Here’s a great article from the latest issue of Ode Magazine about the Grandmothers and “For the Next 7 Generations”
http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/68/grannies-with-a-mission/
Ode Magazine
Grannies with a mission
Diana Rico | Jan/Feb 2010 issue
“The greatest distance in the world,” Agnes Baker Pilgrim is fond of saying, “is the 14 inches from our minds to our hearts.” Grandmother Aggie, as she is known, is the oldest living female of the Takelma Band of the Rogue River Indians in Oregon. She is also a member of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, a group of grannies with a mission. Facing a world in crisis, these wise women believe solutions will come if we can shrink that mindheart distance to zero.
The Grandmothers are respected medicine women and shamans from the Americas, the Arctic Circle, Asia, and Africa. All say they received the message, in visions and prophecies, that at a crucial historical moment they would be called onto the world stage to help lead the human race into a new era of healing, cooperation and peace. In 2004 they came together in upstate New York, formed the council and set to work. “We are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction of our Mother Earth and the destruction of indigenous ways of life,” they declared. “We believe the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain future.”
The Grandmothers have taken on some ambitious longterm tasks, such as pressuring the Vatican to rescind the 500-year-old Papal Bulls that enabled Europeans to strip First Nations peoples of their inherent sovereignty in the Americas. They have also received $250,000 to donate to causes of their choice from the Flow Fund Circle, a philanthropic model that empowers visionaries, healers and social innovators to give away money.
With these funds, the Grandmothers are having a direct impact on people in their homelands, supporting such projects as Death to Meth, a drugabuse prevention program for Lakota youth in South Dakota; the Santa Casa de Saude, a center for healing with traditional plants in the Brazilian rainforest; the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala, India; and the Mazatec Women’s Weaving Cooperative in Oaxaca, Mexico.
A new documentary film, For the Next 7 Generations, chronicles the Grandmothers as they travel to New Mexico and South Dakota, India and Gabon, Mexico and Italy, galvanizing thousands of people who respond to their message of both urgent need and drastic hope. Emmy and Peabody Awardwinning producer/director Carole Hart captures them as they hold their twice-yearly public gatherings for prayer, ceremony and outreach, and act as spokespeople for such issues as ending uranium mining. The Grandmothers help people connect to what they call the sacredness of the web of life. “And once people make that shift in their own consciousness, it affects their behavior enormously,” says Hart, whose film has been generating a buzz since its premiere last summer. Audiences are often moved to tears.
Perhaps the Grandmothers’ biggest impact has been the one that’s impossible to measure, as their powerful and loving presences open minds, heal hearts and transform individuals from the inside. At one of their gatherings, a nonNative American mother brought her adopted Native teenaged daughter because the girl had never had the experience of being with her own people. “We brought her up to the front and called on people who were from her tribe to come up and stand with her,” recalls Grandmother Mona Polacca, a Hopi/Havasupai/Tewa elder from Arizona. “We had a special song sung for her, and she was received and welcomed into her nation. We had about 400 people at this event, and they were all standing with her as she became recognized.” The experience was lifealtering not only for the girl but, says Grandmother Mona, “for everyone who witnessed it.”
The Grandmothers’ agenda is simple, yet potentially revolutionary: “Our No. 1 priority is promoting peace and good relationships with everyone in the world,” says Grandmother Mona. Adds filmmaker Hart: “They are helping people see the world from an indigenous perspective, which says that we are all part of a web of life that connects us, and not just people but every living thing on the planet. I would like everybody who watches the film to take that trip from the mind to the heart that Grandmother Aggie was talking about.”