TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Genevieve Vaughan (GV)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: April 10, 2002
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Chris Flores and Robin Johnson
REELS: 2178 and 2179

Please note that videos include as much as 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers correlate with the time codes on the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. And it’s April 10th, year 2002 and we’re in Austin, Texas, at the home of Gen Vaughan. And we’re fortunate to have some time with her to talk about her activism and philanthropy and theory of gift giving and feminism, which is I think all lent to support for a lot of environmental work and peace work and other kinds of good deeds in Texas and around the world. Thanks very much for spending some time with us.
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GV: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
DT: I thought we might start by talking about your early days and if there were moments in your childhood experiences with your family or friends that might have first opened your mind and soul to the outdoors and to nature.
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GV: Yeah, well I was born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1939 and lived right on the Bay and my father was a hunter and liked to take us hunting and fishing with him, which I hated. My first like political action was to not go hunting and—with my father in—or fishing because I felt really bad about the animals being killed. But he had a lot of knowledge of nature and so he transmitted that to us. And the other hand, we were—my—my mother’s side of the family was Irish and there was a kind of fairy story atmosphere about things and they talked to us about fairies and daddy told us stories
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about fairies and so I believed in fairies a lot as a child. And of course fairies are nature’s spirits and living there near the Bay in Corpus Christie, I had a—a really sense of—of nature right there. And I found out later, as I was growing up, that that area had been a Native American graveyard also so the spirits of the ancestors really were there. And anyway, I grew up, grew older, and started wondering why we had money and other people didn’t. And I worried about that for a lot and nobody could answer that question for a long time. And went—went away to school in Dallas and then in Pennsylvania and
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there was no answer to that question until I met this Italian philosopher (who I later married and then latter divorced from), who explained to me that poor people were poor because rich people were rich—that there was a transfer of wealth going on from one group of people to the other. And so that explained it to me. It was not a happy explanation but I began to wonder what could I do because I was obviously on the wrong side of this equation and my husband (inaudible) got married and moved to—to Italy and I lived there from 63’ to 83’ and early on when I was there I went with him to a meeting of some professors who were talking about applying Marxist theory of the commodity
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and money to language. And I was so blown away by this idea, the way they explained it and so forth, that I—I—it really changed my perspective and I started working on it, and he did also. He wrote about that same idea. And I worked on it for years and years and years. And I—finally he made a theory in which language was like exchange, like market exchange. And I made a theory in which language was like gift giving, not like exchange. And I was bringing up my children at the time, I had three daughters, and taking care of them and I realized that they could talk although they didn’t exchange and
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I was not doing exchanges with them. And exchanges when you give in order to get back an equivalent of what you’ve given. And the gift giving is when you satisfy a—a need directly and the gift giving is other oriented whereas exchange is ego oriented, you give in order to satisfy your own need—in order to get back the equivalent. And so I worked on that a long time and I finally became a—a—a feminist, and—in 1978 it was as—just after I got my divorce, I started going to a group of women that worked at the FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN, which was near my house in Rome, and I
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went to that consciousness raising group. And there they were talking a lot about women’s free labor in the home and I realized this was a gift. This was gift labor that was going on—that this—women’s free housework is a gift that women are giving to the system. And in fact forty percent would have to be added on to the GNP if women’s housework were counted in monetary terms, and that’s just in the U.S. and in other countries it’s even more. So there’s a huge amount of free work being done that’s invisible. And as I went along I realized that there are two paradigms, two ways of
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looking at the world and one is based on exchange and the market, and the other is based on gift giving and the exchange way basically hides and competes with the gift way, which ends up supporting the exchange way and the exchangers. As women are the ones that have to bring up children, not that men can’t but women have been assigned that role socially and children are so dependent that they have to have gifts given to them free, they can’t exchange with you. So they have to receive gifts free from somebody, and that role has been assigned to women. Because I think what we do is, we misinterpret our different biologies, or physiologies to mean that we have to have very different social roles and we really don’t have to do that. We—what has happened is that boys have been told that they’re in a different category from their nurturing mother and so they have to create a different identity and that takes them away from this gift economy, this giving and receiving that they have when they’re little. And I think first they identify with their mothers and then they realize they can’t do that anymore. And so they have to create a different identity. And unfortunately that identity has become one of competition, domination, hierarchy, and in my book For-Giving I go through the—the reasons for that a lot, but which I won’t go into right now exactly, but it does happen that there is what’s
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called a manhood agenda in which men are supposed to prove themselves in the world in a way that women are not, and—or at least haven’t until they’ve been absorbed into the market. But I believe that both the economic market and a lot of the interactions at large-scales, the institutions that we have, are based on this manhood agenda and that we are not paying attention to the gift giving agenda that really belongs to all humans as our birth right. And instead men are being pushed away from that—from their earliest childhood and then we’re building our institutions on that pushing away, on that let’s say change, deep change in the kind of behavior and logic that people are expected to have.
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Now what’s happened is that as women have been absorbed into the market, we’ve shown that this manhood agenda is not biologically determined. Women can be just as competitive and hierarchical and dominant as men. So it’s not a question of bi—that’s not a question of biology, but neither is the nurturing. We call be nurturing and so I think what we should do is call ourselves homo donons instead of homo sapiens, that is the giving being instead of just the knowing being. Because even when you’re—when
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you’re a child, you have to give and receive, especially receive, before you can know, be—knowing comes after receiving and you have to be given to and participate in this gift economy earlier on. There are societies which have been based on gift giving—indigenous societies that have a lot of gift giving practices and many of them still do from the Potlatch of the northwest coast, of the U.S., up to the south—South Pacific Islands and so forth. There’s lots of gift giving going on, and it fits into I think a—a structure of communication. And in fact in my book I worked a lot on seeing gift giving as communication at a material level. If I give to you, you receive from me, we have communicated. That is, we’ve created a bond—I’ve informed you by satisfying your
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need because you’ve like eaten the pie that I’ve cooked. And that’s actually real information because it’s part of your insides now that you’ve eaten it. And, the very fact that I care enough about you to see what you need and that you are able to receive from me and use that good in a creative way for your good, that is an interaction which has a logic of—of its own and it’s a transitive logic—that is something goes from one person to the other. In exchange, something goes over there in order to come back here, so the gift, or the relation, is cancelled because it has to come back to my good—it’s not other oriented anymore. So there’s not a transfer of—of humanity, let’s say, from one person to the other. It all gets cancelled out and comes back to the person who is—initiates the exchange. So, my idea is that what we need to do is create a society that’s
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based on gift giving instead of on exchange. And I believe also that we have washed out gift giving out of our understanding of society. And that’s why, for example, I think it’s very important to see language as (inaudible) which is what I have worked on for all of these years ever since my husband was working on it as exchange and I was working on it as—as gift giving, as—so I see words as verbal gifts that take the place of the material gifts, verbal communication that takes the place of material communication. In fact, communication is communication, and “muni” means gifts in Latin. So really that word means giving gifts together, which is kind of a—a surprise, it certainly was when I realized it, but I think that is what happens. And there are various levels of gift giving in
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language I think. I think even syntax is based on gift giving—that the subject gives the predicate to the object, that those are the three basic like phases within a sentence. At any rate, that is certainly not the way linguistics is looked at in the present. But I think there are also lots of other areas of life that gift giving has been wiped out of, or cancelled from. And one of the reasons that it is cancelled by that market, by exchange, is that exchange is not as good of way of interrelating as gift giving is. And, in gift giving we need abundance in order to give without self-sacrificing, whereas exchange needs
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scarcity. And in fact scarcity is artificially created by the exchange economy, which wastes money, for example, on armaments. Eighty billion dollars-wait, excuse me—eighteen billion dollars is spent every week on armaments and that would be enough to feed everybody on earth for a year—every—every hungry person. That means a huge waste, a huge hemorrhage, is going out of the economy that could have gone for nurturing people and instead is being wasted because armaments do not nurture anybody. And not only that, I think the—the—the taking of the gifts of the many into the hands of
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the few is also a way of creating scarcity artificially so that exchange and all of the structures, the power structures that are built on that, can function because if everybody had enough and there were abundance, everybody could just give to everybody else and there would be no need to exchange—there would be no need to follow the lead of the dominators. And so we could have a much, much better society. So, as I said, I think that gift giving is not seen in many places and one of the places it’s been cancelled out of is nature. We don’t realize how much of nature really is a gift. In fact you don’t see
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nature giving us something in order to make us give it back something. And in fact very few people in the exchange economy are giving anything to nature. They’re only taking away from it and then using that as a basis of exchange. But, you can start with your own body, in which your heart beats and takes the blood out to your cells and nurtures your cells and that creates a gift cycle of your blood. Your breath is a gift—free gift from the universe and you breathe it in and give it out again. Then I talk about the elements in which fire is a gift that you can give without losing—some—somebody else can light their fire and—and take it. The wind goes from a high-pressure area to a low-pressure
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area and that’s from where there’s more to where there’s less and I said that’s the answer that’s blowing in the wind. And the earth sustains everybody and gives birth to all of these amazing creatures and plants. And—and the water nourishes us and our—our bodies are made up mostly of it and we’re not every even thinking about all of these gifts that we’re being given all the time. And I think, you know, even the word “data” like experiential data. All our experience comes to us as givens. We’ve taken all of that aspect out of our philosophy because we’ve been focusing on the market, on the exchange economy, and on patriarchy—on the dominant one—the people that are dominant and not on the people that are being dominated or the ones that are actually
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giving the gifts. We’re—we’re focusing on the ones that getting the gifts. So, so I think what needs to happen is that we need to have a—a strong women’s leadership on the basis of gift economy values. That is, our practice of free giving has a—an ideology that goes with it, which are those values of compassion, of other orientation, that are not the market values. And, we need to have a society that’s based on that, rather than a society that’s based on the values of the manhood agenda that have been externalized into the society at large. Wait a second, cause here’s my daughter coming. (pause) So nature is actually a gift-giving conglomeration and perhaps has some kind of underlying unity as well. And that makes the market and exchange an aberration within nature. So if we
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were able to act according to the gift giving logic instead of according to the exchange logic, we would align ourselves with nature rather than being at cross-purposes with her. And rather than dominating nature and exploiting it, we would live in harmony with it. And one of the intuitions that I had was that if language is based on gift giving, perhaps the fact that they say, you know, that human beings evolved because they had language. Well maybe it was not just the abstraction side of the linguistic way that made us evolve, but the gift giving—doing gift giving at another level was what made us evolve and if we could go back and do that again in our practice, in our economy, we would evolve again. So that’s the secret I think that we could actually move forward and that the market
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economy is keeping us from doing that. And so is the manhood agenda because I think it is a false se—series of values that puts people at odds rather than making us cooperate, which is more like our true nature. In fact exchange, in exchange, everyone is out for their own good. It’s ego oriented. It pulls people apart because each person is trying to get more. Whereas in gift giving you create the bonds and the exchange systems works to make people so-called independent and isolated. Of course everybody is dependent on the whole market systems, so it’s a false independence. It’s only dependent—I mean I can’t go and grow my own food, I have to get it from the supermarket. I’m—so I am dependent on the supermarket, I’m not independent. If I’m getting a salary, I’m not independent. I’m dependent on the person that’s giving me the salary. So, that is a false idea of independence, but at any rate you’re not getting gifts. And somehow our society has no discounted the gifts and discounted the gift giving, so it feels bad to get gifts. It feels good to only be able to do exchange and be so-called independent. So we’ve really sold ourselves a bill of goods on this and we’ve—we’ve—we’ve created an illusion of a reality that is really very harmful to everybody. And what happens is that the exchange
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economy and the market take over as many gifts as they can. And even profit, I think, is actually a free gift that’s given from the worker to the capitalist, is that part of what Marx called surplus value. That—the part of the value of the product that’s not covered in the salary of the worker. And so there’s—there’s a margin of gift, not of profit, of gift that’s being given from workers to capitalists, from the poor to the rich, and that’s that transfer of wealth, rich are rich because the poor are giving them these gifts and then those gifts get either wasted. They get put into monuments to the glory of the rich—obelisks and
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rocket ships, and so forth. And it’s really a crazy way to—to run the world. But we keep on doing that and one thing that I have become interested in now is—is the question of life form patenting. That is a—where the species, whole species, are patented by companies—for example from the north, patenting species—plants from the south. There’s a company here in Texas, Rice Tech, which had a patent on the Indian Basmati Rice, and I think that is just where you can see that the traditional gifts, what traditional –people shared, the knowledge of how to breed that rice, how to cook it, all of the different ways it was husbanded or wifed, if you want that in a—anyway, taken care of and grown
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and selected through the centuries. All that gift giving that was being done socially has been taken over by a company that can get a patent on that whole species by—by sort of recreating that species here and patenting that. And so then actually that did not happen because there was a huge battle by—done by the people in India and some of us here in the U.S. also protested, and we invited Vandana Shiva here. She spoke about it and it was all very wonderful struggle that was, for the most part, successful, although they still have some counts of the patent. But that is being done on a very wide scale and-where—
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whereas that—that battle has been, at least partially, there are many others in which whole species are being patented and taken out of the public domain and into private hands. And the same you can say for our genes, which are all being patented and—and privatized. So you can see how the gifts, what was a gift, has been taken into the market economy and privatized. So, it’s been—right—this period in history there is this transfer going on from the gift economy into the exchange economy and tons of money is being made that way.
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DT: Is it your effort to reverse that by reinstating the gift economy through your own altruism and giving?
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GV: I think what we need is a basic change in consciousness for everybody. I think everybody needs to tap into the gift giving side of themselves and I really believe that much more of life is—is interpretable in terms of gift giving and that we’ve been looking at it through the glasses of exchange, but we need to take off one pair of glasses and put on a different pair. And that by changing the consciousness, and therefore at least in part the values, we’ll be able to step back from the exchange economy and—and, which is getting ever more grievous and more dominant and more terrible and into an ideal world
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for everybody based on gift giving. And half of humanity, the women, are already having to do a lot of gift giving in their daily practice and a lot of men do it also. So it really is not something extraneous to us. It’s something we’re already doing. We don’t have to go invent something outside of ourselves. We can do what is already there. And we just need to really realize it and validate it, give value—and that’s another gift is that we give the value to the gift paradigm of that way of interpreting the world, which also will tell us what we ought to be doing. And yeah, when I first came back from Italy in 1983 I already had this idea although I had not written a book about it yet. And I did
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write a couple of essays back in the 70’s but they weren’t quite it—they were about—more about communication and—and money and what it is and all of that. But I got to the gift idea pretty—sort of in the 70’s at some point. And so I already had the idea when I came back and so everything I did as a funder is based on that idea—on the idea also that if we can change the values from—from the manhood agenda to a nurturing or mothering agenda, we can—we can fix this terrible problem that we’re living in. We can change our society. So I have had a—a theory that I then practiced—I’ve practiced since 1981 basically—I first started the funding in—back in 1981. And—and I practiced it in a
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whole lot of different ways and a whole lot of different levels and doing just whatever I could. I have tried to find women, because I believe these values are in women closer to the surface than they are in a lot of men. And I want to see women’s leadership according to those values, not according to the patriarchal values because women can also lead in that way. But we need to lead according to these gift giving values and—and we need to do it at a conscious level. I mean there needs to be a sort of (?) level about it in which you stand back and you say, okay this is about changing society from here to here and not just about taking care of this one person or doing this act of charity or even
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fixing this one particular social problem, housing the homeless in Austin, or any of the other pro-even—even stopping nuclear proliferation or war or dumping is still not the answer. The answer is doing that with the aim of changing society towards a gift giving economy, and towards thinking in—in gift terms. And so all of the social change work that I’ve funded I did that as a gift to society and funded people who could give that gift also. The work that they did on social change was a gift that they were giving, so we passed it along and in fact you—the—gift giving has a certain kind of syllogism to it. So
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if A gives to B and B gives to C, then A gives to C. That does pass the gift on from one person to another and so you are united in that-in that way of giving. And so they were—the people that I funded were giving their gifts. And I tried all along to try to make it clear that this was about changing the paradigm, changing society from one way of thinking to another way of thinking and that—that—we were doing that in practice at the time. But it has been hard to do that, especially before I wrote the book, because as much as I might preach, you know, it’s was—it’s very much different from what people are usually saying in—in the society we’re in, which is a great advantage in some ways
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because I’m saying something they’re not thinking already and so I don’t go through—go—I go through an open door rather than to a door where people already have all of their defenses up and are—are already ready to attack—they—they’re not. And so we’ve had sort of this window of opportunity in—in—to—to work in. And I justified it also the fact that people were not becoming conscious of it, also because I think that this communication at a material level is what I was doing and what we were doing as activists and funder activists. Because we were giving material gifts, both the gift of money and the gift of social action and the gift of hopefully solving some of those problems. So, that all was all right even though I thought, “Well maybe it needs to
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change at the material level before the consciousness level can come out.” And so I did it a lot for many years. I started in 1981 and continued—one of the—I did a lot of funding both in the U.S. and in other places, and that has been a—a real plus for me that I’ve
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always had this international perspective since I lived in Italy those twenty years. You know, I know other people are out there in the world and that their situations are—bear on ours and ours very much bears on theirs because of the way the U.S. functions in-in—in a patriarchal way to oppress other countries. And—and so…
DT: Do you try to do this as an individual and anonymously and then later set up the foundation?
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GV: I start out anonymously, as I said, I was just a shy housewife and I’ve really didn’t know, you know, how to go about it. I decided I wanted to do this so I hired my cousin, Sissy Farenthold, to do the going around and talking to people in groups and finding who all to fund. I didn’t know who I would have funded in the U.S. I’d been living in Italy for twenty years. And so she did that and brought a bunch of proposals to me and I funded a number of them. For quite a few years we worked together like that. And I also did the—this Peace Tent in Nairobi in 1985, which was just a wonderful collaboration of
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women at the U.N. Decade For Women final conference. And they had said that we were only supposed to talk about women’s issues, which to them I guess meant abortion or whatever. And we said we would talk about peace and when that peace was a women’s issue. And so we had continuous dialogue in there for ten days of women from all over the world talking about the pe—peace issues in their countries, which of course had to do with the environment as well. And we interspersed all that with music and dancing and poetry reading and so forth. So it was really—it was a fantastic thing. We also have the video of that some—I have a copy of it. So I did that and—and—but I was anonymous. And so nobody knew that I had done that and it was very—I mean I put in a ton of money into it and brought about eighty women to Nairobi from all around other countries as well
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and—it was—it was quite something. And—and afterwards I realized I really should have been—I really should have been be saying what I was doing because it was a distortion of history not to say that I had done that. And another group basically kind of took credit for it and it really wasn’t—that wasn’t fair. And also at a certain point, I don’t know, there was a—there was a group in Kenya who—of—of women, Kenyan women, who were being chased by the police and they took refuge in a sort of Peace Tent. And eventually they—they held out there for weeks and eventually they were killed by the police. And I just thought if I had known that I would have—I would have done
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something. I would have made a—put a—put an ad in the New York Times and—and done something big to protect them, and I didn’t know about it and nobody had contacted me cause they didn’t know I had—I had put on the Peace Tent. So, you know, it’s my political beauty to stand up and say what I was doing and—and that I was doing it.
DT: (Inaudible) if they knew how to trace it down to you….
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GV: Well, you know, there was a group that—that claimed the credit for it and—and actually I did this. I did all the funding. But I did it together with another group that I had helped to form, which was not the group that took the credit. And it was important I think to say that an individual had done something because if you’re trying to understand how to make things happen and you think that a group is gonna make it happen when in fact it’s an individual that did, you’re not gonna be able to make it happen. I mean you need to learn the lessons of her story or history. How do you make things happen? I
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mean who’s got the money to put in to something like that to make it as big a success as it actually was, which was great success. There were sixteen thousand women and—in—in Nairobi at this meeting and most of them came through the Peace Tent and we had—it was just great. We had all of the—we had space for everybody’s posters and the things they had brought from their countries and they’re all—the people there from all the different places with their different clothes and their different hair styles and—and speaking out about their problems in their countries. And, you know, it was an example of women talking to each other about terrible problems that—but we were not hitting
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each other. We were not fighting. We were discuss—we may have discussed in a pretty loud voice from time to time, but we were not at war. And it gave—that gave an example of the fact that women are really good peacemakers given a chance to do things according to their own values and not having to be subservient to the directives of some kind of a male hierarchy. So, so anyway, I—I decided to come out as a funder and I’ve been public ever since—since about 1989 or so. Anyway, in 19—no in 1988 I guess. In 1988 I decided to start this Foundation For A Compassionate Society because I had also already started other projects like Stonehaven Ranch, which is a retreat center near San Marcos, had been funding that, The People Speak, The PB Show, I had done Austin
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Women’s Peace House, had just bought the Peace and Justice building Grassroots Peace Organization’s Building we had here on Congress. There were a large number of projects, some of which I started and some of which other people started, and—that I have funded. And—and so I—I brought those together all under one umbrella, which was the Foundation For A Compassionate Society. Really I didn’t—still didn’t like actually going out there and saying hey I’m the funder because it’s—it’s not a pleasant place to be sometimes. And so I said the foundation did this. But the foundation basically was me so that’s—that’s how that happened.
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DT: (Inaudible) a private foundation?
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GV: It was a private operating foundation. I hired women to do projects for peace and those projects were either ones that I had initiated or that I had given the spin on, or that they had initiated. And so there was a—there was a—a collaboration. And at one point I had about twenty-five women working for me. And a lot of—some of those were international women as well. And one of the things that we did was right—right after
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Nairobi, there was a woman named Alice Wiser who lived up in Canada and I had an RV and she took my RV with various women from other countries and went around from town to town talking to different groups about the Nairobi conference about the Peace Tent, about women in peace, and so forth. And she did that for a couple of years, not full time, but I think it was in the summers maybe, anyway, several months a year. And that was a successful thing that she did. She was a Quaker and she met—went mostly to different Quaker groups, It was very—I think it was successful. And at the time a—one
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of the women that had collaborated with me, our two women, on the Peace Tent, Ellen Dietrich and Fazia Yanzen were from Germany and Fazia was a black, German singer and Ellen was a peace activist and they decided they wanted to do a Peace Caravan in Europe. And so I bought an RV for them and they took this van through Eastern Europe
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from (?) they went through Eastern Europe and to Moscow and back. And that was—that was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that was quite—quite an amazing thing. And they did a whole lot of peace work and I basically funded their work for—for years. I also—we went—there was a women in peace conference in Moscow in ‘87 maybe,
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which was done by the Women’s International Democratic Federation, which was the peace organization of the Soviet Union. And there were a whole lot of women from the U.S. that wanted to go to that and I also funded that, and we all went and that was a very interesting meeting as well. But anyway, not—certainly not at the level of the Nairobi Conference, but it was quite a good meeting anyway. So then after that, with the—when
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I started the foundation, some of—well I’m trying to get into the next Peace Caravan that happened, which was the one that Susan Lee Solar did and we started that—I think it must have been around ‘92 or ‘94—I’m not quite sure exactly when we did it. But, we did it because this other Peace Caravan—these other Peace Caravans had happened and I had seen you could do that. And so were sitting at the university, Susan and I and Mavis Bellisle and some other people, at a demonstration, and thinking what can we do, what can we do and so we—Susan and I started taking about a Peace Caravan and she said she
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would do it and so we went and got an RV. And then she had it fitted out and we put in all of the different things in it and she figured out what ought to be in there. And we had it painted and I got Liliana Wilson to do that great picture that was on the outside of it, which is actually the picture that we also used for the Breast Cancer and Nuclear Radiation Conference. And that is how that museum got started. And Susan was
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working for me in the Foundation and she went around from town to town all over in the country and in Mexico as well and talked to people about the whole nuclear issue and I think she had a great effect.
DT: What would the RV have inside it typically? What were some of the props and exhibits? What was her spiel about?
GV: Well she had a—a whole lot of pictures that started out with Hiroshima and went
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up to now and then had a lot of the—the data on what radiation does to people on the transport of the nuclear waste across the U.S., pictures of the Hibacroshaw from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She also had a—a solar powered computer and pictures of people who were activists who were trying to change things. So she really had this spectrum of what was going on in the whole nuclear issue from nuclear bombs, nuclear testing, to new reactors, to nuclear waste, and it was a—I think it was a really good project. She was very helpful during the Sierra Blanca issue and she also came up to Nevada many times. At a certain point, 1992, I was finally able to buy a piece of land near the nuclear test site because…
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DT: (Inaudible)
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GV: Yeah, near the nuclear test site in Nevada. I bought twenty-two acres up there. It’s on a Highway 96, which goes to the test site, and I built a temple there to the Goddess Sekhmet, and there’s a whole story about that. Sekhmet is a—an Egyptian lion-headed human-bodied Goddess Of Fertility And Rage. And many years before I had been in Egypt in Luxor in the—in a temple there and the guide had said if you want to get pregnant, you have to make a promise to this goddess. And so I made her this promise
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that I’d build her a temple and—and I was worried cause all of these years. I hadn’t built the temple. But anyway I had—I got pregnant very shortly thereafter so I figured many years later I still had to build this temple and so I thought well it would be really good to have it near the nuclear test site because it’s a place to take a stand for the integrity of our genes and against nuclear radiation. And so we did build this temple there, which is a—a environmentally appropriate, straw bale construction—stucco and straw bale, and Marsha Gomez did a statue of Sekhmet, which is there, and a statue of Mother Earth—that statue that was in—that had been confiscated by the U.S. government that I had put—I had
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commissioned her to put outside the nuclear test site several years before, was also put into the Sekhmet temple. And I was able to give that land back to the Shoshone. Shoshone had—had owned all of that land around there at one point—and so I gave them back their—that little piece of land. We didn’t need all that space for the temple and they were happy to let us use the—the part the temple is on. So, that project has been keeping on since 1992, it’s ten years now
DT: (Inaudible)
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GV: Yeah, there’s the Priestess of the temple, Patricia Pearlman…
DT: (Inaudible)
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GV: Well, you know, I think she’s originally from Brooklyn. And she’s a wonderful person. She’s—she sort of has always believed in the goddess she says, but she was a psychotherapist, and a—I don’t know, did radio and stuff until she finally—there was another woman working out there the first year. In fact in 1992 I wanted to say I was just really blessed with having been able to be there for the end of the five hundred years. October the 12th they had the—we had the ceremony of the donation of the land like two
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days before October the 12th, which is—yeah, so-called Columbus Day—Dia de La Raza, whatever. And so it was very wonderful to be on the right side of history at that moment and not be celebrating the five hundred years of colonial oppression. Anyway, so but—there was another woman, Cynthia Burkhart, who was the first Priestess of the Goddess Temple there for the first year and then Patricia had come out from Las Vegas to come to some of the ceremonies and things that Cynthia had done and so when Cynthia decided to leave, Patricia said she wanted to be the Priestess. So that was fine with me and—and I
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hired her to do that and she has been doing it ever since, so that’s been nine years I guess. And she lives there with her—there’s two trailer houses there, one for her and her husband and the other one is for visitors. And then there are a couple of other houses there that the Shoshone use and we rent those two houses from them, from the Shoshone. And—and she takes care of the temple and does—she’s a witch, as I am—I’m a witch
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also—witch as the sense of nature religion based on goddess images instead of on a male god and on contact with the forces of nature and the elements and so forth. And so she’s a witch and she does ceremonies there and anybody can go and they—she has two or three every month and—like at the full moon and the new moon. So if you’re in Nevada, in Las Vegas, you can drive out into the desert, it’s about sixty miles from Las Vegas, about fifteen miles from the test site, and go to these wonderful rituals. She has a fire pit in the middle of the temple and they sing and dance and pray for peace and all good things.
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DT: Can you say a little bit more about being a witch and more in touch with nature and a spirit nature?
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GV: Well I’d say in the last twenty to thirty years there has been a whole new current of spirituality in the U.S. and in other countries too—women spirituality, which is Pagan, and there are certainly male witches also. But I’m part of the, what they call, Dianic witchcraft, which is mostly women. And it really is a—I hate to say religion because it’s not a religion like other religions that you know because it’s really not very patriarchal, especially the women’s spirituality is not patriarchal, although there have been some sort of hierarchical groups which I don’t like very much. But it is a way of being in contact
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with the forces of nature and it’s sort of the evolution of the fairies too. When I was little I began to be in contact with those nature spirits and now I’m in contract with—with the other nature spirits, more of them. I was actually, you know, I have a sort of strange spiritual history let’s say cause I was a very ardent Catholic until I was about sixteen. Then I became an atheist until I was forty-three and came back to the U.S. and somebody told me about this—this goddess religion, which convinced me just immediately. And—and so that’s what I’ve done ever since but I have not ever gone to school to do it. I’m not like a trained priestess and so I kind of follow my own sense about—sense about it—
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my heart let’s say. And I think that, you know, patriarchal religion is still those eyeglasses, the wrong eyeglasses, the market eyeglasses, the ones that come from the manhood agenda and we look through those and what we see is a—a patriarchal god and—who has those warlike values and we keep re-infecting ourselves with the patriarchal values over and over again. And if we can take those glasses off and look at the world with innocent eyes, and with eyes that align with nature instead of dominating it, we can really get in harmony—I mean we can really get to be the way we were meant to be. We can overcome or live through or—or heal from this society which is hurting
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everybody. And, that is something I think that—that really gives us the—the courage and the ability to—the—the energy to try to make the change.
DT: Can you elaborate a little bit more, just talk about some of the principles or tenants of the—I don’t know if it’s Wiccan Faith—and maybe some of the spirits or fairies that you feel like populate it.
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GV: Well, you know there’s some well known proponents of this, like Star Hawk, I’m sure you’ve heard of her. No? Well she is a witch, eco-feminist—who is also a great activist and she’s been very active in the anti-globalization movement. And she’s written many books. The Spiral Dance was her first book. She’s also a novelist, she’s written five or six no—novels, The Fifth Sacred Thing is one of her novels. And you don’t—you really don’t know anything about all this…
DT: No.
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GV: Okay, well, women get together or sometimes women and men because there are mixed groups that do it, and they do rituals which try to change the consciousness in a sort of psychic spiritual way towards good things—this is all positive witchcraft. And it has to do with imaging, imagining, and using your words to make changes and contacting the forces of nature in a psychic way and, you might say, tuning in. Then when you do this in a group way, it—it creates a—an energy, a group energy, that is also in—contact
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in a kind of a different level. And people are getting together all over to do this. We have a place here, The Center for the Study of The Gift Economy is—is a cen—is a—is a house here in Austin where we keep a lot of these archives from the Foundation and, which I use for teaching about the gift economy and so forth. And there’s a group here in Austin that goes there once or twice a month to do rituals, which usually consist of making a little fire, some candles, or something and then—then you call on the different
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directions, the spirits and the different directions and talk about some aspect of the earth or—of what we want, of peace, of healing, and maybe sing or dance. We may talk about some of the elements like the moon for example, remember some of the ancient goddesses that other cultures had that were represented the elements in some way. And that’s—that’s what we do and we also study the different cultures uses of spirituality that’s connected with nature. And at Stonehaven Ranch, which is another of the projects
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that I’ve been doing since 1984—it’s a retreat center near San Marcos. There are often groups that go there to do the goddess spirituality or Wicca, or witchcraft. It is a great bit thing that’s going on. I might think of Harry Potter and say, ”You’re a muggle if you don’t have—if you’ve never heard of it.” Have you read Harry Potter?
DT: No.
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GV: Well cause you’ve got kids so you—you’ve probably read some. But anyway the—the, lots of—I don’t know why it is but I—I guess some people are just not in that group or not in that wavelength or something so you haven’t heard about it but now you have.
[End of Reel 2177]
DT: When we left off we were talking about eco-feminism and the Wiccan Faith and also some of the anti-nuclear work that you’ve helped facilitate near the test site in Nevada, and I was hoping that you might be able to continue to talk about your anti-nuclear work.
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GV: Well, anti-nuclear work was one of the first things I did. I lived for forty years without using my money for social change. And I was living in Italy. My husband didn’t really believe that I ought to use my money for any social reason. He thought that if you gave your money away, somebody else would just have it and they might not be as good stewards of it as you were, so it would be better not to—to do that. But I really wanted to and I was involved in this feminist group I mentioned and people from the outside came
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and talked. I remember one woman I think from Women’s Pentagon Action came. Another woman that had been working in the South Pacific came and talked about Palau, the Island of Palau and jelly babies and how the babies were born without any skeletons because of the nuclear testing there. And that was one of the things that really struck me and I had mental problems back then and I had gone—I was on my way to the therapist one time, psychiatrist, and I was dredging along and I saw this sign which was like—they call like fruit of the womb or something, it was these gremlins in underwear. And it just
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reminded—showed me how—how our society, our marketing, our economy, is so much a part of that creation of monsters and how the whole nuclear issue fit in with that. And I—it just floored me to see that. And so shortly after that, somebody came to talk to me about Comiso, which was a town in Sicily where the U.S. had put cruise missiles. There were cruise—specialty cruise missiles (I think there were Pershing also) that were pointed at the Middle East. And they were nuclear missiles. And so there was a lot of public protest against it by the Italians and peace camps and stuff set up there. And so I
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began to fund the peace camps. And I don’t know, women from Greenham Commons came there, and women from there went to Greenham Commons and I helped out with that. So that was like, I think…
DT: What is Greenham Commons?
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GV: Okay, Greenham Commons, is a—or was, a base—U.S. military base in England and women in England had decided—they—they decided to do a march to Greenham Commons where there were the Pershing and the cruise missiles also. And the women did a march there at one point from some other town quit far away and then they decided to stay. And so they put peace camps at various different gates of Greenham Commons and it became a rallying point for people all over the world. And women—it was a women’s action and it—ongoing for years. And they had an action one time when they
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actually held hand all around this base that was like ten miles around. It was huge and it was just an amazing—amazing action and an amazing way—the women just wouldn’t let go. You know, the say—they did not want those missiles there. They didn’t want the nuclear warheads. And they really stood up for it. They were heroes and—and should be everybody’s heroes. And in fact I went—I went to Greenham Commons once with one of my daughters and actually went to one of the camps that was still there and talked to the women and it was very moving. But I went back a—a couple of years ago and
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there’s on more base, there was no more, there were—there were no more camps, it was this beautiful green field. Now I hear the-the—they’ve restarted other base things going there and more problems for the women there, but it was—it was—in a way it was a battle that the women won.
DT: When you talked to these women at Greenham Common and elsewhere, what were their concerns about the nuclear cruise missiles and Pershings? I guess there are a number that they could have had, but what were some of the things that you heard?
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GV: I don’t remember right now what they said. But I think we were all concerned about how long lasting the damage done by any kind of radiation can be and how also (inaudible). You know, even the male sperm count has really gone down lately (inaudible), the history of low birth weight babies. The whole nuclear issue is tremendously damaging, toxic, in the long-term and it invades the body and takes the place of good hormones and replaces them with radioactive things that continue to poison you as you go along. And not only that, not only human genes and makeup is—is
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affected by it, but also plants and animals and—it is—the whole—the nuclear radiation issue is terrible. But of course the nuclear bomb issue is really terrible also because you can destroy so many people at once and create a nuclear winter and all of those things and in fact I helped to—to fund discussions of nuclear winter and all back then too as well as the work done around the film—remember the—The Day After that they did. But I think that the women in Greenham Commons were certainly worried about the nuclear war side of it and didn’t want the—the U.S. missiles to be fired out of British soil and the Italians didn’t want the U.S. missiles to be fired out of Italian soil and they didn’t want
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the missiles at all and no more bombs at all of—nuclear bombs. Now then there’s the whole patriarchal aspect of—the phallic aspect of all these bombs and things in which you can really see a—a mentality that’s nuts, that’s in—involved in going out and killing people, dealing death with these phallic symbols, which is, you know, something is really wrong with this picture. So, some—something is wrong with people that are doing that. And at the time of course we had the whole—the whole Cold War and the whole aspect of the escalation with the—with the Soviets and so on. And—and that was a—a really crazy thing because there again you see the market exchange type relationship where one
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builds one and then in exchange they have to build a bigger one and in exchange they have to build and—and then when you actually have what they call the exchange of both of you kill each other, it is again the apotheosis of the market. So, you know, it’s like we’re doing this—this market dance when we think we’re doing something else like being brave and protecting ourselves or being technological and using our money well or our time well or whatever, which it’s not, it’s part of a—a psychosis, it’s a real psychosis I believe.
DT: (Inaudible).
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GV: Yes, exactly.
DT: So—so this is sort of your first start…
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GV: So that’s the first work I started out in and—and I was able to bring some people from the U.S. there and the, so forth, and to—to do speaking as well I remember. And then when I came to the U.S., which was quite a culture shock, it was back in 1983, people were working on the nuclear freeze still then and there were lots of marches on that and I—I was able to help out with that and also people were going to the nuclear test
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site in Nevada and I was able to like pay for busses to go there and so forth and that was—that was neat and then I finally went myself in maybe it was ‘87 or so was the first time I went to the test site. And that is an amazing place. I mean it’s very desolate in its way but the desert is really alive and, you know, you’ll—you look down and there’s some little plant there or some little bug crawling along and—and there were Native American people there that sort of…
(Misc.)
DT: Can you resume talking about the nuclear test site in Nevada?
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GV: Well and—and I began to go out there fairly often after I went out there in 1987 because there was a group of Shoshone led by Corbin Harney and several others, Chief Raymond Yowell, who did a protest at the nuclear test site twice a year more or less—one time in the spring and one in the fall. So I use to go to those and help support that work, then they would bring people from all over to—to those meetings and that’s—in fact I—I first heard Doctor Ernest Sternglass speak at a meeting that they had of the—called Healing Global Wounds, which they had in Las Vegas, and—and in—invited him
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to Austin to speak and many others also in the sort of series of speeches that we had to try to educate people. And at a certain point, I can’t remember, it must have been the early 90’s or maybe—yeah it must have been the early—early 90’s, somebody told me about the struggle in Sierra Blanca that was beginning and the people in Sierra Blanca, especially Bill Addington, were—were trying to resist and—were having a real hard time. And at that time Erin Rodgers was working for me as a receptionist at the Peace Building and Patty Solace was also working for me, and they wanted to go out to Sierra Blanca to see what was going on so I sent them out there and they came back and told me
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what the meeting was about and so forth. And so they both were really interested in trying to work on it and I supported them to do that and-and then at a certain point we moved out of the building and into another location—two other locations actually—and Erin began to work more, not as a receptionist, but just more on the Sierra Blanca issue most of the time. Then in…
DT: In the Sierra Blanca issue, just for background, is about using this site in West Texas for a low level radioactive waste disposal site, is that right?
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GV: Yeah, right. There’s a—it’s a very small town—I think it’s like fifteen miles from the Rio Grande, and they were going to put a nuclear waste dump there. There’s already a garbage dump there and—they did all of these studies on how it wouldn’t—the nuclear waste would not filter into the ground water and would not be a danger and then it was found out that there were faults underneath and it was just like such a-such a
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boondoggle done by the government on the people—that—the people that live there. And fortunately there were a few people who really didn’t want it in Sierra Blanca, although there were a lot of people that kind of did want it because the government went in there and sort of brainwashed them and offered them money and trips to beautiful places and all kinds of things to be able to—to convince them that it would be good for them. And so it was a—a struggle that built slowly over many years and I also was able to fund a—a fellow who—Richard Boran, who went to Mexico and talked a lot in
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Mexico about Sierra Blanca and the dump and how it was not a good idea. And Susan Lee Solar with her Peace Caravan who was going around in that area and in the large towns as well and then went to Mexico as well and—talking about how that dump would be a really negative thing. And at a certain point Erin decided that she really wanted to work with lawyers on it. And so she got with some other people and they did the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund. I kept on funding her, I mean she still worked for me but she was doing that other strategy. It would not have been my strategy. So I just said “Okay, go ahead and do that.” And it—in the end I think the reason that it succeeded was that they were able to get really a whole lot of popular support from—they really created a
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grassroots movement and—and succeeded in getting that issue known all over Texas, all over Mexico, and in the last—the last part of that—Mexican officials came up and did a hunger strike on the Capital steps and that was one heck of an embarrassment to Bush because he didn’t—certainly he was about to run for—what was it—President I guess. And so he couldn’t—he couldn’t hold out against them and ended up by saying that the dump did not have to be. And so it was really a—a wonderful victory. It was really a great—great proof that popular opposition can stop the—the nuclear industry from having its way and polluting places for—for centuries to come. Unfortunately, in a lot of these issues, you go two steps forward and one step back because there are other dumps
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being planned, other dumps already existing, and the Yucca Mountain thing is going on and now with Bush in the White House, the whole nuclear issue has risen from its grave. And it’s a really tragic fact that he has turned back history in that way. They were continuing doing nuclear testing all along—low-level nuclear testing and Susan Lee Solar and I got arrested together at the Federal Building for protesting that. She went to—she decided to go to jail after we waited for a long time for our trial. I did community service and she went to jail, so that was the different approaches. But I have actually gotten arrested lots of times at—at the nuclear test site because there’s the—you cross across the—the cattle guard, which they—they don’t have the cattle guard anymore. But it was
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that you—if you went in through the gate and crossed the cattle guard during these demonstrations they would pick you up and put you in a couple of pens that they had there and they were—they were okay, I mean they even had a toilet in there and some water. So it was all right to—to do it, but it was awfully hot and—strange to say the least. You’d stay in there for a day or so—well not a whole day, six hours, seven hours, or something. And they’d finally take you out and—not—at this point they didn’t book people anymore. So for the last maybe ten years they haven’t booked people. Maybe they’re starting up again doing it. But one time—a couple of times—they’d—you’d get in—they’d—the policeman would have you come get in the car. They’d ask what your
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name was, you’d say Jane Doe and then they’d let you go. And—lots and lots of people did it—I’ve been arrested maybe ten or twelve times but I –to do that. But, I’m not too anxious to do it anymore cause as I get older, it gets more and more strenuous just to go do it and so unless there’s a real reason to do it, I—I’m—I don’t. It’s a—it’s a symbolic gesture that feels great to do but it’s a—it’s not earthshaking, I mean you’re not changing anything really because it’s just part of the, you know, now they have even commercial group, The Wacky Nuts, that—that guard the gate and you’re not really doing anything but going out there and doing a ritual also. So, but—as time goes on now it may become
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more and more important to go to the nuclear test site to do the protest and I hope people will do that. Anyway, this—I think the Sierra Blanca struggle was really great and that the town meetings and things that they had were wonderful examples of how democracy works and all of that. I—I don’t think democracy always does work and—and so as I say, I think we need a whole consciousness change. It really was not what I would have done, but I am very glad that it succeeded.
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DT: Can you mention some of the other efforts that worked against the military establishment in part because of peace concerns and in part because of environmental concerns and maybe other reasons that—I think it also, besides your work at Sierra Blanca, have also been involved at Pantex and also with health studies at some military bases. Could you talk about some of those
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GV: Well, yeah. One of the first places that I did go when I came to the U.S. was Pantex, or that I found out about. And so…
DT: What is Pantex for those who aren’t familiar with it?
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GV: Pantex is a place near Amarillo where they were assembling all the nuclear weapons and now have been disassembling them. And a very heroic woman named Mavis Belisle started. No, she didn’t actually start it, some other people started it. But anyway, there’s a Peace Farm there which she has been one of the mainstays of now for quite a long time. And she just, and the other people before her, and maybe some other people now too, have just lived there like a—a tick on the dog’s ear and not let go, you know. And so for years and years and years and she’s been able to, I think, to have quite
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an effect on the community in Amarillo itself and has—there has been many demonstrations out there to—some of them I went to—and—and I think it’s a very inspiring sort of thing that she’s done.
DT: Can you describe some of the demonstrations that you’ve been part of there?
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GV: Well I remember one right now that we went—I can’t remember—maybe it was—I can’t remember the year it was—but we had—we—I had made a Peace Tent—a tent in the—like the Peace Tent that we had in Nairobi to use in events here, it was blue and white stripped. And so everybody that did demonstrations liked to have our tent, so that tent was being used out there. And people would line up along the side of the road outside of the base—the Pantex base. And there—there wasn’t a lot of space there, it was
25:37
like having—it was a drainage ditch and the Peace Tent thing just barely fit in there. And there were, for some reason, a bunch of fundamentalist out there who were really mad at us and so we were demonstrating against the—the nuclear assembly plant and the fundamentalists were there for them. And so they were there yelling and screaming at us and all along side the road and I was supposed to be speaking, or something, I can’t remember quite what, and so I started singing Amazing Grace and so that quieted everything down and we won through Amazing Grace—through moral superiority. We sang them their song, it’s a beautiful song anyway. But that—I remember that little piece of it.
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DT: When you’ve been in towns like Sierra Blanca or outside of Amarillo and you go to demonstrate and there are counter-demonstrators or there are opponents that you run into in one form or another, what do they say? It seems like a very logical thing to be for peace and for a clean environment and—what sort of arguments have they made on the counter side?
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GV: Well I don’t know, I suppose that they—they think that you’re like bleeding heart liberals and—and you’re not part of reality, you don’t understand the way things really are and—and you’re Commi’s and, you know, that kind of—that kind of a thing. I’ve recently encountered a little bit in being—dong this Women In Black demonstrations in front of the capital and every once in a while somebody will—will come up and, you know, like say you’ve—you’re for Sadaam and you’re for bin Laden and what are you
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gonna do and how are you gonna do it and. There’s some real like macho fellows that like to come up there and berate people. It’s interesting isn’t it? The—the—mainly be macho fellows that have an issue with us, but they do.
DT: How do you respond to them?
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GV: Well, I mean there’s various different ways. You can, you know, try to talk gently to them, you can ignore them, you can sing a song, or you can argue with them, but that doesn’t usually work too well.
DT: I understand you’ve also tried to help produce studies so that if you can’t sing to them then at least you might be able to show them charts and graphs. Maybe you can just describe a little bit about the health studies that you…
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GV: Right, well, sometimes people really need to see things like statistics and so forth. And so back in the early 90’s I think it was, I hired Susan Lee Solar and Betty Brink from Dallas, to try to do some health surveys around, which they did. Later on I—I got Rosalie Bertell who’s a doctor and a nun from Canada to come and teach women here how to do health surveys around Kelly Air FOrce Base where there’s a lot of toxic waste. And I asked Rosalie also to go to the Philippines to a project there called People’s Task Force For Bases Cleanup that I have supported over the years, which has tried to bring up the issue of the U.S. responsibility for the toxic waste it left at Clark and Subic bases, which have caused numerous, numerous health problems for so many people there and—and I think that—that Rosalie Bertel’s health survey did really help a lot in bringing that issue up. I went there a couple of years ago. Well I—I went seven years ago the first time and then I went again two years ago. And I saw so many deformed children and-with their mothers having to take care of them all the time and—it’s a—it’s a totally tragic when your government does that and there’s so many tragic things that the U.S.
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does do. I mean the, you know, the issues of rape around the military bases and the—the long-term pollution of the Philippines itself. I mean that is one of the most polluted countries I ever saw. It’s totally un—un-breathable air, all the beautiful nature ruined, people amazingly poor. And the—the nuclear—I mean the—the toxic waste on the bases where the first time I went the refugees that had left their homes that had been inundated by the—the way—the lava dust from the volcano. All those people, some thirty thousand people, had been moved onto Clark Air Force Base after the U.S. military had left and
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they were living in terrible hovels, and they were drinking water from the wells, that was the only water they had. And all of that water was polluted from the waste that the military had left there whether it was gasoline or oil in the ground or radioactive waste or whatever all of the different chemicals, the PCB’s, everything that was—that was radiating them or vibing them, whatever, all the time and that was really just awful to see. And fortunately I supported this woman to—to try to do something about it. I still remember this one old man and they had brought me into a little room and offered me a
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Coca Cola of course, that’s the, you know, poor people’s champagne. They don’t know how much it plays into the system I guess. But—and this old man was there saying, he didn’t—I mean he was the poorest of the poor and he was saying, “Oh we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something.” And I thought, “Wow, you know, I’ve really got to do something.’ And so, I—I—I did support this one to—to do the work of making the issue public in the Philippines and she did. And she, along with several other people who had been working on the issue, got the—the climate changed of opinion changed enough that the government and some aid agencies actually got some other housing built, sort
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of—not great housing, but anyway, viable housing built, and the people had—moved into it and that was just really a—a wonderful thing to see that the next time I went back. But that still doesn’t keep all of the people who have been polluted by—and—and poisoned by the—it doesn’t heal them. And in fact there was just this little call—whose name was Krezele, and I—I wrote a song for her too, who had leukemia caused by the toxic waste. And—and she died at six years old and her last wish was to go on the Rainbow Warrior, which happened to be docked at—in—in the Philippines at the time. And so they took her to the Rainbow Warrior and she died when she was on it. I mean it was just such a
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tragic story. And—anyway, so they publicized her case and so on. And I actually met her mother and…
DT: (Inaudible) problems getting repeated around the world? You said you funded the Kelly Air Force Base—what happened in Kelly Heights?
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GV: They found that there were pollutants underneath the houses, plumes of water un—underground of—of the toxics that went underneath the houses and a lot of—a lot of—there was a lot of various kinds of sicknesses there and they did a health survey and tried to bring up the issue a lot there too. But it is hard to do a health survey that convinces the powers that be because, you know, they’re the ones that are calling the shots. And the ones that are calling the shots are the ones that don’t want the truth to come out. And so they’ll tell you “Well, you have to have your study done a—another
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way than this. You know, you had to ask thirty-five questions instead of thirty.” Or, you know, the—something like that which is—maybe that’s not a good enough example—but they make it so that they can discount anything you say, basically. And that—that makes this kind of citizen action really difficult. So that—that’s the—and they—the people there, together with the Southwest Workers Union, brought that issue up a whole lot. I—I don’t think that any really changes were made there like they were in the Philippines. But of course the U.S. Government still has not taken responsibility for the toxic waste in the Philippines either. So, I mean the—we haven’t succeeded in making that issue really
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change any U.S. policy to keep it from happening again and again and again. And the other issue about the Philippines is that there were forty thousand Eurasian children left in the Philippines by U.S. service people—men from relationships that they had with Philippino women. So these were orphaned by the fathers, left there from relationships they had with the women there. And then those Eurasian children now—who are now growing up because the U.S. left, don’t fit in either to the Philippino society or to the U.S. society, nobody wants them, and they have a horrible time. Not only that but there is a huge amount of prostitution in the Philippines and I met a group of ex-prostitutes there
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that have horrible lives. The poverty is—is—is amazingly more than you can conceive of existing when you’re sitting here in West Austin. It is amazing—it’s amazingly more than there is in—the poverty in East Austin. It’s—it’s more than there is—well I wouldn’t say—I don’t know some places in Mexico, even there along the border, the Maquiladora, shanty towns are terrible, really terrible. People make forty dollars a week working for U.S. companies. This whole economy, this whole way of doing things really doesn’t work. It sacrifices huge number of innocent people and—and pollutes the environment for the future. So, you know, we are getting gifts from all of these people who—who are dying who give way to us if they’re not—I mean, of course it doesn’t
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make me any stronger the fact that somebody else has died because of my government’s policy. That doesn’t really help me personally any, but a lot of times there is a—an economic connection and the—the theft of the resources of other countries. The changes in their markets due to the way they have to support us through their work and their resources and their basically unpaid gift work. That is a—is a—that is a terrible way of organizing human life. And not only that because we’re polluting and devastating the ecology, we’re ruining it for the children of the future and so we’re making them give us their gifts just like we’re making the poor people in the Philippines give us their gifts. I mean that we’re taking all the gifts away. Mother Nature is the great gift giver and we’re—we’re making her not abundant anymore. We’re cutting off her breasts and
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giving her breast cancer. We’re polluting her and poisoning her so she can’t have any other children. What the heck are we doing? You know, what kind of a mentality creates this? What kind of a psychosis? We’ve got to do something different. When I first started out this funding, I thought “Oh gosh here I’m giving all this money away and, you know, what am—am I sure it’s gonna help anything?” And I thought, “Well, at least when I see those bombs falling from the sky, I won’t say oh I wish I’d done something.” And so I’ve done something. Did it help? I hope so. Can we do something—everybody do something different from what we’re doing? Yes. Is there another possibility? There is. We’ve got to open our minds, not think the way we’ve always thought and seize the time, seize the possibilities and do something different. It’s just too awful what we’re
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watching happening in—in Palestine and Israel. All of that devastation people are doing to each other. It’s horrible. It should not be—it should not be—it is not the human way of doing things; it’s the patriarchal way. We have to step back from that, base it on mothers, base it on people who—who have to care for their children and who have to make the piece of bread go around to everybody. Anyway, there you are. So I’ve tried to do this in many different ways. I’ve tried to explain this idea in a lot of different sauces. I’ve done—I’ve done the practice, I’ve done the theory, and I’ve also done songs that I’ve si—that I’ve written. I’ve written a children’s book. I’ve done some other things that I don’t remember, but that’s kind of it.
DT: One thing I wanted to ask you to talk about is how you have tried to get the word out and not just through your own personal voice but also through FIRE and WINGS and other groups that have used media to try and get this idea—give this idea legs.
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GV: Well there’s FIRE, Feminist International Radio Endeavor that I started in 1991. It was the—at—at the beginning of the—before the war on Iraq started I went to New York and I was there—there were several people there, Bella Abzug, Florence Hall, Sissy, and some other people, went to talk about—we got together in one person’s house to talk about what can we do? What ought to be done now? And—and I said “Well we ought to have a women’s radio station” and I’ve tried to do that before and I had thought—I had a lot of different meeting about starting a women’s radio station. And one woman said well you’re always talking about that but you’re never doing it. I though
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okay, I better do it. So in—a station really was beyond my possibilities I thought. But I did hear about a radio program in Costa Rica, on—Radio For Peace International—I heard about this radio station there. And that was in the U.N. University for Peace and it was a group of Americans who had gone to Costa Rica and started this alternative radio on short wave. And so I talked to them and through them I hired a couple of women to do a radio program which I—I paid for the airtime and the salary of the women that were doing it. But I had not met any of the people. I didn’t meet the people at the radio station or women that I hired—we only talked on the phone. And we did two hours everyday of women’s programming—one hour in English and one in Spanish on short wave. And I
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finally met them like six months after I’d hired them. It was really done on faith and on a—and—on the feminist faith that we were kind of on the same wavelength and we had similar ideas. And it worked out great cause they were really, really good people. And FIRE, Feminist International Radio Endeavor, went on for seven or eight years daily—it was a daily show, it was really something, on short wave. And then actually Radio For Peace was not as—as feminist a group as—as I had hoped and they ended up kicking out the FIRE and—and so FIRE started again on the internet, on—it has been doing web casting now for several years. And you can see them at www.fire.or.cr. And they’re great and they go around also not only do they broadcast, but they go to a lot of different
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conferences and they broadcast from the conferences and get the women at the conferences to broadcast themselves and hear their own voice and realize that they too can do radio. So that is—that is a really good thing that—that has happened. And they’re still going on and that’s been since 1991. And the other is WINGS, Women’s International News Gathering Service that’s done by Freda Worden and she and a woman named Katherine Davenport started that back in a ‘86, ‘5, something like that. And actually at the Nairobi Conference, I had organized a meeting about women in radio cause I was back then still thinking about doing a radio station and about sixty women came to this meeting and I got their—the list of their names and addresses and everything and somehow or other after the meeting it disappeared—the list disappeared. And several years later I met Freda and she somehow or other that list had been give to her by somebody else that had been at the meeting or something. And she used it to start her
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WINGS contacts with International Women Radio Producers. And it was one—I didn’t even know her then, she was living out in California so this—this list had just made its own way all the way over to—to—to her, so that was great. And anyway that radio show is a syndicated radio program and she interviews women from all different places and—and persuasions and it is really inspiring. It’s one here in Austin on KAZI and when I turn it on and sometimes just turn it on when I’m in the car and happen to get it, it just like ups my whole soul about two levels higher to hear that because she’s telling the truth and these women are telling their—their truth. And that, you know, they say that is one
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woman could really speak her truth, it would change all of the societies. It is a lot of women speaking their truth. I don’t generally just try to promote the gift economy this way, but I’m—but these are gifts that are being given because the truth is actually a gift. Because if you tell the truth, you’re satisfying the other person’s need to be able to relate themselves to the world around them. If you tell a lie, you’re only satisfying your own need and not the other person’s need. And so the truth is actually a gift whereas a lie is a
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kind of an exchange—or exchange is a kind of a lie. And you can see that so much in the advertising and in—in the media—false media programs that we get and biased media.
DT: One of the—I guess the clearest way that some people talk to one another is through song and I was wondering if you’d be willing to sing one of your songs that might have a…
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GV: Yeah I would, I’ll sing a song. I do want to mention though that we also did the Waterhouse Women’s Act says to electronic resources, and that was a training facility to train women in video, radio, and computer networking. And we did that for quite a few years and Fern Hill was the person that made that happen. So just wanted to add that we did do that training facility. We often also brought in women from the outside like from Mexico and other places and did that. And I do want to mention also Stonehaven Ranch that has been going on since 1984 and we’ve had literally thousands of people go out there and use it for a retreats for their groups for peace and justice, for feminism, for
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women’s spirituality, and so forth, and it’s still going on in—and right now it’s free. So people go there and use the facility free. And we even cook for them free. Well I have a couple of songs I could sing you. I’ll sing you the one on—I have one of life form patenting called “The Tree of Life.” And I have another one on the statistics. I’ll sing you the statistics one cause that’s (inaudible). I—I wrote this song when I went to a demonstration some years ago and I heard these statistics and I was just so struck by it that I didn’t know what to do and I went home and—and I finally it—I came out with this song that at least satisfied me a little bit of trying to say what I’d heard. So this is the song.
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Last night I heard a story, a terrible story.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

The budget of our Army, oh God,
the budget of our Army
is greater than the budget of the country of Italy.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

The budget of our Air Force, oh God,
the budget of our Air Force
is greater than the budget of South America.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

The budget of our Navy, oh God,
the budget of our Navy
is greater than the budget of Africa.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
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GV: And the words mea culpa mean it’s my fault, my greatest fault and it comes from the Catholic Mass where you beat your breast. And I’m not really talking my personal fault only but of a collective guilt that we’re not stopping this. I can sing you a song about life form patenting too if you want, if I can remember the words.
(Misc.)
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This is the tree of life.
This is the tree of life.
This is the living tree that branches, this branches me.
This tree is no one’s property.

This is the tree of life.
This is the tree of life.
Patenting forbids the fruit.
It takes the leaf and (?) the root.
It steels poor people’s right to food.

This is the tree of life.
This is the tree of life.
You must not commodify the gifts of nature, earth, and sky.
Our genes are not to sell or buy.

This is the tree of life.
This is the tree of life.
You must respect the innocence of humans, animals, and plants, and our internal spiral dance.

This is the tree of life.
This is the tree of life.
This is the living tree that branches you, this branches me.
This tree is no one’s property.
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DT: I’d like to see if we could close with any thoughts you might have about a place that you go for solace.
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GV: Well, excuse me, I’m gonna—it makes me cry. It just makes me cry for this thought because it’s not a thought I ever thought before. But when I was a kid I saw a movie that they showed us in elementary school called Nature’s Half Acre and it showed all of the tiny little things that were part of nature in that half acre—you know, how every blade of grass and every little insect were doing something and growing and—and interacting at the same time. And that influenced me so much and I think back to that—
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what I learned from that is, you know, every blade of grass can be a whole world and you can sit in front of the grass and look at—and it is—it can fill up your whole perspective. And anywhere you are you can find nature because you can find that blade of grass or that weed that grew in the cement or look at the sky and see the clouds and—so—and right now you can hear those doves calling outside. And I actually do have a place in the country where I—where I go and, which is really beautiful and there’s a little sort of falling in grotto there and I’m sure some nature spirits live there and I’m sure they live in
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other places there where there are lots of wonderful Texas wildflowers and other beautiful deer and animals and everything. But the nature spirits live in the blade of grass and in the weed and in the sky and in the wood that was used to make this house and in the carpet that you’re sitting on that women wove. And nature and culture go together and we’re all (?) and there’s not a distinction between humans and nature and that’s one thing that Julia Butterfly Hill said the other night. So there we are.
DT: Very nice quote to end on because I think that you’ve been able to find a special piece of nature and people everywhere.
Well thanks for your time. I really appreciate your contribution, your gift.
1:00:42 – 2178
GV: Thank you.
[End of Reel 2178]
[End of Interview with Genevieve Vaughan]