“Why is it that adult men keep young girls from going to school”.
Michelle Obama
Who are these grown men attempting to snuff out the aspirations of girls?
Like Martin Luther in 1517 nailing his “protest” onto the door of the Catholic church, this morning I nailed my own protest onto my own sculpture: the “phallic” Peace Pole that rises out of the earth’s womb/vulva/yoni.
It was but a small, symbolic act as a partial answer to Michelle Obama’s Mothers Day question.
My act of protest states:
1. That the masculine, if left unchecked, will eventually deny the feminine.
2. That it will take a “masculine sense of power” — from men, especially — to hammer away at our present denial of the feminine.
3. That individual acts of protest, no matter how small, are vital to effect change.
4. That I am in allegiance with indigenous people world-wide who inherently/spiritually understand the need to balance the masculine with the feminine.
Outside of Indigenous cultures, most readers of this blog (myself included) — and whether or not we’re Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, communist, socialist, capitalist or atheist — the dominant paradigm we live in is one that fosters misogynist beliefs.
These beliefs stem from a global cultural meme where women are simply seen as “inferior” to men rather than “equal” to men.
Until we start looking into the mythic and cultural foundations of this meme, then any progressive liberal attempts to change fundamentalist attitudes will be met with failure.
When I began writing about the First Nations protest movement Idle No More, which has swept across Canada since December 2012, I wanted to communicate why Idle No More is a movement to which the rest of the world needs to listen. This came down to a founding premise that characterises the movement: it states that the treatment of women and the treatment of land are inextricably connected.
As I dug into all of this it brought up rage, injustice, loss — and most of all, incredulity and despondency. It took me deeper into my own cultural history, back to religion and mythology, history and historicity. In order for one country to colonise another, it must already have colonised itself, and most notably colonised those elements of its own culture that it goes on to extinguish elsewhere: the sacred feminine, intuitive knowledge and communication with the non-human wold, the land and removal of people from that land.
Laura Burns, “Decolonizing the feminine: Idle No More”, from EarthLines magazine
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