If you don't follow Betty Fokker, you're an asshat

From "When does self-delusion cross into mental illness?"

Something horrible happened in Mississippi. A couple of white teens, John A. Rice, 18, and Deryl Dedmon, also 18, went hunting for a black person to “mess with” and found a 49-year-old auto worker named James Craig Anderson – who just happened to be black. Because he was black, and for no other reason, the goat fuckers John A. Rice and Deryl Dedmon murdered him. Mr. Anderson was beaten savagely by both of the festering anuses, and then Deryl Dedmon ran him over with a truck, deliberately and with vile malice. It was murder. Pure and simple a racially motivated hate-crime and murder. They caught it on TAPE. It is beyond contestation.

But, of course, the motivation for the killing is being contested. Deryl Dedmon’s lawyer, Lee Agnew, “said in an early hearing that he had not seen evidence to support the accusations that the episode was racially motivated.” Yes, I am sure the racist scum Deryl Dedmon and John A. Rice, who announced they were looking for someone black to attack, mistook James Craig Anderson for a Swede and were just boisterously roughhousing! It wasn’t racially motivated at all!

The full post and everything Betty pumps out are always worth reading.

Awesome Woman: Suraya Pakzad

The AWESOME woman of the day is SURAYA PAKZAD (born ca. 1970), an Afghan woman deeply committed to women's rights to education, safety, and opportunity. Pakzad founded the "Voice of women Organization" (VWO) NGO in 1998 and began to teach girls how to read in groups across Afghanistan. Since 2001, when Afghani women to some extent could operate to pursue their aspirations in a rigid society, VWO began to function openly. Her work to protect women and girls at risk as well as advocacy for women’s right puts her in constant danger in a traditional society in Afghanistan.

In 2009, when she was one  of the first four women to receive a "Power and Peace Award" (one of several high honors she has earned), the Washington Post explained the kind of violence Pakzad witnessed in her youth, that led her to follow her mission of working for women:

Suraya Pakzad was 12 when she saw a gunman kill the headmistress of her Afghan school because the woman taught girls and refused to wear a headscarf. A few weeks later, a rocket smashed into the school and killed a student sitting near her, another warning for girls not to learn.

In addition to her open efforts towards educating women and teaching them skills and trades (she is the only woman in Afghanistan who has ever trained other women to run a restaurant, for example), she also runs a system of secret shelters for child brides and other victims of Taliban-style abuse of women, providing housing and medical, legal and job-training services.

Pakzad was named in 2009 by Time magazine as one of the "Time 100" most influential people in the world. A mother of six children, she lives with unimaginable daily risk. She has been the victim of many death threats and conservative influences within the government have worked against her good efforts. Funding is also a constant challenge. 

The write-up of Pakzad in Time 100 noted:

It is difficult to name a more committed advocate for women's rights in Afghanistan.... Pakzad knows that any future success for Afghanistan depends greatly on the full, unimpeded participation of its women as contributing, productive members of society. In 1926, then Queen Soraya said famously, "Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should also take their part, as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout history. And from their examples, we learn that we must all contribute toward a development of our nation." This is what Pakzad believes. This is what she fights for. And it is — and this, however unpleasant, must be said — what she may die for.

Awesome Woman: Kathryn Bolkovac

The Awesome Woman of the Day is KATHRYN BOLKOVAC, a law enforcement professional who blew the whistle on DynCorp, a contractor paid by the U.S. Military to assist in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in the late 1990s, for failing to take action against their own task-force trainees who were patronizing Bosnian establishments that trafficked in very young sex slaves. (A movie called The Whistleblower, based on this true story, was released on Friday, August 5.)

Bolkovac was working as a police officer in her native Nebraska when she saw a recruiting poster for the mission. A mother of three, with two of her children in college, she signed up to be one of 2,000 police officers from 45 countries to work as peacekeepers. During her training session in the States, she learned that at least one man in her group was aware of the use of very young girls for sex in Bosnia, a fact that was borne out once she was deployed. Bolkovac discovered restaurants and night clubs in Bosnia that were fronts for sex-trafficking operations that rented out girls aged 12-15 to international clientele, including her fellow U.N. peacekeepers. The Bosnian police were no help; they apparently were being paid to ignore the awful situation.

The treatment of these young girls was truly atrocious. Bolkovac uncovered evidence of girls who, when they refused to have sex, were beaten and raped in bars by their pimps while peacekeepers stood and watched. She discovered that one UN policeman who was supposed to be investigating the sex trade paid $700 to a bar owner for an underage girl he kept captive in his apartment.

[Madeleine Rees, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission office in Sarajevo, believes trafficking in little girls started with the arrival of the international peacekeepers in 1992.]

Bolkovac reported her findings to her DynCorp, which at the time had a $15 million contract to recruit and train police officers for the Bosnian operation, and she was immediately demoted. Six months later she was fired, and was warned by fellow workers that her life was in danger. After a two-year lawsuit she waged against DynCorp, in 2002,  an employment tribunal ruled that Bolkovac was unfairly dismissed by DynCorp.

In 2002, Salon did a two-part investigation into the participation of DynCorp employees in the Bosnian sex-slave trade, and determined that t least 13 DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia -- and at least seven of them fired -- for purchasing women or participating in other prostitution-related activities. But despite large amounts of evidence in some cases, none of the DynCorp employees sent home have faced criminal prosecution.


In January, a book co-authored by Bolkovac about her experience, The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman's Fight for Justice, was published

Awesome Woman: Faith Bandler

Today's Awesome Woman is FAITH BANDLER, an Australian activist who has lived an iconoclastic life and has been a lifelong civil- and women's-rights leader.

In a review of Marilyn Lake’s biography of Faith Bandler, Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, Lyndall Ryan writes:

...the subject is full of contradictions. She is not Aboriginal, but as a woman of colour she has devoted most of her adult life to removing legal discrimination against Aboriginal people. She is not a white woman, but she has led a middle-class life as the wife of an engineer on Sydney’s North Shore. She is not a member of a political party but she has been a political activist for over fifty years. She is Australian born and bred, but has always felt an outsider in mainstream Australia. She is not a historian but she has published four books about her family’s origins and about the struggle to win a ‘Yes’ vote in 1967. 

Bandler was born on September 27, 1918 on a banana farm in New South Wales, to a father who had been "blackbirded" (kidnapped and forced into slave labor) in 1883 from his native island in what was known as the New Hebrides, and an Australian-born mother of Indian and Scottish descent. During the Depression she left high school and went to work as a milliner. But when World War II brought the opportunity for women to serve in the Women's Land Army, she gained a consciousness of the inequities dealt to the Aboriginal people, particularly Aboriginal women who earned a fraction of what other women were paid.

Ryan continues to list Bandler's very unusual (for a woman of color in Australia) relationships, travels and pursuits:

After the War, she lived a cosmopolitan life in Kings Cross, where she had a long affair with a Finnish sailor, took music lessons to improve her fine singing voice and learn the importance of a public presence on the stage, and studied at WEA classes to overcome her lack of education. Her political involvement with the Left enabled her to travel to Europe in 1951 to attend a major cultural youth festival. In this formative period of adulthood, she gained a very sophisticated understanding of herself sexually and politically. In 1952 she married Hans Bandler, a Jewish refugee engineer from Vienna. It proved an enduring partnership, based on shared political beliefs and a great love of classical music and gardening.

In 1956, when their daughter was two years old, Faith used her middle-class security to become a fulltime political activist, determined to eradicate discriminatory laws and practices against Aboriginal peoples.

 From 1956 to the early 1970s, Bandler was a major influence, spokesperson and figurehead in the fight to gain full citizenship rights for the Aboriginal people. As general secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders , Bandler led the campaign for a constitutional referendum to remove discriminatory provisions from the Constitution of Australia. In 1967, after the federal government had agreed to hold a referendum on the Aboriginal question, Bandler was appointed New South Wales campaign director, a position she fulfilled with energy, skill and enthusiasm. By the time the Referendum was won in May 1967, Faith Bandler had become a major public figure.

As the Black Power movement developed into the early 70s, being black but not Aboriginal was now a disadvantage, and Bandler "retired" from the Aboriginal struggle to begin researching, writing about and campaigning for the rights of South Sea Islander Australians. This was an even more challenging political feat, since she not only was fighting to overturn the false historians who claimed that "blackbirded" Islanders were in fact voluntary indentured servants, but she was also ostracized by the Aboriginal Rights community who had become influenced by a separatist Black Power ideology. Finally, in the year 2000, the Queensland government offered a measure of official recognition to the South Sea Islanders when it conducted a ‘recognition ceremony’ at Parliament House in Brisbane -- largely due to Bandler's research, writing and publicizing of the cause.

Bandler has also written and co-authored many books, including two histories of the 1967 referendum, an account of her brother's life in New South Wales, and a novel about her father's experience of blackbirding in Queensland.


In 1975, she traveled to Ambryn Island, the land of her father's birth from which he had been kidnapped 92 years prior. In 2009, she was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia (a sort of Australian "knighthood").

In interviews about her personal evolution as a political activist, Faith Bandler expresses a deep gratitude and strong consciousness of the influence of other women who served as her mentors and motivators.

Sources:

National Museum of Australia http://www.indigenousrights.net.au/person.asp?pID=954

Australian Humanities Review (Lyndall Ryan's review of Marilyn Lake's book) http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2003/ryan.html

Australian Biography (Australian government site) http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/bandler/

Further links available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Bandler

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

He did not act alone

"In the face of inhumanity, we have to be more human. Because there is only this one world, brutal and beautiful, and we only have one fragile life to make our difference in the world we all share as home." ~~ Erik Abild, coordinator for Myanmar and the Occupied Palestinian Territories at the Norwegian Refugee Council, in Al Jazeera.

Photo by Jens Rost

My thoughts:


(1) The terrorist was not Muslim.

(2) The terrorist's mental illness and hatred was fueled by anti-Muslim rhetoric and right-wing extremism that cast anyone involved with the Labor party as some kind of devils.

(3) If you go around spewing rhetoric and hatred against any group of people, if you go around calling any group names or blame any group for your condition or for the local, national or global state of affairs - based only on their nationality, religion, gender, sexual preference, age, race, etc. - I consider you guilty by association. I do. You are guilty. You stoke the fire that sets guys like this one off. Do not let yourself off the hook, this person did NOT "act alone".

Multi-generational homelessness

This man has been sitting in the same spot for a few days on East 4th Street near First Avenue in Manhattan's East Village, my neighborhood. He asks for nothing but I noticed him scraping the sides of a jar of something dark, chocolate spread perhaps, with a spoon.

He does not ask passersby for anything, does not initiate interaction. Yet when I asked him if I could take his photo he engaged with me quite readily. He was clearly not a wino or addict, and does not show overt signs of any mental illness.  I gave him the change from my pocket (and would have given more if I could). I told him he is beautiful, because he is.

The next morning on my way to the supermarket, with my two dogs in tow, he was still there. Still scraping the same jar. I picked up a jar of "Vitamin Water," an apple and a pear, with him in mind. On the way back I said, "I have some things for you." Again, in his absolutely accepting and gentle manner, he simply smiled and said, "Oh, good!" I asked him how his teeth are doing, are they strong.

"I don't have too many left," he said.

"OK, then, the apple is out, but can you eat a pear?"

"If it's soft," he answered, "but I have a grater in my bag, I can grate it up!"

I gave him the pear, the drink and some slices of bread from the bag I had just bought for my daughter and me, thinking how organized and skillful a homeless person he is to have a grater in his bag.

"So what are you doing out here?" I asked.

He shrugged slightly. "I'm homeless."

"Where  do you stay in the winter?"

"I  stay outside. I have warm blankets in my bag." (In New York City winter temperatures are at or below freezing for months.) Again I thought, "What a skillful man."

"No family? Where do you come from?" I expected to hear that he has drifted here from elsewhere.

"From Inwood."

"Uptown?"

Yes, he answered, he comes from that neighborhood, on the northernmost end of Manhattan.

"Well," he clarified, "I was raised in Inwood but my family was homeless, too."

My sweet new friend petted my dogs for a bit. I had to move along. "You take care out here," I said.

"Oh, I will! I do!"

Awesome Woman: Nadia Al-Sakkaf

Today's Awesome Woman is Nadia Al-Sakkaf, a Yemeni woman who, in 2005 after her father was murdered, took over as editor and publisher of the Yemen Times, the country's  first and most widely read independent English-language newspaper. As painfully demonstrated by her father's fate, this position in the ongoing political protest in Yemen -- protest that was first started by a woman -- entails extreme risk. But Al-Sakkaf does not stop at publishing a newspaper that dares to report on government oppression and violence, she also actively initiates and supports efforts aimed at improving the lives of Yemeni women. And she uses her newspaper as a platform for activism.

Al-Sakkaf travels out of country on the conference and speaker circuit and, while she could easily obtain residency in any number of Western countries, she returns to her homeland to continue upholding the principles of free speech and to advocate for women and others. While she was in Washington, D.C. in March, 2011 she was interviewed by Judy Woodruff of PBS.

Yemen today is in a very unique situation. The process was started by a woman and a number of women. And, alongside with men, they managed to lobby the students in the streets.

And the women are also part of the support group of these protesters. They bring them food and blankets. And they -- I have seen a woman throwing hot water on soldiers when they were trying to attack the protesters from her window.

So, we need not forget the role of women in this magnificent time of Yemen.

Al-Sakkaf was the very first recipient of the Gibran Tueni award bestowed annually by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) for, "attachment to freedom of the press, courage, leadership, ambition, and high managerial and professional standards."   Indeed, she has become a strong voice in the call for the Arab media to mind its own store rather than merely complain about the international press, to balance its coverage, to play the critical role that no one but the press can play in a fair-minded society, and to improve its pitiful record at reporting on the many human rights abuses -- both political oppression and the traditional practices that victimize women.

From the WAN page where Al-Sakkaf's 2006 award is documented:

She considers the Yemen Times to be a newspaper with a mission: it should not only criticise the government but also furnish solutions. Editorially, she focuses on raising the newspaper's general standards, with a strong focus on human rights, gender issues and women's rights....

Ms Al-Saqqaf has made it a priority to raise the professional standards of the journalists working at the newspaper and to improve the competence of female journalists in Yemen. Legal education is among upcoming projects for the staff, as well as training in how to report on scientific developments.

In her biting article, "Arab media: To lead or to follow?" posted on the Arab Media Community web site in 2008, Al-Sakkaf wonders why her newspaper was the only one in Yemen to take up the case of Nujood Ali, the 10-year-old girl who fought her way out of a marriage to a man more than three times her age, until it became a huge story in the Western media. And she never misses a chance to encourage women to become full partners in Yemeni public life, and to exercise their voices via the media. When she received the Tueni award she said, "This is recognition of Yemeni journalists generally and especially Yemeni women working in the media. This should encourage them to grow and not give up."

This month, Al-Sakkaf spoke at TEDGlobal. "How did you, then, make the decision and assume the responsibility of running a newspaper -- especially in such times of conflict?" asks the interviewer.

"Well, let me first warn you that I am not the traditional Yemeni girl."

Nadia, you can say that again. You are not the "traditional girl" anywhere!




[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

Awesome Women: Lisa Shannon and Fartun Abdisalaan

The Awesome Women of the Day are Lisa Shannon and Fartun Abdisalaan, who together are working to improve the lot of women in Mogadishu, Somalia, which was "recently named one of the five worst places to be female" and is a place where few on this earth would choose to visit, never mind work. They are being honored today for risking their lives and giving up Western comfort in order to advocate for the human rights, health, safety, opportunity, education, and well-being of women in one of the hardest hit places on the planet.

Lisa Shannon, center and in black, and Fartun Abdisalaan Adan, in blue directly behind her,
surrounded by participants in the new organization Sister Somalia,
which helps Somali victims of gender-based violence.

In an article penned by Shannon, "In Mogadishu: A Lifeline For Somali Rape Victims"
in The New York Times this week, she leads off:

“Why did you come here when no one else does?” The African Union communications director asked us over dinner at its compound in Mogadishu. Good question. We were warned against it, especially by war-zone regulars. It’s been called the most dangerous city—or place—on earth. In fact, we had to delay our trip for two weeks due to multiple suicide bombings and riots inside the area controlled by Mogadishu’s transitional government (TFG). So, why go? I gave the short answer, “We’re supporting a local social entrepreneur in launching a sexual violence hotline.”

But the real answer was more complicated. Somalia bothers me. The 1993 Black Hawk Down incident was tragic not only for the loss of United States servicemen, but because many experts credit this loss with a shift in American public sentiment and policy toward mass atrocity in Africa. In effect, we collectively flipped off our empathy switch, approaching African crises like Rwanda, Congo and Darfur as “Operation Not Worth It.” But no country has been more written off than Somalia. And in Somalia, no group has been more written off than women.

Abdisalaan's husband, Elman, was a human rights worker who was murdered in 1996. After escaping to Canada to raise her children there, she returned to Mogadishu in 2007 to continue his work and is the founder of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Center. Counseling and other services are provided to the survivors of gender violence, the nearly universal female genital mutilation practiced in Somalia, and all sorts of struggles the women endure due to the chaos and conflicts in their country.

And then there is Al-Shabab. The radical, militant Islamic group linked to Al-Qaeda rules 90% of central and south Somalia with utter impunity. Not only do they abduct and imprison through forced marriage, terrorize and gang rape. If women complain, they are often accused of adultery and speaking against the brotherhood, punishable by death. The execution methods of choice: Stoning or beheading.

Abdisalaan founded Sister Somalia, a program in collaboration with Shannons' new organization, A Thousand Sisters, which offers the only sexual violence hotline in Mogadishu, provides counseling, business startup advice, and also works to move survivors and their children away from their attackers. "Each woman who walks through the door will also receive a letter from a 'sister' abroad," writes Shannon. "We hope to raise $120,000 per year to make it happen. How is a broke activist like me planning to pull this off? Just like every stage of my journey with Congo, I don’t know exactly. But I’m betting we can find at least 1,000 Americans who would welcome the opportunity to show up for women in Somalia, through writing a letter or giving at least $10 per month."

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

Awesome Woman: Christiane Amanpour

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Christiane Amanpour (born January 12, 1958), a broadcast journalist well known around the world for her coverage of major conflicts and world events since 1990, as international correspondent at CNN for years and currently as anchor  of ABC's This Week.  Amanpour has navigated war zones, built an unparalleled network of worldwide connections, excelled in a hugely male-dominated profession, and gone face-to-face with world leaders fearlessly asking the hard questions. And she has also on many occasions taken the risk of breaking the "neutral journalist" mold by reporting from her own point of view and expressing her own conscience, in defiance of the old meme that if a reporter has a personal opinion on a situation they must keep it to themselves. She is brassy, outspoken, and brave.

Amanpour was born in London (or, by some accounts, in Tehran) to an Iranian father and British mother. She spent her early years in Iran, receiving an elite education as her family was among the privileged class under the Shah's regime. Her family emigrated to England on the eve of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In England, Amanpour attended the New Hall School, the country's oldest Catholic school that has educated girls since the year 1642. She then traveled to the United States to study at the University of Rhode Island, and graduated summa cum laude in 1983 with a degree in journalism.

Very soon after graduating, she was hired as an entry-level desk assistant on CNN's foreign desk in Atlanta, Georgia (1983) and gained rapid recognition and major opportunities early on. After an assignment covering the Iran-Iraq war, by 1986 she was transferred to Eastern Europe to cover the fall of Soviet Communism, and she remained in Europe into 1989 reporting on the democratic revolutions on that continent. Her achievements landed her a role as a correspondent for CNN's New York bureau, and very soon afterward she was shipped out again to serve as CNN's foreign correspondent covering the Gulf War as it commenced in Iraq.

Amanpour quickly gained recognition and notoriety for her gutsy style of journalism, for her bravery in the field (even parachuting into conflicts), for her poise and incisiveness when interviewing officials and leaders, and for allowing herself to occasionally report quite emotionally on difficult events. After the Gulf War she was promoted to the position of being CNN's chief international correspondent (a position she held until she departed CNN in 2010), and she was sent to cover the Bosnian War.

Deftly moving between the field and arranged interview, on worldwide live TV in perhaps her most famous moment she challenged President Clinton (on his own "Global Forum" show) regarding U.S. policy on the Bosnian war. Locking eyes with him across the satellite signal, she asked one of the most ballsy questions in the history of broadcast journalism:

Mr. President, my question is, as leader of the free world, as leader of the only superpower, why has it taken you, the United States, so long to articulate a policy on Bosnia? Why, in the absence of a policy have you allowed the US and the West to be held hostage to those who do have a policy - the Bosnian Serbs - and do you not think that the constant flip-flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia set a very dangerous precedent and would lead people such as [North Korean president] Kim II Sung or other strong people to take you less seriously than you would like to be taken?"

An angered Clinton responded coldly, "No, but speeches like that may make them take me less seriously than I'd like to be taken. There have been no constant flip-flops, madam." This exchange is worth watching -- Amanpour has it posted to her Facebook page. To cut Clinton a break, he did pretty well at recovering from her unsettling challenge. Also, near the end of the program Clinton returned to what she had said. "That poor woman has seen the horrors of this war, and she has had to report on them... She's been fabulous. She's done a great service to the whole world on that. I do not blame her for being mad at me. But I'm doing the best I can on this problem from my perspective."

Amanpour fell under some pretty strong criticism after this broadcast, and was accused of lack of objectivity -- many felt she was reporting too emotionally and that she had an agenda in favor of the Bosnian Muslims and was biased against the Serbs. Amanpour explained in a 1996 article in Quill that the Serbs denied CNN and other Western media better access to the territory they controlled, and she believed the Serbs did themselves an "incredible disservice."

Also in that article, Amanpour answers in response to the charges of bias: "The very notion of objectivity in war becomes immensely important... I have come to believe that objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally. Once you treat all sides the same in a case such as Bosnia, you are drawing a moral equivalence between victim and aggressor. And from there it is a short step toward being neutral... So objectivity must go hand in hand with morality."

Since that time, Christiane Amanpour has covered wars, conflicts, genocides, strife, political upheavals, and other heavy aspects of the human story around the globe, before settling in to anchor studio-based work towards the end of her time at CNN and now at ABC. She has scooped some of the hottest political interviews in recent history. But whether working in the field with bombs exploding all around her, or sitting at a desk in the United States, she gets to the heart of the matter, engages people, and does not shy from the most important job in journalism -- holding politicians' feet to the fire while demanding answers to the uncomfortable questions.

---

Personal footnote: I met Christiane Amanpour, who was friends with an Iranian co-worker of mine, for a brief moment in 1990 when she was about to depart to cover the Gulf War. She had come to say goodbye to my co-worker. I was introduced, and was bowled over by the woman's aura without even knowing who she was. As a fly on the wall witnessing the exchange between her and my friend, I learned some private details that I will not share here, but I can say that in order for Amanpour to accept her first war zone assignment, she was braving not only the potential dangers of the gig, but also faced going through significant personal changes. She was truly stepping off a cliff, and doing so with her characteristic (but not callous) moxie, which explained for me the energy that shimmered all around this awesome woman.

Awesome Woman: Wilma Mankiller

Today's AWESOME WOMAN is Wilma Mankiller (November 18, 1945 – April 6, 2010), American Indian activist and chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995. Mankiller grew up with her 10 siblings on a land allotment in Oklahoma, in squalid poverty.

In the 1960s Mankiller lived in Oakland, California, with her husband, had two daughters, and attended college. In 1969 she joined the Native American activist movement and participated in the 19-month-long occupation of Alcatraz Island. The stated intention of the Occupation was to gain Indian control over the island for the purpose of building a center for Native American Studies, an American Indian spiritual center, an ecology center, and an American Indian Museum. After the occupation was forcibly ended by the U.S. Government, Mankiller volunteered for five years for the Pit River Tribe.

In 1977, Mankiller divorced her husband and moved back to Oklahoma with her daughters, in hopes of helping her own people and began an entry-level job for the Cherokee Nation. By 1983, she was elected deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation, and when the chief took a position in Washington D.C. in 1985, she became the first woman to assume the role of Chief of the Cherokees.

Contrary to the traditional inclusion of women in tribal leadership, the Cherokee nation at the time was a very male-dominated power structure. Wilma Mankiller worked within that structure to achieve great progress for the tribe. She spearheaded community development projects such as tribally owned horticultural operations, plants that got defense department contracts, and building a hydroelectric facility. She leveraged U.S. policies to gain every possible advantage for her tribe, and paved the way for the government-to-government relationship the Cherokee Nation has with the U.S. Federal government. During her 10-year stint as Chief, she created reasons for Cherokee people to rejoin their Nation, and increased the population from 55,000 to 156,000.


Mankiller lived through a near-fatal car accident and multiple grave health problems. Largely due to health reasons she resigned as Chief in 1995 and became a teacher at Dartmouth College. Upon her passing in April, 2010 from pancreatic cancer, President Obama said:


"I am deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Wilma Mankiller today. As the Cherokee Nation’s first female chief, she transformed the Nation-to-Nation relationship between the Cherokee Nation and the Federal Government, and served as an inspiration to women in Indian Country and across America. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, she was recognized for her vision and commitment to a brighter future for all Americans. Her legacy will continue to encourage and motivate all who carry on her work. Michelle and I offer our condolences to Wilma’s family, especially her husband Charlie and two daughters, Gina and Felicia, as well as the Cherokee Nation and all those who knew her and were touched by her good works."

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Woman: Annie Oakley

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Annie Oakley (1860 - 1926). She was an American sharpshooter whose talent in this traditionally male sport led her to become a long-time star in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. She was the first coast-to-coast famous American woman, famous of her own accord and not via marriage or birth circumstances.

Born Phoebe Ann Mosey in Pennsylvania to Quaker parents - her mother was 18 and her father was 49 -  Oakley was put into a "poor farm," where she was taught to sew and decorate, after her mother was twice widowed and could no longer care for all of her children. But she was not to remain confined to this classic female employment for very long!

Annie had begun hunting at age 6 and sold the game to help support her mother and siblings, and by age 15 had paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm. She had a natural gift for marksmanship, and by the age of 21 had won serious props for her shooting talent, helped a hotelier win a high-stakes bet, and met her soon-to-be husband, the man who lost the bet, all in one day. From Wikipedia:

During the spring of 1881, the Baughman and Butler shooting act was being performed in Cincinnati. Traveling show marksman and former dog trainer Francis E. Butler (1850–1926), an Irish immigrant, placed a $100 bet per side (roughly equivalent to modern US$2,000) with Cincinnati hotel owner Jack Frost, that he, Butler, could beat any local fancy shooter.

The hotelier arranged a shooting match between Butler and the 21-year-old Oakley, to be held in ten days in a small town near Greenville, Ohio....

After missing on his 25th shot, Butler lost the match and the bet. He began courting Oakley, and they married on June 20, 1882.

Annie Oakley, for all the stature and respect she earned during her many years touring and becoming increasingly famous, stood only five feet tall. She had a long and very successful career as a performer, traveling abroad to many countries and even performing for the Queen Victoria. She was truly an almost super-human sharpshooter. Her most famous trick was to repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, while using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet.

In 1894 Oakley's fame led her to star in one of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope films, The "Little Sure Shot" of the "Wild West," an exhibition of rifle shooting at glass balls, etc. that can be viewed on this Wikipedia page.  In 1901 Oakley was injured seriously in a train wreck, and endured temporary paralysis and five spinal operations. She tamed her career down for a bit, left Buffalo Bill's traveling show and began starring in a play that was written especially for her, The Western Girl. Oakley played the role of Nancy Berry and used a pistol, rifle and rope to outsmart a group of outlaws.

Oakley set a new kind of role model for American woman and did her share of work to promote self-respect and equal recognition in society for the country's females.

Throughout her career, it is believed that Oakley taught upwards of 15,000 women how to use a gun. Oakley believed strongly that it was crucial for women to learn how to use a gun, as not only a form of physical and mental exercise, but also to defend themselves.

She also had written to President McKinley when the war with Spain was on the horizon,  "offering the government the services of a company of 50 'lady sharpshooters' who would provide their own arms and ammunition should the U.S. go to war with Spain." Oakley continued to perform here and there, and to set records, into her 60s, but she also was known for her philanthropy and support for women's rights. At age 62 she hit a hundred clay targets in a row from 15 yards. After a bad car accident soon thereafter, which forced her to wear a brace on one leg and to spend a year and a half in recovery, she again set records at age 64 in 1924.

In 1925, Annie Oakley died of pernicious anemia. It is said that her husband (Butler still!) was so crushed by her death that he stopped eating. He died 18 days later. It is also said that it was discovered after her death that she had given her entire fortune away to her family and to charities.

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Woman: Flor Molina

Flor Molina is a survivor of forced labor in the garment industry in Los Angeles, California. She was forced to work 14 or more hours per day, was told she owed her trafficker thousands of dollars, and was even required to live within the garment factory and was not allowed to go out without escort. Sadly, this is all typical in the world of human trafficking. What is unusual about Molina is that within 40 days of her arrival at the Los Angeles factory in 2001 she found a way to escape, immediately placed a phone call to a (non-enslaved) co-worker, and blew the whistle in spite of threats that her three children and mother back home would be harmed. Her phone call initiated a process that ended with the conviction of the human trafficker who had brought her to the United States and kept her enslaved.

Molina's coworker picked her up, took her to a restaurant, and contacted the FBI who were already investigating the trafficker. The FBI connected her to the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), who helped her find shelter and get back on her feet. She then became a member of the CAST Survivor Advisory Caucus, one of the groups that worked hard to pass a bill in California (that will go into effect in 2012) that requires manufacturers and retailers in the state to disclose their efforts at making sure their supply chains are free of slavery.

Molina offered the final testimony in the California legislature while Governor Schwarzenegger's pen was poised over the bill:

I and other members of the caucus speak up against slavery not because we are not afraid but because we want to make sure that what happened to us doesn't happen to anyone else.

The CAST Survivor Advisory Caucus fought hard for this bill to pass. We testified at hearings, we wrote letters and got signatures for our petition. Our voices were heard and action was taken, action that will, hopefully, protect others from falling prey to traffickers like we once did. I am proud to stand here, not as a victim of slavery but as a powerful agent of change.

Please, Governor Schwarzenegger, will you please sign the legislation?

There was applause, and the Governor signed.

http://www.szone.us/f76/governor-highlights-legislation-combat-human-trafficking-51387/

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/05/i-was-enslaved-for-40-days/

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Kudos: Stonyfield Farm (kinda sorta)

Due to my rapidly deepening anti-plastics obsession and my recycling OCD, I check the bottom of every plastic container I need to dispose. While #1 and #2 bottles are the only plastics collected by New York City's municipal recycling program, #5 plastics can be dropped off at Whole Foods customer service desk to be recycled by Preserve's Gimme 5 program.

So yesterday I bought some organic Stonyfield yogurt for my daughter who needs some probiotics after running a high fever for a couple of days.

I turn over the cup and see the welcome news that it is not #anything plastic, it is "Made from plants":

My initial reaction was, I am thrilled, thinking that someone finally invented an enviro-friendly degradable bio-plastic food container that can hold liquids. I guess that was a bit illogical, huh, since liquids ought to degrade anything that is truly degradable ...

I headed off to Stonyfield's site and read their PR about these containers. The plant-based plastic they are using is called PLA (Polylactic Acid). Turns out that ...

• PLA is used only for their small multi-pack cups. Their larger containers use #5 polypropylene plastic (see link at top of post for how to recycle these)
• While Stonyfield claims to have examined various options for yogurt packaging including glass, poly-coated paper, they then go on to explain why they decided against glass and in favor of lightweight #5 or plant-based plastics. They do not explain why they do not just use coated paper. For so many years all yogurt or sourcream etc. containers were made from waxed or otherwise coated paper and there was no problem I ever noticed with this material!
• Their PLA is not really compostable. Further, there is some kind of double-speak going on about why composting is not a good idea:
  

  While PLA itself can be composted, the particular blend used in our multipack cups is too thick to be considered compostable under American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) international standards. And, surprisingly, the independent review of PLA’s environmental impact found that composting is not the best option for disposing of the cups. Why? Because composting would release the carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the plant-based plastic (CO₂ absorbed by the corn when it was growing) back into the atmosphere where it would contribute to global warming.

• The PLA is "recyclable" but only in our dreams:

  The good news is that PLA is recyclable. The bad news is that, right now, the recycling infrastructure for PLA is in its infancy, so this technology is available in only two places, Wisconsin and Belgium, and these facilities aren’t equipped to separate paper labels, adhesives or lidding from our PLA multipack cups to enable recycling.

• The PLA can contain GMO corn! Actually, they sort of get a pass on this. Cargill, the container manufactuer, is working via an offset program to ensure that -- while their procured corn may include GMO kernels -- an equivalent amount of non-GMO corn is grown (somewhere, by somebody, if we trust this).

Still, all in all, kudos to Stonyfield Farm for reducing their carbon footprint, "by 1,875 metric tons of CO₂ a year. That’s equal to the CO₂ emissions from 4,360 barrels of oil, or the greenhouse gases from the energy used in 160 homes for an entire year." And, of course, the elimination of toxins leaching into ground water when the containers end up in landfills is huge, too.

Awesome Woman: Chef Anne Cooper

Todays very Awesome Woman is Chef Ann Cooper, a.k.a. The Renegade Lunch Lady.

Cooper is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and was among the first 50 women to be certified as an Executive Chef by the educational arm of the American Culinary Federation. She had a strong career going as a noted chef, having held positions with Holland America Cruises, Radisson Hotels, the Telluride Bluegrass and Film Festivals and the Telluride Ski Resort where she catered parties of up to 20,000. She has been featured in numerous newspapers, magazines, radio show, and television shows, has given seminars at Smithsonian Institute ... the list of honors is long.

But rather than pursue this path to a pinnacle of riches, Cooper's focus shifted to the need to feed our children properly, and to care for our planet wisely. No longer could the environmental and health facts be ignored when it came to producing food in this country. Cooper’s career shifted from primarily cooking to a path of cooking, writing, and public speaking – all advocacy work for a healthier food system.

Cooper uses her skills and background to create a sustainable model for schools nationwide to transition any processed food based K-12 school meal program to a whole foods environment where food is procured regionally and prepared from scratch. In 2009, Ann founded Food Family Farming Foundation (F3) as a nonprofit focusing on solutions to the school food crisis. F3's pivotal project is The Lunch Box - a web portal that provides free and accessible tools, recipes and community connections to support school food reform.

In adidition to writing books about food, cooking, health and sustainable practices, Cooper has also penned "A Woman's Place Is in the Kitchen," in which she discusses both traditional and current vantage points of women involved in the food service industry. Some of the historical issues discussed include: the influences of sociological change emanating from the transfer of power from matriarchal to patriarchal emphasis and the effects of the implementation of the brigade system which was developed from all-male military institutions.

A database of 6500 women and the compilation of 500 surveys provide statistics for the contemporary discussion. Women culinary professionals of today express passion for food while having to balance choices between professional and family obligations; what are the ramifications of these choices and how do they effect the culinary industry and the decisions made by colleagues, mentors and staff?

This is the first book that has been written exclusively about women chefs and restaurateurs; A Woman's Place is in the Kitchen provides an informative, insightful and objective portrait of the role of women working in the multi-faceted culinary field.

A TED Talk by Ann Cooper is available here, given in 2007 when she was the Director of Nutrition for Berkeley Unified School District, heading up an operation that provided 7100 meals a day to schoolchildren, and successfully introduced healthy, safe food into the system.



Ann Cooper's web site is at http://www.chefann.com/

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Women: Bel Kaufman

The Awesome Woman of the Day is *Bel Kaufman* (born May 10, 1911) who at 100 years old is still an active and teaching a course in Jewish Humor at Hunter College, her alma mater (in the City University of New York system).

Bel Kaufman is the granddaughter of the famous Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, described in a recent New York Times article about Kaufman as "a writer who was able to squeeze heartbreaking humor out of the most threadbare deprivation and wove the bittersweet Tevye stories that became the source for 'Fiddler on the Roof.'"

Kaufman emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States at the age of 12 and was forced to start school in the first grade. Only 11 years later she had graduated from Hunter, and then pursued a master's at Columbia University. She began to teach in New York City Schools, and worked part-time as a writer for Esquire and other publications.
In 1965 her book Up the Down Staircase was published, a novel that deals with the experience of a new teacher's experience dealing with both the other teachers and the educational system, and the students. The book was based upon Kaufman's own teaching experiences.

Kaufman has carried on the tradition of distinctly Jewish humor her grandfather was known for. The Times article opens with this example:

When Bel Kaufman sits you down on her sofa and asks, “Are you comfortable?” the right answer, she reminds you, requires a Yiddish inflection, a shrug and the words, “I make a living.”

In explaining the origins and particular flavor of Yiddish humor, Kaufman explained to the Times reporter:

“It goes back to immigration from the shtetl, from that poverty, and because the Jew was the object of so much opprobrium and hatred,” she said. “The jokes were a defense mechanism: ‘We’re going to talk about ourselves in a more damaging way than you could.’ ”

When asked about the secret to her longevity in a New York Post article earlier this year, Kaufman answered, "I'm too busy to grow old."

There are beautiful pictures of her at Sholem Alecheim's 150th birthday celebration In the blog of Joan L. Roth, a photographer and writer who has done much documentary work about Jewish Women. See http://joanlroth.blogspot.com/2009/03/bel-kaufman-theodore-bikel.html

Other links:
NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/nyregion/bel-kaufman-at-100-still-a-teacher-and-a-jokester.html

NY Post: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/prof_shticks_to_her_guns_18F6lFUm9wG983kyjevRgP

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Kaufman

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Sitting is Killing You

This excellent infographic originated on the Medical Billing and Coding website. The researcher(s) and artist(s) are not named there.


Via: Medical Billing And Coding

Awesome Women: The Barefoot Solar Engineers of Africa

The Awesome Women of the Day are the "Barefoot Solar Engineers", women who left their African villages to spend six months at Barefoot University in India learning to create solar energy installations to power their villages. They brought their skills home, electrified their villages, and share their knowledge with others.





From the video narration:

This is about simple women in Africa who have made an extraordinary difference to their own communities, from Ethiopia to the Gambi, from Mauritania to Tanzania, a quiet revolution is taking place. Illiterate & semi-literate women, most of them grandmothers who have never left their villages in their lives, let alone going to another country several thousand miles away, they are making the impossible possible. They are baffling high-powered engineers, universities, donors, development planners and qualified experts by demonstrating incredible sophisticated skills and exposing the fundamental inadequacies of the formal educational system.

And a special shout-out to the woman who birthed and raised Sanjit “Bunker” Roy -- a man who recognizes that the best candidates for his project are women because of their superior patience and natural motivation to share what they have learned with their communities. Roy's Barefoot College has trained more than 3 million people for jobs in a bottom-up, social entrepreneurship approach to fight poverty and deprivation.

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Awesome Women: Phyllis Rodriguez & Aicha el-Wafi

It is Mother's Day many countries around the world. Today I  honor TWO AWESOME WOMEN OF THE DAY, Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and Aicha el-Wafi, the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, accused, tried and convicted by the United States of being the missing "20th hijacker".

Women can bridge vast rifts. Women can heal the world. Only women. Happy Mother's Day to all of you. Regardless of how many children you do or don't have, your powers of love and care and action and courage are what the world needs now. ♥



My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Quote of the Day: Suggested signs for Tea Partiers

Andrew Kimbralls excellent piece "The Empty Pulpit: The Obama Problem" in Tikkun criticizes the lack of ballsy action taken on the very issues Obama all us progressive types fired up about during his campaign. The piece is a stand-out because it illustrates ways in which the opinions and slogans of the reactionary right can be countered with common-sense points that might actually change some hearts and minds (rather than capitulation to the right and rather than dissembling in the name of political realism, as has been the case).

In his point about countering the "Government is the problem" meme, Kimbrall suggests:

To be true to their “anti-big government” message, Tea Party rallies should have been festooned with signs such as “Fire the Fireman,” “No More Police,” “Bite the Postman,” “We Support Fewer Teachers and Overcrowded Classrooms,” “Collapse our Bridges — No More Infrastructure,” “We’ll Pave and Build Our Own Roads,” “Citizens for Salmonella,” “Unsafe Drugs for Everyone,” “Americans for a Weak Defense,” “Senior Citizens Against Medicaid and Medicare.” These signs were missing, of course, and instead we have the endless brow furrowing over “big government” in both parties as the discussion remains conveniently abstract.

OK, you rugged individualists out there. Get out your steamrollers and line-painting equipment. Self-sufficiency, right?

Awesome Woman: Limor Fried

Today's AWOD is Limor Fried. She is an engineer, artist & hacker ("Ladyada"). She received her M.Eng in EECS from MIT where she developed and built subversive electronic devices, including a pair of glasses that darken whenever television is in view and a jamming device that disables people's annoying cell phone conversations at the press of a button. (see http://www.ladyada.net/portfolio/2004/index.html )

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.