Agora
THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE
SPRING 2020
LUTHER COLLEGE, DECORAH, IOWA
Courage to Care Luther College Hospital 1918
Contents 2019-2020 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series: Resistance and Resilience African Roots in Southern Fields: What the Slaves Ate Kelly Kean Sharp............................................................................................................ 3 Culture as Resistance in the Chilean Andes: An Indigenous Community’s Struggle for Rights and Recognition Anita Carrasco................................................................................................................ 9
Sabbatical Reports Lutheran, Ecumenical, and Interreligious Conversations Wanda Deifelt.............................................................................................................. 18 A Different View of Health Advocacy in Amish Country Angela Kueny............................................................................................................... 20 Resilient Communities in a Time of Change Jon Jensen..................................................................................................................... 25
Chapel Talks International Women’s Day Charlotte A. Kunkel...................................................................................................... 29
Poem At Cardinal Marsh Diane Scholl................................................................................................................. 31
Cover: In October 1918, a deadly influenza outbreak arrived at Luther College, which was quarantined for three weeks. The campus nurse, Theresse “Tess” Eleanor Arneson, was one of six nurses caring for the afflicted. Courtesy of Luther College Archives, RG18, S1, SS4, Box 4
Introduction by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English, Editor of Agora
W
hen the coronavirus struck the U.S. in full force this March, recent Luther nursing grads Shannon Lunn (’20) and Maddie Market (’20) were on the front lines responding. They posted a writing on the Luther Nursing Facebook page, sharing how being a nurse during Covid-19 was not at all what they had expected when they went into the profession. As new nurses, we thought we were signing on to become med-surg, cardiac, neuro, or even pediatric nurses. However, now many of our units have been transformed into positive or rule-out coronavirus units. We have been thrown into caring for people on the front lines with only a few weeks under our belts. Yet they trusted their Luther education. “There isn’t a whole lot you can do to prepare yourself for something like this,” they wrote. “Trust yourself, trust your education. If something doesn’t feel right, ask about it, investigate it, your instincts are probably right.” Shannon and Maddie took heart, too, from the courage they saw in their fellow health care workers—“doctors, lab techs, physical therapists, and other essential workers . . . Each and every one of those people is walking through the hospital doors knowing all too well that this could be the day they become exposed . . . This could be the day they take the virus home to their loved ones.” And yet “despite the fears, each one of those workers has the strength and courage to enter those doors anyway.” Shannon and Maddie also enter those doors “because this is what we were trained to do. It is why we entered the profession in the first place . . . to make a difference and do our part in fighting something greater than ourselves.”
2
Agora/Spring 2020
The courage to care is nothing new among nurses at Luther College. More than 100 years ago in 1918 a deadly global influenza pandemic hit the campus at a time far more extraordinary than our own. The United States was involved in the “Great War” (World War I). In early October the college established a Students’ Army Training Corps, enrolling 105 of Luther’s 241 students, and turning the third and fourth floors of Old Main into barracks. The same month the influenza hit. According to the Center for Disease Control, over the course of the flu 500 million people were infected worldwide and 50 million died, including 700,000 in the United States. According to records provided by college archivist Hayley Jackson, five faculty and 112 students were infected; one student died. The success of the college in combatting the flu was likely due to a three-week quarantine of the college and the efforts of six nurses, two of whom also contracted the disease. On the cover of this issue is a photo of Luther College nurse Theresse Eleanor Arneson, or Tess as she was known, with two of her patients. She brought such good care to her patients that she was fondly remembered in the 1920 Luther College yearbook as an “enthusiastic, good-natured, and sympathetic girl, willing to help us in our difficulties and to give us encouragement . . . During the most critical period of the influenza epidemic, she proved her true worth as a nurse, working almost incessantly for the boys” (see page 32). By November 11, when the armistice ending the war was signed, Luther was back at full strength. There was a huge parade on Water Street and the Luther bell was rung so hard it cracked. In this time of Covid-19 we have plenty of role models for the courage to care
among nurses and other health care professionals who daily risk their safety and lives for others. But the courage to care occurs in many ways and many places—even among Luther faculty! Every writing in this issue speaks to our faculty’s passion to care for others and for the larger world. Teaching in the time of Covid-19 also takes a certain kind of courage to care—not risking our health or lives, but risking new ways to teach and learn with our students. In this respect, what Shannon and Maddie write at the end of their Facebook post applies to all of us. They quote a famous doctor—Dr. Seuss in this case—who wrote: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
African Roots in Southern Fields: What the Slaves Ate by KELLY KEAN SHARP, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies
I chose the city of Charleston as the location for this study because it was the heart of the antebellum South— its political, economic, and cultural systems. In 1790, Charleston was the fourth largest city in the young United States and indisputably the largest and wealthiest in the US South. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the city remained primary port for international trade and the commercial center of a vibrant regional economy. Even as its economic standing and population declined in relation to newer American cities such as New Orleans and Cincinnati, Charleston’s leadership role in the nullification crisis of the early 1830s and in the secession movement of the 1850s solidified its position as the standard bearer for the Southern way of life. But make no mistake! It was the coerced labor performed by millions of enslaved African and African Americans that shaped these social, economic, and political realities. At the heart of my book are three historical theses. First, Provisioning Charleston demonstrates the necessity to view city and countryside as economi-
cally and culturally integrated places in order to properly appreciate enslaved people’s exhaustive contributions to antebellum agriculture, economy, and culture. Economic, labor, and environmental historians have chiefly associated Lowcountry plantation agriculture with the commodity crop production of rice and cotton.1 This work embraces the importance of Charleston not only as an entrepôt of the Atlantic world but also as heart of the local economy, the provincial hub of consumerism for the region’s diverse population. In growing and selling produce for the city’s population, enslaved men and women of the US South not only filled pocketbooks of planters but also the stomachs of the region’s residents— rural and urban, white and black, free and enslaved.
to cooking, Provisioning Charleston articulates how bondpeople skillfully navigated the Lowcountry landscape both literally and metaphorically. Within the confines of bondage, enslaved men and women of the Lowcountry navigated sadistic working conditions, geographical isolation, restrictive state and municipal laws, enslavers’ merciless demands, and the bigoted social order
Second, Provisioning Charleston elucidates that the labor performed by bondpeople provisioning the urban metropolis of antebellum Charleston was in fact skilled work with each stage of the process requiring persons adept in a specialized skillset. Early American labor history Kelly Sharp speaks at the Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture disproportionally lauds the on February 18, 2020. male artisan, formally trained in his craft and producing goods for sale to, as civil rights activists anachronistiin the commercial marketplace. Provically described, “make a way out of no sioning Charleston expands the concept way.” The chapters of my book outline of what constitutes skilled labor and in how the skilled work performed by what spheres enslaved people performed regional bondpeople greatly shaped not it by adopting Daina Ramey Berry’s only the economic but also the cultural definition of skill as “the ability to do development of the US South. any form of work well… [including] all activities and crafts that a person masFinally, Provisioning Charleston asserts tered with her or his hands or body.”2 that race was historically more imporBy examining bondpeople’s roles in each tant than place in shaping culinary culstage of provisioning, from cultivation ture. Respected foodways scholar John Spring 2020/Agora
3
LUTHER PHOTO BUREAU, MCKENDRA HEINKE ‘21
T
his essay is based on the research presented in my forthcoming book, Provisioning Charleston: Food, Race, and Labor in the Antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in the next year. Provisioning Charleston uses food as a lens to study the negotiation of race and culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry between 1783 and 1860. While historians have well documented ways in which white and black residents of the colonial and antebellum American South legally and intellectually constructed understandings of race, none have considered culture, particularly culinary culture or foodways, as an expression of racial identity.
Egerton articulated that the intimate “proximity of whites and blacks in the South… made Afro-European cookery an existential reality almost from the beginning.”3 Thus, when I began this project, I presumed the foodways of antebellum Charleston would reveal a creolized culinary culture, one in which antebellum residents shared ingredients, cooking techniques, and dining practices across the bounds of race. However, Provisioning Charleston demonstrates that Black people, both free and enslaved, did not simply imitate the culinary habits of the planter-merchant elite. Instead, they created and developed their own culture which facilitated a distinct African diasporic foodway. Making these arguments, my work is organized in farm-to-fork manner. Chapter one explores the crops grown by bondpeople on regional plantations both under the command of their enslaver and on their own time. Chapter two outlines the overland and waterway routes used by enslaved people bringing goods to market. This chapter exposes the critical skillset required by bondpeople to safely navigate marshy and sandy paths as well as swamp-streams under the command of their enslaver but most often on Sundays or covertly at night. I argue that in doing so, bondpeople formed an intimate and everyday knowledge of the regional landscape and actively used this knowledge to extract material gain and negotiate degrees of temporal freedom. My third chapter explores the power dynamics enjoyed by the enslaved women who labored in Charleston’s Center Market selling to urban residents across the bounds of race and class. Recognizing their role in provisioning the city deepens the historical understanding of the involvement of enslaved labor in the daily economy of urban Charleston. Chapter four continues a close examination of enslaved women’s role in provisioning urban Charleston’s consumers by reexamining enslaved cooks within the framework of artisan labor. Historian Eugene Genovese argued that enslaved cooks merely demonstrated “a healthy concern with cooking.”4 My research clearly shows that these women developed a distinct and specialized set 4
Agora/Spring 2020
of skills, passed on through training along kinship ties or apprenticeship. They held an expert level of competence using the tools of their trade.
applied their agronomic expertise most famously to tidal rice cultivation; their knowledge and labor also proved critical to the cultivation of the regional commodity crops—corn, sweet potatoes, and peas—grown under the command of their enslavers.
My final chapter exposes the ways in which Lowcountry residents used culinary culture, specifically meal construction and the accoutrements of An examination of plantation records clearly demonstrates the frequency of dining, as a marker of racial distinction crop diversification beyond rice and cotrather than an expression of economic ton for export. Specifically, Lowcountry class. Archaeological evidence, estate plantations supplied 38 percent of the documents, and tax records left behind state’s pea crops, 42 percent of the poby Charleston’s free families of color tato crops, and 15 percent of the state’s confirm they did not live in impovercorn crops (see “Tandem Growth” beished conditions. In fact, by 1860, the low). These foodstuffs, grown in enslavmajority of Charleston’s free blacks were ers’ fields, served as the basic starches for in the equivalent economic category as all residents of the plantation enterprise the city’s white middling class. Regardas well as for Charleston’s burgeoning less that their economic status was akin population, regardless of race or class. to middling class white Charlestonians, free black Charlestonians chose to serve meals that Tandem Growth of Commodity and Provision Crops mirrored on Lowcountry Plantations the culinary 100 culture of 90 regional enslaved people. 80 70 Free black 60 folks of the 50 antebellum 40 era again did 30 20 not simply “mimic ladies 10 0 and gentleRice and Peas Cotton and Rice and Corn Cotton and Rice and Potato Cotton and men of the Peas Corn Potato master class” as historian It was foodstuffs grown in bondpeople’s Cynthia Kennedy argued but rather provision grounds—the plots of land actively used food as a field of action to enslavers set aside for their enslaved 5 assert a shared history and culture. It people to grow their own food—that was bondpeople’s cultivation of foodallowed for the formation and mainstuffs on regional plantations, especially tenance of a distinct African diasporic genealogically African food crops, that culinary culture. Living and laboring facilitated this distinct African diasporic under conditions of economic exploitafoodway. Having outlined my book, I tion, enslaved people of the Lowcountry will now return to the plantations of seemed poorly situated to perpetucoastal South Carolina that supplied ate any sort of agricultural heritage. Charlestonians with fresh produce. However, the African Diaspora was Pursuing the greatest financial profit one of plants as well as peoples. African possible, antebellum Lowcountry plantspecies were well-suited to the subtropiers ordered the vigorous cultivation of cal climate of the coastal US South and rice and cotton for the transatlantic bondpeople perpetuated genealogically market. Simultaneously, they used their African crops by continuing to cultivate enslaved laborers to grow food crops these foodstuffs such as okra, eggplant, to provision their own plantations and melons. They grew these alongside as well as sell to consumers in urban the subsistence staples of American Charleston. Lowcountry bondpeople Indians which had been naturalized in
Africa, including corn, sweet potatoes, squashes, and peppers. The task system greatly shaped enslaved people’s ability to contribute to a racially-segregated Lowcountry culinary culture. It was a system of management popular in the Lowcountry, particularly on the coastal rice plantations. The task system divided “slaveholder’s time” and “personal time” during which enslaved people could labor for their own designs. It was during this time that enslaved people worked their provision plots, often with the help of the rest of the kinship network. The size of the family sometimes effected the plot size given. Some planters averaged “5 or 6 acres of ground” for each familial unit whereas planters like W.W. Hazzard of Berkeley District allocated “everyone a task of ground, and a half task for each child capable of working it.”6 The produce grown by bondpeople in their provision plots served three significant and distinct purposes. The plots first of all reduced costs for enslavers to feed their bondpeople and secondly allowed bondpeople to select the production of foodstuffs specific to their individual preferences and collective culinary culture. Third, the provision grounds allowed bondpeople to develop an extensive range of independent marketing activities. While these purposes have been recognized in scholarship throughout the West Indies and greater Diaspora, my research argues that plots worked by bondpeople on plantations near urban centers uniquely facilitated a rural-urban culinary culture shared between the free and enslaved black population. Examining provision plots outside of the capitalist market system and instead considering their cultural importance reveals provisioning plots as vegetal landscapes of the marginal—land used by people in their spare moments under a barbaric labor regime to perpetuate their cultural identity. Early generations of enslaved Africans introduced new dietary and medicinal plants to European naturalists/ plantation owners through pioneering cultivation outside Africa. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, European authors documented a host of African-origin food crops distinctly present in the plantation
societies of the Americas. Bondpeople’s agency in the New World establishment is suggested in the African words adopted by the colonial languages of former plantation societies.” For crops with no existing words in European languages, whites often appropriated the names used by enslaved people who grew and prepared the crops. For example, banana, yams, and okra are words of African origin adopted into the English language. This is evidenced in other languages of colonial plantation societies such as guandu, guandul, and wando – the respective Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch adaptations for what in English we call field peas. Likewise demonstrating enslaved people’s agency in agricultural knowledge, Europeans referred to some species by geographical descriptors that indicated their African provenance such as guinea corn (sorghum), guinea squash (eggplant), guinea fowl, and Congo or Angola peas as an alternative name for field peas.
Plots of land set aside for enslaved people to grow their own food allowed for the formation and maintenance of a distinct culinary culture. Most crops cultivated by Lowcountry bondpeople in the antebellum era are of distinct African genealogy and Asian or American genealogy but naturalized in Africa. For example, one Sea Island planter identified the plants in his bondpeople’s provision plot including “long collards, peanuts, arrowroot, sesame seeds, gourds, and watermelon”— all cultivars of undeniable African heritage.7 In Africa as in the American South, people of African descent used greens to impart a bitterness to stews and thickened these dishes with peanut paste/leaves from the sesame plant. Gourds grown by bondpeople served as a starchy staple or could be made into a vessel. Even several generations removed from Africa, crop choices of Lowcountry bondpeople predominantly featured the chief crops of their African predecessors. These cultivars represented
identity and humanity in the midst of a dehumanizing system.In addition to dietary and cultural preference, bondpeople focused on cultivars that did not require close and constant attention. For example, they cultivated genealogically African high-yield crops such as okra, which fruits up to four times a season, and peanuts, a protein-rich, self-pollinating bush that literally plants its own seeds. Not only did they plant high-yield crops but bondpeople also practiced lowimpact cultivation methods. Examples include the intercropping of companion plants such as corn and beans, tilling by hand so as to guarantee the best yields, and using compost material such as fire ash, household waste, chicken manure, riverbed soil, and grass to keep a plot fertile. Historian Frederick Knight explains that West Africans practiced the same techniques as adaptations to farming without a heavy reliance on livestock. Their labor time relegated to nights and Sundays under the task system, cultivating ancestral high-yield crops through low-impact practices ensured bondpeople the best return on their investment of time and labor. The availability of seed also likely perpetuated bondpeople’s choice to cultivate genealogically-African provision crops. Bondpeople faced virtually nonexistent financial costs if using seed saved and stored from the previous year’s plantings. Also, scholar Betty Wood points out that axes, hoes, spades, and baskets that planters regularly issued to field hands were available for use in the bondpeople’s own time. Bondpeople thus seeded their garden literally with heirloom seeds, perhaps hidden on the transatlantic voyage in women’s hair or smuggled in folds of clothes, and passed them down across generations in bondage, renewing the cultivar year by year. Uninterested in consuming the bizarre produce of their bondpeople’s provision plots, most Lowcountry enslavers hoped to foster a “disgrace attached to idleness” by allowing their bondpeople to sell their marketable crops outside of the plantation enterprise. Roswell King, overseer to over five hundred bondpeople at Pierce Butler’s plantation, Spring 2020/Agora
5
culinary culture. Genealogically African foodstuffs transitioned cuisines of survival to ingredients that deliberately references a shared past. Cultivating and selling the excess crops of African genealogy from their provision plots, bondpeople of regional plantations provided both free and enslaved blacks of Charleston the opportunity to participate in a shared regional diasporic culinary culture. These crops, introduced and cultivated by enslaved people for hundreds of years, are now central components to the stereotypical culinary culture of the US South. However, in the antebellum era it was exclusively free and enslaved African Americans that were nourished by the flavors and textures familiar to the generations before them.
an alternative framework of cultural expression. Bondpeople’s choices in meal preparation and consumption document not only an extension of West African meal composition but also the underlying resourcefulness of Lowcountry black culture. Antebellum bondwomen employed a range of genealogically-African preparatory techniques. These included slowly simmering ingredients, baking in ashes, roasting food over coals, and steaming food by wrapping it in cabbage or poplar leaves. These techniques served two primary and significant purposes. First, slow cooking often required less fuel. Second, the slow cooking style allowed bondwomen to begin meal preparation before leaving in the morning and having a portion of the evening meal prepared when she returned in the midafternoon upon completion of her taskwork. While a cast iron pot stands as the ubiquitous cooking utensil identified at bondpeople’s quarters, bondwomen in fact wielded a host of culinary skills within their materially-limited conditions.
From these findings, as mentioned, my research asserts that race is historically more important than place in shaping culinary culture. For bondwomen, who on a daily basis performed the majority of domestic labor for their households, the intimate entity of food served as an important instrument with which to
COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
expressed many Lowcountry planters’ beliefs that “if industrious for themselves, they [bondpeople] will be so for their masters. No Negro, with a well stocked poultry house, a small crop advancing, a canoe partly finished, or a few tubs unsold, all of which he calculates soon to enjoy, will ever run away.”8 Following suit of their Caribbean predecessors, Lowcountry planters believed the reward of a small amount of molasses or tobacco purchased through trade/ profit made by bondpeople selling extra produce posed little threat to the system of slavery. Planters also had the ability to mold their bondpeople into a more obedient and property-respecting workforce. Thus, bondpeople’s labor was critical not only in growing these dietary staples and specialties but transporting them to the consumers of urban Charleston. For urban African Americans living and working in Charleston, access to these locally produced goods served as powerful legacies of continuity, linking them to the larger African Diasporic community in the Lowcountry, US South, and Atlantic World.
This Currier and Ives print portrays a bondman using a pole to guide his flat downriver. His passengers are presumably his wife and child, as well as several chickens and baskets of eggs to be sold at their destination. The straw hat and striped shirt worn by the patroon mirrors the description penned by William Howard Russell on his visit to the Lowcountry. “Floating Down to Market” ca. 1870 Attention to how and what foods Lowcountry enslaved people grew illuminates the manner in which Lowcountry bondpeople not only perpetuated but also promoted an identifiably unique 6
Agora/Spring 2020
practice daily resistance to the material and psychological conditions of enslavement. Meal composition and tableware served as two of the limited forums in which bondpeople forged and promoted
The most striking confirmation of a racially-based foodways culture is verified through enslaved and free African Americas’ distinct preference for bowls, particularly shallow and shouldered colonoware vessels. Colonoware is a type of ceramic, specifically an earthenware, that is handmade from locally sourced clay. Material evidence documents it was made by both regional Native Americans and enslaved people on plantations. Bowls as a percentage of diningware recovered at Lowcountry bondpeople’s quarters range from 52-94% of ceramic vessel shards with an average ratio of 70% bowls to 30% plates. These statistics strongly advocate enslaved people predominantly prepared and consumed soups and stews alongside or on top of a starch. This meal composition is yet another reflection of West African culinary culture within the foodways of the antebellum Lowcountry. While roasted yams and leftover cornbread provided starches to be consumed on the move, bondwomen used peas and rice from rations provided by their enslavers alongside millet and sorghum from their provision
Bondpeole’s meals also included meat in soups or stews. This is verified through chemical analysis of a colonoware jar from the slave quarters of Crowfield Planta- During his visits to Richmond and Charleston as amanuensis to William Thackery, artist Eyre Crowe tion in Berkeley County. This sought to learn all he could about American slavery and the American slave trade. He returned to Engdata verifies that bondpeople land and published articles and illustrations about his experience in order to help raise awareness about prepared animal and plant the business of human trafficking. “A Group of Market women,” 1853. From Crowe, With Thackery in matter in the same vessel America. and likely at the same time. the planter/merchant elite—a EuroLowcountry bondpeople and free blacks Not only did this preparatory technique centric entre of meat and side dishes served as a vital strand which wove require one pot to prepare, but simmeron plate—free blacks practiced a meal racial group identity across the bounds ing small or scrap pieces of meat with structure and material culture not akin of geography as well as economic, ingredients on hand has greatly impactto their economic peers but rather to legal, and social status. Participating ed postbellum, and even contemporary, regional bondpeople. This preference in African Diasporic foodways, free Southern culinary culture at large. One of soups and stews served atop grain or black Charlestonians asserted a shared example is purloo. Lowcountry bondstarch is evidenced in the type of vessel distinctive culture with the lowest rungs women created this dish of boiled rice recovered at their residences, specifically in the most caste-like society of Amerimixed with whatever fish, game, salted a high percentage of bowls (see table 2). can history. While the free blacks of meat, and vegetables were on hand, and While not of the same legal category antebellum Charleston were very likely today it is considered a “classic” dish of as regional bondpeople, the antebellum not discussing how their food choices Lowcountry cuisine. city’s growing free black population was communicated a collective history and of the same culture—indeed, many had culture, their everyday meals do illusAs with the dramatic predominance of relatives who had been born into slavery trate broader social patterns, values, and bowls recovered from regional bondpeoor began life as enslaved people thembeliefs which extended across the urban ple’s residential sites, the ratio of vessel selves. and rural spheres. Thus, plantation forms at sites of free black residences bondpeople’s garden produce suggests a meal composition dominatcontributed not only material ed by soups and stews. Genealogicallycomfort and health but also African ingredients grown by regional allowed urban enslaved and free bondpeople were made available to blacks access to genealogically free black Charlestonians through the African produce and the ability enslaved marketers at Centre Market. to practice a shared culinary Here, as mentioned earlier, free blacks cult. purchased ingredients unfamiliar to their white peers’ foodways, such as millet, field peas, peppers, sesame, peanuts, and okra.
While middling whites allocated their economic and cultural capital resources to mimicking the culinary culture of
This shared patterning of food preparation/meal composition between
The study of foodways has developed into a respected intersectional discipline over the past two decades. Southern foodways are indeed the most studied regional US cuisine, though the scholarSpring 2020/Agora
7
COURTESY OF THE ALDERMAN LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
plots as the starchy base. As in West Africa, these legumes and cereals served as the foundation for a meal. Root vegetables, eggplants, collards, cabbage, and squashes from bondpeoples’ provision plots served as the bulk of the soups and stews. Just as contemporary West Africans used and continue to use the ingredients, Lowcountry bondwomen similarly employed sesame seeds, peanuts, and okra as thickeners for their dishes.
ship is dominated by studies on the 20th century which portrays an already entrenched Southern culinary culture with no distinction of contributions along the lines of race. Of the 19th century, previous scholarly interpretations trivialize to a singular culinary culture grounded in the “bounty of nature” and fetishized with an African American “flair.”9 My work recognizes that most iconic dishes of today’s US South are derived from black peoples’ culinary culture: from gumbo to shrimp and grits, Hoppin’ John to red beans and rice. Provisioning Charleston uses food as a lens to study the negotiation of race and culture in the antebellum era, but this lens can also be applied to contemporary culinary culture, as just demonstrated. As historic interpreter and culinary historian Michael Twitty explains, black Americans “are surrounded by culinary injustice where some Southerners take credit for things that enslaved Africans and their descendants played key roles in innovating.”10
Notes 1. See Peter Coclanis’s Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991); S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Drew Swanson, Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (Athens: University of Georgia, 2012). 2. Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 9.
3. John Egerton, “Forward: A Gallery of Great Cooks,”Toni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), x. 4. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York, Vintage Books, 1974, 543.
5. Cynthia Kennedy, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, 103. 8
Agora/Spring 2020
6. “An Impartial Hand,” Information Concerning the Province of North Carolina, Addressed to Emigrants from the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (Glasgow: J. Knox and C. Elliot, 1773) in Philip Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Low Country Blacks, 1700-1880,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (October 1982), 579. 7. Joseph Dabney, The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebook, 2010), 235.
8. R. King, Jr. “On the Management of the Butler Estate and the Cultivation of Sugar Cane,” Southern Agriculturist and register of rural affairs; adapted to the southern section of the United States, vol. 1 (Charleston: A.E. Miller, 1828), 523. 9. Quotes from Levi Van Sant, “Lowcountry Visions: Foodways and Race in Coastal South Carolina,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies vol. 15, no. 4 (2015), 22 and 23.
10. Michael Twitty, “An Open Letter to Paula Deen,” The Huffington Post, 26 June 2013 and quoted in Hillary Dixler Canavan, “How Gullah Cuisine Has Transformed Charleston Dining,” Eater, March 22, 2016.
Culture as Resistance in the Chilean Andes: An Indigenous Community’s Struggle for Rights and Recognition
I
first heard about Likantatay more than 20 years ago. I was sitting in one of my undergraduate anthropology classes listening to my professor go on a tangent, telling us about a new community that was pretending to be indigenous in order to get benefits from the State. “How do you pretend to be indigenous?” I wondered in silence as my professor went on to explain that they were urban poor squatters who had gone as far as to plant crops like corn and alfalfa, raise animals such as pigs and goats, and practice some ceremonies for the Earth Mother just to be able to claim indigenous identity. My professor seemed very convinced about his interpretation, so I didn’t dare challenge him by asking him why he thought someone would even bother to engage in the hardships involved in farming and animal husbandry just to fake an identity. The tangent was over and class was dismissed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Likantatay. Our end-of-semester assignment was to write an evaluation of an applied anthropology project. I got my hands on a movie available in Santiago’s Pre-Columbian Art Museum’s film collection that documented a visual anthropology workshop that had been held and recorded not long before with representatives of seven Atacameño indigenous communities from the Loa River Basin (Likantatay, Lasana, Chiu Chiu, Cupo, Ayquina-Turi, Caspana, and Toconce). Two anthropologists had put together a project to run a documentary film-making workshop with seven indigenous people, teaching them how to use video cameras and some basic editing skills. The purpose was for them to document their customs and traditions. I thought it was a neat idea, but my professor was very critical of these other anthropologists. He argued that they were essentializing and romanticizing culture.
Furthermore, they were imposing their ideas of what was important to document: “tradition.” But what if, he pondered, the individuals from the participating communities wanted to document their kid’s birthday party, Western style with Lila Colamar (left) and Anita Carrasco in the Atacameño village of cake, candles, and Toconce, 2014 the dirt road that led to Likantatay, this balloons? When urban indigenous community located in my anthropology course was over, I a Calama mining town in the Atapromised myself one day I would visit cama Desert of northern Chile. When Likantatay to find out for myself if they I reminiscence about that day, I can were really farming, raising animals, and still smell the overpowering stench of practicing rituals to “stage” an indigfeces that the wind blew in my face. I enous identity. had been told about the nearby sewage Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale water processing plant and I thought Hurston once wrote about investigation: it was unfortunate to have to live right “Research is formalized curiosity. It is next to one. poking and prying with a purpose. It is This essay documents the story of the seeking that he who wishes may know Likantatay people’s fight for their rights the cosmic secrets of the world and and recognition in the face of mining. they that dwell therein” (Hurston 1942, But before I begin, I want to set the 174). Franz Boas, founding father of tone of this text by summoning the American anthropology and her advisor, words of sociologist Immanuel Wallerwhom she referred to warmly as Papa stein that feel to me especially fitting to Franz, had a genius for “pure objectivdescribe Likantatay’s struggle for culity,” she reported. By this she meant that tural survival: “People resist exploitation he outlined his theory, but if the facts as actively as they can and as passively as did not agree with it, “he would not they must.” warp a jot or dot of the findings to save his theory.” He simply instructed his In 1991, a group of 36 Atacameño imstudents to go to the field and find out migrant families from interior rural “what is there.” That is what I set out to villages, driven by the marginal condido. My curiosity about Likantatay didn’t tions in which they lived, decided to fade over the next five years, when I petition the Ministry of Government finally found the opportunity to visit the Property for land and started a squatter community, now with an elegant excuse: settlement in a former pasturing zone in my master’s thesis. the poverty belt of the city. It was barren land with no public services or houses I vividly remember my heart poundto live in. These families had to build ing with a mix of fear and excitement their homes from the ground up. Most when, for the first time, I set foot on Spring 2020/Agora
9
PHOTO COURTSEY OF THE AUTHOR
by ANITA CARRASCO, Associate Professor of Anthropology
GOOGLE MAPS/GOOGLE EARTH CNES TECHNOLOGIES
Satellite image of Likantatay (center) and neighboring plots, 2020 were slum dwellings with dirt floors and makeshift construction. Likantatay’s resilience is unprecedented in the region. They have fiercely resisted the manifold aggressions of copper mining on their community: displacements from a rural lifestyle because of the mining companies’ voracious extraction of water in the desert and the threat of a forced resettlement due to the existence of copper ore beneath their land. They are still fighting today. From its very beginnings the people of Likantatay have asserted that their main objective, found in their mission statement, has been to reconstruct the traditional community, but in an urban space. The central goal of Likantatay is to embrace an alternative life-making project that is to live in community, preserving Atacameño culture. From the time when the Ministry of Government Property gave a formal concession of lands to Likantatay in 1992, this community, that started as a squatter settlement in 1991, has developed many projects for the creation of a village, but in the city, that aims to resemble the lifestyle in the rural villages they migrated from. Each family initially received an average of 0.85 hectares that they used for planting alfalfa, corn, and raising animals. In a 1966 aerial view of Calama, one can already appreciate that agriculture has 10
Agora/Spring 2020
always competed with mining in this oasis in one of the driest deserts in the world. Some of their community projects have included building roads, preparing land for agriculture (it took them four years to wash the land and desalinate it to make it adequate to plant their first crops), constructing internal canals, constructing a church for the celebration of their patron Saint San Juan as well as a community meeting hall and a craft workshop, installing a potable water matrix and electricity for their homes, and acquiring land titles, just to name a few of their achievements. The community participated in all these projects through the work of shared labor, which is an important component, they say, of the customs and traditions as practiced in the rural villages. An outsider visiting the community may see these buildings and think they look ramshackle, but they mean the world to them.
Reconstructing the Traditional Community in the City
What is the community-based lifestyle of the peoples from the interior rural villages that members of Likantatay have so perseveringly tried to reconstruct? This is an important question because that “lifestyle” has been a fundamental frame of reference for an understanding of the “nostalgic practices”
found in the development of indigenous identities in urban contexts such as Likantatay. Practical nostalgia was a term coined by anthropologist Deborah Battaglia in her study of urban Trobrianders, a tribe first made famous by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his 1922 ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Battaglia studied them more than 70 years later and found many of them had become urbanized. She defines their nostalgic practices as all the practices that urban indigenous people carry out by means of a selective process of “tradition” that they consider represents their “legitimate” indigenous identity. Practical nostalgia is also observed among urban Atacameños. In his now classic book The Invention of Culture (1975), Roy Wagner develops an interesting perspective of culture as a work of art, where creation plays a central role in making culture visible. His approach fits the case of Likantatay quite well. Wagner argues that creation is embedded with invention, which is not to say that people are fake, but rather that the power of invention is what gives the people of a culture some control over the opportunities they create for themselves in their collective struggles for rights and recognition. In Wagner’s words: “The necessity of invention is given by cultural convention, and the necessity of cultural convention is given by invention. We invent so as to sustain and restore our conventional orientation; we adhere to this orientation so as to realize the power and gain that invention brings” (Wagner, 1975). He further argues that invention and convention stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, a relationship of simultaneous interdependence and contradiction. This dialectic is the core of all human cultures. The concept of dialectic is mostly familiar in its Hegelian and Marxist formulation as a historical process involving a succession of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Wagner’s formulation is closer to the original Greek idea of a tension or dialogue-like alternation between two conceptions or viewpoints that are simultaneously contradictory and supportive of each other. In this regard, Likantatay members find themselves in a continuous process of creation that embraces a communitarian
In the villages, we did not have magazines, newspapers, sodas, tea, coffee, sugar or anything. All we had was natural stuff--for example, my grandmother made corn chicha, that was what we drank [...] My grandmother used to travel to San Pedro de Atacama on her donkey, she wouldn’t come back in 15, 20 days, even a month. She knitted crafts--blankets, socks, hats--and my grandfather knitted male accessories. They both travelled to San Pedro de Atacama and they would exchange their artisanal clothes for corn and fruits like pears and figs. My grandmother would stock the produce to provide for the family during the entire year. Everything was done by means of exchange, there was not any money involved (Interview, January 2005). The community-based lifestyle is also filled with elements of what anthropologist Lautaro Nuñez has referred to as Andean Spirit (Núñez, L. 1991:233). These are the set of practices that the Atacameños refer to as “the customs” (las costumbres). For the people of Likantatay, these are key markers of what they see as their “legitimate” indigenous identity. They include practices such as ritual payments to the Earth Mother or Pachamama, carnival, the ceremony of the dead, communitarian work, cropping the land, and raising animals. Life in the interior villages, they say, was marked by the systematic practice of these costumbres. This, of course, is not easy, especially in the context of life in the city where capitalist values are in constant circulation. In a fascinating conversation with one of the founding members of the community, the only one with a college degree at the time, I was told the following:
We are inserted in the context of a country that embraces a market economy. Our essence is communitarian, so it’s the exact opposite of a market economy. So you can imagine how terrible it is not just for us, but for the entirety of the Atacameño world to survive in a system that seduces many people with consumerism. We want to try to change that in a certain way, of course with the tools that we have, that are very few. We won’t hurt the system, but we aspire to create a conscience that all the things that you do will always have a cost and a consequence (Interview, Likantatay 2005).
machinery, figure out where to get water because there was none. For a while we worked on a nearby well trying to see if we could extract water from there. We worked on it for a number of years until in the end we realized that the water we could extract from that well was not going to be enough to water all our farms. Then later we started looking at sewage water that passed nearby, looking into that, looking at what our neighbors from Cerro Negro were doing, which was irrigating with sewage water. We observed the system they had for extracting this water. How can I put it to you any other way, it was like stealing
IMAGES BY RICARDO TAPIA, COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
lifestyle as dictated by convention, where family tasks are combined with collective work that was common to the agricultural activities and pastoral circuits of their rural past. The following testimony recounted by an older woman from Likantatay illustrates the cultural convention that this community is drawing inspiration from in the necessity they face of having to forge an invention of life in the city, as life in the village:
A group of community members push a heavy pipeline into the canal ditch, Likantatay, 2004.
Water Problems From the start, the biggest challenge faced by Likantatay was WATER. They had difficulties obtaining irrigation water, so they had to make a tough choice to break a sewage water pipeline owned by the water company that ran near their lands. They began irrigating with this water the company was dumping in the desert. In an interview about this story, I asked them how they managed to start planting. I was told the following: When we first arrived, the first thing we had to start doing was preparing the land for planting —we had to move the earth with
from someone else. That’s what we had to do to survive-- steal--and the people from Cerro Negro were our teachers. One of the leaders behind the canal odyssey concluded: “We always felt it was terribly unjust that we had to irrigate with that water because in our rural villages we always had clean and pure water for our land.” The waters of rivers and streams had gradually diminished as a consequence of the irrational politics of extractivism of mining companies in the region, which of course caused severe damage to the ecosystems that Atacameño communities lived in. Without water, communities had Spring 2020/Agora
11
little choice but to migrate, because Atacameño culture is founded on pastoralism and agriculture. Land and water, pacha and puri, are sacred elements of Atacameños and without them they are certain they are doomed to disappear as a people. Likantatay irrigated with untreated sewage water for the course of ten years (1992-2002), but the community always had the aspiration to irrigate with treated sewage water. They felt it was a disgrace that the water company was dumping 400 liters per second of untreated sewage water in the Quetena creek, knowing that they lived in one of the driest deserts in the world, in addition to the obvious environmental pollution this entailed. The community engaged in a number of efforts to contact the relevant government authorities and the company in charge of the sewage water that was being dumped in the desert (back then the company was called ESSAN, now it is known as Aguas Antofagasta). The community wanted to ask the company if they could recover those waters for agriculture. They were unsuccessful in their pleas. Time went by and the sewage water treatment plant became a reality, but unfortunately for the community, the company had economic interests at stake and it became impossible for Likantatay to afford the high cost of the sewage water the company was now treating for sale as a commodity. Losing this important source of irrigation water was devastating both financially and emotionally. Now, among other measures, the police were aggressively guarding the pipeline and community leaders had been threatened that they would be thrown in jail if they failed to comply with the law. This loss motivated the community to request the purchase of water rights from the Loa River to the National Corporation of Indigenous Development (CONADI) through their Indigenous Water fund. To their good fortune they were successful and in May of 2002, CONADI bought 52 liters per second of superficial waters from the Loa River for Likantatay. Juana Tomic, a wealthy landowner in the vicinity, sold water to Likantatay. She had promised herself that if she 12
Agora/Spring 2020
ever sold water, it would never be to a mining company. There are records of people selling 1 liter per second of water for up to 300 hundred thousand dollars in this desert, so having ownership of 52 liters per second is not minor. Likantatay’s struggle for water was far from over. They still needed to find a way to bring the water, located 2.1 kilometers away, to their plots. Yet again, the community engaged in a number of efforts to build a canal from the ground up and channel the waters in their direction. Many opposed them; however, they did gain the support they needed and in coordination with the relevant government offices Likantatay was able to reach agreements with the four farmers from whom they needed permission to pass the canal through their property. Finally, they managed to start building the canal in 2004 thanks to the last important source of support, ironically coming from the same mining company that triggered increasing migration from the country to the city in the region. Codelco mining company donated 102 steel pipelines of 25” of diameter, 12 meters long and weighing 1,000 kilos each, costing approximately 500 per pipe. These pipelines were abandoned at the village of Lasana, and the community took the initiative, with the help of the regional minister of agriculture, to contact Codelco to make the request. Codelco agreed to the donation as long as the community dealt with the transportation of the pipes to Likantatay. The Institute of Agrarian Development (INDAP) financed the transportation after the community presented a written proposal with a detailed budget that underwent evaluation before being funded.
The Canal
The community was determined. They urgently needed to irrigate their land. Five months had elapsed without watering their crops and their alfalfa was drying out. In August of 2004 they started the construction of the canal. There were several community members who had worked building pipelines for the mining company when it was owned from the 1920s to 1971 by the gringos of the Anaconda Mining Company. These community members, their parents,
or grandparents had the know-how of dealing with pipes and, evidently as farmers themselves, they were competent in canal-related infrastructure. They had to summon this knowledge to make a number of decisions including but not limited to: tracing the route that the canal would follow, designing it, measuring the slope on the terrain, negotiating with the different farmers to get permission to go through their properties, and the list goes on. All the construction work was done on a community basis every Saturday and Sunday between August of 2004 and March of 2005. No one in the community missed a single day of work. At the end of March of 2005, they tested running water through the entire extension of the canal, with favorable results. The water made it to Likantatay without trouble. What a relief! In all, the community had raised the amount of 50,000 US dollars to cover all the costs associated with the odyssey of building a canal with their bare hands. I first did anthropological fieldwork in Likantatay in December of 2005. Back then I had the opportunity to attend several community work sessions where these farmers continued to improve the canal in areas where the slope would sometimes slow down the arrival of water to their fields. Most of the members of Likantatay were seniors and they all looked exhausted, and somewhat frustrated, because nine months earlier when they first launched the canal they thought this struggle was over. But no, here they were again, in the summer in mid-December sweating under the sun, breaking their backs with the hardships involved. As someone coming from a privileged background who only has to open a tap to get water, it would be insulting of me to suggest I could ever really understand what Likantatay’s struggle for water meant to them. In conversations with one of the community leaders back then, he reflected on the basic yet tremendous problems they had to resolve in the making of their traditional community but in an urban space: First here in Likantatay there was no drinking water, we solved that. Then there was no electricity, which
I remember the day I was first trying to locate the leader of Likantatay to ask for permission to begin doing research in the community. I knocked on a random door, thinking I was already in Likantatay, but instead I was really in the neighboring squatter settlement known as Verdes Campiñas. A man opened the door and introduced himself as Eduardo. He informed me that I was in the Chilean community; Likantatay were the Bolivians next door (a pejorative term used to refer to indigenous peoples by some people in Chile). Without my prompting, Eduardo explained that CONADI (National Corporation of Indigenous Development Government Office) incited racism in the country. In his opinion, what this government office really did was to preserve a “zoo of indigenous peoples for the gringos” for their aesthetic pleasure during their cultural tours of underdeveloped countries. “If we are talking about indigenous heritage,” he added, “we all have some percentage of indigenous blood in us. Everyone here, indigenous or not, are all poor. However, the government only supports indigenous people!” (Interview, Calama, December of 2005). Eduardo spoke in resignation as he gave me
another example of the inequality he perceived. He pointed out that Likantatay had ownership of a potable water matrix, but the Chilean neighbors like himself couldn’t access that water unless they paid. “Likantatay charges outsiders who want to access this water,” he lamented. I later asked members of Likantatay about this issue and they responded that they worked hard on obtaining this resource and if they didn’t value their own work, then no one else would. People who did not work on this project should pay, they concluded. Eduardo, the Chilean neighbor, had a different interpretation: “they are just selfish.” He continued on a racist rant claiming that indigenous peoples in general are used to getting assistance from the State, they like to ask for a lot, and many of them are also alcoholics. Despite his negative perception of his indigenous neighbors, Eduardo did recognize their incredible capacity for organization and their unity as a group. He lamented that Chileans were more individualistic and did not look out for one another in the same way.
Forced Resettlement
In May 2007, the Codelco mining company, yes, the same one which donated the 102 pipes, approached the community and held a meeting in which they communicated their intention to begin
prospecting under Likantatay to determine if the existing copper found there was “high grade.” If so, they explained they would start negotiations with the community with the goal of either resettling them or providing monetary compensation. In that meeting, Codelco took a highly ambiguous position and did not make any concrete offers to the community. They talked in terms of “perhaps and maybe in the future.” Under pressure from the community leaders at the meeting, who asked the Codelco representatives what they meant by “the future,” mining reps said the “future” would not happen any time before 2020. Codelco promised that they would come back to inform people about further developments in their exploration plans; but since May of 2007 there has been no official news from the company, only informal interactions. This lack of communication lends itself to pervasive waves of speculation within the community. This spreads anxiety and creates internal divisions. “Internal divisions” or pre-impacts in the community are already reflected in each family’s differing perspectives. To illustrate the range of opinions in the community and their internal divisions over Codelco’s visit, I selected three testimonies out of the 32 recorded in conversations that took
IMAGE BY RICARDO TAPIA, COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
was something people really hoped for, we solved that. We had no land titles, and that by the way was one of our biggest fights. We ended obtaining land titles in a record time of 10 years. The neighboring community adjacent to Likantatay, they are squatters like us in the beginning, they are not indigenous though, and they have been around here for more than 50 years and still, they have nothing. That creates a lot of envy, and people in Calama always accuse Likantatay of being privileged. But that’s not true, our community achieved everything through unity and organization. For example, electricity, it wasn’t easy. It involved three occupations (tomas) of the governors’ office, several public protests, and formal letters of complaint to a number of government offices. Because we understand how things work in this country: pressure. Everything in Chile works through pressure (Likantatay, Interview 2005).
Finished irrigation canal in Likantatay, 2005 Spring 2020/Agora
13
place during ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation in 2008. Far from being homogenous viewpoints, Likantatay families have diverse assessments of their place in the system and the alternatives that appear viable to them in the event that Codelco strikes them with a forced resettlement: (1) “In case of being forced to negotiate, the money has to be good, but above money I would prefer that Codelco gave jobs to at least one of the sons or daughters of each family. What I most hope for though is for Codelco to buy land and relocate the entire community together, that would be best.... This should include our meeting hall, a church, everything just as it is in Likantatay here today.... We struggled for our drinking water and for our crops; we worked hard in the construction of a canal and we are still struggling. Sadly, Codelco doesn’t respect us, they see the indigenous and farmers as an inferior kind. People from Codelco believe themselves as superior” (Interview, October, 2007). (2) “Codelco has to set up two strategies of negotiation with us: an individual one and a collective one and even if it exasperates them, the collective level has huge weight. Here in Likantatay it’s just as in any place, everyone thinks differently, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t a community. There’s a decisive factor and that is that Likantatay has collective legal titles for its irrigation water, it is the property of the community and if one of its members doesn’t participate in its processes and decides to leave, their water rights stay in the community.” (Interview, December, 2007). (3) “Codelco offered us to move to the land next to the river, the Tomic land. They’re nice, but what about pollution? We would be next to the mining deposit that Codelco wants to open in the west side of Calama city. They would poison us, poison our animals, and poison our crops. And afterwards when we suffer the consequences of pollution, they would say to us: ‘but, we paid you’” (Interview, September, 2007). As these testimonies suggest, there is a great diversity of viewpoints in the community, so we can anticipate the 14
Agora/Spring 2020
complexity that future negotiations will entail. There is another important factor that influences the decisions that the families have to make: their involvement or detachment from what was described as “rural lifestyle” and las costumbres. There are many families that are not willing to abandon their rural lifestyle orientation, but there are others that are seduced by the idea of their family’s “progress” and Codelco appears to them as the only opportunity for them to change their lives to an orientation in direct contradiction to the one they practice with pride.
to Likantatay, it meant that they had a place of their own where they could keep their animals, so when they settled here they started preparing the land for cultivation. Then they built corrals for their animals, and of course they started thinking about where to get water for their crops. They discovered that there was a well nearby. They tried extracting water from there first, but it was impossible. The other closest water source to Likantatay was the sewage water disposed by Aguas Antofagasta (ex ESSAN), the water company. So what did people do? If they wanted pasture to feed their animals, they needed to find a way to irrigate even if they had to do it with sewage water. So people made a decision. They tried extracting sewage water by breaking the pipeline. Then they built canals and started distributing water among the different community members’ plots. Their land was ready, so they started planting just like that. Q: And how long did you do this without being caught?
Pan-Andean wiphala indigenous flag
The Fight for Sewage Water Dignity is not a minor issue in the context of this story. To put the Likantatay struggle for survival in perspective, I want to share excerpts from an interview I conducted in 2005. The conversation revolved around their fight for sewage water, and the structural violence represented by the prospect of first having to leave their rural village because of mining development and now potentially having to abandon Likantatay again because of mining development. Paradoxically this story about human dignity also expresses the unique nostalgia the people of Likantatay have for the times when they could irrigate with sewage water: Q: I know that when you first arrived at this place it was barren, but what economic activity allowed the people of Likantatay to stay here? A: When people first came here, they were living with relatives, or in farms by the river. They owned animals, but they did not own land. Once they came
A: Shortly after people were caught, sanitary authorities came, ESSAN came, government authorities came. They forbade the use of sewage water for our crops. But the community could not sit idly. We needed to survive. Q: What did they tell you? A: They warned us about hepatitis, that the water was not suitable for crops, that the land we were occupying should have never been given to us, that it’s not apt for agriculture. But people were already hopeful. They had already prepared their plots of land, they had built their houses. What else were they going to do? Anyhow, it was forbidden. Back then the community leader knew that the families were in such harsh financial need that he went ahead and suggested we break the pipeline again, just in another section. And people continued irrigating. This time it was serious. There were arrest orders, [and] the police were looking for the community leader to take him to jail. He had already been warned, so he went into hiding. We insisted to the authorities that we were not planting lettuce, nor produce to be eaten raw. We argued that we were only interested in food for our animals to eat:
corn and pasture. We were being careful, it wasn’t huge quantities of production, [and] we were not going to cause problems for the city of Calama. We argued that we were organized, that we had an irrigation shift system and all. So finally they gave us a provisory authorization to continue irrigating. And a couple of years went by, and another year, and another, and people got used to the system. However, in private conversations we had amongst ourselves, we were aware that it was an immense humiliation the state was committing against us, having to irrigate with sewage water, especially because we had to migrate from our villages because the mining company Codelco and the water company took our water, and there was not enough water left to continue farming in our rural villages. So when people tried recovering a space here in Likantatay, here in Calama, to be put in the position of having to water our crops with sewage water was a disgrace. People left their rural villages because Codelco took their water. And here we were fighting for water with shit! (Interview, Likantatay 2005). I have a confession to make. In my career as an anthropologist there is a before and after: before Likantatay and after Likantatay. The story of their struggle was inspiring for me not only as an anthropologist, but as a person. I can safely say that getting to know Likantatay made me, for the first time in my life, want to emancipate myself from my own culture. It took me years to figure out why Likantatay made me feel this way until I had an epiphany when I read anthropologist David Graeber’s book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. In it he points out that many societies in the ethnographic record endorse basic principles of anarchism, which literally means “without rulers” (Graeber 2004: 3). Some of these principles include: autonomy, self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid, direct democracy, and the rejection of all forms of structural violence, inequality or domination. Although they never used the word “anarchists” to describe themselves, Likantatay embraces all these principles.
Likantatay’s non-declared anarchist spirit is especially true when it comes to their approach to decision-making. Most anarchist groups operate by a consensus process. Graeber provides a good overview of what this process entails: In a consensus process, everyone agrees from the start on certain broad principles of unity and purposes for being for the group; but beyond that they also accept as a matter of course that no one is ever going to convert another person completely to their point of view, and probably shouldn’t try; and that therefore discussion should focus on concrete questions of action, and coming up with a plan that everyone can live with and no one feels is in fundamental violation of their principles. Rather than be based on the need to prove others’ fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeks to find particular projects on which they reinforce each other (Graeber, 2004: 8). I was told repeatedly that Likantatay’s biggest strengths were organization, mutual aid, and collective decisionmaking and action. Even their Chilean neighboring squatters from Verdes Campiñas who openly envied Likantatay agreed. The canal is a powerful example of the anarchistic strengths of Likantatay. David Graeber also points out that “Anarchists tend to argue with each other about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, or at what point organization stops being empowering and starts crushing individual freedom” (Graeber 2004: 5- 6). In sum, anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. This brings me to the end of my essay, an anarchist joke: “Q: How many voters does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. Because voters can’t change anything.” (Graeber 2004:77) Likantatay certainly didn’t change the circumstances of their own destiny by their ability to vote; rather, everything they changed was accomplished by embracing a striking revolutionary praxis.
A Final Note on Cultural Survival During the Q & A in this Paideia Lecture, one student raised the question about what the future holds for
Likantatay. Do they continue to be so organized? Do they continue to be so united? I brought these questions to Lila Colamar, my best friend from the community. I told her how people in the Luther College audience seemed genuinely moved by their story and what Likantatay had gone through as a community. I could see the emotion in their faces as I glanced at them from the podium. A colleague told me later that evening over a glass of wine that: “not even in a movie, a filmmaker could have come up with all the problems Likantatay faced in real life.” It’s an important story to document, I went on to say to my friend Lila, and she agreed. She told me something I was acutely unaware of. In the present, the youths from Likantatay don’t even know their own story. They have no idea about the details behind the canal odyssey and all the struggles for water their parents and grandparents had to go through to build their village in the city from the ground up. Their indigenous leaders today struggle to motivate the youth, she lamented. What my Atacameño friend believes needs to be done is to teach. Teach the young about their own stories and others like it. Stories like this one can’t be forgotten. Their collective memory of struggles is the main source of inspiration they need to be drawing from to secure cultural survival into the future. I was blessed to meet Lila Colamar 15 years ago when in 2005 I was pursuing a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. That year I travelled to Chile to conduct fieldwork in Likantatay. Initially, my research goal was to document the oral history of the arrival of the people of Likantatay to their land. I was interested in documenting the process of indigenous migration from rural villages from the Loa river and San Pedro river basins to the poverty belt of Calama as a consequence of mining development. I had a list of questions I wanted to ask the elders from the community, but first I asked Lila to help me with my work. She became the most outstanding research assistant one could ever hope for. Lila soon realized that my questions were written in an academic style that Spring 2020/Agora
15
village of Caspana, Lila’s home village. This book contains invaluable information about the ways of life carried out by Atacameños in the rural villages. Lila represents some continuity of the fight to maintain a culture alive in spite of the politics of extractivism and water grabbing from the hands of the mining industry in the region and the consequent displacements of rural indigenous peoples from the country to the city. Water losses have made agricultural and pastoral ways of life no longer viable for many Atacameños.
Thanks to that experience, I didn’t hesitate to ask Lila to work with me when I returned to northern Chile in 2015 with a group of 16 Luther College students for a Study Abroad course about the impacts of mining and tourism on Atacameño rural communities. Lila did outstanding work as a cultural guide for our students, making the course a success. Her charisma, her intelligence, her excellent sense of humor, and her ability to explain native concepts left our students enchanted with her both as a person and as a Lila Colamar celebrating Indigenous People’s Day, Calama, 2018 teacher. Lila’s story goes back to when she was During the 15 years of our friendship five years old and her mother had to and collaboration we have remained in migrate to Calama in search for work touch. Currently we are working on a opportunities. Her father had passed new project to document her life story. away from cancer, so her mother We have completed eight in-depth needed to find work to support and interviews, but it constitutes a project provide an education to Lila and her for the long haul. The idea was born three siblings. Lila’s mother never cut out of the inspiration we experienced ties with Caspana and would travel reading the life story of her uncle, Julián back frequently to work the land, raise Colamar. In the publication Julián her animals, and partake in one of the Colamar Recuerda, which appeared for most important traditional ceremonies the first time in 1996, anthropologist among Atacameños until the present: Pablo Miranda Bown documented the the cleaning of canals, or water fiesta. life story of this Atacameño from the Lila’s mother had a ritual role, Puri16
Agora/Spring 2020
kamana or water master, who, in this ceremony, leads the community in their collective act of gratitude toward Earth Mother or Pachamama for her blessings and the life she gives. Lila followed her mother and observed her example of the love she professed for the Earth Mother. Lila’s mother passed away from cancer in 2012 and on her death bed she begged Lila to follow in her footsteps with respect. With much fear, Lila accepted her mother’s request. She wanted to carry out this ceremonial role with dignity, and she has committed to being Purikamana with utmost humility in the cleaning of canals ceremony, because her mother asked her to do it. That has been her cultural leadership and she hopes that the new generation of youth do not forget their roots. This is why she is highly motivated to obtain a college degree from a new technical intercultural education program recently being offered by a state university in northern Chile, to which she is applying. This program was created in response to a recent initiative from the Ministry of Education to eventually require schools to offer a mandatory indigenous culture course for all K-12 students in Chile. IMAGE BY RICARDO TAPIA, COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
would be difficult to understand for the elders in her community. She helped me edit my interview schedule and translate it into questions people could connect with. For example, my question about the origins of the community read something like this: “Could you tell me about the processes you went through to forge a life in this new space?” Lila masterfully translated this to: “When you first arrived here, were there any trees? What crops did you start planting?” With her help, I was able to collect excellent narratives of the oral history of her community and the impacts of copper mining on their lives.
Lila has also been an active member of Calama’s Indigenous Association of Traditions and Customs, precisely with the goal of compiling and preserving traditional Atacameño knowledge that has suffered the impacts of colonization; and what better example of this violence than the extinction of the Ckunza language. Lila’s leadership is materialized in her enthusiasm for living her culture and setting an example for future generations of Atacameño youths, and what better way to accomplish this than through her teaching. In the school where Lila works as a para-
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
them in theory,” she tells me. “I have to help them live it.”
Lila Colamar (left) and Anita Carrasco in Lila’s home village of Caspana, in front of her mother’s house where Lila was born. teacher, she notices how there are many young people who come from the rural villages, yet feel shame for their culture. She doesn’t blame them, given the racism and discrimination that indigenous peoples suffer in the city. What Lila has done to support the young people is to organize workshops for the recognition of indigenous people’s day. And in an interactive walk-through exhibit she explains to them and shows them the importance of the cleaning of canals, the relevance of community work, the importance of water, and the legacy of their ancestors. Her biggest joy comes when later she can see these youngsters, who at the beginning were shy, awaken and realize that their culture is magnificent and that they should feel pride, not shame, for being Atacameños.
In a beautiful example, Lila shared with me her pedagogy as para-teacher and how she has embraced the role of assuring that the kids in her school who are indigenous respect their culture, know about it, and ultimately become proud of it. She reported to me that she starts off her workshop by telling her students that they know her as the simple para-teacher, but on this day, she wants them to get to know her as Lila Colamar, an indigenous woman from Caspana. “Look at how I am dressed today, look at my braids,” she tells them.
Inside her exhibit room she displays a powerpoint slide with the Whipala, a square emblem commonly used as a flag to represent some native peoples of the Andes in an area that includes parts of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. The Whiphala is composed of a 7 × 7 square patchwork in seven colors, arranged diagonally. Lila took the time one summer to make 49 real sized cushion pillows representing all the colors and squares of the Whipala. She asked for the help of co-workers and family to assist in sewing these cushions. The day of the exhibit, she throws these cushions in a disorganized manner all over the room’s floor. Pointing at the picture on the powerpoint she instructs the children to team up and build the Whipala with the pillows available to them. After they scramble and make some decisions, they finally get the job done. Lila interrogates them: “What did you do, how did you manage to build the Wiphala?” The kids respond with pride that they started looking at who had what colors and subdivided into teams and together they all decided how to proceed and worked out a system. This is when Lila pauses to congratulate them and explain: “What you all just did, that there is community work.” What the ancestors have practiced in the villages since time immemorial “is not a concept I can explain to
Cultural survival is yet another manifestation of resistance and resilience, the topic of this year’s Paideia Lecture Series. What I learned from Likantatay’s story is that to fight for cultural survival you have no choice but to change the world you live in. To fight for cultural survival, you have no choice but to be anti-systemic. In the words of Immanuel Wallerstein: “to be anti-systemic is to argue that neither liberty nor equality are possible under the existing system (capitalism) and that both are possible only in a transformed world. References Arrigui, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein. Antisystemic Movements. London: Verso, 1989.
Battaglia, Deborah. Rhetoric of Self-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Carrasco, Anita. “When Pachamama is Left Hungry: Healing and Misfortune in the Atacama Desert.” Terrestrial Transformations. A political ecology approach to society and nature, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, Lexington Books, 2020, 179-192. ----------------. Embracing the Anaconda: A Chronicle of Atacameño Life and Mining the Andes. Lexington Books, 2020.
Carrasco, Anita and Eduardo Fernández. “Estrategias de Resistencia Indígena Frente al Desarrollo Minero: La Comunidad de Likantatay Ante un Posible Traslado Forzoso.” Estudios Atacameños 38 (2009):75–92. Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm Press.
L.L. Langness and Gelya Frank. Lives. An Anthropological Approach to Biography. Chandler & Sharp Publishers. Inc., 1981.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1942, pp. 174-205. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1922.
Miranda, Pablo. Julian Colamar Recuerda. Visiones de Caspana. Santiago, LOM Ediciones, 1998.. Nuñez, Lautaro. Cultura y Conflicto en los Oasis de San Pedro de Atacama. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1991..
Wagner, Roy. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Spring 2020/Agora
17
Lutheran, Ecumenical, and Interreligious Conversations by WANDA DEIFELT, Professor of Religion
Luther, the Roverud Fellowship, and the ecumenical movement
Since the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, there has been a heightened awareness that Luther’s theology can be translated anew by addressing contemporary challenges ranging from climate change to gender violence and economic inequality. Even if Martin Luther had not explicitly addressed these topics, in my research (“Luther’s Theology in the Public Square”) I propose that his insights can serve as hermeneutical lenses through which we can critically evaluate and propose alternatives to current challenges. In 2017 I had been asked to do several lectures on topics related to the Reformation in the United States and elsewhere. In my presentations I addressed themes as diverse as “Yesterday you were Catholic and today you are Lutheran” (La Crosse, WI), “Here We Stand: Top 10 Reasons for Being Lutheran” (Rochester, MN), “Reclaiming an Ethic of Care in Luther’s Theology of Embodiment” (Washington, DC), “Planetary
18
Agora/Spring 2020
Solidarity: Global Women’s Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice” (American Academy of Religion, Boston), “Luther and the Catholic Church” (Gettysburg, PA), “Protestant Theology and Medieval Art” (Mexico City), “Can Religion Foment Human Rights?” (Bielefeld, Germany), and “Reforming Church for an Inclusive Community: Revisiting the Reformation” (Chennai, India). While the themes were specific for each audience and addressed their curiosities, I identified a common thread: a willingness to engage the novelty of the Reformation (and Luther’s key theological discoveries) with queries that occupy our current mindset. In wrapping up the Roverud Endowment Fellowship, I spent the first months of the summer and fall of 2018 polishing three presentations that became published essays (as book chapters). The first came under the rubric of women in the Reformation, comparing two key female figures – Katharina von Bora and Katharina Schütz Zell.1 The second was geared toward the role of compassion and advocacy on behalf of those who have been historically disen-
franchised, using the care for bodies as a catalyst for an ethic of care.2 The last one was a theological reflection on the nature of the church and its call to be a voice for those who are at the margins of society.3 These publications are in line with previous works in which I used Luther’s theology to reflect on the implications of public policies on human trafficking,4 related his two kingdoms theory to Michael Foucault’s writings to further conversation on citizenship,5 and connected Luther’s theology of the cross with current environmental crisis and climate change.6 This time also brought to a closure my tenure as a member of the international bilateral dialogue between Roman Catholics and Lutherans (formally known as the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity, appointed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity), on which I served from 2008-2018. Besides the publication in preparation for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation,7 a new document titled “Baptism and Growth in Communion” is forthcoming.
IMAGE COURTESY OF STIAS
A
s it often happens in the academic world, a sabbatical is a time not only to start a new project but is also an opportunity to finish old ones. So I spent the first months of my year-long sabbatical, beginning in the fall of 2018, completing activities related to the Roverud Endowment Fellowship (2017-2019), with the project “Luther’s Theology in the Public Square.” The topic of the sabbatical proper was “Religious Pluralism, Hybrid Identities, and the Postcolonial Religious Other,” and this work was carried out through a research fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), in Stellenbosch, South Africa, from January-June 2019. Although it does not seem obvious, both projects are connected.
Wanda Deifelt (back row, third from right with scarf ) with her colleagues from the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa in 2019
IMAGE COURTESY OF STIAS/ANTON JORDAAN
Notes
Wallenburg Research Center, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa From Ecumenism to Interreligious Dialogue
My understanding of ecumenism (the promoting of unity among Christian churches) shares similar principles with interfaith/interreligious dialogue: to emphasize what unites us instead of what divides us. The effort to stress commonalities is necessary – especially in light of xenophobia and violence fueled by religious discourse – but this approach might overlook the uniqueness of different religious traditions. For instance, in recognizing that Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean is deeply influenced by indigenous and African cosmologies, there is a potential of subsuming these influences into the narrative of Christianity, without recognizing the specificity of these religious expressions. Prior to my sabbatical, I had already worked on this idea in a few lectures and published a book chapter on the topic, analyzing the concept of Christian inculturation.8 In mapping the encounters between different worldviews and religions, I realized that I needed to spend a substantial amount of my sabbatical revisiting the theories of colonialism, post-colonialism, and decoloniality, since they help explain the construction of hybrid identities and are instrumental in elucidating patterns of racial prejudice, economic inequality, gender stratification, and socio-political dependence. For my sabbatical, I received financial support from the Paideia program to investigate these approaches and eventually use this information for the research unit in the
Paideia 112 course that I teach in the spring semester, titled “Iberian Conquest of the Americas.” To pursue this research, I spent a semester as a research fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), where a cohort of 25 other scholars from around the world engaged in an interdisciplinary exchange of research. Some of the interests of my colleagues overlapped with mine, since they covered varied topics such as human rights in the global south, African literatures of resistance, theories of complexity, philosophical justifications for enslavement, etc. The focus of my research was religious pluralism and hybrid identities, particularly the construction of religious identities resulting from the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean – a topic that will I will continue to work on in the next years. Some preliminary results of my sabbatical were already presented,9 but my ongoing involvement with an international network of scholars has become a venue for collaboration, exchange of ideas, and further dissemination of my work. For example, two forthcoming book chapters are closely related to my sabbatical research project: “La Morenita: The Hybrid Identity of Our Lady of Guadalupe” and “The Construction of Religious Hybrid Identities Resulting from Colonial Occupation.”10 All in all, this was a productive sabbatical, and I am grateful to Luther College for the opportunity.
1. “Duas Catarinas: Papeis Femininos na Reforma do Século XVI” In Ecologia, Economia, Ecumenismo: Celebrando os 500 Anos da Reforma: V Congresso Latino-Americano de Gênero e Religião, edited by Marcia Blasi et al., 29-43, São Leopoldo: CEBI, 2018. 2. “Reclaiming an Ethic of Care in Luther’s Theology of Embodiment.” In The Forgotten Luther II: Reclaiming the Church’s Public Witness, edited by Ryan P. Cumming, 55-68. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2019. 3. “Ecclesiology from the Margins: The Power and Authority to Define the Church’s Identity.” In The Diaconal Church, edited by Stephanie Dietrich et all, 112-123. Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2019.
4. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Lutheran Reflections on Human Trafficking.” In On Secular Governance: Lutheran Perspectives on Contemporary Legal Issues, edited by Ronald W. Duty and Marie A. Failinger, 160-181, Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, U.K: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2016.
5. “Heterotopic Citizenship: Luther’s Two Kingdoms Theory in a Globalized Age.” In Radicalizing Reformation: North American Perspectives, edited by Karen L. Bloomquist, Craig L. Nessan, Hans G. Ulrich, 265-282, Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2016.
6. “Out of Brokenness, a New Creation: Theology of the Cross and the Tree of Life.” In Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, edited by Lisa E. Dahill and James B. Martin-Schramm, forward by Bill McKibben, 55-70, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016; “And G*d Saw That it Was Good – Imago Dei and Its Challenge to Climate Justice.” In Planetary Solidarity: Global Women’s Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice, edited by Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Hilda P. Koster, 119-132, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. 7. The document is available online at https://www.lutheranworld.org/content/resource-conflict-communion-basis-lutherancatholic-commemoration-reformation-2017.
8. See “Inculturation in the Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean” In Reform im Katholizismus: Traditionstreue und Veränderung in der römisch-katholischen Theologie und Kirche, edited by Bernd Oberdorfer and Oliver Schuegraf, 433-450, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2018. 9. I offered a keynote address at the conference of the International Academy of Practical Theology (IAPT), under the broader theme (De) Coloniality and Religious Practices: Liberating Hope. The title of my presentation was “Decoloniality, Ecology, Sustainability.” São Leopoldo, Brazil, April 4, 2019.
10. An example of the work produced by this network is my contribution “Bodies, Identities, and Empire.” In Vulnerability and Resistance: Body and Liberating Theologies, edited by Jione Havea, 107-122. Lanham/Boulder/New York/ London: Lexington Books/Fortress, 2020. Spring 2020/Agora
19
A Different View of Health Advocacy in Amish Country
H
ealth advocacy is defined as “Activities related to ensuring access to care, navigating the system, mobilizing resources, addressing health inequities, influencing health policy and creating system change” (Hubinette, Dobson, Scott, & Sherbino, 2017, p. 128). As a nurse, working in a health system of expensive marketbased specialized care, care centers primarily located in urban centers far from rural agricultural communities, and health care providers who receive little education and support in working with unique cultural groups, I believe in health advocacy as a core of my profession (American Nurses Association, 2020). Improving access to quality care to those who are left behind in this health system is one of my passions. I work as a nurse at the Decorah Free Clinic and annual University of Iowa outreach clinics for Amish families with hemophilia. Both charitable endeavors ask nothing of participants except to come, which represents one model of health advocacy to bring health care to marginalized populations. Sabbatical allowed me to see a new side of health advocacy that I had not explored before. This article will explore a model of joined health advocacy between providers and community partners that creates potentially more sustainable and empowering health care resources than I have engaged in the past. I will also describe the experiences of several Amish families with genetic illnesses who benefit from access to these resources. During my Scholar in Residence fellowship at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies (2020) in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania in the fall of 2019, I came to deeper understanding of a vast innovative network of health options for Plain Population families. Plain Population is a term that represents religious group members of Anabaptist origins,
20
Agora/Spring 2020
such as Amish and Mennonite. Due to the high Plain Population size in Pennsylvania, several health care resources provide primary care, mental health care, and hospital payment plans (Amish America, 2015; Goldsmith, Porter, & Royce, 2019; Yohn, 2018). I was specifically focused on learning more about care for families with genetic illnesses because Angela Kueny at her desk in the Young Center at Elizabethof my past work with families with hemophilia town College in Pennsylvania in Iowa. Plain Populaurine disease, or familial hypertropic tions experience a heightened risk for cardiomyopathy (The Change Foundagenetic illnesses because of historition, 2006); all of these highly complical practices of marrying within their cated illnesses with costly treatments tight-knit religious groups, large family require consultation with specialized gesizes, and founder genetic illnesses neticists. In Dr. Morton’s words (2012), within members (Strauss, Puffenberg, “If in our society we have prejudices and & Morton, 2012). In a community that business practices that in effect deny does not subscribe to public or private children with genetic diseases access to health insurance and lives remotely to medical care, then we should change any genetic specialist (Kraybill, Johnsonthose practices and prejudices.” But, I Weiner, & Nolt, 2013), a significant wonder, what do Plain families with challenge is to make the connection genetic illnesses need in their health between these families and life saving care services? And, who is responsible health care. for making these services available? In Extensive time with Dr. Holmes Morton, the physician who founded the Clinic for Special Children in 1989 in Strasburg, PA and now the Central Pennsylvania Clinic (2019), allowed me to see the operation of a network of clinics to address the health care needs of Plain families with genetic illnesses. On one of our first drives through a valley in the Pennsylvania mountains, housing several conservative Amish and Mennonite sects, Dr. Holmes Morton pointed to each home, listing off the genetic illnesss found within such as: phenylkentonuria, propionic acidemia, pyruvate kinase deficiency, maple syrup
essence, how does one advocate for this unique and remote population?
Joined health advocacy, in this case, would ask and partner with the Plain families to understand their needs and then house the responsibility of the needed care within the Plain Population members. Dr. Morton’s two clinics, in partnership with six other clinics across the country in states such as Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin, provide care in the heart of Plain communities to families with genetic illnesses with this model (Plain Community Health Consortium, 2020). These non-profit clinics are literally built by the Plain
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
by ANGELA KUENY, Associate Professor of Nursing
ate treatment, states provide newborn blood screening and metabolic programs to assist families (Iowa Department of Public Health, 2020). This illness presents a unique picture of understanding Amish priorities and considering health care services that may accommodate those priorities. All names are changed to maintain anonymity, and this study was approved by the Luther College Human Subjects Review Board.
Amish families with Phenylketonuria
Family One: Unfamiliarity of Illness Severity and Treatment
I collaborated with Dr. Morton to interview Amish families with PKU in one Pennsylvania Amish settlement nearby the Central Pennsylvania Clinic. The clinic intends to incorporate PKU treatments into their practice but first needed to know family needs. As a background, PKU is a condition in which individuals are born without the ability to metabolize the amino acide phenylalinine, found in foods with protein (Mayo Clinic, 2020; National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD), 2020). From the moment of birth, if children take in phenylalinine it builds in their system like a toxin and the child can develop irreversible cognitive impairments. The treatment for PKU is to remove all phenylalinine (natural protein) from the diet and incorporate a phenylalinine-free amino acid formula into their diet. Without insurance, the formula can cost between $60,000$200,000 per year (Pollack, 2007). PKU is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder, passed on to children if both the mother and father have it (NORD, 2020). To diagnosis this early and initi-
IMAGE COURTESY OF WPSU PUBLIC RADIO
Populations, endowed through fundraisers in Plain Population communities, overseen by a board comprised of mostly Plain Population members, and then paid for by Plain Population families when they receive care. The physicians, nurse practitioners, therapists, and nurses who are hired to work at these clinics are prepared in general fields, but then spend their practice focusing on genetic illnesses. The clinics house diagnostic genetic screening equipment, molecular biologists, pharmacies, and patient and therapy rooms; the clinic structures are in alignment with Amish cultural values with mostly wooden structure and quilt hangings, and minimally visible technology. Profoundly, the clinics continue to discover new genetic illnesses and manage hundreds of illnesses in thousands of patients (The Change Foundation, 2006; Strauss, Puffenberg, & Morton, 2012). It is easy for anyone to be inspired by this impactful work, and I sought a deeper understanding of the need for these services with a group of families with one specific genetic illness, phenylketonuria (PKU).
Dr. Holmes Morton founded the Clinic for Special Children in 1989 and the Central Pennsylvania Clinic in 2019.
I first interviewed Nora Stutsman, a widow with seven children, two who have PKU. She teaches school and manages a farmstead with the assistance of her children. Cheryl, an 8-year-old girl with PKU, sat quietly watching as we discussed her positive PKU diagnosis. Cheryl tested positive for PKU as a newborn and was referred to a metabolic geneticist in a town 80 miles away. The geneticist provided some initial education, including diet changes and the necessity of a prescribed formula. He arranged for Cheryl to have monthly tests of her phenylalinine levels through the local health department who came to her house to facilitate. Phenylalinine levels reflect how much she has in her diet, which should be minimal. She and her mother would get the results back in one week’s time and had little communication with any provider in between her appointments. Nora received some formula from the Central Pennsylvania Clinic for her son with PKU, who no longer lives at home. But, without continued access to the
formula, Nora did not purchase the formula on her own. Cheryl did not take the formula and mostly controlled her own diet, as Amish children have a high level of self management. Her mother told me, “If Cheryl has a bellyache after she eats meat, she knows to stop eating it that day and take a break.” Then Nora read in a paper (she can’t recall which) that people with PKU should take 1-2 enzyme tablets per day; Nora thinks that Cheryls seems to be having fewer bellyaches with the enzymes. She showed me Super Enzymes, found at the local Amish grocer store. Although it did contain enzymes such as amylase, protease, and lipase, it contained no amino acids. Besides going in for bumps, bruises, and immunizations, they don’t see any doctors regularly. When I asked Nora what might help her and Cheryl, she wanted to know more about how to get formula and if it would really be beneficial to Cheryl. Family Two: “Leaving Things to God” Levi Yutzy is a bishop and father of six children, two boys and three girls still living. The three girls tested positive for PKU, and Levi described them as having a “touch of PKU” with lower phenylalinine levels consistently. They never received any treatment for PKU, but made adjustments to their diet to avoid proteins. One of his sons, Enos, had a more severe case of PKU and showed symptoms of intellectual disability growing up. Although they gave Enos formula (Levi called it “special milk”), Enos’s levels were consistently higher. Despite Enos seeming a bit slower, he did get married and now has a farm and children in New York. Similar to the Stutsman’s, the Yutzy’s went to see the geneticist in the town 80 miles away; they had Visiting Nurse Association nurses who came to provide formula and draw blood regularly. On one of the visits to the geneticist, Levi saw a room full of “special children.” As he recalled, “I stopped right then and thanked God for what I had and knew that things could be a lot worse.” He decided to “leave things to God” when the children were 13 years old; he was willing to see what would come. The state was providing funding for their formula, but Levi did not want to waste Spring 2020/Agora
21
Family Three: Uncoordinated Health Services
a month to the geneticist. Similar to the Stutzman’s, they don’t receive their labwork results for 1-2 weeks after their levels are drawn. Their insurance covers their formula, so they have no worry about the cost. Because they do access some technology, Mrs. Miller has connected to other families with PKU through a facebook site and finds recommendations for recipes that avoid proteins and answer any questions she has in between doctor visits. Mrs Miller would appreciate a local provider who can oversee her care for PKU; it is cumbersome to have a pediatrician in one location who does not work with PKU, a geneticist in another location, and then remote blood draws in between with delayed results.
The Millers are unique to the others as the father, Daniel, worked for an English (non-Mennonite or Amish) roofing company that provided them health insurance. They left the strict Amish groups to become Mennonites with their parents. Their children were tested positive for PKU as infants and referred immediately to a local pediatrician in a nearby town. The local pediatrician never contacted them for a follow up appointment, so they delayed their initial visit. When they saw their local pediatrician, he did not recognize the symptoms of PKU but thought it might be autism. They needed to see Dr. Morton at the Central Pennsylvania Amish homestead in Big Valley, Pennsylvania Clinic for a different reason for their daughter, Amish Health Care Priorities and he noticed they might have PKU due to their light hair color (common These three families characterize several for untreated children with PKU). Dr. of the inefficient practices in our local Morton provided instructions to adjust health care system that is ineffective their diet, begin taking formula, and to reach and treat Amish families with consult with a geneticist. genetic illnesses such as PKU. With the expectation for families to see a specialLater that year, they did see the remote ist in urban locations for education, care geneticist who then was able to oversee instructions, and follow up, this limits their care. They see the geneticist once family access to their needed care for a year, a local pediatrician for non-PKU these rare conditions. Having a week in routine or well child visits in between, between lab draws and receiving results, and they send in their labwork once 22
Agora/Spring 2020
families are uncertain about dietary changes for a whole week’s time; that would be similar to having a glucose test and not knowing for a week what blood sugar levels are. With local pediatricians unaware of how to follow up with rare genetic conditions, there is a care gap for families when they are visiting these pediatricians for other reasons throughout the year. Without a system to assist non-health insurance carrying families in paying for the necessary formula, families bypass the formula in search of less expensive options, such as the Stutzmans do. Living with and being Amish is a definitive choice that individuals make as young adults. Staying in their homes and close to other Amish members
IMAGE COURTESY OF HE AUTHOR
state funding or blood draws when nothing changed. Levi thought that the PKU was “over now,” and his children had successful productive lives running farms and raising children of their own. Within a week of my visit to Levi’s home, Enos made a phone call to set up an appointment with Dr. Morton at the Central Pennsylvania Clinic, noting that his symptoms seemed to be continuing to get worse as he got older and he was having a hard time managing his farm. He worried that it might continue to get worse.
allows them to make health care decisions in line with their preferred Amish traditions. These three families highlight some Amish cultural factors that impact their understanding and management of illnesses. Families prefer to leave things to God and use natural supplements when possible (Cuyún Carter, et al., 2012). Families make independent decisions about their children’s welfare and their children’s treatments, such as the Yutzy’s cessation of treatment. Families prioritize a productive life of raising a
family and sustaining a farmstead or steady job to provide for the family; when these priorities are met, expensive medical interventions may not be prioritized.
case. I witnessed the anguish in his face and the need to persevere until a solution is found. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Through this joined health Amish families advocacy model, create a unique Plain community picture of health members have advocacy with their the opportunity cultural approaches to identify their of limited technolneeds and work ogy, avoidance of collectively toprivate or public gether to address health insurance, them; health personal transportacare providers Angela (Oldenburg) Kueny (‘02, Nursing) and her sister Martha Oldenburg (‘09, Nursing) tion by horse and who are deeply are pictured in front of the Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, which buggy, and minimal connected to specializes in genetic health care for Plain populations. community telethese communiphones. These Amish ties have the opportunity to align their came to Dr. Morton that a sweet little families continually bring questions to expertise in an exciting and growing four-year-old, Evelyn, passed away in my mind: How can I help families to health care field with their passion the evening. She was playing all day access care that is closer to home and to care for children and families in at her grandparents, came home for well informed? How can I best advocate need such as Evelyn, the Stutzman’s, dinner, and started feeling nauseous for families with such different priorithe Miller’s, and the Yutzy’s. Doctors with difficulty breathing. After a bit ties for health care services and health Strauss and Puffenberger who work at of the fit, she just collapsed and her outcomes than myself? What if families the Clinic for Special Children (2009) heart stopped beating. Her parents had don’t want a typical American health state, “The Old Order communities witnessed her having a heart attack and service or payment plan? measure the value of medical research could do nothing for her. Dr. Mornot in grant awards, publications, or ton assumed she had an arrhythmia. Health Care Services for Amish Famiacademic promotions, but in human When we arrived at the home, the light lies with Genetic Illnesses terms: alleviation of pain, prevention in the kitchen shone, and a woman The Central Pennsylvania Clinic is an of disability, equitable delivery, and fair stood inside at the table. What would example of patient-led health advocacy cost. They understand that to translate a mother be thinking right now? Why that enables Amish families to receive genetic information into better public would a beautiful gift be taken away? culturally aligned care, at affordable health, one must first commit to caring In the quiet light, Dr. Morton entered costs, without dependence on mainfor individuals.” the kitchen and several men were going stream health insurance. With their in and out of the house with hurried In closing, my call to serve marginalnew building, Dr Morton will be able footsteps and flashlights. It was 9:30 ized populations sees great hope in to conduct inexpensive PKU blood tests at night and pitch black in the Amish his joined health advocacy model with on site that give results the same day becountry without secondary lighting. Plain Populations through these clinics. cause these stand-alone nonprofit clinics Her little brother was awake during it These models of care not only give me can limit the overhead costs of larger all. Just the week before, he was playing a template for health care options for institutions. Additionally, the clinic in the barn and smiling at me, making Amish families with genetic illnesses, board can work to negotiate with forfinger gestures for me to mimic. Such a but they give me a network to join. This mula companies for a reasonable price playful little boy who likely looked up sabbatical project renewed my sense of for families paying at cost because of the to his sister just as my son, Liam, adores health advocacy, and challenged my traconcentrated patient population. Finally, my daughter, Ruth. Evelyn had a poor ditional inclination in health advocacy the nurses who live in community with heart function that wasn’t responding to create options for my patients and the local Plain Populations will be able to treatments. Dr. Morton was discommunities. Truly, with partnership, to make visits and give education to turbed that she had a cardiomyopathy patients, families, and communities can families as they need throughout their of unknown origin with no known be the solution in themselves, creattreatments. treatment. Despite his studies to find a ing and sustaining health care services. solution to prevent the cardiomyopathy On our way home one evening from This, I am sure, will be my next chapter’s in the Amish population, he knows several home visits, a heartbreaking call scholarship work at Luther College. he is missing something with Evelyn’s Spring 2020/Agora
23
References Amish America (2015) New Clinic to open for special children & adults in Big Valley, PA. Retrieved from https://amishamerica. com/the-new-clinic-for-special-children-inbig-valley-pa/. Central Pennsylvania Clinic (2019) Central Pennsylvania Clinic. Retrieved from http:// centralpennsylvaniaclinic.org/. Clinic for Special Children (2020). Clinic for Special Children. Retrieved from https:// clinicforspecialchildren.org/.
The Change Foundation (2006). Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite genetic disorder database. Retrieved from http://www.biochemgenetics.ca/plainpeople/index.php.
Cuyún Carter, G.B., Katz, M.L., Ferketich, A.K., Clinton, S.K., Grainger, E.M., Paskett, E.D., & Bloomfield, C.D. (2012). The use of daily aspirin, nutritional supplements and alternative medications among Amish and non-Amish living in Ohio Appalachia. Nutrition & Cancer, 64(7), 911–918. https://doi.org /10.1080/01635581.2012.714046. Goldsmith, G., Porter, J., & Royce, M. (2019). The Plain Community: Meeting a unique consumer healthcare challenge. The Patient Experience [Blog]. Hubinette, M., Dobson, S., Scott, I., & Sherbino, J. (2017) Health advocacy. Medical Teacher, 39(2), 128-135.
Kraybill, D. B., Johnson-Weiner, K., & Nolt, S. M. (2013). The Amish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mayo Clinic (2020). Phenylketonuria. Retrieved from https://www.mayoclinic.org/ diseases-conditions/phenylketonuria/symptoms-causes/syc-20376302.
Morton, D.H. (2012) Roads Taken: Recollections, words, and images from meaningful work. Retrieved from https://www.etown.edu/centers/young-center/files/hmorton-references/ Roads%20Taken.pdf. National Organization of Rare Disorders (2020) Phenylketonuria. Retrieved f rom https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/phenylketonuria/.
Plain Community Health Consortium (2020). Retrieved from https://www.plaincommunityhc.org/organizations. Pollack, A. (2007, December) Agency approves drug to treat genetic disorder that can lead to retardation. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/ health/14genetic.html.
American Nurses Association (2020) Advocacy. Retrieved from https://www.nursingworld. org/practice-policy/advocacy/.
24
Agora/Spring 2020
Strauss, K. A., Puffenberger, E. G., & Morton, D. H. (2012). One community’s effort to control genetic disease. American Journal of Public Health, 102(7), 1300–1306. https://doi. org/10.2105/AJPH.2011.300569.
Yohn, M. (2018, February 23). Pennsylvania Dutch: WellSpan tries to close cultural gap in health care. YorkDispatch. Retrieved f rom https://www.yorkdispatch.com/ story/news/2018/02/23/wellspan-dutchliaisons-seek-close-cultural-gap-local-healthcare/364790002/. Young Center (2020) Young Center For Anabaptist And Pietist Studies. Retrived from https://www.etown.edu/centers/youngcenter/.
Resilient Communities in a Time of Change by JON JENSEN, Professor of Philosophy
T
he Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said that you can never step into the same river twice. Since both the river and you are constantly changing, it will no longer be the same river and you will not be the same person when you step in again. Heraclitus believed that change is the fundamental reality of our universe, a view that seems quite compelling in the spring of 2020 as Luther, the US, and the world react to the everchanging circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic. As I write this essay, the Luther College campus is empty, nearly 2,000 students have left their dorms to return to their families, and most Luther faculty and staff are working from home as well. For the first time in its 160-year history, Luther is doing distance learning rather than the place-based, community focused pedagogical approach that is a hallmark of a Luther College education. We are adjusting, students and faculty alike are adapting, utilizing new technologies and techniques, making do, but the reality of change lingers and generates a nearly constant series of questions. How bad will it get? When will infections peak? When will the campus reopen? How long will this last? What will the new normal look like for us and the world? How will the community bounce back after this shock? This last question about “bouncing back” is at the very heart of my recent research and the subject of this essay. I study community resilience, the ability of a community to prepare for and respond to disruptions. Resilient communities bounce back after adversity and are able to thrive in the changing and challenging world of the 21st century. In what follows I describe a couple of these research projects before returning at the
end to some closing thoughts on the coronavirus and what it means for community resilience. What do flooding and childhood obesity have in common? No, this is not the opening for a bad joke. Like a pandemic, these are two threats to thriving, resilient communities and subjects of research projects of which I was a part. Though trained as a philosopher, my primary work for the past decade has been in the area of sustainability. As a teacher, I have been focused on integrating sustainability into the curriculum through our Environmental Studies program and throughout all disciplines and departments at Luther. My service included helping to found and direct Luther’s Center for Sustainable Communities and working on campus sustainability and community resilience projects at many levels. As a scholar, I have pursued opportunities to both study sustainability and engage with communities to nurture more resilient, thriving communities that respond to the challenges of our time. While sustainability is often associated with recycling and solar panels, and these things are important, the real work of sustainability is primarily about community and connections. While individuals can (and should) work to make their lives more sustainable, the primary unit of sustainability is communities, and the key is often to strengthen connections. Whether that is a campus community like Luther College, a municipality such as Decorah, Iowa, or a bioregion like the Driftless Region, communities must strive to achieve the balance between human systems and nature’s systems that is the hallmark of true sustainability. If community is the unit of sustainability, building connections is a primary tool of the work. How can we connect people to each
Jon Jensen other and the land? How can we help organizations make the connections that will advance their work? How do communities become more resilient to the inevitable shocks of the 21st century and improve the lives of citizens while reducing our impacts on the environment? Luther’s Center for Sustainable Communities has as its mission to “promote sustainability and be a catalyst for change on campus and in the region.” This involves the daily work of waste and energy management for the roughly 3,000 people that live, work, study, and play on the Decorah campus. But it also includes a wide variety of projects in Decorah and surrounding communities to address sustainability challenges and nurture more resilient communities. Here I highlight two projects that were part of my recent sabbatical, with an emphasis on the way that the work of sustainability can create unique learning opportunities for students while assisting communities to look to the future. The Upper Iowa River forms the western border of the Luther College Spring 2020/Agora
25
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Emergency responders in Freeport, Iowa, August 2016 campus before meandering through Decorah on its journey to the Mississippi. While this small river is usually a peaceful backdrop to the view from Peace Dining Room, with its riverside trails serving as a favorite spot for students to walk or jog, the Upper Iowa has another side. On the night of August 23, 2016, a predicted light shower turned into a sustained downpour—more than 10 inches in a few hours—and the river rose rapidly, causing severe flooding of lowlying areas. Residents of Freeport, an unincorporated community on the downstream edge of Decorah, were especially hard hit. The rising river converged with flash flooding on two local streams to catch Freeport in a “perfect storm” of flooding. Basement walls collapsed, homes were flooded, evacuations were made by boat, roads were closed. While the August 2016 flood impacted the whole watershed, Freeport suffered the most, partly due to its geography but also because of underlying vulnerabilities. In the aftermath of the 2016 Upper Iowa River flood, the Luther Center for Sustainable Communities convened a team of faculty and students to work in partnership with the Iowa Flood Center and the Upper Iowa River Watershed Management Authority to study community flood resilience, with a particular focus on Freeport. Funded by a fed26
Agora/Spring 2020
eral grant, our research on the Upper Iowa was part of the Iowa Watershed Approach, a statewide initiative that sought to understand and enhance flood resilience in nine watersheds across the state. Both climatological research and anecdotal experiences are showing that flooding is a growing concern in the upper Midwest. Especially those who live near rivers like the Upper Iowa must adapt to this changing reality and enhance our ability to respond. Our research sought to understand how this can be done most effectively. What are the impacts – direct and indirect – of flooding on communities within our watershed? How do various elements of social vulnerability – such as poverty, race, age, household size, and isolation – impact flood resilience? What can be done to enhance community response and recovery to future floods? Working with teams of students and faculty over two summers, we sought to answer these questions and more through extensive interviews of Freeport residents, a survey of households throughout the watershed, and conversations with key community stakeholders, from emergency management personnel to community leaders. While the Luther team worked on our par-
ticular project, we were part of a much larger team within this watershed and throughout the state who were all seeking to understand the impacts of flooding and how communities can bounce back after a flood.
One result of this project was a report that highlighted both the impacts on Freeport residents and lessons learned from the flood of 2016: “On the path to community flood resilience for the Upper Iowa Watershed.”1 This report included a thematic analysis of the detailed interviews that students conducted of Freeport residents using the general themes of Response, Impact, and Resilience. Not surprisingly, the analysis showed no “silver bullet” or easy solution to increase community resilience to future flooding. Better communication, enhanced formal and informal networks, and more coordinated efforts both before and after floods were recommended as steps to help communities prepare for and “bounce back” after the next flood. A summary of this report and the underlying research was presented to both Freeport residents and the Upper Iowa River Watershed Management Authority. The process and subsequent product have also been shared across the state through the Iowa Flood Center. While the specific research project in Freeport has concluded, Luther faculty and staff remain actively involved in ongoing watershed planning efforts and work to enhance community flood resilience in Northeast Iowa.
3333
Flooding is not the only change that threatens communities, nor are environmental factors the only element of sustainability. There is a social dimen-
Obesity is a growing problem nationally as an increasing percentage of the US population is overweight or obese and health problems related to obesity are rising rapidly. While often seen as a personal issue, obesity is best viewed as a systemic problem, a symptom or output of the policies, institutions, and structures of contemporary western society. It is, in short, a systems issue rather than an individual one and thus requires a systems perspective and approach. Food and Fitness was premised on exactly that approach: looking beyond individual behaviors to uncover the structures and drivers that result in individual health outcomes. Working in schools and with the food systems, Food and Fitness intervened at strategic points to “make the healthy choice the easy choice” and to increase access to healthy local food. Recently, the focus of our work has shifted beyond K-12 schools and the food system to address issues with younger children and the institutions that serve the early childhood population. Supported by a large grant from the WK Kellogg Foundation, Luther’s Center for Sustainable Communities has led an ongoing project titled “Expanding Farm to Early Childhood Education.” This project works with Head Start throughout Northeast
Iowa and other early childhood learning environments to “create a refined model to expand and enhance Farm to Early Education in preschools and early childhood environments.” The project uses three pillars to structure our work: 1) increased access to healthy local food–making connections between local farmers and educational institutions and reducing barriers to purchasing local food; 2) professional development for early educators—we have a curriculum that helps teachers introduce new foods and develop habits of healthy eating and; 3) parent engagement—from cooking classes to grocery stores, our peer educators work to ensure lessons from the classroom are transferred to the home environment. One key element of this project was utilizing a systems approach, and this was highlighted in an article we published in the journal Health Promotion Practice. With co-authors Kathy Zurcher and Ann Mansfield, we explained the models and how they were applied in “Using a Systems Approach to Achieve Impact and Sustain Results.”2 The systems approach works to move beyond a narrow, linear understanding of causes and effects to grasp the complicated relationships and feedbacks that influence and drive institutional and individual behavior. This article describes the ways that we employed systems thinking within the Food and Fitness Initiative
while also sharing lessons learned for other practitioners. One exciting element of this project is the many connections to Luther College students, faculty, and alumni. Utilizing data collected over several years, in 2017 we embarked upon a new chapter in this work as we partnered with the Mayo Clinic to study the effectiveness of the initiative’s interventions. Through a unique partnership, the Center for Sustainable Communities brought together our community partners, Luther alum Dr. Brian Lynch at the Mayo Clinic, Luther nursing students, and Dr. Loren Toussaint and students in his psychology lab. The collaboration produced the paper “Slowing BMI Growth Trajectories in Elementary School-Aged Children: The Northeast Iowa Food and Fitness Initiative,” which was published in Family and Community Health: The Journal of Health Promotion and Maintenance. Not only did this project add to our knowledge of strategies for addressing childhood obesity, it also provided unique experiential learning opportunities for Luther students.
3333
Both of these projects involve teams of people working with vulnerable communities over a period of time. Each of them attempts to both understand the disrupters that affect community vitality and also to play some small part
LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU
sion that is equally strong, especially in the work of the Center for Sustainable Communities. One of the longestrunning projects is Luther’s partnership with the Northeast Iowa Food and Fitness Initiative. For more than a decade, Luther has been a core partner in this six-county project to address childhood obesity and create healthier communities in Northeast Iowa. The Center and other partners have worked closely with local schools, Head Start classrooms, and other early education centers to incorporate healthy local food and ageappropriate educational interventions.
Luther students and staff respond to the 2008 Upper Iowa River flood Spring 2020/Agora
27
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Aerial view of flooding on the Luther campus in 2016 in enhancing community resilience, improving the ability of communities to “bounce back,” to create healthy, flourishing, sustainable communities in which all people thrive. These projects also understand that change is part of the fundamental reality of life in the 21st century. Sustainability is not about achieving or maintaining some static state; rather, it recognizes the dynamic nature of life and strives to fortify communities to accept and work with change. We must find a healthy relationship with the more than human world rather than attempting to ignore change or pretend that we humans stand above the natural world, immune from the many limits we face. As we all strive to find our way through the radical change of 2020 and the global pandemic that at times seems to upset all that we know and care about, we would do well to remember Heraclitus and his metaphorical river of change. Enhancing resilience – personal, institutional, community, and societal – is the wise choice and we have no shortage of examples from which to draw in this ongoing work. 28
Agora/Spring 2020
Notes 1. The full report is available online at https:// www.luther.edu/sustainability/assets/Report___Community_Flood_Resilience_in_ Freeport.pdf 2. Health Promotion Practice, September 2018 Vol. 19, 15s-23s.
International Women’s Day
March 6, 2020
by CHARLOTTE A. KUNKEL, Professor of Sociology
M
arch is Women’s History Month, and on March 8th every year we celebrate International Women’s Day. The theme this year is Each for Equal. And this year we are also celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the US. Thinking about women’s history comes on the heels of honoring black history and Black History Month. Ironically, these two months illustrate a vexing problem black women (and other women of color) face. Are they mostly part of a race, or part of a sex? How often are they invisible to each? In response to this problem of a hierarchy of oppressions, two speakers last month, Lydia Kelow-Bennett and Terrion Williamson, referred to the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977. It is also a text that I am currently teaching. I want to tell you a little bit about this text and one other I am also teaching—both have been wandering around in my head lately.
Meaning that, “If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Taylor, 23). Similarly, in 1927, a collective Korean feminist organization called Kunuhoe was organized to bring vastly different Korean feminist organizations together: socialist feminists, farm and factory workers, and nationalist feminists. They wrote its inaugural declaration in 1929. It reads, “It is readily apparent that all the irrational factors that put women at a disadvantage are essentially linked with factors that haunt Korean society and indeed all societies around the world. Therefore, all the solutions to the problems are intricately connected and cannot be separated from each other. IMAGE DEY SUBRATA CC BY-SA, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The Combahee River Collective was a radical black feminist organization who
gathered to address the complicated and interlocking nature of multiple oppressions. They chose their name to honor Harriet Tubman and her role in the raid of 1863 along the river Combahee. In this raid, Tubman served as the first woman to lead a US army operation, in which she and a unit of 150 African American male soldiers freed over 700 enslaved peoples. What courage did it take to fight alongside the US army, to risk her safety, herself, her life? In 1977, in remembrance of Tubman, the collective theorized: “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism as well as Patriarchy” (19).
Shaheen Bagh street protest art, Delhi, India, January 2020
“Women are not weak. When women are liberated, the world
Charlotte A. Kunkel will be liberated. Korean sisters, unite.” (Maloney, Theiss and Choi, 204). Why address these texts on the celebration of International Women’s Day? I chose these texts because radical and courageous women of color have been reminding me, reminding us, for centuries that no one is free until we are all free. In recent decades all too often we have been fighting individual fights. We have often used a distorted and exclusionary identity politics to divide us— we say, “I am a woman, I will work only for sex equality.” Or “you are not part of this group, you can’t stand with me.” Or we ask, “why are you fighting for that issue? Are you sure you belong there?” We create new identities to address our specific problems and create new groups that call for new identities. We are often stuck in identity politics such that we fail to see that, if women of color were free, we would have had to confront all systems of oppression. Racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, Anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, colonialSpring 2020/Agora
29
IMAGE BY DTM CCO WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Peaceful protestors in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood in Delhi in January, 2020. Mostly Muslim women, they demonstrated against police brutality, poverty, and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) until India’s COVID-19 policies forced them to end the protest in late March.. ism, capitalism: these issues are all our issues. I must fight these fights everyday because I am not free until, unless, we are all free. Moreover, I can use my privilege, whatever its forms, to raise the issues, to make the connections, all the time wherever I see them. And I must see them—because my sisters are suffering.
streets, across borders, and into our classrooms and communities. We must remember that challenging boundaries, while it does not come easy, often comes at great cost, yet challenging boundaries is necessary to claim equity and inclusion. It is necessary to challenge boundaries with a full and loud voice, and with votes. For us all.
The women of Shaheen Bagh street have been in the streets of Delhi since December fighting against the citizenship law that Prime Minister Modi has passed in India that questions the RIGHT of Muslims to be Indian citizens. These women are staging a peaceful occupation of the street to protest the law—in the face of extreme cold, in the face of police violence and death. Women at our border are fighting against the internment and caging of their children. Women all over the US are fighting for a living wage. Women are fighting for black lives. Women are fighting against religious oppression, against borders, against the exploitation of workers, against sexual harassment, and on and on. Women are fighting. They are fighting for me, for my freedom. Thus, these are all my issues as well. We are not free until all of us are free.
It is incumbent on each one of us to be courageous, to be brave (and I mean Harriet Tubman brave) to create equality now, each and every day, everywhere, and especially right here where we live, work, and learn. For only when every woman is free, are we ALL free. Each for Equal.
International Women’s Day is a day to honor women around the world who have wandered out of their designated spaces, who have wandered into the 30
Agora/Spring 2020
Works Cited
Maloney, Barbara, Janet Theiss and Hyaeweol Choi. Gender in Modern East Asia: China, Korea, and Japan. Westview Press, 2016. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.
At Cardinal Marsh by DIANE SCHOLL, Professor Emerita of English
O
n Sunday we drive to the marsh, corona sweeping the country in rising wet waves. In the parking lot we maybe interrupt a drug deal; dirty pick ups gun down the rutted road, spitting angry dust in their wake. You almost lose a shoe in the mudflats when you try to take a picture of the ring-necked ducks, gabbling and flying in quick hops to the riverbank. At first we’re disappointed: no cardinals in sight, the sky a pale blank slate. When we see them, the pelicans cluster like hosts robed in white, heads tucked deep against their swollen chests. Sometimes one raises a flash of wing in the late light, points a yellow bill in the air with a gesture resembling joy. On the news, bodies stacked like fish cool in trailer freezers, rows of coffins wait austerely for burial when this is over. We wonder where the pelicans go. We’re lucky to see them at all, we say. We say we want to stroke them, but they’re resting from their flight, just idling in the current, feathers clean as shriven snow.
Spring 2020/Agora
31
LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES REPOSITORY 3644.3
The tribute to Luther College nurse Theresse Eleanor Arneson in the 1920 Luther College Pioneer is described in the Introduction by Martin Klammer on page 2 32
Agora/Spring 2020
THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE Luther College, 700 College Drive, Decorah, Iowa 52101-1045 Address Service Requested
Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Rochester, MN Permit No. 289