"Circled with Knowledge" :
.Sally Roesch Wagner and the first .feminists
.By Stephanie Hiller
"War is the barbarism of the past." -- Matilda Joslyn Gage
Sally Roesch Wagner gave up a tenured faculty position at Sacramento State College to go on the road with her dramatization of the life of suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage and her better-known ally Elizabeth Cady Stanton.Friends on the faculty thought she was nuts, but Wagner has no regrets, especially after faculty cutbacks and "that ungodly work speed up" that followed.
"I ended up making a good decision, and in terms of the joy I feel, there's no question. I get to do what I love to do." She tours the country to deliver her historical drama performances and also serves as a freelance historical consultant to organizations like the National Women's History Project. In addition, she's the director of the Gage Foundation, which is currently engaged in the purchase of Gage's house for a historical site while carrying on her legacy. Gage fought not only for women's rights but for the sovereignty of the native American peoples.
"Until there's freedom for every group, the Civil War will not be over, is what she said," Wagner tells me with obvious gusto. I am talking with Sally long-distance from the Gage home in Fayetteville, New York. The house is not haunted, but you might say Sally is -- well, possessed. Quotes from Gage spring spontaneously into our conversation. "I feel like I'm with her all the time."
One of the first women to receive a doctorate for work in women's studies (UC Santa Cruz), Wagner's distinguished intention has been to uncover the untold story of the early feminists. What she discovered holds enormous significance for women today.
She had puzzled over the work of the first feminists. She began to ask where did these women -- confined as they were, and oppressed by church and state, where did they "get the idea that you could have humans who did not oppress each other? And how did they have the strength, to stand up to all that?" With the help of a grant from NAH, she found out.
It was the Iroquois women.
"They saw something different. That's how they knew it was possible.
"They had friends among the Iroquois women, and their association with them was "the missing piece. This is what I was looking for."
"I think it has real impact today. Being around women who live in a world where women are honored, are respected and have authority -- to hang out with those women is to be transformed. Because it's a constant calling to how you should be treated.
"I think white women are not the natural leaders of this movement. I think it's the women who have been living in a place of authority, despite the best efforts of this government and the churches, Native American and African American women, and not just ones who have been recognized by the white world.
"I'm having the same experience with Haudenoshaunee women." We spoke at length of her own deep connections with Iroquois women. "I keep getting my racism mirrored to me, living in a culture where I'm expected to have the answers by virtue of my whiteness.
"It's a process, of learning to listen, of being in stillness. That stillness is a place of awareness that I'm not the smartest woman at this table. I need to still myself so that if these smarter women choose to share the gift of their knowledge, I'm in a receptive position to hear it.
"Paradigm shift is kind of a mild term for this process."
She gave an example of her experience.
"A couple of clan mothers were at one of my performances. I asked for some feedback. In her graciousness, one of the women said, 'Just one thing. Is, not was.' The things I had been talking about are not in the past. Clan mothers still nominate the chief, still plan the ceremonies, still live in a world of balance where, when you're out of balance, that's when you need to take action."
A teacher, she began to understand that "the process of teaching is not one of telling people what to do. They have to find out for themselves in their own way. These are people who practice that. Individual freedom is just a given in their lives.
"The way of teaching is being circled with knowledge. What different sort of process that is!"
Asked how we can learn from these women, she said, "The first thing we need to do is be very very watchful of the most likely scenario and that is cultural appropriation. We know how to steal. The women of all red nations have said that the stealing of spirituality now is comparable to the stealing of land in the past.
"I firmly believe that white people should not sun dance, that Pine Ridge is appropriate in arresting all white people who carry sage.
"Knowledge is part of the place. We believe knowledge can be extracted from its place and its people, and be sold. How can we use their knowledge? We can't.
"I think we can be inspired but I don't think we can lift things out of the place where it lives without doing damage.
"We can enter into a spirit of openness to friendship, and if they choose to be part of that process then we can share with each other and become part of that process, -- and it's a process.
"My heritage, my legacy, is to do damage. I know I'm going to be culturally inappropriate. This is what white people do. We carry with us the arrogance of believing that ours is the norm. We don't understand the cultural garbage we carry, and it makes us dangerous. I have maybe a thousand pages of notes on ceremony. No one will ever see that because it's not my story, and to put that story into the world is to appropriate and destroy it.
"They've managed to survive by keeping that information from white people.
"The more knowledge, I have the more dangerous I am, because the main potential I have is to take their spirituality and destroy it. Whatever I've seen or been given is a gift. The place of interaction, of eating together, laughing together, is the place from which we can move and grow."
I ask how we can approach that place. Can we knock at their door and be welcomed? She laughed. "How can we begin to build the bridge? My sense is that those bridges are easy to build. What's difficult is gathering the material to build the bridge. It's a process of shedding stuff before we cross the bridge, and leaving behind the bag to bring stuff back in.
"The issue of sovereignty is being written right now in the land claims that are being made all over this country. This is the time. We can be there supporting their land claims. The doors are more open now than they've ever been.
"We really do have a place in the creation of justice right now!"
In the Black Hills for example the Supreme Court said in 1980 that of course the land was taken illegally and we'll pay you $17.5 million for it (but not a penny for all the gold and minerals we've taken out of it) and the Lakota said no, We want land.
"Everywhere you look there are sovereignty issues or land claims. The Cayuga have a land claim that's going to be decided in court.
"Being a silent observer is to be part of the majority that makes history. We can begin to understand what the internal issues are, without meddling. Just knowing. Developing an ear for their music. Beginning to discern the traditionalist from the neocolonialist, the white Indian. Creating ourselves as appropriate friends.
"That's the place where we can step out, the place of friendship."
That, for Wagner, is the bridge to the circle of knowledge. For her, it secures the future.
"I sleep well each night knowing that native elders are meeting regularly and talking about the survival of the planet. People who have been caretakers of the planet for a long long time are talking."
For a complete discussion of their association with Iroquois women, read Wagner's article, The Untold Story of the Iroquois Influence on the Early Feminists.
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