Reviews

Winona LaDuke
South End Press
2000

This is an inspiring and frightening book. We are more aware than ever, as we unlearn schoolbook history, of the incredible devastation the settling and expansion of the United States had on the indigenous peoples of this continent.

But that is a general understanding, and based in the past; in All Our Relations, Winona LaDuke makes it more specific and ties it tightly to the present and future. The devastation is still happening now, and is well beyond the point where Native Americans are the only people affected.

The structure of the book is simple but effective—each chapter discusses the history of a tribe from the time before white settlement to now. In particular, LaDuke goes into some detail about each tribe’s understanding of their native ecosystem and their place in it, and constrasts that sharply with the attitudes of the European settlers who claimed and colonized it. From the Seminole to the Cheyenne, the pattern is distressingly similar: white colonization of native lands (usually by military force), Native Americans killed or moved to reservations, and extreme environmental destruction of their former lands through industiral development and its subsequent pollution.

It’s not hard to see how LaDuke can make the case that the disregard for the Native Americans and for their land went hand-in-hand. And that disregard continues now not just for them, but for anyone who would suggest putting limitations on the almighty corporation. That’s the frightening part. The inspiration comes from her accounts of how many tribes are fighting (and have historically fought) to keep their lands unpolluted. Tribe after tribe is putting itself ont he line all over the country to hold industrial polluters and the government accountable to environmental standards, and in some cases there have been victories.

As LaDuke says in conclusion,

There is, in many indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be.

[Originally published in Reclaiming Quarterly #80, Fall 2000]

Malcolm Gladwell
Back Bay Books
2001

Another title for this book could have been How to Cause a Thought Epidemic. If you’ve ever wondered how ideas and trends suddenly catch on and spread, Gladwell is happy to be your guide. His examples are drawn from such diverse sources as disease and fashion, but the principles of The Tipping Point reach into almost any type of human interaction and have important implications for anyone trying to change human behavior.

Gladwell has traced the epidemiology of trends, and has identified three key principles: Context, Stickiness, and the Law of the Few. Context is the idea that our behavior is primarily influenced by the circumstances in which we find ourselves, rather than personal principles, upbringing, or heredity. Changing behavior requires the creation of a context where that change is at least safe, and at best rewarded in some meaningful way. Context is also an area where small changes really count, as illustrated by an analysis of New York City’s abrupt crime drop during the 1990s.

Stickiness is just what it seems to be: finding a way, in all of today’s multimedia clamor, to make a message stick in the minds of its recipients. It is one of the main principles used in direct marketing, where techniques that often seem cheesy (scratch boxes, stickers, etc.) often yield the best results. Finding some way to personalize the message or involve the recipient in an activity can greatly increase the stickiness of the message.

The Law of the Few brings us to the realm of people more concretely. Just as some combination of Gladwell’s three principles is required for a successful trend, so is some combination of certain types of people. He identifies these three types as the Connector, the Maven, and the Salesman, and each has an important role to play in spreading the word.

Connectors tend to be “people collectors”—they maintain a diverse circle of acquaintances and excel at spreading ideas through word of mouth. Mavens are also collectors, but of information rather than people. They also have a strong desire to share what they know—a basic helpful impulse that can reap great benefits, as in the case of a small program that trained hair stylists to share breast cancer information in a casual way with their customers.

Those stylists were also part Salesman—they had good information, a way of presenting it that was tailored to their customers’ circumstances, and trust built from existing relationships. It is the Salesman who often takes an emerging trend and tweaks it a bit in such a way that the result is interesting to a wider range of people.

The Tipping Point may seem a straightforward, dry book, but the pleasant surprise is how entertaining and full of real-life examples it is—it reads like a well-woven tale, and offers thorough case studies to show how all six factors can combine to create sudden, massive changes in human behavior. The result is an intriguing road map for any activist.

[Originally published in Reclaiming Quarterly #86, Spring 2002]

Patricia Foster, Editor
Anchor Books
1994

We have many roles in our lives as women; we are mothers and writers, workers and intellectuals, athletes and artists. And yet it is striking, in spite of all these different ways we have of defining and creating ourselves, that so much of our self-image and identity becomes focused on the physical: our bodies. A host of current “women’s” issues center around our bodies, our control over those bodies, and what our culture limits us to because of them. In Minding the Body, Patricia Foster and the contributing writers address that wide range of issues and ideas related to the female body with a great deal of insight.

Foster begins the book with a personal and political memoir about the vision of womanhood that came down through her family, one which placed motherhood as the natural (and mandatory) order of things. She also discusses the warping of self-image that led to her own anorexia as a young woman, that “abyss of illusory self-control” which can lead a healthy woman to starve herself to death. The theme of weight is echoed in many of the selections here, in both its personal and social implications. Sallie Tisdale contributes a moving piece about coming to terms with her body, about what it took for her to step out of the self-loathing that feeds so much of the diet industry.

Other contributors discuss more external political issues. In “Department of the Interior,” Linda Hogan traces the lineage of western culture’s fear of the female body to a related fear of wilderness—of wildness—specifically relating it to the treatement of Native Americans by arriving Europeans. They saw the land and the native people as wild things needing to be tamed, as women’s bodies are often seen now. Western culture “is a culture that fears and destroys what it perceives as wild….” In “Beauty Tips for the Dead,” Judith Hooper shares a poignant and insightful memoir of her battle with breast cancer and how it has caused her to re-evaluate her own body.

This collection, though it contains many grim truths about western culture’s (and women’s own) views of the female body, is not without its mellower and lighter moments. Margaret Atwood contributes “The Female Body,” written in response to a request by another anthology on a similar topic. She begins:

I agree, it’s a hot topic. But only one? Look around, there’s a wide range. Take my own, for instance.

I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell. I sprinkle it with water, brush parts of it…I dump in the fuel and away goes my topic, my topical topic, my controversial topic…in its oversized coat and worn winter boots,…hunting for what’s out there…hungry as ever.

Patricia Foster has done us a service. By providing one book with such a diverse set of ways we can look at the female body—our bodies—she has opened up new ways of seeing all the different ways it can be objectified and used to suit others’ purposes and needs. And the contributors, through the strength of their personal testaments, give courage to those who want to find peace in the body.