Your Mother Wears Army Boots, Kid

"mama wears army boots. I like 'em too." 

OK, so they're not army boots. They're Red Wings. But she still likes 'em. This is a shameless attempt to win feministe's Anti-Awards Part Deux. Hope my daughter will forgive me someday!

This is an old pic. She's three in the picture, and five now. Now, she has a tool belt of her own so she can be a sparky like Mama! The Duluth Trading Co. sells kid's tool belts and kid-sized tools. No kid-sized work boots, though!

3-7-77

Last night, I watched An Injury to One, a bold documentary by Travis Wilkerson, on the lynching of IWW organizer Frank Little. But it doesn't stop there---Wilkerson draws parallels between Little's assassination and the later economic slow demise of Butte, Montana, the rewriting of the Sedition Act for union-busting purposes, the subsequent Palmer Raids and McCarthyism, and corporate rape and destruction of the environment.

Frank Little was quite a character; one of the Old Guard of the IWW, he hopped freights across the nation to organize and agitate for the working class. Proud to be half-cherokee, he would brag of being a "real american", a "real Red", and would joke, "the rest of you are immigrants." He was in the thick of the free-speech fights that raged across the West and Midwest from 1910-1913, but he was no fool---James Cannon, in his Notebook of an Agitator, was impressed with Little's ability, while in a Peoria, IL jail cell during the strike and free speech movement there, to defuse the unfocused anger of a young man who just wanted to get out and fight. He carried a quietude and authority with him, earned by long years on the labor battlefront. He served 30 days on the rockpile in Spokane for publically reading the Declaration of Independence. During the ore-docks strike in Duluth and Superior, after he had been kidnapped and held under armed guard while strikebreaking thugs broke up worker meetings, he led Cannon on a walk down to the docks. The hired guns of the company were all about, but he insisted that the walk was necessary "to show the gunmen that we aren't afraid of them, and also to show the strikers that we're not afraid, so that they won't be afraid." Far from a "swivel-chair" leader, he was in the trenches---literally, when in Iron River, Michigan, he was found beaten and unconscious with a rope around his neck. That happened a year before his coming to Butte.

Butte had formerly been a union mining town, but years of struggle, including martial law, had broken the movement. After the Speculator Mine explosion of June 8, 1917, when 168 miners were gassed and burned alive, trapped behind bulkheads cemented to save the company money, interest in unionism was renewed. Frank Little heeded the call. He was all activist, blasting company greed and WWI in the same fiery speeches. "Either we're for this capital slaughterfest, or we're against it---I'm ready to face a firing squad rather than compromise." Novelist Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective (translation: company thug) for Anaconda in Butte claimed to have been offered $5000 to kill Frank Little and turned it down. Someone took it.

On August 1, 1917, Frank Little's body was found hung from a railroad trestle, the note "3-7-77" pinned to him---the legal dimensions of a Montana grave; 3' wide, 7' long, 77" deep. Over 8000 people attended his funeral; still the largest in the history of Butte.

The Anaconda Mining Company was extracting 10% of the world's copper from Butte during WWI, and the mortality rate for miners was greater than that of the soldiers in Europe's trenches. It is estimated that at least $25 billion in copper has been extracted from Butte's mines. Now all that is left is the Berkeley Pit, the largest Superfund site in the United States. Locals keep their eyes on the Pit, a deep and highly toxic sinkhole of acid in the center of town. Efforts are undertaken to discourage migratory birds from landing there after hundreds of Canada geese, looking for a safe place to land before a storm, chose the Pit as their spot. Their skin and feathers were burned off from the acidic "Lake Berkeley"; with open lesions and esophageal corrosion resulting in death. A new term arose to describe it; "pit effect". The Berkeley Pit has been proposed as the nation's first National Environmental Disaster Monument.

Anyway, An Injury to One will be playing again on Saturday, and throughout the month. For more info on modern Butte, you can't beat this article from William Langewiesche in The Atlantic. And film and/or labor history buffs will recognize that Will Oldham, contributor to the soundtrack, was the teenage preacher in John Sayle's film, Matewan.

Umana Cosa: Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Religion, program in Women's Spirituality, of the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, where she won a scholarship to the University of Kansas City. Her former elementary school principal, who had been following her progress through school, advised her against it. "Italian Americans do not do well at University". He recommended she attend a junior college. She ignored him.

She went on to earn her PhD. at Berkeley, with a provocative disseration on racism, behaviorist psychology, and social engineering (including education) in the United States...this, in 1964. She was fired from her position as assistant professor of U.S. History at San Francisco State in 1967, for participating in a student/professor strike against racism and imperialism. As an independent feminist scholar of cultural history, she has been affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford.

Inspired by the anti-war movement (she was a founding member of the Peace and Freedom Party) and anti-racist and feminist movement, she searched for her sicilian roots....where and when she entered. Her first book, Liberazione della Donna: Feminism in Italy won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She took her quest further with Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion and Politics in Italy, for which she won the Valitutti Award for non-fiction. Her third part of what she considers a trilogy, is Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers, a multidisciplinary tour-de-force that discusses the origins of the human race in central Africa, woman-centered religion, the symbology of carnivale, how subaltern beliefs were masked and reified in community and religious ritual, the human memory of the dark mother, art as survival...the whole cannoli.

In 1996, she was inducted into the International African American Multicultural Educators Hall of Fame. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Italian Research and Study Program for the International Area Studies at Berkeley. She keeps quite busy with lectures and symposiums, from the Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference to the Valcamonica Symposium of archeologists, to the American Italian Historical Association, although as she says in this interview, "italian-american male collegues consider my interest in the dark mother and african origins to be outside the italian american canon". In her article published in Ishmael Reed's Multi-America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, she quotes this ancient line from Civilization of Isis:

Struggle for happiness
like people with little struggle for bread
and remember that love is the seed and the
fruit of joy

Love one another and love yourselves
Be born without fear
because she who gives your life gives you
a fertile earth

Do not be fearful of hunger, or of the years
or of growing old
because at each season of life you will find new wisdom

She has recently edited a forthcoming book, She Is Everywhere! Anthology in Writings in Feminist Spirituality. Like the dark mother, you can expect to be hearing more about Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum.

More links: an article from ReVision, December 1998, Memory of the Dark Mother, and a radio interview from the Woman, Spirit, and Peace series on KPFA.

UPDATE: For a good essay by Lucia herself on her recent experiences at a conference in Italy last February, go to Blue Dog Services, click on "News and Notables" in the right hand column, scroll down to the bottom and click on page 6, then scroll down to the entry, "Wars, nonviolence, and women's spirituality: Conferences in Italy in February 2004" by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum.