1st Edition
Ecological and Social Healing Multicultural Women's Voices
This book is an edited collection of essays by fourteen multicultural women (including a few Anglo women) who are doing work that crosses the boundaries of ecological and social healing. The women are prominent academics, writers and leaders spanning Native American, Indigenous, Asian, African, Latina, Jewish and Multiracial backgrounds. The contributors express a myriad of ways that the relationship between the ecological and social have brought new understanding to their experiences and work in the world. Moreover by working with these edges of awareness, they are identifying new forms of teaching, leading, healing and positive change.
Ecological and Social Healing is rooted in these ideas and speaks to an "edge awareness or consciousness." In essence this speaks to the power of integrating multiple and often conflicting views and the transformations that result. As women working across the boundaries of the ecological and social, we have powerful experiences that are creating new forms of healing.
This book is rooted in academic theory as well as personal and professional experience, and highlights emerging models and insights. It will appeal to those working, teaching and learning in the fields of social justice, environmental issues, women's studies, spirituality, transformative/environmental/sustainability leadership, and interdisciplinary/intersectionality studies.
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction
Jeanine M. Canty (Editor)
Section I Worldview
Dekaaz One: Vow
Rachel Bagby
Chapter I This is What Happens When
Mei Mei Evans
Chapter II Sustainability and the Soul
Susan Griffin
Chapter III Seeing Clearly through Cracked Lenses
Jeanine M. Canty
Chapter IV Intersection of an Indigenous World View and Applied Neurophysiology
Anita L. Sanchez
Section II Place
Dekaaz Two
Rachel Bagby
Chapter V Finding Hope at the Margins: A Journey of Environmental Justice
Ana I. Baptista
Chapter VI Intricate Yet Nourishing: Multiracial Women, Ecology, and Social Well-being
Nina S. Roberts
Chapter VII Linking Ancestral Seeds and Waters to the Indigenous Places We Inhabit
Melissa K. Nelson and Nícola Wagenberg
Chapter VIII Beauty Out of the Shadows: The Indigenous Turn in a Filipina Narrative
Leny Mendoza Strobel
Section III Healing
Dekaaz Three
Rachel Bagby
Chapter IX Navajo Youth: Cultivating Healthy Relationships through Traditional Reciprocity
Molly Bigknife Antonio
Chapter X A Yinyang, EcocriticalFabulation on Doctor Who
Ju-Pong Lin
Chapter XI Piercing the Shell of Privilege: How My Commitments to Environmental and Gender Justice Moved from My Head to My Heart
Nina Simons
Chapter XII Our Differentiated Unity: An Evolutionary Perspective on Healing the Wounds of Slavery and the Planet
Belvie Rooks
Index
Biography
Jeanine M. Canty, PhD, professor at Naropa University, intersects issues of social and ecological justice within the transformative learning process. Selected works have been featured in The Wiley Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, Sustainability: The Journal of Record and World Futures: Journal of New Paradigm Research.
Jeanine Canty brings us one of those rare and priceless books that free us from conventional reality and, in so doing, illumine our own gifts for personal and collective healing. Like a clarion call to affirm the authority of our often-marginalized experience, Canty's powerful essay, along with the women's voices she has assembled here, thrill me with the challenge to see and act in new ways. The intellectual excitement as well as the emotional grounding that I find in this collection charge my life with a sense of truth and adventure.-- Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back to Life
Ecological and Social Healing is a transformative collection of women’s voices whose pain, passion, and resilience are a representation of millions of women whose stories are powerful interventions that interrupt a master narrative and shape what it means to live in a diverse, inclusive, and ecological world. Their stories offer hope for ecological and social healing beginning with self, transformed into social praxis. A must read to further understand ourselves in a complex relationship with our natural and social environments. --Suzanne Benally, executive director, Cultural Survival
Ecological and Social Healing is one of the most inspiring and beautifully conceived compendium of texts by formidable women writers and scholars on the most salient and urgent issues of our troubled Anthropocene. It is a clarion call, an imperative, a spiritual crossroads for understanding and appreciating our interconnectedness and indebtedness to one another and the "more-than-human". From explications of the profound spiritual traditions of Navajo and Filipino cultures, to talk of restructuring our global economy and so much more, this compelling book teems with antidotes to living in a dark, paralyzed,wounded time. Let us gather and absorb the gnosis here and act on it. Many kudos to editor Jeanine M. Canty for moving our century forward. -- Anne Waldman, poet
We often speak of books "breaking" new ground. Ecological and Social Healing heals it. It asks us all to reconnect areas of life that have been falsely divided to (re)discover the wisdom necessary to bear witness to the pain of the societal disconnect that has led to the degradation of our collective habitat. Only from that place of honoring can true healing begin. It is more than just reclaiming the feminine and the indigenous. It is reclaiming the whole. -- Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Sensei
