feminists must have a choice, will they respect Indian political and spiritual autonomy or will they promote materials that are fundamentally racist under the guise of “freedom of speech.”

White feminists should know that as long as they take part in Indian spiritual abuse, either by being consumers of it or by refusing to take a stand on it, Indian women will consider white “feminists” to be nothing more than agents in the genocide of our people.

Our spirituality is not for sale!

Dead Aid is written by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian woman who holds a Bachelors of Science from Lusaka, Zambia, an MBA in finance from American University in Washington, D.C., a Masters from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a PhD in economics from Oxford.

Moyo was a consultant at the World Bank, then head of economic research and strategy for sub-Saharan Africa at Goldman Sachs.

She’s has been dubbed by superlative Western journalists as the ‘the Anti-Bono’ – and not just cause she’s highly educated.

No, it’s because — rather than fall in step and fawn over mass media celebrity admonitions to buy ipods and swag made by children dispersed on one foreign continent in order to benefit children on another — Moyo calls for the cutting of global, systemic aid to Africa.

Via the Guardian:

[Moyo] makes it clear at the outset what kind of aid she means. She does not mean humanitarian or emergency aid, mobilised in response to calamities; she does not mean charity-based aid, given to specific organisations and people on the ground, in order to achieve specific things (she sits on the boards of several charities, one of which distributes antiretrovirals); she is hopeful about a new attitude to food aid, whereby the money is used to buy food from farmers within a country, and then distribute it to those in need, instead of flooding the place with foreign food that undercuts local growers. What she means is “systemic aid”, the vast sums regularly transferred from government to government, or via institutions such as the World Bank.

She paints a dismaying picture of the history of that aid, beginning with the realisation, at Bretton Woods in July 1944, that Europe would need massive injections of cash to get back on its feet (and the concurrent establishment of the World Bank and the IMF). The Marshall Plan did a similar job. Both were so successful in Europe that it seemed sensible to assume that the same paradigm could apply in Africa. But these capital injections, she argues, worked in Europe because they were limited in scope, and Europe had the institutions to make the most of them; this was not true in many African countries. And there were other, not particularly altruistic imperatives: the cold war had begun, and “aid”, writes Moyo, “became the key tool in the contest to turn the world capitalist or communist”. Geopolitics trumped sense, again and again.

Paul Collier, one of Moyo’s old professors, reviews Dead Aid here:

Dambisa Moyo is to aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam.

…Way to compare apples and chainsaws there.

Here is an African woman, articulate, smart, glamorous, delivering a message of brazen political incorrectness: cut aid to Africa. Aid, she argues, has not merely failed to work; it has compounded Africa’s problems. Moyo cannot be dismissed as a crank. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she heads the Africa strategy of a major bank. Nor can she be dismissed as a renegade who has rejected her roots. She is deeply wounded by the lack of development in Zambia, her home country. So what is she saying?

Yon bastard is left to wonder how this Ivory Tower patriarch, with his FAIL analogies and barely concealed consternation at women who happen to be brilliant, attractive and brown, could possibly come off as more clueless and/or condescending.

Scroll down and check out the comments section.

And just to provide an academic counterpoint – Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor at Columbia and director of the Earth Institute:

The “reformed” aid architecture has actually deprived aid of its political support in the rich countries. Aid reformers have generally argued for “budget support,” meaning money to the treasuries of the poor countries, rather than “tied aid” in the form of investment projects supplied by industrial and construction companies, or targeted support through specialized global funds for disease control, education, agriculture, and so forth.

…The most successful aid in recent years has been for targeted purposes through global funds – to provide immunizations for children, or to fight aids, TB, and malaria. The public then clearly understands how money translates directly into lives saved. Aid can be counted in bed nets, antiretroviral treatments, doses of measles vaccine. The results can be counted in the dramatic reductions of deaths from malaria, measles, polio, and other diseases now strikingly evident. These funds have won public backing and increased financing.

The second reform should be to “re-tie” aid, in part, by encouraging national donor agencies to support infrastructure projects provided by national companies.

China is doing this by the investment of billions of dollars throughout Africa, to notable benefits on the ground throughout Africa. Japan has a history of success of this kind of aid in south-east Asia. With a deep recession in the high-income world, direct financing of companies to build vitally needed roads, power plants, port facilities, and the like in the poorest countries would be a triple win: for development, for macroeconomic stimulus, and for building a domestic political base for meeting aid commitments.

(Photo credit: Chris Floyd for The New York Times)

FIERCE.

Now watch some white, Western upper-middle-class feminist snipe behind palms that she’s unemancipated for having the gall to wear heels and modern clothing.

Q: …”Dead Aid,” as your book is called, is particularly hard on rock stars. Have you met Bono?
I have, yes, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. It was at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me.

What do you think of him?
I’ll make a general comment about this whole dependence on “celebrities.” I object to this situation as it is right now where they have inadvertently or manipulatively become the spokespeople for the African continent.

You argue in your book that Western aid to Africa has not only perpetuated poverty but also worsened it, and you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.
Think about it this way — China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.

Maybe that’s because they have so much money that we here in the U.S. are begging the Chinese for loans.
Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

What do you think has held back Africans?
I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

If people want to help out, what do you think they should do with their money if not make donations?
Microfinance. Give people jobs.

But what if you just want to donate, say, $25?
Go to the Internet and type in Kiva.org, where you can make a loan to an African entrepreneur.

Do you have a financial interest in Kiva?
No, except that I’ve made loans through the system. I don’t own a share of Kiva.
(Source)

 
Also:
‘For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid,’ German interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.

“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar,” said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. “There’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.”

Via Wired

ETA:: A golden orb spider eating a chestnut-breasted mannikin! (Photo credit: Bonnie Malkin, Sydney)

Silk Soft 100% recycled toilet paper.

Real Life is Rubbish, 2002
Two separate piles of general household rubbish with projected light

Less within the domain of disgust, the trash pile in Real Life Is Rubbish is constructed out of studio instead of everyday waste. Tools that the artists would eventually run out of – like a screwdriver that serves as Noble’s nose – and discarded items such as used up brass polish are piled together. Out of the apparent jumble of chaos, two perfectly formed silhouettes of the artists emerge. (Source)

Source

HE/SHE(installation view) 2003
Modern Art, London

HE/SHE (daylight view), 2003

Metal fucking rats with heart shaped tail, 2007
22″ x 25″ x 7″
Welded scrap metal and light projector