"d1086068-857f-4e83-a18c-37ec0bddd6be"@en . "CONTENTdm"@en . "http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=1213576"@en . "Kinesis"@en . "2013-08-15"@en . "1988-07-01"@en . "https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045716/source.json"@en . "application/pdf"@en . " i juiy/August 1988 Putting lead on the table; Free Trade & Guns CPPA $1.75 elections Serial News About Women That's Not In The Dailies \u00E2\u0096\u00A0 \u00E2\u0096\u00A0\u00E2\u0096\u00A0 % * i wiiryj \u00C2\u00BBtos: diftmtely not vanishing I J The crying need for special needs |2 daycare I ' Mt L -:M Feminism in Fiji, A fight-back in \u00C2\u00AB&yb: England sL^ ! 1 f\ MkSL j -1 Public [ KatariTaiko P restitution Dreams | Kinesii BOX itnests welcomes volunteers to work on all aspects of the paper. Call us at 255-5499. Our next News Group will be August 4th at 1:30 pm at Kinesis, 301- 1720 Grant St. All women welcome even if you don't have experience. PRODUCTION THIS ISSUE: Louise Allen, Marsha Arbour, Astarte, Gwen Bird, Brenda Bryan, Jass Hailley, Andrea Lowe, Sonia Marino, Ann McCus- ker, Allisa McDonald, Joni icy Moreira, Nancy Pollak, Katrtryn Ryches, Ann Sarazin, Sophie Servos, Noreen Shanahan. FRONT COVER: \"The Goddess\" from a Public Dreams production. Figure by Catherine Hahn, photo by Kent Curry. EDITORIAL BOARD: Marsha Arbour, Pat Feindel, Allisa McDonald, Nancy Pollak, Noreen Shana- han, Esther Shannon. W .inesis Is published 10 times a year by the Vancouver Status of Women. Its objectives are to be a non-sectarian feminist voice for women and to work actively for social change, specifically combatting sexism, racism, homophobia and imperialism. Views expressed in Kinesis are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect VSW policy. All unsigned material is the responsibility of the Kinesis Editorial Board. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Individual subscriptions to Kinesis are $17.50 per year or what you can afford. Membership in the Vancouver Status of Women is $25.50 or what you can afford, includes subscription to Kinesis. SUBMISSIONS: All submissions are welcome. We reserve the right to edit and submission does not guarantee publication. All submissions should be typed double spaced and must be signed and include an address and phone number. Please note Kinesis does not accept poetry or fiction contributions. For material to be returned, a SASE must be included. Editorial guidelines are available on request. ADVERTISING: For information about display advertising rates, please contact Kinesis. For information about classifieds, please see the classified page in this issue. DEADLINE: For features and reviews the 10th of the month preceding publication; news copy, 15th; letters and Bulletin Board ings 18th. Display ad- ing: camera ready, design required, 12th. Chrystos is a Native-American poet with an extraordinary first book, \"Not Vanishing\" 14 Being cultural, being collective\u00E2\u0080\u0094Katari Taiko interviews themselves 21 INSIDE (0S Bill 19: trouble in Gold River 3 Dalkon Shield proposal attacked 3 Adult children of violent homes 6 English lesbians, gays fight back 10 Stronger anti-apartheid links urged 10 FEATURE Special needs daycare found wanting 5 by Jackie Brown Free trade: putting lead on the table 7 by Marlon Grove Fijian feminists: taking great risks 11 by Radhlka Bhagat Chrystos talks back 14 by Celeste George ARTS Disabled we stand 16 by Eunice Brooks and Nancy Mitchell Dreaming on a grand scale ...17 by Pat Feindel Mina Totino: pleasure in painting 19 by Susan Lelblk Katari Taiko combines politics, emotions 21 by Leslie Komorl Movement Matters Commentaries. by Dorrie Brannock and by Kairn Mladenovlc What's News? Natural Causes 12 by Heather Herlngton Beans by Nora D. Randall Speculative Fiction by Melanie Conn Letters Bulletin Board. complied by Lucy Morelra Kinesis is a member of the Canadian Periodical Publishers Association and is indexed in the Alternative Press Index. CORRESPONDENCE: Kinesis, Vancouver Status of Women, 301-1720 Grant St., Vancouver, B.C. V5L 2Y6 Camera work by Northwest Graphics. Laser printing by Each Time and Eastside Data Graphics. Printing by Web Press Graphics. Second class mail #6426 ISSN 0317-9095 KINESIS NK5^i^iNTWAffERS =^^^ ^tlii AAovemenT matters listings information Movement Matters is designed to be a network of news, updates and information of special interest to the women's movement. Submissions to Movement Matters should be no more than 500 words, typed, double-spaced on eight and a half by eleven paper. Submissions may be edited for length. Deadline k the 18th of the montb preceding publication. Don't forget to vote Vancouver women are encouraged to register as voters for the civic election. The new mail-in registration scheme has community activists worried: at least 50 percent of eligible voters in the Grandview-Woodlands district have failed to register. Forms are available at libraries, community centres, health units and ... the Vancouver Status of Women. Drop by. The deadline is August 30. Volunteers welcome at Health Collective The Vancouver Women's Health Collective depends on the energy and enthusiasm of volunteers to keep going (they have no core funding). Volunteers can get involved staffing the Information Centre, researching and developing workshops and publications, providing counselling or helping produce the newsletter Healthmatters. Women work collectively in small groups and participate in a monthly meeting where major decisions are made. For information about the regular volunteer training sessions, call 255-8285. Feminist survey of women/sports literature Women, Sport and Physical Activity: Research and Bibliography by Helen Lenskyj provides a feminist critique of sports-related literature on women in Canada. Newly released by the federal Fitness and Amateur Sport ministry, the publication presents a thorough survey of literature \"across the major disciplines\": psychology, physiology, medicine, and sociology. Lenskyj describes her book as being \"for women in physical education and sports administration, for advocacy groups ... and students and researchers working in the area.\" Single copies are available free of charge from: The Manager, Fitness and Amateur Sport Women's Program, Rm 1106, 365 Laurier Ave. W., Ottawa Ont KlA 0X6 Study needs never-married lesbian women Very little written information exists about never-married midlife women without children. What does exist, often portrays us in stereotype. I am a midlife graduate student at University of British Columbia School of Social Work and am interested in studying this phase of our lives. I have completed several interviews so far, but would like to speak with never- married lesbian women between 50 and 60 years of age. I am particularly interested in your experiences and perceptions, since a great deal of information about midlife assumes women are partnered and/or have children. I am asking for approximately two hours of your time and, if you agree to be interviewed, the information will be entirely confidential. H you would like to take part in this study, or have friends or relatives in this age group whom you think may be interested, please call: Barbara Herringer at (604) 876-7487. Thank you. Free report analyzes major strategies Women's Economic Agenda is pleased to announce their new publication, a pocket- sized book analyzing free trade, the Meech Lake Accord and privatization. The publication looks at how these three economic strategies affect women. Display Advertising: This space is yours for only $23. Ask us about discounts. Phone 255-5499 Champlain Realty Ltd. Bus. (604)438-7117 Nancy Steele Res. (604) 254-0941 Marlene Holt REALTY WORLD'\u00D1\u00A2 Res. (604) 255-5027 We'll help you make a good move. This report is part of WEA's ongoing work to broaden women's understanding of the economy so we can shape an economic future based on women's and children's needs. It deals with the following questions: what are these three strategies and how are they linked?; in what way will they change economic structure? Women have been ignored both in the creation of these strategies and in what passes for public debate. The impact on women, women's jobs and on services will be devastating. This report will be available free of charge by late summer from WEA. Write to BCPIRG, TC 304, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby BC V5A 1S6. Telephone (604) 291-4360. We hope to workshop the book around the province, if transportation and billeting are provided. Aid for women in El Salvador The Support Committee for Women of El Salvador recently launched a fundraising drive in aid of a health and education campaign for Salvadorian women. The campaign will focus on rural areas, where women face numerous health problems due to poverty and the ongoing pohtical crisis. Funds raised will go towards antibiotics, contraceptives, hygiene supplies such as sanitary pads and soap, and teaching manuals on menstruation, birth control, pregnancy and childbirth. Donations may be sent to: Support Committee for Women of El Salvador, PO Box 69321, Stn K, Vancouver BC V5K 4WK. For more information, call (604) 879-7405. Young feminists compile book A group of young feminist women from diverse cultural backgrounds are compiling a book by, for and about young women in Canada. All sorts of submissions are welcome, including poetry and prose, cartoons and photography, plays and multi-media works, essays and erotica. Women of all ages are invited to send works that reflect their experiences as young women. Written materials should be typed and double-spaced; art work should be photographed, b& w or colour. Please include your name, age, telephone number and address. Submissions will not be returned. Before September, write to: Young Women's Committee, 3710 Drolet, Montreal PQ H2X 3H6. From Sept. to Feb. 15,1989, write to: 3040 Sherbrooke West, Montreal PQ H3Z 1A4. Sexual assault booklets available Four new booklets dealing with sexual assault are now available from the Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre. Titles include Information for Adult Survivors, Information for Families, Information for Partners and Friends, and Child Sexual Assault: Information for Parents. Written in a way that is non-threatening and easy to understand, each booklet is useful for anyone who has experienced sexual assault or wishes to support someone who has. Professional and non-professional helpers alike will find these booklets a valuable resource to enhance the service they already provide. Individual copies are available for $1 plus postage and handling. To order, and for information about bulk rates, contact the Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre, 1045 Linden Ave., Victoria, B.C., V8V 4H3. Family court's treatment of women studied The Vancouver Association of Women and the Law is researching how women are treated by the courts in separation, divorce and custody cases. Alison Bond would hke to talk with any Lower Mainland women who have been through the system. Contact her at (604) 669-3233. Kinesis says \"Thank-you\" The end-of-May Kinesis raffle and benefit were a smashing success: we made money and had fun, too. Our thanks to the prize-givers: Sewell's Landing Horseshoe Bay, Airborne Enterprises, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, Debbie Bryant, the Lazy Gourmet, Value Village, Kate Jarocz, Lifestream, 24 Hour Health, Heather Herington ND and Banyen Books. Thanks also to the performers: No Frills Bluegrass Band, Jazz, Claire Kujundzic, Cynthia Flood, Pam Tranfield, Helga, Claire Stannard and Sylvi. Corrections In the June Kinesis, Andrea Lowe's photo credits were left off her pictures of Dionne Brand. This isn't the first time we've forgotten Andrea's name; Hke Andrea, we hope it's the last. CCEC CREDIT UNION \"Keeping our money working in our community.\" When you bank at CCEC, you are investing in a neighbourhood business, in the co-op down the street, and in the whole community's growth. CCEC CREDIT UNION 33 EAST BROADWAY VANCOUVER, B.C. VST 1V4 MON. & WED. 11 am-5pm FRIDAY 1pm-7pm 876-2123 KINESIS ////////////////////^^^^ ////////////////////^^^^ news Bill 19 The Sun Also Stoops photo by Andrea Lowe \"Thank you, Mr. Lautens, for bringing us together, but no thank you for the crap you wrote,\" said Shirley Turcotte at a demonstration in front of the Vancouver Sun building June 24. Turcotte, an incest survivor and counsellor, was denouncing a June 18 editorial page column by Trevor Lautens which dismissed the trauma of sexually-abused children and blamed feminists for spreading hatred against abusers. The spirited protest was hastily organized by the Vancouver Status of Women and WAVAW who were alarmed at the pro-abuse tone of the column (Lautens characterized a convicted child molester's actions as 'deep bum patting'). Community activist and incest survivor Sue Harris also spoke, demanding an immediate apology from the writer and publisher for trivializing child abuse. If a retraction is not forthcoming, said Harris, \"we'll go to the Press Council.\" Dalkon Shield Proposal assailed as illegal by Anna Blume A disastrous precedent will be set if A.H. Robins, manufacturer of the Dalkon Shield, gains approval for its victim compensation plan, says the international Coalition of Dalkon Shield Claimants. According to coalition member Dalkon Shield Action Canada (DSAC), the company's offer of a $2.26 billion trust fund is \"unfair, inadequate and contrary to law.\" The trust fund proposal, which individual claimants have until July 11 to approve or reject, stems from a bankruptcy hearing in Richmond, Virginia, A.H. Robins filed for bankruptcy in 1985 in the face of mounting awards to women harmed by the defective intrauterine device (IUD). The Dalkon Shield was widely distributed in the 1970's despite evidence it caused sterility, abnormal pregnancies, brain damage in children, and, in at least 21 documented cases, death. In Canada alone, DSAC estimates there are upwards of 6500 claimants. \"The big winners under this plan are Robin's directors and stockholders,\" says Elaine Cumley, president of DSAC. \"In fact, after paying [them], there may not be funds left to pay all claimants.\" Under the proposal, which Cumley says is in clear violation of normal bankruptcy procedures, the Robins family will receive $350 million prior to the settlement of creditor's claims. Furthermore, women seeking damages will be at the bottom of the creditor pile and \"the fund may be exhausted.\" The Official Claimants Committee, appointed by the bankruptcy court, has testified that $4 to $Z billion would satisfy known claims. Unfortunately, says Cumley, that same committee is describing the company's proposal as \"a victory.\" \"They are not representative of claimants,\" says Cumley.\"The last time we heard from them was two- and-a-half years ago.\" In the face of the proposal, the international coalition was formed in April finking American and Canadian claimant groups. According to Cumley, there is no accurate sense of how many Third World women were fitted with the IUD. Approximately 4.2 million devices were distributed worldwide, about 2.3 million in North America. \"Money is not the point,\" says Cumley who stresses corporate accountability as the real issue. \"What does it mean when a Cold wind blows in Gold River by Noreen Shanahan Bill 19, B.C.'s Industrial Relations Reform Act, has swept through Gold River leaving forty- seven women without jobs and the door locked behind them. Since management locked them out of Vancouver Island's Coast Gold River Chalet in March, the hotel workers\u00E2\u0080\u0094members of the Pulp and Paper Workers of Canada (PPWC) Local 6\u00E2\u0080\u0094are facing tough times which they say directly result from the new antiunion labour laws. \"Our hands are tied right down,\" says local 6 vice-president Dayle Crawford. \"Since Bill 19 the only thing we can legally do is put pamphlets on people's cars but as soon as we stop anybody from going in [the hotel] that's considered a form of picketing and we'll be stopped.\" Information about the lockout is not getting out, she said, with all attempts stymied and the women continually threatened with appearing before the Industrial Relations Council in Vancouver. Coast Hotels locked their doors after the workers unanimously rejected a contract offer of a 25 percent wage roll-back and major concession demands in every area including working conditions, seniority and job security. Management's demands came as a surprise to the women, who company knowingly produces and markets a killer device? \"We don't want other multinationals to use this plan. The company needs to accept responsibility ... [the settlement] needs to send a signal to other companies.\" DSAC is particularly distressed that the plan grants future immunity to both A.H. Robins and their insurer, Aetna\u00E2\u0080\u0094 regardless of whether claims are satisfied. Aetna is believed to have conspired with Robins to suppress evidence of the IUD's failings. Cumley is conscious of the psychological pitfalls that may prompt women to accept such a flawed plan. \"We are like Vietnam vets: we are in a state of shock, there has been victim-blaming and say Gold River is experiencing an economic boom from a recent $320 million pulp mill expansion. \"Four years ago Gold River was in a real slump,\" said Crawford. \"Stores were going bankrupt, people moving out of town\u00E2\u0080\u0094but then we got an increase after only 27 minutes of negotiations. Now the' hotel has never been so busy and they locked us out! It doesn't make any sense.\" According to Rob O'Neil of Coast Hotels, the women rejected the company offer\u00E2\u0080\u0094and instead demanded a wage increase\u00E2\u0080\u0094 because their husbands are looking for wage increases at the pulp mill. \"It's understandable that they want an increase,\"0'Neil says. \"There's a buoyancy in the town, more development. I fully see the environment they live in.\" But the economics, he explained, are simple: \"Our waitresses' base rate is around $11.50 an hour while at the restaurant across the street they pay $4.00 or whatever the minimum wage is\u00E2\u0080\u0094and they charge the same for a coffee as I do.\" To Crawford, a waitress in the hotel, the economics are also simple: \"I'm a single parent with four teenage children ... asking for an increase had nothing to do with see Bill 19 pg 4 we may have turned it in on ourselves.\" At face value, the plan represents a huge sum of money and women may feel unjustified in rejecting it. \"We have to look at the plan in a holistic sense,\" says Cumley. \"We don't want it defeated, but amended.\" She adds that, because the plan is \"illegal\", if accepted it will very likely be appealed. DSAC is in urgent need of funds to sustain their network of claimants. They are a registered charitable society. Please send donations to: DSAC, #108 1861 Welch, North Vancouver BC V7P 1B7. Tel. (604) 980-2696 Gentle /\u00C2\u00A7\u00C2\u00A7fes^ ^ Reminder l- :L:Lg|s .>\u00C2\u00A7S^ i Survey! Results of June's Kinesis Reader Survey will be published in the October '88 issue. Look for it! A big Thank You to those of you who participated in our survey. The replies are giving us new insight into your interests and con- If by chance you haven't re- tamed your survey form, please do so today. H you can't find a copy of the survey we'd be glad to supply one. Just drop by the office. (# 301 - 1720 Grant St. at Commercial). KINESIS Across B.C X\X\N\NNN\XXN\\\XNXXXXX\X\XNXX\\^^^ BCYAWC Association faces uncertain future by Lea Dawson The B.C. and Yukon Association of Women's Centres (BCYAWC) has serious work to do in the next year to confirm its viability as a voice for women in the province. In May the BCYAWC held its fourth conference and annual general meeting at 108 Mile House Resort. Representatives of 25 women's centres attended and the weekend provided a welcome opportunity for women\u00E2\u0080\u0094especially those from rural communities\u00E2\u0080\u0094 to connect, share information and have fun. Although the speakers, workshops and entertainment on Saturday were well-organized and well- received, Sunday's annual general meeting ended in confusion and frustration. The BCYAWC has had a history of problems in its short fife, and funding has been one. The association has been consistently underfunded, and this year was dealt a further 40 per cent cut by Secretary of State. Lack of funding makes organizing a geographically widespread Same Time, Last Year photo by Rob Klein What the Topp Twins of New Zealand did last July, the Raging Grannies of Victoria will do this July 24 at the Third Annual Fiesta in Vancouver's Grandview Park. Fiesta is a fund- and spirit-raiser for La Quena, a cooperative Latin American coffeehouse used by many political groups for benefits, screenings and concerts. Dance music, drumming, comedy, speakers\u00E2\u0080\u0094plus special kid's events\u00E2\u0080\u0094and wonderful food are all slated for the 24th at 1200 Commercial Drive. and politically diverse group like BCYAWC difficult, if not impossible. Where is the money for mail-outs, travelling, long-distance calls? Can the association organize effectively without staff or office space? There was general agreement at the AGM that the BCYAWC needs to expand its funding sources. However, talks broke down around an application for charitable tax status\u00E2\u0080\u0094a move that might compromise the association's goal of political lobbying. Members pointed out the association has done very little lobbying and this compromise may be more one of principle than substance. The BCYAWC renewed its committment to become broadbased, i.e. to include women's organizar tions that have a single issue focus and do not meet the definition of \"women's centre.\" This has been a contentious issue. It is feared that a broadbased membership would mean domination by the Lower Mainland; at present, the BCYAWC is predominantly rural. The hope is that Bill 19 from page 3 what the husbands were going for ... there's a big boom in Gold River, and we've been working with twice the workload.\" \"We've opened our books to them,\", said O'Neil, \"but they said they're not interested in the economics\u00E2\u0080\u0094so we said we'll have to close the hotel.\" The women received letters of termination dated May 14, effective July 14\u00E2\u0080\u0094two months notice given in lieu of severance pay. According to the union, the company is holding back their pensions to prevent the money being used as lockout funds. Crawford also believes the company, with the help of Bill 19, is finding a convenient and legal way of union-busting. \"H a company closes it's doors for two years they can then decertify the union and re-open as a non-union hotel,\"she says. \"No union can then operate there until six months after it re-opens.\" Furthermore, under Bill 19 successful union organizing is much more difficult to achieve and the company is free to interfere at any stage in the campaign. Asked whether Coast Hotels was finding the revised labour laws advantageous to them in this dispute, O'Neil replied, \"I wouldn't know. I just ask advice from my counsel and simply take what's available to me under the law.\" He also expressed frustration with the women's lack of savvy concerning the hotel business, even though many of them have worked at the Gold River Chalet since it opened in 1973. He puts their ignorance down to small town dynamics where, he said, the struggle is not an economic one, it's union versus company. \"Therefore there's a certain amount of distrust. They Hke to think something devious is going on, some Machiavellian plot to do the workers out of money.\" Don't steep here tonight Locked out members of Pulp and Paper Workers of Canada, Local 6 are asking for support in boycotting the following Coast Hotels until such time as their dispute is over: \u00E2\u0080\u00A2Coast Tahsis Chalet, Tahsis, B.C.oCoast Gold River Chalet, Gold River, B.C.\u00C2\u00BBCoast Discovery Inn, Campbell River, B.C.\u00C2\u00BBCoast Bastion Hotel, Nanaimo, B.C.#Harbour Towers Hotel, Victoria, B.C.\u00C2\u00BBChateau Victoria Hotel, Victoria, B.C>Coast Airport Hotel, Vancouver, B.C.^Georgian Court Hotel, Vancouver, B.C.\u00C2\u00ABCoast Canadian Inn, Kamloops, B.C.oInn Of The North, Prince George, B.C.\u00C2\u00BBProvincial Motel, Fort Nelson, B.C.\u00C2\u00ABTerrace Inn, Edmonton, Alberta a broader base would mean new energy and analysis, and much- needed revenue from membership fees. Unfortunately, the only organization invited to join the association has declined and several women's centres\u00E2\u0080\u0094including the Yukon women's centre\u00E2\u0080\u0094have failed to renew their membership for 1987/88. The members at the AGM had little time\u00E2\u0080\u0094about 45 minutes\u00E2\u0080\u0094to develop priorities for the upcoming year. There was confusion as to the outcome of this session, exaggerated by the departing of several member groups before the meeting adjourned (some had travelling time of 16 hours). One clear priority was to find funds for a Mobile Facility\u00E2\u0080\u0094a van or mobile home that would travel among communities with information about BCYAWC and women's issues. The new steering committee, centred in the Lower Mainland for 1988/89, will be acting on this and on the broadbased expansion. Strategies for lobbying remained elusive, and the future of the BCYAWC as a pohtical force is nebulous. For women's groups concerned with provincial organizing and interested in the BCYAWC as a way to go, now is the time. In the Lower Mainland, contact the steering committee through the Port Coquitlam Women's Centre at 941-6311. Abortion Some wins, some losses, frustration all 'round by Nancy Pollak B.C. women are being forced to wage election-scale campaigns in an effort to maintain the already meager level of abortion services in the province. Recent hospital board of directors elections have prompted energetic community sign-ups by both pro-choice and anti-choice factions in Richmond, Kamloops, Vernon and Langley. Concerned Citizens for Choice on Abortion (CCCA) groups were successful in Vernon and Richmond, electing pro-choice candidates to hospital boards. In Kamloops and Langley, the story was different, with anti-abortion candidates sweeping the slate. Since the Supreme Court's January ruling, access to abortion has actually diminished for many Canadian women, with at least a couple of B.C. hospital boards hiding behind the 'future law's uncer-. tainty' as an excuse to cut services entirely. Langley Memorial ended its substandard service\u00E2\u0080\u0094the hospital did \"maybe 10 abortions a year, tops,\" according to CCCA's Pat Brighouse\u00E2\u0080\u0094in May. Richmond General, which gained three new pro-choice directors in the June 28 election, had also imposed a ban, infuriating the community and medical staff alike. Richmond still has majority of anti-choice directors. In Vernon, CCCA's Marnie Gudeit said of the pro-choice victory \"the community was ready for a change ... and you can't un derestimate the need for organization.\" Vernon Jubilee Hospital will be restoring abortion services which were cut in February. The CCCA's strategy in Vernon this year was to run candidates from across the pohtical spectrum (including Socred) and to be explicit about their pro- choice stance. \"Last year,\" said Brighouse, 0 the approach was 'let's make the election open to all voters'. The lack of direct reference to choice on abortion \"confused people.\" People in Kamloops were deliberately confused by the local anti- choice group's tactics. \"Kamloops Pro-Life were as obnoxious as possible,\" said Val Carey. \"They distributed phoney information pamphlets door-to- door saying, 'There is an abortion chnic coming to your neighbourhood, it has been rezoned for a chnic, come to a meeting ... ' and people went to the meeting. They had children handing out leaflets with torn-up fetuses.\" Although the election this year went anti-choice, the Royal Inland Hospital still enjoys a pro-choice majority and abortion services are available. At present, only 37 out of a possible 115 B.C. hospitals provide some level of abortion service. \"Childbirth By Choice\" is a one-day conference co- sponsored by the CCCA and other community groups, July 23 at the Justice Institute in Vancouver. For information about registration, subsidies and child care, call CCCA at 266-9636. 4 KINESIS ->- Across B.C. Daycare Special needs kids left wanting by Jackie Brown To the casual observer, Joshua Nelson is just a normal little boy. The energetic, curious two-year old likes to play hard, gets into his share of trouble and generally keeps adults on their toes. While Josh's antics are nothing unusual, he is, nevertheless, different from other kids. Josh has fife-threatening food allergies so that wherever he goes, so must a kit complete with adrenalin and a syringe\u00E2\u0080\u0094just in case he accidentally ingests any one of a number of potentially lethal foods. For Josh's mom Louise, a registered nurse who works the night shift at a Vancouver hospital, contending with her son's severe allergies is struggle enough. Josh must be watched constantly, which means she gets little sleep during the day, and his nighttime care is left to her ageing mother. Now, to further complicate matters, Nelson says a local daycare (she declined to name the centre) which had agreed to accept her son is no longer willing to do so for fear of being sued should anything go wrong. That, despite the fact the Ministry of Social Services and Housing (MSSH) agreed to subsidize a special needs worker to supervise her son for part of the day. The about-face ordered by the daycare's lawyer and insurance company was about as welcome as last year's tornado in Edmonton for Nelson, who was forced to shelve plans to retrain in a career that would have allowed her to work during regular daycare hours. She is particularly bitter that Josh is being denied an opportunity to spend important time with his peers. According to MSSH information officer Ron Armstrong, (Kinesis was told by a regional special needs daycare co-ordinator that all questions had to be referred to the ministry) MSSH has no control over daycare decisionmaking because the centres are privately operated. At present, Nelson has few options, especially after rejecting a number of daycares in her area as unsuitable. Among them were two special needs centres recommended by MSSH. One, said Nelson, closed too early, while the other was too large to provide safe care for Josh. While she probably could find a place for her son in a Vancouver centre, Nelson says the drive between her home in Port Coquitlam, the daycare, and the Burnaby college would be exhausting for both of them. Downtown Eastside Dream of safe housing comes true by Hinda Avery Mavis/McMullen Place, a social housing project for Vancouver street women, was born in the spring of 1986. The Downtown Eastside Women's Centre (DEWC) contacted the City of Vancouver, informing them they were interested in going for group housing for women in their area. \"It was crazy,\" said DEWC's Laurel Kimbley, \"because we had only one employee at the time, myself, as well as a hard-working board\u00E2\u0080\u0094and it was the beginning of Expo. But we gambled and went for it.\" With Expo taking place, the DEWC gathered housing applications and statistics on women to justify the need for housing in the area. Statistics revealed that downtown eastside women die 22 years earlier than their counterparts in the city, suicides are four times higher, and homicides are twice as frequent. Downtown women die from malnutrition, going through institutions and back onto the street, and from physical and psychological violence. Insecurity and poverty result in alcohol and drug abuse. In fact, said Kimbley, the fifes- pan of women in the downtown eastside is only about 50 years. Most of these statistics came from a study by the Vancouver Health Department and the City of Vancouver, conducted 15 years ago; however Mavis/McMullen Place is the first housing project for women in the downtown eastside. \"The backgrounds of the women are the same as you and me, that of ordinary poor women,\" says Kimbley. \"There is no difference, you can't say these women are such and such. Most women are poor, unless we have had an opportunity to acquire an education, have a husband or family support. \"As we get older and have less income, we all suffer. This is \"every woman's plight. This isn't a unique population of downwardly mobile, dependent women, tins Neither does she want to bring a special needs worker into her home, feeling Josh should spend time with kids his own age. Although Nelson doesn't minimize Josh's condition, (\"If he had an attack it would be frightening. It's terrifying for me and my mother\"), she says the daycare is overreacting. She is most angry, however, at a government she says does not recognize the needs of children like her son. \"We're turning the clocks back 30 years by trying to hide our special needs kids,\" says Nelson. \"I'm not asking for the world ... all I want is what every other kid is entitled to.\" Thousands of Children According to daycare experts, Louise Nelson isn't alone. With only a limited number of special needs centres in the Lower Mainland and thousands of children to place, space is tight. Finding a spot for so-called 'medically frag ile' children is harder still, they say, since the youngsters are often rejected by regular daycares for insurance reasons. Jen Moses, a daycare worker at the University of B.C. with 10 years' experience, says the government's attitude is the biggest stumbling block. Says Moses, \"There is no recognition of the need for daycare. We are the only province in Canada that has no money going straight into daycare (operating) costs.\" The result: parents with typical kids have a rough time; those with special needs children \"find it very hard.\" Moses says part of the solution lies in having more integrated centres. That, however, comes with its own set of problems including the need to upgrade existing faculties and funnel more money into training. Parents she describes as having a \"super kid\" complex are also delaying the process because they worry their children will be held back. In the meantime, says Moses, children hke Josh Nelson are caught in the middle. Regular centres balk at the idea of taking them because even if a special needs worker is present for part-time supervision, once she leaves responsibility shifts to the remaining staff who already care for up to eight other children. Claire Stannard, now a substitute worker at UBC with a background in special needs, agrees that more integration is a must, especially since funding for more expensive special needs centres doesn't appear to be forthcoming. She also believes integration would benefit both special needs and typical children. \"In a lot of cases, special needs kids don't need to be segregated and it would be good for other kids to see that diversity.\" And, she says, the extra training involved would help workers better deal with the roughly 10 per cent of children in any centre who require more attention due to family problems, higher than normal energy levels and the like. Most of all, says Stannard, workers would realize their fears around children with even se vere personality or medical disorders are largely unfounded. \"I've seen workers who have said, 'No, we can't take the child,' without knowing the situation,\" says Stannard. Dianne Noort, a worker at the Rainbow House special needs daycare in New Westminster, agrees that regular daycares are growing ever more nervous about special needs children. see Daycare p.6 has nothing to do with that at all\u00E2\u0080\u0094that's a myth.\" The building was named after Mavis Hippolyte, a Black woman who died as a result of violence in the downtown eastside. Helen Mc- Mullen is a 74-year old Mennonite woman who believes her Christian there are \"hopefully\" no stars,\" said Kimbley. \"Ideally, power and recognition are shared. \"Women normally work in a cyclic, or circular fashion, unlike men who tend to work in a linear or hierarchical manner,\" added Kimbley. Linda Baker was the architect of Mavis/McMullen Place located across from Oppenheimer Park. conviction is to work with the people in the downtown eastside. Mc- Mullen worked on the board of the Women's Centre for four years and with the Mavis/McMullen Housing Society. \"The core of the story is that this has been a kind of process and One month prior to the move- in date, the women hired a facilitator, Willie Monroe, and a co-ordinator, Gail Meredith, whose job was to make the move as smooth as possible. \"The process of facilitating and self- empowerment is encouraged in the women,\" said Kimbley. \"We've developed our rules and regulations, our tenancy agreements and all of the paperwork with the intention of being supportive of the women moving into the building.\" There are 34 units\u00E2\u0080\u0094one, two, and three bedrooms\u00E2\u0080\u0094in Mavis/ McMullen Place. Men\u00E2\u0080\u0094lovers, husbands and boy children\u00E2\u0080\u0094are welcome in the building. Women, however, remain the primary tenants and will be the voice heard at the monthly tenant meetings where safety and security\u00E2\u0080\u0094which is imperative in view of the neighbourhood\u00E2\u0080\u0094will be the primary concern. When asked what her dream was, Kimbley replied, \"My dream is to have more safe housing for women, to stop the cycle of violence, and for more women to have housing and property that they can control. \"Another dream is that my sisters who have moved into the building will be happy and find that this is a safe place where they can reconstruct their lives and start to build new lives for themselves ... We had the odds stacked against us and accomplishing this project was a remote possibility. \"But we did do it. We can actualize our dreams, women can do it!\" KINESIS Across Canada Across Canada^ Silent no longer Adult children of violent homes by Terrie Hamazaki In 1986, the Family Violence Prevention Division was created in the Department of National Health and Welfare. Now, in 1988, the federal government has announced it will spend $40 million in additional funds over the next four years, $22.2 million of which will go towards the creation of 500 new \"short term shelter units\" for crisis assistance. These units are to provide emergency shelters for 25,000 battered women and their children each year. Considering that a 1987 report by the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women estimated each year as many as one million Canadian women may be battered by the men they hve with, the inadequacy of the funding becomes blatantly clear. Jan Forde of Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) says more units of second-stage housing\u00E2\u0080\u0094where women and their children can spend an indefinite period after they've left an emergency shelter\u00E2\u0080\u0094are needed. But it is not enough to support the women and their children, thereby preventing further abuse. What is also needed are programs geared towards intervention to prevent the violent pattern which will, in all hkehhood, be continued by the children who witness violence in their homes. It appears the government has decided a woman and her child are one entity, and that a program for the mother will be adequate to serve the needs of her child too. But as more research is conducted around the children of violent homes, it becomes obvious their needs will have to be addressed separately. *c\u00C2\u00BB^^^^^*#^r*'^*^**^^*^*\u00C2\u00BB Extrapolating from Ontario statistics, it is likely that 50 to 70 per cent of school- age children in British Columbia witness woman-battering in their families. Violence is a learned behaviour\u00E2\u0080\u0094the implications behind the statistics are appalling. \"We need programs to counsel children between the ages of two and eighteen if we are to end the cycle of violence,\" says Rae Gabriel, education co-ordinator at the Vancouver-based Battered Women's Support Services (BWSS). And these programs cost money. At a 1987 Community Mental Health Conference on \"The Hidden Victims of Wife Assault\" in New Westminster, the effects on children who witnessed family violence Daycare from page 5 Like Stannard and Moses, she sees merit in integration, and prefers that route to bringing in special needs workers on an 'as need' basis\u00E2\u0080\u0094a process she says can segregate staff. She also says most daycare workers would gladly upgrade their training accordingly. Still, Noort feels a certain sector of children do require segregation (\"in an integrated daycare you have to give up some social benefits in order to work with the kids\u00E2\u0080\u0094in a special needs daycare they'd get both\"), and says there is a need to increase the number of special needs centres. \"Parents could have at-home care, but part of the reason these children are attending daycare is because they need extra treatment for ... learning disabilities, mental handicaps or hyperactivity.\" According to Ron Armstrong, the provincial government's $20 million Strengthening the Family program makes no special provision for special needs daycare centres although daycares can apply for program funds so long as the request complies with \"overall objectives.\" He also says providing money for new structures \"would be a major departure\" since government funds space only. When asked about the possibility of more integration, Armstrong said the process is already underway, with increasing numbers of typical centres accepting special needs children. While government ministries and daycare advocates argue over solutions, parents of special needs children have little choice but to wait and see. Many undoubtedly find the situation more than a little confusing, considering the government's vehement pledge to make the welfare of children a top priority. For Louise Nelson, the answer is clear: \"Claude Richmond (the minister of social services) himself has said it costs less for daycare than it does to keep a family on welfare for a year. \"I want him to live up to that.\" were taken very seriously. Discussions fo- counselling techniques to be used on the children and adolescents of violent homes. The fact that children's needs were addressed at all is testimony to the growing awareness of the rippling effects of wife abuse in our society. But Janet Freeman, support-group co-ordinator at BWSS says that \"only recently has the community recognized the need for support groups for the children.\" On September 30, 1987, the mayor of Vancouver announced the formation of a Task Force on Children. The task force has recommended that city council urge the provincial Ministry of Social Services to restore the child abuse teams which were severely cut in 1982. While alderman (sic) Carole Taylor, chair of the mayor's task force is fully supportive of addressing the needs of children of violent homes, nowhere in her report, dated May 24, 1988, does the issue arise. Not only is funding required, but so also is community awareness. On June 7th of this year, CJOR 600 hosted a show on \"Adult Children of Violent Homes.\" Guests were Rae Gabriel and 'Cindy', a woman raised in a violent home. Cindy spoke of the bed-wetting nights of unspoken terror, the 'conspiracy of silence' which kept her silent for so long, and how the violence she had witnessed had hampered her psychological and emotional well- being as an adult. She described her frustrations when trying to seek out a support group for herself and women hke herself. No such groups existed because the funding was just not there. I am Cindy. Hear my voice now. , As a child and teenager, because I did not receive counselling to help me overcome my feelings of grief, anger, guilt, loneliness and confusion, I internalized my conflicting emotions. And, contrary to standard studies, I did not repeat the pattern of my mother as the passive victim; rather I chose to imitate my father's abusive role. This eventually led to a failed relationship and forced me to face my past. Again. There is a definite need for support groups for the children, whether they be 2 or 20 years old: early intervention for the former, and therapeutic counselling for the latter. The cycle of violence must be stopped. No longer is it enough to 'band-aid' the problem. Wounds heal, scars are forever. v.; ^ you.Louj^/! t> r, we^e cane tj, A New iMMa&woni^ YE*,ABOUT teACHKl^ ouRowM Free trade Putting more lead on the table by Marion Grove Under the proposed Canada/U.S. free trade agreement, Canadian economic development will very like shift to increased military production. Both Ottawa and Washington are reserving the right to subsidize their national defence industries. All other Canadian industries seeking to maintain\u00E2\u0080\u0094or eventually develop\u00E2\u0080\u0094American markets will be expressly prohibited government support. Canadian governments have traditionally dealt with regional unemployment and sluggish industrial development by offering incentives and subsidies to entice businesses to these regions. The free trade agreement will put an end to this. Businesses currently operating in depressed regions will find it more profitable to move directly to the larger U.S. market to take advantage of cheaper labour. Several U.S. states have no minimum wage laws and others have appallingly low minimum wage rates. Texas, for instance, has a minimum wage of $1.40 per hour. Encouraging weapons or weapons-related industries will be one of the few courses left to Canada's three levels of government as they move to counteract the even greater regional economic disparity created by the agreement. In fact, the White Paper released last year by Defence Minister Perrin Beatty explicitly states that military production is the best way to overcome regional economic discrepancies. However, increased defence production in Canada will also require an expanded export market. At this time, 80 per cent of Canadian military sales are to the U.S. Under the free trade agreement, Canada has no guarantee of access to this market. In fact, there are currently 10 separate legislative proposals before the U.S. congress which would restrict Canadian and other foreign military sales to the U.S. (an attempt to keep the Pentagon's spending confined within U.S. borders). This leaves Canada in a bind. Under free trade, Canadians would be forced to choose between higher unemployment and increased weapons production. Yet there is nothing in the agreement that prevents the U.S. from implementing protectionist legislation to squeeze Canadian military producers out of their largest market. With more workers and more corporations dependent on continued\u00E2\u0080\u0094and increased military sales to the U.S., it is inevitable the Canadian government will bow to U.S. foreign and military policy in the hope of securing Canada's share of the U.S. military market. Canada is already committed to embracing many U.S. policies and strategies under the Defence Production Sharing Arrangement (DPSA). The DPSA requires Canada to purchase roughly as much military equipment as it sells to the U.S. As Ernie Regehr points out in the Dec. 1987 issue of The Ploughshares Monitor, \"The equipment itself comes with military CED The world as household by Kinesis Staff Writer \"Economy comes from a Greek word meaning management of the household. What that means is that the world is our household and it is our responsibility to manage it properly.\" So spoke Joan Kuyek, keynote speaker at the National Conference on Women and Community Economic Development last May at Douglas College. Kuyek, of the United Church's Economic Justice Project, continued: \"You all know what would happen if you only managed your household by those things to which you could attach a dollar value. There would be no way to make decisions about sitting ap with a side child, or listening to good music, or using compost in your garden, except in terms of dollars. An economist and a business man can only deal with those things which are measurable. \"Therefore a forest in an of itself has no value, happy children have no value, community building has no value. The language of economics is very limited ... \"There are a number of strategies for so- ciai and economic change. They vary from writing briefe to government ... to blowing up environmentally destructive factories; from putting on picnics and church suppers to organizing squats in vacant housing; from organizing unions in sweatshops to starting our own worker co-operatives.\" Over 250 women from across Canada spent the weekend revising \"the language of economics\" and exploring strategies. Proceedings of the conference will eventually be available. Contact Community Economic Options, 4340 Carson St., Burnaby, B.C., V5J 2X9, (604) 420-0453, roles and policies built in, and [hence] political assumptions about military threats. \"When you stock your armed forces with American equipment, you also equip them with American perceptions of threat.\" Fear of losing military contracts has been responsible for past Canadian cooperation with U.S. military policies: witness Canada's involvement in Cruise missile testing. An increased Canadian role in global arms production and conflict does not, however, end here. Saskatchewan is the world's largest and cheapest supplier of uranium. The free trade agreement would eliminate all barriers to the uranium trade, including Canada's current\u00E2\u0080\u0094albeit rather unenforced\u00E2\u0080\u0094restrictions on the eventual uses of exported ura- A recent report by the Defence Industrial Preparedness Task Force of the Department of National Defence proposes an \"education\" plan, aimed at legislators and policy makers, to promote still further integration of Canadian and U.S. industries. Freeing Trade, Running Guns The other inevitable outcome of increased economic dependence on weapons production is that Canadian defence contractors\u00E2\u0080\u0094 eager to reduce their dependence on the U.S. market\u00E2\u0080\u0094will actively seek to increase their Third World sales. Already Canada is heavily involved in arming the Indonesian government in its genocidal war against the people of East Timor. Eighty-five per cent of all loans to Indonesia\u00E2\u0080\u0094many of which support the purchase of arms and other war-related endeavors\u00E2\u0080\u0094are financed by the Royal Bank and the Bank of Commerce. Increased dependence on such arms sales will irrevocably place Canada in a position where its interest would be to stimulate, rather than to mediate Third World conflicts. Ltd. supplied uranium for the first atomic bomb\u00E2\u0080\u0094Canada has been a major supplier of weapons uranium, particularly to American and French defence industries. This, despite a 1965 ban on Canadian exports of uranium for military purposes. A clause in the free trade agreement gives the U.S. the right to \"respond to direct threats of disruption in the supply of nuclear material for defence purposes.\" The clause renders it impossible for the Canadian government to ever respond positively to public outrage against uranium mining on indigenous lands, against environmental damage caused by uranium mining, milling, processing and storage, against threats to the health of uranium workers and the public, and against complicity in the build-up of nuclear weapons. Imposing safeguards upon\u00E2\u0080\u0094or eliminating\u00E2\u0080\u0094the uranium industry to deal with these problems would very likely be perceived by the U.S. as a \"disruption\" of the supply of uranium. The result would be heavy economic or pohtical penalties for Canada. WEU- YOU REN-Lf BR\u00C2\u00BB\u00C2\u00AB* OUT THE PETTW6SS IN M\u00C2\u00A3 because You're So IWMEDiei-i ferrf _ u\u00C2\u00AB T5r*y. 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If I'M M\u00C2\u00ABT vf To fiflE VHtecffirTioAi of THE$\u00C2\u00AB4 .. . \u00E2\u0096\u00A0 \u00E2\u0096\u00A0 I K\u00C2\u00ABI> To $0 HoM\u00C2\u00A3 To St*=g*\u00C2\u00BB..... KINESIS KINESIS Jul/Aug. Commentary Internalized dominance Invisible to those who have it... by Dorrie Brannock I read therapy books like some people read murder mysteries\u00E2\u0080\u0094one or two a week. It's clear from my reading and from going to therapy groups that the therapy community knows about internalized oppression and how destructive it can be. They know it can cause all kinds of behaviour that is inappropriate to an individual getting what they want and need out of life. It's also clear from my reading that the therapy community knows little or nothing about internalized dominance. It is invisible to them because of their own idea of normality. They themselves have internalized dominance and it's pretty hard to see your own stuff, especially if it is considered normal. When internalized dominance is operating within you it allows you to walk all over certain people without realizing you are invading their territory. It allows you to feel better than others\u00E2\u0080\u0094more \"normal\". It allows you to feel that the person whose territory you have invaded is a poor sport if they complain. It allows you to see the other person as distressed, neurotic, or just plain inappropriate if they get angry at the way you are treating them. It allows you to feel picked on, mistreated, battered, totally misunderstood, if someone mildly points out that your behaviour is anything by appropriate and normal. It is pretty hard to break up your own internalized pattern\u00E2\u0080\u0094to make changes\u00E2\u0080\u0094 without pressure from the outside. People < seek therapy when things in their fife are not working for them Internalized dominance, which is sanctioned by society, works for people who have it. It makes that part of their fife easy, because they don't see any- thing wrong with their behaviour even if it is hurting others. It allows them to disregard large segments of the population. For example: Heterosexuals who oppose lesbian and gays becoming ministers within the church: they don't see their behaviour as oppressive; they see themselves as saviours of their church with go on their side. \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Only white people work within an organization: if they think about it at all, they don't think their organization is racist; they think no capable people of colour applied for the job. \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 I went to a meditation retreat recently. When I asked why they had no women teachers, I was told \"they found out that people don't hsten to women.\" They did not think they were sexist; they just thought they were being realists. \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 White women insisting on white standards from women of colour in areas like newspaper articles don't think of themselves as racist. They think they are upholding fair standards. Invisible Internalized dominance is invisible to most of us who have it. If we went to a therapist because some brave soul kept pointing out our dominant behaviour towards them, the therapist would see our behaviour as normal. Imagine being white, going into a therapist's office, and saying, \"I need help to deal with my internalized dominance. My friend who is a woman of colour says my behaviour is oppressive to her.\" Therapist: \"What did you do to her?\" Woman: \"Nothing. I was just being normal. I was just being myself.\" Therapist: \"Is this a good friend?\" Woman: \"Yes, yes, but I don't know for how much longer if this keeps up. It's really upsetting me.\" Therapist: \"What is this 'internalized dominance' stuff?\" Woman: \"I don't know. It's something to do with territory, something to do with assumptions. It's something to do with my friend not understanding that I'm just being myself.\" Therapist: \"Do you have other friends of colour?\" Woman: \"Yes, one.\" Therapist: \"What does she have to say?\" Woman: \"Nothing, she thinks my behaviour is fine. I have no trouble with her.\" Before very long, the therapist would be telling this woman she has to look after herself and understand that her friend had a hard life but she was not responsible for her friend. Please see Invisible page 12 Prostitution Many more women will be working the streets by Kairn Mladenovic In Canada, prostitution has been a \"hot\" social issue for the last few years because we have been under direct attack by politicians, the courts and police. This has meant that prostitution has been, and probably will continue to be, \"a \"hot\" feminist issue and debate for a few years to come. Unfortunately, feminists have had more of a say about our lives than we have had. Often the theories have been based on assumption, with no direction from or accountability to women working in the sex trades. Far too often this leaves us in separate corners, fighting each other, while men are literally getting away with murder. It is crucial that we build on our commonalities. It is also crucial that our differences are not ignored and explained away by the common myth that we are ignorant women playing into men's sexism. Poverty and racism are the realities for women working the streets: \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 13 per cent of women have worked in the sex trade at least once. \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 70 per cent of prostitutes are single mothers; hke most poor women, we five with the fear of apprehension. \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Over 50 per cent of prostitutes working on the street are women of colour. Less than five per cent work indoors. \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Less than 20 per cent of prostitutes are drug addicts or alcoholics (the same for any profession). Most of us turn out (start turning tricks) because we can't afford to house, feed and clothe ourselves and our children. As the Socreds prove time and time again they are not friends of the poor, many more women will be working the streets. Prostitution is a Job Prostitution is a job. The average time spent with a trick is about 15 minutes, including conversation. There is no intimacy and it has nothing to do with sexuality. Eighty-five per cent of all men have been tricks. The more money and power the trick has, the weirder the sex he wants to buy. Being a prostitute is not illegal, but everything surrounding prostitution is. Under Bill C-49 (the federal anti-soliciting law) all we have to do is nod and we can be convicted of communicating for the purposes of soliciting. The sentences range from fines, area restrictions, curfews, probation to jail sentences up to six months. While passing sentence, the judge arbitrarily decides if a woman can afford to pay a fine. Poor women and women of colour get jail sentences. Any woman working the street can be stopped by the Vancouver police to have an ID card made. This is done with no connection to charges: it is harassment. The police take our pictures and fill out an information card including our names, address and birth date\u00E2\u0080\u0094which we must show identification for\u00E2\u0080\u0094what hours we work, what corners we work as well as what we \"specialize in\" and what we charge for it. A woman can be ID'ed several times in one evening. Although this is illegal, if we refuse to co-operate, we can't work. The police will sit in their cars close by, scaring away clients for hours. This is the job of Squad 6 of the Vancouver police force. Prostitutes are given an outlaw status by society at large because we charge for sex. We get treated as disposable women. On an average, we are raped 10 times a year. When we try and report this violence to the beat cops, most refuse to take the reports and threaten to charge us with soliciting. The myth is you can't rape a prostitute. jtes?7' fli&w ^p^i ; I ^B '\ / When a women downtown tried to report a rape the police asked her if she was going home. When she said no, she needed to make some money, his response was, \"Too bad, I guess he didn't do a good enough job.\" This is not uncommon. Many sex trade workers have been told by the police if they didn't want this to happen, they should get off the street. KINESIS When we are lucky enough to be taken seriously and the case gets to trial, like most women it is our lives that are put on trial, not the man's behaviour. We at POWER (Prostitutes and Other Women for Equal Rights) have heard from many women that rapists tell women if they go to the police they will say she was working as a prostitute, even if she was not. Since February 1986, 21 prostitutes have been murdered in B.C. alone. Only four of these murders have been solved. Violence has increased drastically anywhere prostitution laws have been made harsher. At POWER, we are getting more and more reports of rape with weapons. From our statistics, 76 per cent of these rapists are white males in their twenties and thirties. Abusive Boyfriends Everyone thinks prostitutes are forced to work by pimps. A woman works for money and then chooses whether or not to give her money to her lover. This doesn't make her any different than the straight woman who shares her income with a man. There are pimps, but they're not the same as we see on television. Because of racism, we are led to believe all pimps are black; pimps come from all races. The second myth is that women can't escape their pimp. If a woman S wants to leave her man she can. POWER | has helped women to get away from abusive \u00C2\u00A3 boyfriends. 3 It is common knowledge on the street I that the only transition house in Vancouver where prostitutes can stay is Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter. Rape Relief not only encourages women to talk about their fives, but to also take on the fights with other women in the house about prostitution; that way, no women get isolated. There are individual workers at different transition houses that will allow women to see Prostitutes pq 12 Across Canada WHAT\" S NEWS? by Andrea Lowe UI benefits extended to natural fathers The National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) is applauding a June 8th Federal Court ruling giving natural fathers the option of staying home with a new child and collecting unemployment insurance benefits for 15 weeks. Prior to the decision only adoptive parents had the choice of either parent giving childcare at home. The judge in the case ruled the failure to offer a choice to natural parents is rooted in sex-role stereotyping and violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The judge was also quick to add the solution was not to be found in cutting into present maternity benefits. He drew a sharp distinction between maternity benefits for childbearing and parental benefits for childcare. Helen Orton of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund said LEAF was pleased with the decision, particularly because \"the court recognized that maternity benefits are primarily granted for childbearing.\" Maternity UI benefits run to a maximum of 15 weeks. NAC president Lynn Kaye stated the decision would provide \"an opportunity for Ottawa to give men a chance to nurture the family.\" The federal government, however, could appeal the decision and how the Unemployment Insurance Act will be changed is not yet known. While both the mother and father could apply for parental benefits, in reality only men would be eligible for a subsequent 15 week parental leave because of the overall limit of 15 weeks for special UI benefits. Furthermore, fathers who may benefit are those few who have paternity provisions in their collective agreements. Only Saskatchewan and Manitoba have labour legislation that entitles men to parental leave. Women's groups, labour organizations and opposition MP's are calling on the federal government to respond quickly to the recent ruling by expanding benefits and amending the UIA accordingly. Anti-rape messages slated for broadcast A $600,0000 television ad campaign in Ontario aimed at dispelling myths about rape is intended to increase public awareness of responsibility for sexual assault, says the province's Minister for Women's Issues. The campaign will be accompanied by public information programs by 69 community groups in the province. The government ads show women and men talking about acts not generally seen as rape: a woman being forced by her husband to have intercourse; a man demanding sex from a woman after an expensive date. The ads suggest that any forced sexual contact is assault and that offenders, not victims, are responsible. While rape crisis centre organizers in Ontario welcome the public education, they fear the campaign will swamp overtaxed resources. Anticipating an increase in demand for services .as a result of the ads, the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, representing 21 organizations, filed a request in April to increase funding from $325,000 annually to $1 million. Solicitor General Joan Smith labelled the request unrealistic, stating, \"You can't just walk in with a good cause and expect to get unlimited money.\" Sask. welfare recipients fight allowance cut In response to cuts in transportation allowances to welfare recipients in Saskatchewan last fall, welfare offices are being flooded with official appeal forms. According to Angel McKay of Equal Justice for All, a group dealing with issues concerning people on welfare, the decision to cut transportation money is not only cruel and disempowering, but possibly illegal. Since every welfare decision can be appealed, the group is encouraging welfare recipients to make appeals to the Department of Social Services and to resist intimidation. The welfare rights group has also launched a door-to-door campaign to support welfare recipients whose appeals are proceeding. To date, over 400 appeals have been submitted. LEAF: sexual harassment is discriminatory Sexual harassment is a way in which women are kept subservient in the workplace, Louise Lamb of the Women's Legal Educational Action Fund (LEAF) told the Supreme Court of Canada in mid-June. Lamb was acting on behalf of two Winnipeg women, Dianna Janzen and Tracy Govereau, who complained to the Manitoba Human Rights Commission after being sexually harassed by a cook at the restaurant where they waitressed in 1982. \"This form of harassment is particularly offensive to women as women, because it reminds us of our group history of subservience and social oppression,\" said Lamb. She also compared sexual harassment to racial harassment. The case went before the Supreme Court following a Manitoba Court of Appeal ruling in 1986 overturning a lower court deci- ' sion that awarded the two women compensation for sexual discrimination. In rejecting the original decision, the appeal court judge compared sexual harassment to a schoolboy VDT's linked to miscarriages once again A new study on video display terminals (VDT) has prompted accusations the Ontario government is failing to protect its employees from the potential hazards of VDT's. Published recently in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, the study found nearly twice as many first-trimester miscarriages in women who worked at VDT's more than 20 hours a week compared to women in similar jobs who did not work at terminals. The report is being viewed as one of the most significant yet on the hazards of The study's findings are the focus of a grievance hearing that began June 13 in which the Ontario Public Service Employees Union is charging the government has refused to adapt its terminals to guard against very low-frequency radiation. The Ontario government appears reluctant to give credence to the report and has discouraged continued testing of VDT's. A letter from a senior Labour Ministry official last year reveals the ministry's view that \"the more testing that is done, the more people are lead to beheve there might be something hazardous to protect against.\" There are nearly three million VDT's in use in Canada today. N.S. doctors stonewall abuse complaints More than 50 women have taken action against the Nova Scotia medical establishment with complaints of verbal and sexual abuse. Since May, the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women has received a flood of allegations concerning harassment by doctors. The Council subsequently brought together over a dozen women to form a support group and approach the Nova Scotia Medical Board. Vicky Trainor, one of the complainants, has been fighting for three years to get her case of mistreatment taken seriously. Trainor revealed that her doctor, a Halifax- area gynecologist, referred to her continuously as 'doll' and 'sweetheart'. Before examining her, Trainor reported the doctor told her: \"Lift up your shirt, I want to feel those.\" When Trainor wrote to her family doctor about the incident, he refused to pass the letter on to the gynecologist, saying it would hurt his feelings. Trainor also attempted to bring the matter to light through the provincial medical society and the Chief of Staff of gynecology at Grace Maternity Hos pital in Halifax. He dismissed her concerns as a communication problem. Other women have had similar horrifying experiences with their doctors and are equally frustrated in their attempts to pul a stop to the abuse. About half the complaints involve the Halifax gynecologist. Fifteen other doctors share the remaining complaints. Women in the support group were lingered to learn that their family doctors and the medical society could have complained on their behalf to the provincial medica] board. The board has the power to revoke a doctor's licence, impose a fine or other disciplinary measures. Military wives claim victory in ruling A recent ruling by the federal defence minister will allow limited political activity by spouses and dependents of Armed Forces members on military bases. The ruling is seen as a victory for the Organizational Society of Spouses of Military Members, an activist group founded in 1983 by five women from Alberta. In 1985 the organization filed a lawsuit against the Department of National Defence charging _, that regulations covering conduct of civilian ^ spouses contravened the Charter of Rights. I: Mary Anne Jablonski, vice-president of the organization, cites alcoholism, family violence and an almost total lack of daycare facilities as serious problems on military bases. Until the recent Ottawa decision, family members have been powerless to organize for change. The new ruling does, however, give base commanders discretion to intervene in activities they feel may affect base security. Women doctors increase, men scared off The number of Canadian women applying to medical schools is steadily increasing while the number of male applicants diminishes, according to a new study by the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges (ACMC). Between 1973 and 1988, the percentage of female applicants rose from 25 to 46 per cent. Enrollments in Canadian schools this year reflect those figures; 935 men to 817 women. Dr. Peter van Nostrand of the University of Toronto blames government for the shift: \"Medicine is ceasing to appeal because of government intervention ... limiting billing numbers, deciding where doctors can practice. The profession has lost its lustre.\" But the study's author, Eva Ryten, offers a different interpretation. \"When a field tends to become feminized, men move out,\" said Ryten. '\u00C3\u0084\u00C3\u00BB KINESIS International In England Lesbians, gays and the \"Looney Left\" fight back by Sherri Hetherington H you've talked to anyone living in England recently, you'll know the British government has declared war on six million gays and lesbians. Clause 29 was introduced in the House of Commons on December 14, 1987. This piece of legislated discrimination threatens to make gays and lesbians second-rate citizens by outlawing any positive imagery associated with being gay or lesbian. The clause prohibits any authorities (such as a mayor) from intentionally promoting homosexuality and/or publishing educational material which promotes the acceptability of homosexuality. The clause also prohibits the promotion of gay and lesbian couples and their children as \"pretended\" families. In defending the clause, the Earl of Caithness stated the majority of homosexuals would not be affected by the bill. However, the terms \"intention\", \"promotion\" and \"pretended family\" were never defined as the bill passed through the House of Commons and then the House of Lords. Clause 29 received Royal Assent on April 1, 1988 and became law on May 24, 1988. Translated, this law means gay and lesbian clubs, counselling centres, parades, publications, housing operations, plays, films, art and bath houses could be seen as promoting homosexuality. Any local authority permitting the above activities would be subject to prosecution. Authorities have been advised by lawyers to anticipate the possibility of the above and to act accordingly. Clause 29 stems from a combination of homophobic factors, the most obvious being the backlash from AIDS and the negative Toronto conference environment created by mainstream media. Concurrent to AIDS hysteria, -a few London boroughs actively advocate gay and lesbian rights. Haringey, Camden and Islington have strong gay and lesbian communities represented by gay and lesbian elected officials. Citizen Advice Bureaus which provide social services have worked to promote the acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. When two books Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin and Young, Proud, and Gay, were introduced into the school curriculum last year, parents in Haringey withdrew their children in protest. The justification of Clause 29 has been \"primarily to stop left-wing councils from teaching school children that homosexuality is a valid alternative to heterosexuality,\" says Viscount Falkland of the House of Lords. Yet in its composition, Clause 29 has obviously been drafted to affect much more than the books permitted in schools. Fortunately, Clause 29 has done anything but keep British gays and lesbians in the closet. Jan Parker, a member of the Association of Local Authorities, has stated, \"It's sad that we are not going to win in terms of the law, but we have succeeded in mobilizing the biggest gay rights movement ever in Britain.\" The Stop the Clause campaign coalition succeeded in changing the Labour party's partial opposition of the bill to complete opposition. The coalition, with Organization for Lesbian and Gay Action (OLGA) at the forefront, held a 15,000-strong march on January 9th. Thirty-four were arrested, including two lesbians on charges of kissing in public. In the House of Lords, Viscount Falkland voiced his belief that, \"Many of the extrem ist groups were well financed by the United States waiting for chances to exploit Clause 29.\" In April, 50,000 people marched in London. There has also been brave work by individuals. Three lesbians scaled down from the Strangers Gallery into the House of Lords chambers on February 2nd to protest the clause's passage. On April 23rd, a small group of lesbians disrupted a BBC broadcast by chaining themselves to a camera. In addition, local authorities from the nicknamed \"Looney Left\" have vowed to defy any restrictions imposed by Clause 29. OLGA is establishing an international network of support, a task they deem necessary in order to appeal Clause 29 at the European Court of Human Rights. The battle for gay and lesbian rights in England should justifiably concern B.C. Urging stronger anti-apartheid links by Sadie Kuehn In the mines, people are only numbers. When there is an accident, sometimes it is. days before a family knows the father has been killed because no names are issued. Mothers watch their children being brutalized\u00E2\u0080\u0094and determine to fight against the system that does this. They watch their children grow angry\u00E2\u0080\u0094and this anger turn into hate. This was the message delivered by four South African women to the first national women's conference on solidarity with South Africa, held near Toronto on June 3-5. Nine women from B.C. joined 70 others from across Canada in trying to understand the role race, gender and class play in power relationships here, as well as in South Africa. Bibiana Seaborn of Inter Pares identified a central theme at the opening session. She said women have played an important role in the struggles in South Africa. Women's resistance has raised new issues for the liberation movement. Their perspective, growing out of their specific oppression under apartheid, has changed the broader movement. On the following day, a woman from an organization within South Africa spoke, along with two women from SWAPO (Namibia) and the African National Congress. In addition to fears for their children's future and destruction of the Black family, these women talked about rape and other abuses while under detention, and about the economic struggle in a system that pays them very low wages. Women lack control of their own bodies. Many companies force Black women to use Depo-Provera\u00E2\u0080\u0094a contraceptive drug banned in European countries\u00E2\u0080\u0094as a condition of employment. All these problems are easier to face if you are not alone, and the speakers described support systems women have set up to help one another cope. Workers are fighting for maternity benefits and child care. Domestic workers, who And women's organizations have come alive again. The Federation of South African Women, dormant for 20 years after its leadership was banned in the late 50's, has been resurrected and is active in the Transvaal and northern Cape. The Federation and the ANC Women's League laid the groundwork for these new groups and provide a clear perspective that women's struggles tie in with the broader struggle. At the same time, there is a recog- \u00C2\u00B0Rememberall our women in campaigns Remember all oar women in the gaols cRemember all our women over manytighting years cjfiememberallour women for their triumphs $> for their tears often face sexual harassment, are struggling against being separated from their families, as their children are sent to the \"homelands,\" while they look after someone else's children. Their union has placed the issues of 'rights to a family' on the agenda for negotiations. nition that national liberation does not in itself ensure the liberation of women. In addition to oppressing the majority of its own people, South Africa illegally occupies neighboring Namibia. Monica, the speaker from Namibia, told of her country residents. The Social Credit party has refused to provide basic human rights to gays and lesbians, has passed a Quarantine Law, and is making moves to censor information on homosexuality and lesbianism in B.C. schools. Anti-homosexual violence is on the increase. On April 29, 1988, Stop War on Gays and Lesbians (SWOGL)\u00E2\u0080\u0094a new Vancouver activist group\u00E2\u0080\u0094demonstrated at the British Consulate, adding a British Columbian voice of disapproval to such an outrageous act of discrimination. For more information on Clause 29, write: Stop the Clause Campaign, c/o ULU, Malet St., London, WC1E, England. For more information on SWOGL, contact VLC, 876 Commercial Dr., Vancouver, B.C., (254-8458). having one South African soldier to every 11 or 12 Namibian people. In many of the public institutions there are informers planted by the South African government, creating a constant atmosphere of mistrust and fear. But the struggle goes on in Namibia, with school boycotts, large and militant labour unions, and the organizing and fighting by SWAPO, the liberation organization. The Namibian situation is very much related to what is happening next door in Angola where there have been recent successes in pushing back the South African supported guerrillas, UNITA. But Angola, too, has already paid a tremendous price for being located in the neighbourhood of South Africa, It has the highest amputee population in the world\u00E2\u0080\u0094 from mines placed in the fields and on the roads by UNITA and South African forces. The women from Southern Africa called on us in Canada to push our government and corporations not only to take a stronger stand against apartheid, but to help build an alternative by relocating industry from South Africa to the Frontline States. What was the response from the Canadian participants? The women at the conference committed themselves to building a strong national network, including Black, Native and other women of colour. As an initial building activity, as many provincial groups as possible are to organize South African Women's Day events, and exchange messages of solidarity with Southern African women's organizations. And commitments were made to continue with campaigns in our communities, such as the Shell boycott. The conference was a fine start to building a stronger network for anti-apartheid work among women and in the broader community , KINESIS Jul./Aug. 88 International /////////////////. Fijian feminists Taking great risks in the wake of the coup by Radhika Bhagat As an Indo-Fijian Canadian, I consider Canada a \"new home.\" But, hke me, the Indo-Fijians of Vancouver have left behind friends and family, and that strengthens our interest in Fiji. During my recent visit to Fiji, I was exposed to the changes the country has gone through since the coups of 1987. For me, Fiji has always been a mixture of people with different cultures, languages and ways of life who lived beside each other peacefully, with some cross-cultural exchanges. Now, there is a general feeling of depression and apathy, especially among Indo-Fijians. Exploitation of women and violent crimes against them seem to have increased. This oppression has given birth to a real sense of strength among some women: they are placing themselves at great risks fighting against the militarization of Fiji. This oppression has given birth to a real sense of strength among some women In order to understand present-day Fiji, I will give some historical background. When first contact was made by European explorers, Fiji was inhabited by the ethnic (Melanesian) Fijians. After colonization by Britain, British settlers\u00E2\u0080\u0094especially from New Zealand and Australia\u00E2\u0080\u0094bought land from the Fijian chiefs for the purposes of farming. Labourers were needed to cultivate the land and ethnic Fijians were \"an option.\" However, since ethnic Fijians lived in villages under chiefs, using them as labourers meant disintegration of this village way of life. Around that time, it was in vogue for British colonials to use Indian labourers under the indenture system in countries like Trinidad and Mauritius. In the indenture system, labourers were bonded to work for five years but could renew their \"contract\" for another five. After the first five years, the labourers could either go back to their original homeland or stay behind as free settlers. From 1879 to 1916, 60,500 Indians of mainly Hindu and Muslim backgrounds from varying caste systems were recruited from North India and later South India. Backbreaking Work Other than what is known from oral history, little has been written about women and their experience from a woman's perspective. Three known methods or reasons have been given for recruiting women: they were deceived by recruiters and taken to transport depots instead of where they wanted to go; they came of their own accord in order to escape patriarchal village life; or they accompanied husbands and families. For every 100 men, about 30 women were recruited. My paternal great-great grandmother is said to have been deceived by a recruiter, who took her and her two children to the transport depot instead of her intended destination. My maternal great grandmother was \"romantically involved\" with a younger man (she wouldn't have been accepted by his family because of her age and religious background) and she asked him to run away to the \"beautiful and rich land\" everyone talked about. My paternal great grandmother sang songs women had made up during the in-i denture days. These were stories about their daily events\u00E2\u0080\u0094how they were woken up by the overseer banging on the door at 4 am and how they used to carry their farming hoe, their food and water bundle and their children to the fields for a nine hour day. She would reminisce about the poor living conditions (shack-like barracks called \"coolie fines\"), the whips used on them by overseers and the back-breaking work in the heat. My maternal great grandmother, who was an attractive woman, apparently lived in constant fear of being sexually harassed by her overseer. The small women-to-men ratio is said to be one of the reasons for the violence against women\u00E2\u0080\u0094stories of how a man disfigured or murdered a woman he regarded as his wife for suspicions of unfaithfulness; of how a father sold his daughter to one man, then took her back to sell to someone else; or how husbands would \"lend\" their wives to overseers for material favours. The indenture system ended in 1916. Free labourers initially leased land from the Colonial Sugar Refining Company and later from ethnic Fijian chiefs. (Presently, 83 per cent of land is under the Native Land Trust Board. Decisions on use of this land is made by the NLTB, which is dominated by the chiefs of certain areas. A common ethnic Fijian has no say in who gets the land or how it should be used.) Emigrants, mostly from Gujrat in India, came to Fiji after 1916 to open up retail businesses. Today, some of the most successful businesses are owned by the Gujratis. Once high school education became available, descendants of the labourers started moving into professions. During this time, ethnic Fijians maintained their village way of life, with a slow move by some towards the urban areas. Little inter-racial mixing occurred between the Indo and ethnic Fijians due to differences in culture, religion (ethnic Fijians are predominantly Methodist Christians), language and living arrangements. These differences\u00E2\u0080\u0094and some created splits\u00E2\u0080\u0094were used by the British Colonials to \"rule\" Fiji. For example, Indo-Fijians have always been considered foreigners brought as labourers only who have slowly asked for more. Ethnic Fijians were used as scab labour or for policing when disputes or strikes occurred in the early post-indenture days. The only people who would not have benefitted from the Fijian Labour Party are the privileged upper class ... Giving up Fears However, during my recent visit I noticed the beginnings of inter-racial exchanges. It looked like people were slowly getting ready to give up these deep-rooted fears and suspicions of each other. The formation of the Fiji Labour Party in 1984 can be seen as evidence of this. FLP was led by an ethnic Fijian (Dr. Bavadra) and the party had a cross-cultural appeal. The only people who would not have benefitted from the FLP are the privileged upper class, responsible for a lot of corruption and the exploitation of the common ethnic and Indo-Fijians. The 1987 coup displaced the month-old FLP government. Behind the coup were for- } cards together and strike up a conversation, not hard to do in a bingo hall. First of all they got us straightened out about the different games. Yellow were your bonanzas, the flurry cleared, we came away with five different sets of paper bingo cards. We spotted four women who had everything under control and headed over to their table so we could rely on their advice. We could tell they were veterans because, half an hour before start-up, they had all their cards glued together and laid out, their drinks all bought and their snacks in the middle of the table. They were sitting orange were your early bird specials, blue were your houdinis and green were your odds and evens. The big mats with nine games on every page were your regular bin- gos. I was glad to have this information, but it also made me very nervous. I had never heard of houdini or odds or evens. I had no idea how to play those games but I figured if I just took it easy, the pros next to us would explain all. In exchange for all the local bingo customs my friend's mother told our neighbours all about how bingo is played in England. They were interested because it is so different. People have little books of numbers and when the numbers are called they put a fine through it with a pen. The same number is in the same place on every page, and the announcers go much faster. Interesting, but not as colourful as here\u00E2\u0080\u0094until she told about the National Bingo. Every night at twenty past eight in every bingo hall in England, Scotland and Wales, people play the National Bingo by computer. The winner gets \u00C2\u00A350,000 ($100,000 Canadian). \"Shit,\" said the woman next to me. \"And I'm sitting here playing for a lousy fifty bucks. They don't do anything right in this bloody province!\" You never know when moments of political solidarity will occur. I looked at my neighbour in a new light as she went on to complain bitterly about the new regulations that had cut into how much you could win playing bingo. I looked down at my pile of multicoloured paper bingo cards and noticed the proudly waving flag of British Columbia flying in the centre freespace and saw the legend \"British Columbia Lottery Corporation\" printed across the bottom of every card. I looked around the room. Eighty-five per cent of the people I could see were women. \"Is it mostly women who play bingo in England?\" I asked my friend's mother. \"No,\" she said. Just then the announcer came on the microphone and announced that tonight's good neighbour prize would be stuffed teddy bears. (A good neighbour prize goes to the people sitting on either side of the person who wins the bingo.) The woman sitting next to me snorted. \"What the hell am I going to do with a teddy bear?\" She needn't have worried. None of us won. Before she left for England, my friend's mother crocheted me a bingo chip bag. Qjl\u00C2\u00A3fo% JJsUWU^ # ty ctar\< fcgetlrlng ready for_fcKe dance ...J 1146 Commercial * 253-0913 KINESIS IMflMMMrtMffflMMNflMMffflMrfWIflMffff*^ With breathtaking clarity: Chrystos talks back by Celeste George Not Vanishing by Chrystos is a new poetry book from Press Gang Publishers. The book launching will be at Octopus Books in Vancouver on the evening of July 8, 1988. Recently, Celeste George and Con- stanza Silva of the Women of Colour group interviewed Chrystos when she was in Vancouver. Chrystos in her poetry speaks eloquently of our fives as women of colour. She rages against many of the same injustices and oppressions that we fight against. She is passionately political about racism, sexism, classism\u00E2\u0080\u0094in a language we understand. Chrystos is a Native-American woman who refuses to be divided into pieces; her work shows the many facets of who she is as a coherent whole. The humour, the pain, the rage, the loving of women and pride in her heritage are all told with breathtaking clarity and honesty. Constanza: Why is this book important to you? Chrystos: My hope is that it will educate white people so that our lives will change. I think of it as being a political tool. We're pretty much the first generation of native people fluent enough in white ways to be able to talk back. My hope is that the appalling ignorance of the majority of people about native people will at least be chipped at a little. Not to say that the book is the beginning and end all, but that hopefully it can be an entry place for people to begin thinking about native culture and the disrespect it has suffered from all these years. I'm not quite sure it's going to reach the people it needs to reach for change to happen, but I'm hoping it will bring the consciousness of the people who think they're already allied into sharper focus. So that the fighting that they do makes more sense. I can't imagine Ronald Reagan reading it. Or even the white fishermen in Washington and so on. The people I would really like to change will remain immovable but I'm hoping the alliances will become stronger and clearer as a result. When native people try to work with white allies there's a tremendous attrition because of the ignorance that gets confronted over and over again. And if somehow I can do something to dispel the ignorance of those white people so that it is easier for native people to work with them\u00E2\u0080\u0094 that's one of my goals. It's like trying to make our way of looking at things more accessible so that we don't get stereotyped and end up burning out and not doing the political work anymore because white people drive us crazy. Is that enough? Constanza: That's a lot. Celeste: How would you want the Kinesis audience to know you, being that it is predominantly white feminist? Chrystos: I guess the struggle I've had throughout my writing time with white feminists is feeling as though I'm continually clamouring for respect. That what I am saying makes sense or is rational ... My sense is that how I perceive things is very different from the way white feminists perceive things and there's been a lot of disrespect for our way of thinking and processing. Because it is very different. Maybe feminists could become more feminist and less white. They could lose some of that whiteness that leads them to identify with white dominant culture and more and more strongly define themselves as \"feminists\" because at least my definition of feminism is not white. Feminism is something very different. Celeste: It is a political movement? Chrystos: Yes, it is a political movement from my point of view that has taken on responsibility for issues other than issues personal to itself. In other words, the American Indian Movement has concentrated on fishing rights and solidarity and nationhood and all that sort of stuff. I would like to see in feminism the possi- plfiiilllis- bility of not only fighting for women's rights but also the rights of children and the rights of dispossessed people, the rights of minority people and the rights of immigrant people. The basic feminist concept is capable of encompassing a world view; in other words, world hunger is a feminist concern. And nuclear war is a feminist concern. I see feminism as really having a possibility of a much larger movement than it has been, you know much deeper. Celeste: You once told me writing was political; where is it hard for you being a writer and where is it easy? Chrystos: It's very easy for me to write about the struggle of my people and the struggles of people that I feel solidarity I WALK IN THE HISTORY OF MY PEOPLE There are women locked in my joints for refusing to speak to the police My red blood full of those arrested in flight shot My tendons stretched brittle with anger do not look like white roots of peace In my marrow are hungry faces who live on land the whites don't want In my marrow women who walk 5 miles every day for water In my marrow the swollen hands of my people who are not allowed to hunt to move to be In the scars of my knees you can see children torn from their families bludgeoned into government schools You can see through the pins in my bones that we are prisoners of a long war My knee is so badly wounded no one will look at it The pus of the past oozes from every pore This infection has gone on for at least 300 years Our sacred beliefs have been made into pencils names of cities gas stations My knee is wounded so badly that I limp constantly Anger is my crutch 1 hold myself upright with it My knee is wounded How I Am Still Walking with\u00E2\u0080\u0094in El Salvador, in South Africa. It's almost as if politics is safe. I understand, I think, what is happening and I think I understand what needs to be done and the things that need to be changed. And so politics is an area that I am very comfortable in. The things I am struggling to write about are things that, first of all, I'm ashamed of I'm an ex-hooker, I'm an ex-junkie, I'm an ex-mental patient and I'm a survivor of incest. And all of those things consumed a great deal of the time in my fife. I need to write about all of them and it's extremely difficult to get close to those things. Words feel very, very inadequate, but there's also the fear that in claiming being an ex-hooker, or an ex-mental patient, or an ex-junkie\u00E2\u0080\u0094not so much an incest survivor because it's okay to be an incest survivor. It's still not okay to be an ex-hooker, ex- junkie, ex-mental patient. In claiming those things, I'm afraid I'll lose what tittle respect I've scrabbled around to get. My sense of the feminist movement is still one in which there's no recognition of the absolute parallel between being a hooker and being a feminist. You know, a sex- worker is on the frontlines and deserves our most profound respect as someone who is out there fighting in the belly of the monster. In a certain sense, lesbians and whores are the only rebels, the only sexual rebels in the dominant culture. They're the only people who are not owned by a man. You know marriage, affairs and all that kind of stuff is very bourgeois and very acceptable. Even having children out of wedlock is very acceptable nowadays. And so these last places of rebellions are lesbians and whores. It's still not acceptable for a woman to say, this is my body and I'm going to sell it to the highest bidder and that's what I'm going to do with my body. And I get to do that if I want to. One of the things feminists completely ignore\u00E2\u0080\u0094over time prostitution is still the highest paid work a woman can get. Until you change that, talking to someone about how they are abusing themselves is ridiculous. This is a money culture. Hyou have three children in America and you're trying to five on the welfare that you're given, you can't do it! You can't even pay the rent on the welfare you get. So what are you going to do? There's not too much choices. I mean they don't ask for your social security number when you sell yourself on the street. You know, if you get a part-time job somewhere to help support yourself, then you get thrown off welfare and you're back in the whole thing because you cannot even make as much money working full-time. You know, because of the child-care situation. I always get angry when people have moral judgments about someone else's fife and ignore the economic situation. I just wrote a poem called \"Economics 101\" which is about being a whore and it being high-paid work and wanting every feminist in the country to put on a red dress and spend the night on the streets and then see what she had to say. Because when women don't respect hookers you're buying into the patriarchy which also doesn't respect hookers. You've been brainwashed. I'm not saying that prostitution is good. I don't want to be misinterpreted. It's important to remember that almost all pros titutes are survivors of incest. It is part of a continuum of abuse that women suffer. It's pretty crazy for a feminist t\u00C2\u00A9 say to a woman, \"Well, you've really been kicked around in the world, why donrt you pick yourself up, have self-respect. Ac* like me who has never been kicked around!\" Constanza: You write about assimilation, lost culture and growing up with a mixed heritage. Chrystos: I suppose I was most aware of racism when I was a child, being the lightest skinned member of the family. My older brother is very much darker than me. And I always had to help him fight people off. I've been very clear that throughout everything that has happened to me in my life, why I have survived, why I have acceptance in the feminist world is that I have light skin. I'm easier to swallow, so to speak. I'm still struggling with all of this. Because I was raised in a city I'm a very \"white\" person in some ways. I would not try to go back and hve on my reservation because I wouldn't act right. I'm really clear that, whether I like it or not, I'm part of the dominant culture. I just am, so I guess I see my role as to somehow be a mediator between those two cultures. To bring the dominant culture to a more humane view point. I take that responsibility very seriously. I am trying very sincerely to make the lives of Native people easier. Because there's many Native people who haven't had the advantages I've had. My mother is white. We have a very terrible relationship. I'm not sure what that is all about. Need time to sort that out. Part of it is that she wants me to be more assimilated. And she's really deeply angry with me for refusing to assimilate. I think part of her anger is really fear. She's afraid that I will he killed. She can't even voicethat. She's also someone who was an immigrant child. She had rickets as a child\u00E2\u0080\u0094still has bad legs\u00E2\u0080\u0094so she came from a very poor background. And she's very much still very frightened of the dominant culture. It's almost as if she's not really white. She is white but I think when you're an immigrant person in this country, you're a peasant in a certain kind of way. You don't have that slickness. She tries very hard to blend in but doesn't. I've often thought almost as if the war between white and Indian people is in me\u00E2\u0080\u0094 it's in my own body\u00E2\u0080\u0094that I am at war with myself all the time: how to behave, what is a good thing to do and what are ethics and feeling a lot of confusion about that. It would be very phoney of me to try to be a traditional Indian person. I'm not a traditional person at all. I think there's a very unique pain people of mixed heritage have. It is very rarely spoken about. You're really not one and you're not the other. And you get it from both sides, kind of like trying to walk on eggshells with razors in between. You try to wend your way through. Celeste: In the poem \"Vision Bundle\" you talk about Native cultural genocide. Did you get a sense that people hear you, especially in a predominantly white audience? Chrystos: No. Celeste: How do you survive this, what keeps you going? Chrystos: I garden! I write in my journal a lot about speaking\u00E2\u0080\u0094literally years of shouting down a void. MWMtMWIMMIMMIMM ... the racism about Indian people is so dense it's almost as if when I read, I'm behind a wall of three hundred years of television and white women in black wigs playing Indians. Last night I read for a gathering, this white woman came up to me\u00E2\u0080\u0094she has been interested in art for many years and collects Indian art. She said she could hardly wait until she could add me to her collection. This is right after I had read poems about white people collecting Indian art. When I wrote \"I Am Not Your Princess\" it was out of the deepest frustration and I feel I can read it and they still don't get it. You know, they laugh at certain parts but they're really not hearing it. I speak English rather well, I believe. And my language is certainly not complex\u00E2\u0080\u0094I hardly use any metaphors. Most everything I say is just talking\u00E2\u0080\u0094straight out talking. It's almost not even poetry in the classic sense. For a long time I thought I'm not a good writer. I'm not a good poet. These people aren't hearing me because I'm not doing it well enough. One of the things that was really helpful to me is\u00E2\u0080\u0094especially after This Bridge CaUed My Back\u00E2\u0080\u0094I started to make connections with other women of colour. I never have problems being understood with women of colour. They hear me and they don't even have to say anything. We just look into one another's eyes. That gives me a sense that what is really going on is, it's not that I'm not a good poet, or not that I'm not being clear. It's that the racism about Indian people is so dense it's almost as if when I read, I'm behind a wall of three hundred years of televi sion and white women in black wigs playing Indians. Indian women who helped white people conquer the west being idolized. People reading weird stuff about Pocahontas. The real me is not speaking poetry\u00E2\u0080\u0094 what's happening is that Pocahontas is up there. And isn't it exciting to see Pocahontas?! A lot of times I feel like I'm in Disneyland. I could walk out in a Minnie Mouse costume and have the same effect\u00E2\u0080\u0094I am literally a figment of everyone's collective imagination rather than a real person. I struggle all the time to make myself real, to force people to acknowledge I'm real and to demystify myself To make it clear , that I am speaking, to some extent, for Indian people but certainly I am not the only Indian voice. And that I'm not representative of Indian women at all, I don't think. Celeste: What kind of support do you get from women of colour? Chrystos: Oh yes, I do get support from women of colour. Talking to women of colour, even if we were just in a bar surrounded by hostile white people and women who did various kinds of numbers to let us know we were not quite right enough. And then at the end classically smiling at us to say goodbye or saying, \"Oh I'm so glad to. see you,\" and never asking us to dance all night. But when we're leaving say hi. I feel very strongly that what keeps me alive is my relationships with you [Celeste], Constanza, with women of colour. Working in my garden is the physical thing I do, but spiritually my relationships with other women of colour, particularly with Native women, help me. My friendship with Dian Million, for instance. H something were to happen to her I don't know that I could go on, because she's strong and she's political and she keeps going. She was just up to visit\u00E2\u0080\u0094her visit rejuvenated me for months and months. I told her she was making it possible for me to go out and do readings literally. We just shared time giggling, talking, eating. I really feel as though that's one of the most powerful weapons against racism\u00E2\u0080\u0094for us to bond together and be supportive of one another, see how situations intersect. They aren't the same but they certainly do intersect. Celeste: I'd like you to talk about how internalized racism affects you personally. In the book there are powerful and overwhelming poems about it. Chrystos: I guess the worst part of that\u00E2\u0080\u0094I don't address it in the book be- -g cause it's so painful to me\u00E2\u0080\u0094is the chunk | about being stupid. Throughout my life I \u00C2\u00AB have been treated by everyone as though 3 I were stupid. When I say things, count- ^ less, countless times, I was either treated as | stupid or crazy. So I have this overwhelming H sense that apparently does not come out in my work that I'm stupid. When Delia at Press Gang handed my the book and said, \"Well, what do you think?\" I still couldn't believe it! It's not real to me. I don't know if it will ever be real to me. Kind of like\u00E2\u0080\u0094oh, this is real nice, it's all me but I didn't do that! I'm too stupid to do that. Over the years different people have said to me, \"I don't feel that you're stupid, you're very bright.\" Fm starting to get a sense that maybe I'm bright. I see that as the greatest damage that racism has done to me. This is my first published book\u00E2\u0080\u0094Fm 41 years old\u00E2\u0080\u0094I've been writing since I was nine. It's only now I have felt like maybe I was good enough to be in a book. I'm still really unsure of that and don't have the self-confidence and I see that as endemic throughout the Native women's community. My friend Dian is a fabulous writer and is struggling very deeply with that very issue of not feeling as though she's good enough. I try to help her and lots of other people because it makes me really angry that some of the wisest people in the world consider themselves stupid. Celeste: Some of the women of colour in this community are challenging that our voices are silent. However, there's another huge part of that, which is we also have to battle the internalized racism in ourselves to do it. We have to figure out what gets in the way of our doing it, what stops us from writing about our own experiences. Chrystos: That terrible belief that a Masters degree in English literature means you can write. Is that ever a crock of shit! Some of the worst writers in the world have Masters degrees in English literature. Who would ever read that crap? It's boring. It's not even good enough for toilet paper. It just goes on and on and says nothing. That's the struggle\u00E2\u0080\u0094that's why I encourage women of colour, no matter where they're coming from, to write. Chrystos, Constanza and Celeste would like to thank Barbara Bell for the work she put into getting the interview written. \"Not Vanishing\" is available from Press Gang Publishers, 603 Powell St., Vancouver, B.C. V6A 1H2 ($9.50 plus $2.00 postage & handling). t KINESIS KINESIS Arts \\XX\X\X\X\\\NXXXN\\VXXXNXXX\\\X^^ Theatre Disabled we stand - a flourishing culture by Eunice Brooks and Nancy Mitchell Ashley Grey delivers skills and a chance for self-respect to physically and mentally challenged thespians as Canada Post delivers our mail: better late than never. Grey flew in for this year's Youth, Communication and the Arts Symposium, one feature of the Vancouver Children's Festival, May 20-23. Her workshop was entitled \"Disabled We Stand.\" Ashley Grey is a member of the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation, and describes her political self as \"a Labor Party voter, and\u00E2\u0080\u0094well, a pinko lefty.\" Her voice rings like a tenor bell on a clear morning. For only $20 a session, artists, educators, producers, programmers and interested parents reaped the benefit of her years of experience with theater arts in the United Kingdom. While here, she made use of Vancouver's Theater Terrific\u00E2\u0080\u0094a company for the mentally and physically challenged\u00E2\u0080\u0094 to demonstrate the range of her gifts. She broke the workshop into smaller groups each with a disabled person to talk about things long hidden from the general population. They talked about quality of life, lust, passion, sexuality and family tenderness. For ages, disabled persons have been tagged \"not normal\" and assumptions have been made which Grey means to unmake. She produces frothy and fun dramas in which the disability is all but ignored. Focus is rather on wit and charm, and all the things one expects to find in live theater. \"I hope that it's a long time after the applause that any audience begins to think that the actors used tools such as wheelchairs, crutches, or leg braces as part of the stage props,\" says Grey. She has worked with the Graeae Theater- in-Education team which tours U.K. schools to workshop on disabled issues. Next year she has a grant to call for and produce written culture of the disabled minority. \"Most persons don't realise the disabled have a culture, let alone that it is flourishing,\" she told us. Her 90 minute sessions focused on self-assertion, positive imagery and media stereotypes. \"She would describe an emotion, then do it, something like mime at first,\" said a highschool drama teacher. She got all of us exploring the emotion in ourselves. The surprise part\u00E2\u0080\u0094I guess\u00E2\u0080\u0094was when the Theater Terrific people showed similar motions and emotions to the rest of us.\" Since the Vancouver Children's Festival regularly offers entertainment accessible to disabled persons\u00E2\u0080\u0094such as the Kokoro Dance Company who this year performed Rage based on the experience of Canadian Japanese during World War Two\u00E2\u0080\u0094Grey felt it was worth participating in. She found a feast of entertainment for special needs children. Vancouver got to her. She stayed on to work with Theater Terrific as they went into rehearsals for their May 31-June 2 production at the Robson Media Centre. When asked what motivates her, Grey replied, \"The immediate need to change attitudes. I spent my years from age six to seventeen preparing to be a ballerina. Then I was refused a chance to audition because one of my hands is not properly formed.\" She says equality legislation\u00E2\u0080\u0094rights for the disabled\u00E2\u0080\u0094is not happening. Isolation of disabled persons is a major problem. She says too that one of the most handicapping facets of disabled fife is government handouts. The money dribbles in. People working on arts grants or on pensions are expected not to join in protests. Protesting persons may be punished by the holding back of a needed wheelchair. It happens all the time. In her experience, the majority of disabled persons want careers. Certainly she does. Then the voice drops. \"What's the use of us talking, if no one listens,\" said Grey. It's hard not to listen to that enthusiastic voice and the fluid body language. You notice her unmatched hands, graceful as swallows, always in motion, catching bits of wisdom, juggling then passing on. She dances to the tune of her inner voice. \"Social conditioning,\" she told us, \"can be unlearned, just like racism.\" The moment of doubt vanished. Her smile returned. Graeae was formed in 1976; Grey joined in 1981. She acts and writes plays. Graeae prepares students for roles in television and the movies. Young disabled persons hope to and drama.\" They tour for six months at a time and employ as many as 56 persons. At the present time, Graeae is running on $100 thousand in grants a year, but earnings are on the increase. The ideal is complete independence: then, and only then, can she say and write how she feels about the anger inside. Debate and argument are the best tools for change, but they are denied to groups that are government-funded. Grey said, \"We care too much what able- bodied people think of us. I'm proud of myself and my work, and I will say that to anyone who will listen.\" Grey uses the word empowerment often. She also talks about how people can take power away from any group by mak- In an informal moment, Grey talked with actors about how certain unflattering images are built into our language, such as the the word blind for unfeeling and deaf for unwilling to listen. She talked about the conditioning behind the bigotry. She uses that sort of thing in her skits, pointing out that Archie Bunker cured more bigots than any single character in the history of the theater. She writes plays that let people see their own unconscious cruelties. Grey has experienced cruelty in her own She was born with a deformed hand and a determined personality. She left her parents' home in London because her mum was cer- become stars. They know a change of attitude is needed, but the supportive group gives each member courage to attend auditions in traditional repertory theater. They don't want charity. They want to compete equally with others for roles they have rehearsed and know they can play act. The term Graeae comes to us from Greek mythology and, roughly translated, means old woman\u00E2\u0080\u0094but the connection is with two old women who were set to guard the gorgon. Between them, they had but one eye and one tooth. \"The name is even more appropriate,\" says Grey. \"H you look up the myth, you'll find that one of the bloody heros stole even the eye and tooth.\" One of the repertory school tours carries the ironic pun name of \"Ready Salted Crisps.\" (We call them potato chips here.) Grey says the plays make children laugh and for a short while feel empathy with actors. Like junk food, the shows fill in gaps and children love them because they're slightly irreverent. The players gain pride and self- respect with each opening night. \"Black culture has emerged, and is making money run by Blacks,\" said Grey. \"We the disabled must get off charity and put out our own culture with literature, visual arts ing it assimilate and give up its culture, until everyone is the same. She's an admitted subversive. She says that the values of disabled persons are not necessarily those of able-bodied persons. For instance, our society values status which is usually connected to one's job. A jobless person has no status. Disabled persons who seek work in the theater are-not as motivated by the desire to become filthy rich as by the need to be accepted. Grey believes that actors should have a say in their training, a practice Graeae recognizes and which came under discussion with Theater Terrific. She doesn't give stage directions as is normal for a director. Rather, she talks to the role player, asking them to feel the role and to become the character. She told them, \"Once you are the character, everything you say and do will be right and you can forget your hands and feet and just deliver the lines, as though you were that character interacting with another person in real fife.\" Several members of Theater Terrific told us Grey immediately became \"one of them.\" She told them any message they want to get across must be well hidden in the fines, like the pill in the candy. She often touched the people she was counselling, caresses that carried her feelings of appreciation while her words were about stage craft. tain she could be a ballerina. So she grew up in a boarding school for artsy girls on a well- earned scholarship. While practicing ballet, Grey also studied sociology. When the National Ballet School wouldn't let her in the door, she went to university to heal her social wounds, and learn about why some people have more power than others. At the arts boarding school, Grey was forced to use an artificial hand that was a burden physically and emotionally. She didn't want it, but she was taught she couldn't have a normal fife without it. The day she left school, the artificial hand came off and she has learned to cope with the body that belongs to her. She's 28 now, and has ambitions to last her will into dotage. Grey is a woman who wants no help. There are things she wants to do, and she will do them independently. She mused to us, \"I think I was lucky in being born in London, where theater tradition runs strong.\" She then looked at her newly-found friends and sighed. Grey had to go home before Theater Terrific did their May 31-June 2 production. But most of the members of the group agreed she'd have been proud of them. Her enthusiasm was there and they used it like a crutch. AINESIS Arts ^s^*2j^2ms%mim%^ In public, too Dreaming on a grand, hopeful scale by Pat Feindel Paula Jardine, artistic director of the Public Dreams Society, once had a voice teacher who told her, \"H you don't show people the fight at the end of the tunnel, you're not doing your job.\" In a world of catastrophe, war, pollution and general bad news, the Public Dreams Society dares to encourage hope, dreams, play and collective action. Public Dreams is a group of artists and organizers\u00E2\u0080\u0094mainly women\u00E2\u0080\u0094whose large outdoor spectacles incorporate giant puppets, music, dance, fireworks and, most importantly, the audience as a performing character. Members of the core group come from a variety of theatre and music backgrounds and recruit other performers as projects develop. The name was inspired by a tradition in some cultures of acting out personal dreams that affected the fife of the community so that everyone could interpret them. The spectacles draw on mythic figures and symbols from around the world, but build them into a modern local context. The result is Public Dream events that combine politics, mythology and fun in a dramatic carnival atmosphere. In \"The Enchanted Forest,\" Mr. Big plans to build a theme park in what was once a forest. But the Fat Lady (aka Mother Nature) working in the souvenir booth knows the true mysteries of the Forest that exists \"in the forbidden zone in the mists of time.\" She guides members of the audience as tourists into the Enchanted Forest. On their way, they learn songs and dances, make masks and eventually bring about the downfall of Mr. Big to restore harmony to the Forest. An earlier Public Dreams project \"Journey to the New World\" developed a bilingual Chinese/English spectacle featuring the Living King of Hell\u00E2\u0080\u0094the giant-sized embodiment of modern day greed and tyranny. (Says Jardine, \"absolutely the most popular character we ever created! ... and a story is only as good as its really bad guy.\") The Chinese community played a key role in developing the \"Journey to the New World.\" Local community involvement is an integral part of Public Dreams work. It can be a chaotic process, but also sparks the spontaneous creativity that makes the events both exciting and meaningful to the local audience. Jardine had her start in more conventional theatre, but found it stilted and removed. \"It didn't have anything at all to do with real life, with what was going on in my fife.\" The passive role of the audience bothered her. \"The traditional role of theatre was as ritual, and theatre today has really lost that,\" says Jardine. \"It's lost its ability to provide something that people can be actively involved in.\" Every Culture Draws a Circle Public Dreams is a kind of revival of that ritual function, of creative participation in the mythology of a culture. \"People really want to do this kind of thing ... it's as old as history,\" Jardine says. \"But I can hardly think of anywhere people get to participate in public ritual\u00E2\u0080\u0094 except the Polar Bear swim or hockey games or football games. \"Probably the Children's Festival comes the closest because there's a lot of participation in that.\" But it's frustrating for Public Dreams that their work, too, gets classified as only \"for the kiddies\" rather than being seen as having a wide appeal. Jardine believes the classical structure of the quest\u00E2\u0080\u0094a hero (individual or collective) in search of truth\u00E2\u0080\u0094works universally. Her artistic process is to work with her own search for understanding. \"Like any inquisitive individual I've always tried to figure out what things are for and how we should five,\" says Jardine, \"not just accepted that things are what they appear to be. \"A lot has been written now about how in different cultural myths there is a clear common thread. Every culture draws a circle, for example. The characters may be different, but their function is the same. H you read fox stories from Russia or coyote stories or raven stories from North American Indian mythology, they are all playing the same role\u00E2\u0080\u0094the trickster.\" Public Dreams events tell a modern story using these kinds of images. Jardine's dream is to see a Myth of the New World develop\u00E2\u0080\u0094 a synthesis of images, new and old, from the different cultures that make up our communities\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"to create a truly Canadian theatre, beyond the 'heritage days' mentality of multiculturalism.\" The Goddess and her attendants in \"Earth, Wind, Fire and Air.\" Jardine sees myth and public ritual as having an important function that is now missing from many people's fives. \"H there can be a character or image that embodies all the things that are wrong in your life or all the things that oppress you\u00E2\u0080\u0094 and you can recognize them in yourself too, the things that are part of you,\" says Jardine, \"if you can put all that into one figure and then destroy that figure or transform that figure\u00E2\u0080\u0094then you are free ... at least for a week, an hour. The function of that kind of festival is wonderful, it's a purification. \"There are people with a spiritual kind of quality to their fife, but no larger spiritual structure to be a part ot The only art of church I could relate to was the hats\u00E2\u0080\u0094 Easter bonnets\u00E2\u0080\u0094 and the candlelight stuff.\" Jardine found the mythology hard to get into because it was \"so muddled by the idolatrous worship of the image of a man!\" Though steeped in the thought and imagery of mythology, Public Dreams has a very political basis too. Being women has \"absolutely everything to do with what we are and how we work,\" says Jardine. The group is run primarily by women, they don't work out of a building, they rarely have money, they don't have a performance \"season.\" None of these qualities characterize the theatre work that is controlled by men. \"And you'll notice all the theatres are run by men, all across the coun- try.\" Jardine worked at one point with the Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, but eventually found its work too self-consciously \"political.\" She feels that if you have a political or feminist perspective, if you're thinking about these things, they will come through in your work, no matter what you're doing. Her frustration, and that of the group at present, is the difficulty finding the money to carry out projects. \"I had a lot more business smarts when I was a kid really,\" says Jardine. \"I'd plan these back yard carnivals or plays from Grimm's Fairy Tales and I'd go out and sell tickets to all the mothers for a nickel apiece. Then I'd charge the kids a penny apiece to get in ... the mums never came. \"Empowerment is a word that gets used a lot at our meetings,\" says Jardine. The group is totally committed to participation and community involvement. The work is not for ego gratification or power in the conventional sense, but \"to provide a focal point for people who might not otherwise do something together\" to go through something together\u00E2\u0080\u0094a process, a change. \"I want to feel a part of things\u00E2\u0080\u0094that's in the end why I do it.\" The Living King of Hell on a stroll through downtown Vancouver. THE \&NCOUVER OUTDOOR CLUB FORWOMEN ORGANIZED AND RUN BY WOMEN FRIENDLY, NON-COMPETnTVE ATMOSPHERE LEARN NEW SKILLS SHARE THE EXCITEMENT OF THE OUTDOORS Monthly meetings are held the first Wednesday of each month at Sitka Housing Coop (common room) 1511 Graveley St. 7:30 p.m. (July & August are picnic meetings, call for time and place). For information: Gail 734-3007 Jan 251-2974 Linda 432-9542 KINESIS <^^5<5^N^>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^S^^^^ ARTS Sampling women's film/video: Dreaming, witnessing by Anna Dwyer From June 2-4, the Independent Film and Video Alliance (IFVA/AVCI) held one of the most decisive, politically astute and creatively daring AGM's I have ever attended. As a member of many of Vancouver's Alliance affiliates, (Video In, Women in Focus, Cineworks and Pacific Cinematheque) I was immediately impressed by the quietly confident conduct of business and matching sense of political priorities. Watching the workshops progress, one could easily take this gathering for a feminist national conference. I am not just talking about the horizontal organization, such as rotation of chairpersons, presenters of information, simultaneous interpretation of speakers, etc.\u00E2\u0080\u0094but an obvious commitment to listen to each other and share experiences with respect extended to every voice. As well, many of the Alliances' most active members are feminists. The strength of the Alliance became more evident in the application for membership from eight very active groups such as the Western Front and, for the first time, a Native group, the B.C. Native Film and Video Society. This year, the Alliance made a special effort to present the most challenging films and videos from the more than 7,000 members in a showcase curated by Maria Insell of Cineworks (film) and Paul Wong of Video In (video). Titled \"In Absentia\", the showcase succeeded in \"exploring the historical issues, experiences and memories of people who are not part of dominant culture... \"In Absentia\" is a moving testimony to those emerging cultural communities as the films speak with poetic eloquence through sound and image\" (from Maria Insell's curatorial statement). The following is a brief description of a few of the videos/films that were on display. All are available in video format. SCARS by Lorna Boschman In tight focus on arms and hands, while the speakers sit on a lawn, Boschman lets four people describe why they slash and what it feels like. Rejected by society for who they are, they enact revenge by slashing their arms, feehng the pain directly. By bearing visible scars, they testify both to the power and futility of stigmata. Society has attempted to crush their identity\u00E2\u0080\u0094lesbian, artist and fighter\u00E2\u0080\u0094and torture them into conformity. One woman acknowledges that wrist-slashing was more. a symbolic suicide than an attempt to kill herself, but decides against cosmetic surgery to remove the scars: they are proof, silent evidence of her struggle. In Scars, slashing is an almost automatic, oblivious act of rebellion/subversion, but in the female mode of self-sacrifice, turning internalized oppression against the sell It is a moving, disturbing and insightful work requiring courage from participants and viewers. 12 minutes. Available from Women in Focus (WIF), 456 W. Broadway, Vancouver, V5Y IRS. THE CANNERIES by Bonni Devlin and Stephen Insley This documentary examines the conditions in B.C.'s fishing industry. It shows the frenetic pace of piece work and how Asian immigrant women were kept as a racially segregated labour force, with the bosses' divide-and-rule tactics prohibiting interaction and unionizing. In a straightforward way, without preaching or pleading, the viewer is left to draw her own conclusions about who gains by institutionalized racism. Much archival research for original footage must have been involved, since all visuals seem to be historically based. 24 minutes. Available from Canadian Filmakers Distribution West (CFDW), Suite 100, 1181 Howe St., Vancouver, V6Z 2L7. WAVING by Anne-Marie Fleming Dedicated to the author's grandmother, this film engages in subjective questioning of herstory and, in a poetic imagistic way, searches for identity from Fleming's Eurasian heritage. While Waving employs simple technical means, the result is complex, multi-layered and haunting\u00E2\u0080\u0094the point of identity/recognition shifts and turns to personal loss. Beauty and calm disguise fear and danger. Ambiguities are expressed in comments spoken over a soprano solo of Bach/Gounod's \"Ave Maria.\" \"As I said goodbye ... I saw she was not waving, but drowning ...\" Water, floating, birthing, drowning, being buoyed and surfacing by natural elements and female energy, it is a moving tribute to the passing of woman strength through generations. 5\ minutes. Available from CFDW (see above). MAISON NAISSANCE (BIRTH HOUSE) G.LV., Comite M.N. This tape will make grimfaced reproduc- tionists quake in their Guccis. It will also serve as proof to all who have worked hard for reproductive choices that feminists are the genuine pro-life movement. The viewer is invited to follow mother-to- be Chantal through the final stages of pregnancy and birthing of her child in a \"birth house\". This is what having a baby could look like if health care really had a mother and baby's interests at heart. The house is friendly and cozy, where a woman can prepare confidently for a joyful event, coached and cared for by her chosen midwife, assisted by family members. There are no walls of masks and gowns, induced labour or caesarians for convenience of medical staff. Nature is assisted in its course. Why is this just a dream, you may ask. We need to \"remember the future\" in this beautiful tribute to life's beginnings. 30 minutes. Available, French only, from Groupe Intervention Video, 3575 boul. St-Laurent, Bureau 421, Montreal, Quebec, H2X 2T7. photo by Lorna Boschman LAS ARADAS by Janis Lundman El Salvador, June 24, 1980. The refugee camp of Las Aradas\u00E2\u0080\u0094full of families and children displaced by civil war\u00E2\u0080\u0094is stormed by Salvadoran army regulars, the inhabitants massacred. In the absence of photographic documentation, Lundman gives voice to the victims by telling the story in voice-over. What we see are the grey rocks and green ferns and moss, the silence punctuated by birdsong, after the people are gone. There are no heaped corpses, smoking ruins and gringo \"heroes\" taking it all in with Betacam or Kodacolor. In Hollywood, murderous terror only becomes real (and news-reel) when white males from U.S. networks enter the picture. As Susan Sontag states, such images transfix and anaesthetize the viewer. By refusing to exploit and therefore trivialize the atrocities, Lundman bears eloquent witness and engages the viewer's understanding. 8 minutes. Available from CFDW (see above). HISTOIRE INFAME by Nicole Giguere A sly, ironically inflected invective against I the media portrayal of women in prepackaged stereotypes, whether adored icons or feared \"other.\" Using the rock video format, Giguere packs her dense collage into an agit-prop piece against the uses of woman. Louise Portal's lyrics catalogue \"history\" with a refrain of \"Mata Hari\u00E2\u0080\u0094Striptease/history of woman\u00E2\u0080\u0094scandal, scandal!\" This eight minute piece is so slickly and tightly produced, even film scholars wii need to view it often to identify all the elements from pop-mythology\u00E2\u0080\u0094from Marilyn Munroe in headtossing pose to Dreyer's Joan of Arc in agony. The only flaw is the synthesizer pop music track which weakens the overall impact. 8 minutes. Available from WIF (see above). .KINESIS Arts ////////////////////^^^^^ Mina Totino Finding -- and defining -- pleasure in painting by Susan Leibik Painting has frequently been 'unpalatable' to women. In the western tradition\u00E2\u0080\u0094 as practiced by men\u00E2\u0080\u0094painting has often been 'woman,' or more accurately, the subject has been woman as object. For women painters today, the legacy of that tradition invites subversion. In Vancouver a number of women painters are challenging and changing the boundaries of their medium\u00E2\u0080\u0094if not in form, then certainly in dis-content. Mina Torino's work has appeared throughout Vancouver, most recently in a one-woman show at the Contemporary Art Gallery. In June, Totino articulated her concerns as a woman painter in an \"illustrated\" talk at the Artspeak Gallery. Beginning with images culled from fashion advertisements, Totino read a text ex plaining the constructs that define women in a male-dominated system, one built on the values of \"late corporate capitalism.\" The glut of images controlled and manufactured by advertising has the effect of making women into \"non-entities\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094literally making them into nothing. To claim an existence counter to these constructions is to validate one's own body; to break out of the numbing effects of misogynist culture. As a woman painter Totino works against the inherent problems of female representation\u00E2\u0080\u0094how to articulate pleasure and desire, how to frame one's own perceptions in the midst of social invalidation. According to Totino, the situation for a woman painter is analogous to that of women writers and their relationship to language, with its inherent and imbedded sexism. Just as women writers search to redefine and recon struct language on their own terms, so do artists seek venues that challenge the painting status quo. Showing examples of her work, Totino offered responses to this challenge. Her paintings re-address familiar images, taking them out of the context of advertising or media manipulation and altering both the image and the meaning. Like many women artists, Totino practices a kind of reclamation, re-appropriating socially constructed images and using them to create a truer self- definition. For Totino, the act of painting itself is a means of redefining 'pleasure' for herself as a woman, outside of the usual context relegated to desire or sexual pleasure. The phys- icafity of the work process, the tactifity of paint and the ability to direct the imagery reinforce her strength as an artist. Mina Torino's 'Toyota Girl\" i^ ^*~\"5f8?'*' In slides from her last show, images of struggle were depicted, drawing from newsphotos of South Africa, Brixton, Manila and Central America. The tersely titled \"Hot White Sun\" shows a black man in flight; the monochrome grey of newsprint is replaced by intense, heated yellows. The familiar 'frozen figure' is caught by the camera; and caught in the painting, just as the painter herself is implicated as she brings a moral scale to bear in her stance as an artist. Totino noted how photomechanical reproduction distances\u00E2\u0080\u0094\"making object, making abject\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094the images it represents. By contrast, painting has the possibility of \"closing the gap.\" In paintings from photographs, alterations in scale colour and a sense of tactifity all work to transform the flat anonymity of a newsphoto into a vivid presence that requires response. Totino's paintings also take a close look at how photo reproductions shape our perceptions, the subtle and not-so-subtle politics of news and representation. Her concerns about the obscuring of women's realities are embodied in works such as \"Toyota Girl.\" The source photo is from the slick fashion magazine Taxi. In her painting, the woman portrayed has a raw, defiant energy\u00E2\u0080\u0094her hair is wild, her anger palpable. Totino's present direction is to delineate a sense of confrontation; the focus is on \"women breaking away.\" One work in progress \"Dawn and Dusk of the Same Day\", shows two female figures: one from a perfume ad, redolent of constructed seduction, the other based on a Michelangelo sculpture. Totino spoke of being moved by this sculpture on a visit to Florence. The sense of a real body, a woman's body with its skin texture and natural strength all appealed to Totino's sensibility. Her paintings exude the same strength, confidence and sense of body so absent in mass media portrayals. \"Painting is a minor art\" is a quote from Gertrude Stein cited in Totino's talk. She agrees with this estimation\u00E2\u0080\u0094yet Totino also feels painting can offer \"traces and stories'\" which become necessary in a culture where all women have been silenced or marginalized to some degree. Mina Totino's current works address these strictures and create new grounds to exist in painting, and as painters. Where Do You Draw The Line? That's the question posed by three Vancouver artists at the upcoming Summer Sex Show at Women in Focus. Pictured here is an excerpt from the interactive photo-event \"Drawing The Line,\" a series of photos depicting lesbian sexualities, from 'tame' to 'scandalous.' Women attending the show, which runs from Aug. 20 to Sept. 3, will be invited to 'draw their own lines' by marking directly on the gallery wall their limits regarding lesbian sexual imagery. \"Drawing The Line\" is a work by Persimmon Blackbridge, Susan Stewart and Emma Stonebridge, who collectively call themselves Kiss & Tell. See Bulletin Board for more information about the show, or contact WIF at #204 456 W. Broadway, tel. 872-2250. KINESIS Jul./Au,: SSSSK*S*******KSS*%**^^ ARTS And vice versa Folk music meets feminism by Maura Volante I was wondering how some of my old friends from the Vancouver Folk Song Society were seeing and singing in the world these days. So I asked three of them to speak of the past and present connections of folk music and feminism. Passionately Angry \"When we sang songs about women, it was without any consciousness of the kind of message that these songs contained,\" says Hilda Thomas. \"I used to sing songs like \"The Cruel Mother.\" She has her two children and she murders them. These songs are very powerful expressions of what it was hke to be a woman and to have children out of wedlock. \"But I used to sing these songs of women who are used and abused and abandoned without any feminist consciousness whatsoever.\" Thomas and I are talking over her kitchen table about the then-and-now of our involvement with feminism and folk music. She was, with her husband folk song collector Phil Thomas, one of the \"founders\" of the Vancouver Folk Song Society, which is where we met in 1973. \"It wasn't until '70, '71, with the rapid growth of the women's movement, that I began to introduce songs differently and sing them with a different sense, \" says Thomas. I also started to write songs such as \"I Ain't Going to Do It Anymore\" somewhere around 75.\" Reflecting on the changes in her politics, Thomas speaks of the early years as a discovery, a time of asking questions and analyzing women's roles in the world. Now, she feels \"not cynical, because I refuse to be cynical. But I'm unhappy that, having dealt with those theoretical questions, there is an assumption that the problems have gone away. \"There's a whole generation of young women growing up who take for granted all the things that were so hard won, and that are by no means completed. They don't know that there is still no childcare, that women are earning 60 cents for every man's energy to address that by writing songs, but I wish to hell somebody would,\" says Thomas. Next Step is Writing Songs Five children of various ages run in and out of the house while Rika Ruebsaat and I have one of those fragmented conversations common to mothers, full of asides to the kids and yet still able to follow the thread of the story\u00E2\u0080\u0094in this case, Ruebsaat's development in feminism and folk music. \"I started seeking out women's groups after coming back from London\u00E2\u0080\u0094this was International Women's Year, too, 1975,\" says Ruebsaat. \"I went to the Mariposa Folk Festival and was blown away! Sweet Honey in the Rock was there, and Rosalie Sorrells, and it was a very powerful festival for me.\" I remember that event too, and what comes up for me is meeting Malvina Reynolds. \"Yeah,\" says Ruebsaat, \"Malvina Reynolds, for me, was the highlight of that fes- dollar. I am passionately angry that these problems are not being solved and about this attitude that, 'Of course women are equal with men, we all know that,' and yuk yuk. It makes me want to throw up in my shoes! I guess I don't have the creative THE VANCOUVER EAST- m SOU.\" *'\".nNh.\"fS'X\" 8o,.^cr jttorg*!! smK\u00C2\u00A3 JUC \VOMftN, you 1HB ROCK In cooperation with Market Theatre of Johannesburg July 19 - Aug. 7, 8:30 pm 280-4444 254-9578 tival. Also, that year I met Rita MacNeil. She and I shared the bill at a benefit for the women's centre in Kitchener. It started to make sense that I could do the cultural work I had been doing (theatre and music), with the political consciousness that I had been acquiring, I could do both.\" At the same time, Ruebsaat was interested in Canadian folk music. \"We're inundated with American music,\" she explains, \"and I needed to find a sense of place. I started working on my own in schools and I found it hard to find women's songs. I went to see Edith Fowke in Toronto and I said I would like to find some Canadian songs from the women's point of view. \"She said, 'Well, there's \"Old Grandma,\" and \"The Poor Lone Girl of Saskatchewan,\" and \"The Poor Little Girls of Ontario.\"' I mean there really is very tittle. That was very frustrating.\" Ruebsaat kept her musical activities on a dual track for several years, with the feminist material and the Canadiana. Now, she no longer sings for a living, but works full time as a teacher, as well as having two small children. \"So I feel kind of out of touch,\" she says, \"with the forefront of feminist music. I feel saddened by that, and hope that it's something I can do more of as my children get older and I'm freer to do that. \"The next step would be writing songs. One I have written recently is about being a teacher in a time of restraint. So I would probably write about my work, about having kids and that kind of thing. In terms of voice, I feel much less the necessity to be political in the strict sense of the word. I'd like to write more about the day-to-day struggles of fife. I'm feeling that I don't have to prove things. \"This has been a change of perspective for me, that if I'm going to speak to people I have to speak to them on the level of day-to-day life. Teaching and parenting have helped to make me more tolerant and have made me realize that if I can't speak to these people who are miles from my experience, then I'm speaking to people who are just like me. I don't need to speak to people who are just like me. I want to speak to ordinary people. \"Once I pick up the torch again, that's where I'd hke to be going,\" says Ruebsaat. Finding a Voice Through Music \"In 1974 I got a job doing music for six months at Spokane,\" recalls Dianne Camp bell, as we sit on her front porch in the sunshine. \"By that time I was getting tired of all the songs about women that I was hearing in traditional music. I was fed up with the woman-against-woman stuff. I was really tired of women only in childbearing roles. \"While at Spokane [the Folklife Festival at the Spokane World's Fair], I started hearing a lot more American contemporary music. But the turning point for me was Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. All of a sudden I was \"hearing women doing powerful music and singing about issues I cared about. Malvina,Reynolds was a revelation to me. Here were women who didn't sound pretty all the time, and were presenting another view of women. \"At that point I got involved with the National Organization of Women in Spokane. I did women's workshops, and participated in women's rallies and conferences. It was like I had all this inside but I had to find my voice through music. The turning point was finding women's music.\" In the years since those initial discoveries, Dianne has followed up her feminist leanings with women's studies courses at Simon Fraser University. She now works as an alternate program worker in an alternate high school. Speaking of her work experience, Campbell says: \"One of the things that is edging me back to doing more women's workshops and making sure I incorporate songs about women in my sets is realizing that things have not changed that much for the' young women in our school. \"They think they're going to get out of school, have a job for a couple of years, get married, have kids and a husband who supports them. They're not going to have to be responsible for their own hves. They really think that. Getting involved with young women now makes me realize it hasn't changed as much as I thought it was going to.\" Campbell plans to do assertiveness training with the young women next year and to somehow find the space for a music program with them. Meanwhile, in between her job and her garden, she plays music, using a variety of forms to meet different needs. \"Lots of the music I do now speaks about feelings that we all have. I do lots of swing, jazz and country music\u00E2\u0080\u0094and I do songs speaking directly to women's experiences.\" One of her musical outlets is No Frills, an all-women country/swing band which played at the recent Kinesis benefit. n KINESIS Arts /////////////////////^^^^^ The Japanese have played taiko (large drum) for centuries. The instrument has served many functions: it has called for rain or bountiful harvest during religious ceremonies, it has frightened the enemy during battles, and it has accompanied folk dancing during festivals. Like many folk arts, taiko fell into disuse as modernization and urbanization emerged. The Japanese government saw the danger of attrition and stepped in to revive Katari Taiko A combining of politics and emotions by Leslie Komori and members of Katari Taiko now we vote. The only way we could have developed is collectively. We didn't have a leader and we had to learn from each other. It's time consuming. It's not as efficient as if you had a leader. But I think it makes for a solid group. Although in any group, some people speak up more than others and some people are involved more than others, at least the opportunity is there. The premise is that people should speak up if they don't like something and because of that, everybody has a voice. and promote these traditions. Within the past 30 years, taiko has emerged as a true performing art. One can see the repercussions of this taiko renaissance in North America as more than 30 groups have formed in the past 20 years. Vancouver's Katari Taiko was formed in the fall of 1979. The original members saw the San Jose Group perform at the Powell Street Festival that year. San Jose's power and energy inspired them to form their own group. Most had known each other by working together in the Asian Canadian community. Part of the group's focus was to create something uniquely Asian Canadian and to establish a strong Asian presence in a society in which few people of colour are involved in performing arts. Katari Taiko held its first practice in the gym of the Steveston Buddhist Church. People fashioned drumsticks from broom handles and dowelling, and beat on old tires propped on chairs. Few had played music before and no one really knew what was involved in playing taiko. They decided to invite Seiichi Tanaka, the teacher from San Francisco, to give a workshop. In the five-day workshop, they learned the basic skills of stance, rhythm and technique, as well as history and philosophy. Katari Taiko has grown from that point, probably bigger than anyone would have imagined. I interrogated several members of Katari Taiko over lunch and beer. The following are excerpts from those conversations. Leslie: Could you talk a bit about your experience working in this collective ? Joyce Chong: We used to make decisions by consensus when we first started but Sumi Imamoto: I think it makes our music what it is. I think it would be different if there were more set rules. A lot of our pieces have to do with interaction between people. We play off each other and it's very important that we have respect for what another person is doing The challenging part is to keep up front, to be critical without attacking someone. We try to have everything be better for everyone and ultimately the piece itself is better. Leslie: One of the strengths of Katari Taiko is the ability to talk through things. Could the dominant number of women contribute to this successful rapport? Linda Uyehara Hoffman: I think men working in the group would not share their feelings as much as we certainly do, which means you get to know each other. Women are better at communicating so I think we operate more smoothly than a group of men. Sachiko: I prefer to work with women, too. At my workplace, all the women work upstairs and the men work downstairs. The men have all sorts of problems because they don't communicate. But with us, if any problems come up, we work out the solution. We communicate better and we're quite tight with each other. It would be quite different with men around. Sumi: Within the context of taiko, I don't think about the difference between men and women. If we did have more men it might make a difference. I have been in situations where I have felt I am a woman and they are men. Therefore, there's a problem in communicating or getting something done. I have felt that, but not in this group. Leslie: People perceive the women in Katari Taiko to be a strong presence in performance. Yet it's interesting that no woman has written a piece. Can you comment on that difference? Joyce: It's the same old story. The group is mostly women and the women are out there doing it, but we still have a ways to go in terms of seeing ourselves as writers. I know for me it's fear. It's hke, oh God, it's going to be awful or I'm not going to be able to finish it. It's the same old story about holding back. Mayu Takasaki: At the retreat, when you are forced to work on a composition, you can make up excuses: you only had an hour, etc.\u00E2\u0080\u0094and everyone does it. But I think some people don't write because they fear someone's going to say ... Joyce: What a boring piece. Leslie: Is the group a safe place to write ? Linda: It's a safe place but it's a comment about how fearful we are about presenting something we've written. I don't know if it's between men and women. Some of it might be just John (principal composer of the group). I was thinking about the time Joyce, Eileen, Sumi and I played for Co-op Radio on International Women's Day. We worked out a piece and we all contributed. H John had been there, he would have worked out the piece by himselL It would have been fine because he's more experienced and has a good sense of pieces. That's the way it would have gone but because he wasn't there, the four of us worked it out. It was co-operative and we wouldn't have done it otherwise. On the other hand, if Jan or Harold was there, it would have still been worked out cooperatively. So that's specifically John, right? I Leslie: Could you talk a bit about the | politics of Katari Taiko? 0 Connie: Most of us are involved in a po- | litical way in the Asian Canadian commu- & nity. It might also be a political statement | to be a visible minority and perform. 01 We have to deal with who we play for as a group, especially the benefits and to some degree the aid performances because, if we really disagreed with somebody who was paying us, we wouldn't play for them. Sumi: It's also very practical because we know when we have to do something for money. Usually we agree to do things and we talk about it. We won't do things if we can't justify it. We would never play the Socred convention unless we could make some grand statement during that convention. Joyce: It's great to be able to play music, do taiko and express your politics. It's very integrated. You have the community part, the music part and the political part. It's a combination of politics and emotions. Leslie: Most people have full time jobs in the group and taiko takes up most of the remaining time and energy. Do you ever find it a strain? Sachiko: I still want to keep a good relationship with my spouse. It's kind of hard and it's harder for me because other people don't realize it. I don't think the group is ignorant but it's hard to adjust sometimes. But, although it takes up a lot of time, my fife is energetic and powerful. Connie: In terms of time commitment, I've often wondered how people with kids or spouses or partners work out being in taiko. I think it's extremely hard or next to impos- Eileen Kage photo by amis Fhkud* sible. I want to stay in taiko but I feel my part in it is going to have to change. It may mean becoming a non-performing member. I don't want to spread thin amongst the baby, taiko and a job. I think there's a point in the group where there needs to be more flexibility so that people don't have to devote half their fife to taiko. Leslie: What does the future hold for Katari Taiko? ' Linda: I don't think this group has ever had a vision. I think we just go along and things happen and we just adapt to what's happening. Joyce: And everything's a surprise Leslie Komori is, herself, a member of Katari Taiko. I July 23 -15th anniversary, 15% off everything! VANCOUVER WOMEN'S BOOKSTORE 315 Cambie Street Vancouver, B.C. V6B2N4 684-0523 Hours: Monday-Saturday 11:00-5:30 pm ROBIN HOOD WAS RIGHT BUT.. YOU WILL LEARN MODERN FUNDRAISING METHODS BY JOINING V.S.W.'S NEWEST COMMITTEE. 5JC 3|C ^* *T* *1* IF YOU'LL COMMIT TIME (4hrs./ month) AND ENERGY TO FUNDRAISING FOR V.S.W., WE'LL PROVIDE TRAINING. *> 5$C 5yC 5yC 2jC JOIN THE MERRY BAND! CALL ELIZABETH FOR MORE INFORMATION 255-5511 KINESIS SSSSSKSSSSSSKS**^^ ARTS Fretting and fiddling at the fest by Nadine Davenport One can always count on the Vancouver Folk Music Festival to be a moving expe- ; rience. There's something about that big J red-and-white canopy off 4th Ave. that lets \" loose a sort of musical hormone. It represents back-porch jam sessions all over the world. When we talk of women in the music industry, folk music seems to be the root of women's strength. From our political platforms to preserving our cultural heritages, women have been the gift givers of an incredible herstory of storytelling. This year's festival continues to explore this theme of women's power with song. The emphasis has been given to Hawaii, Africa, French North America and the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here is just a taste of some of the outstanding women to look out for. Starting in our homeland, the festival will explore Canadian cultural geography Toronto's Faith Nolan with two new singer/songwriters from Toronto town. Eileen McGann is a fine songwriter whose range encompasses the political to the personal. Also making waves is a Black songwriter whose name has popped up in Vancouver's music scene recently, Faith Nolan. Her first album has just been released. Another Toronto based musician and added ethnomusicologist who, according to the program, knows more than the National Archives about regional Canadian song, fiddle and dance styles, is Anne Led- erman. Although not all women, I couldn't go without mentioning the always earth- shaking Katari Taiko, the Vancouver-based Japanese traditional drummers (see page 21). This year's pure lesbian/feminist concentrate offers the founding influential mother and the \"nu breed\" punk. Beginning with the beginning, Alix Dobkin. Dobkin is a lesbian folk performer in the process of branching out musically (with an attempt at a feminist rap tune) and socially, with this being her first appearance before a mixed Vancouver audience. Expect a strong image of lesbian lifestyle from this radical trooper in women's music. The \"nu breed\" is ... Phranc! another \"girl with a guitar\", but add punk and you have what will be a possible hit of this year's festival. Speaking of American music, Patty Larkin and Christine Lavin hail from New York's Greenwich Village folk scene. And from Arizona, Darcie Deaville: flat picking guitar extraordinaire, who this year, picks up the fiddle. Ampara Ochoa is one of Mexico's finest and best known singers of \"new song.\" Her voice has been described as a combination of Kiri Ti Kanawa and Marianne Faithful. Ampara Ochoa of Mexico Esther Bejarno Esther Bejarano, a survivor of the Auschwitz women's orchestra sings songs from the ghettos and concentration camps of war time Eastern Europe. Esther is an East German dissident singer/songwriter recently expelled to the west for putting the poems of Rosa Luxembourg to music, challenging the bureaucracy. From South Africa, the Vusisizwe Players are a three-woman theatre group who incorporate prose and poem wrapped into rhythms. \"You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock\" will be performed at the festival and the Vancouver East Cultural Centre for a week following the festival. The play commemorates the demonstration in 1956 against apartheid by 20,000 Black women. Haunani Apofiona comes from Hawaii where women are known to be the preservers of Hawaiian culture. This influential contemporary songwriter has released a cassette tape of songs about women's fives in her homeland. , KINESIS ARTS /**^!*^#*^*^*^S^ /N^O>V\\u00C2\u00A3\u00C2\u00A3 Nets of magic, circle of stones by Melanie Conn SONGS FROM THE DROWNED LANDS A Novel of High Fantasy by Eileen Kernaghan New York: Ace Fantasy Books, 1983 $2.50 This column does not often feature fantasy\u00E2\u0080\u0094let alone high fantasy. But in the spring I attended a science fiction event where Eileen Kernaghan read from the last chapter of Drowned Lands and I was struck by the imagery and emotion of her writing. She was also the only one of the three authors present who responded thoughtfully to a question about changes in women characters in SF over the last 10 years. (She said the women in her books had become stronger and more central to her writing.) When I discovered Eileen lived in Burnaby where she and her husband operate a small second-hand bookstore, I decided to find out more about her writing in person. But first, I read the book. Set in antiquity, Songs From the Drowned Lands is a pre-historic disaster novel which explores the mystery of Stonehenge and the disappearance of the Grey Isles beneath the sea. Each of the four \"Songs\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094or novelettes\u00E2\u0080\u0094 focuses on one character's response to foreknowledge of the coming disaster: What do people do when they know that the world is about to end? The first story is about Thieras, a daughter of kings, who struggles between her desire to hve and her destiny to face the end with open eyes. Instead of being melodramatic, the story is a subtle blend of plot and perception as Thieras interacts with family and friends, and ultimately with the Lady who affirms and inspires her. Kernaghan has an exceptional ability to ground her stories in the details of every day life. For a reader who is unfamiliar with the conventions of fantasy, the use of magic in the book seems to emerge as a natural tool to understand and cope with significant events. The final story, \"Ainn's Song\" was even more powerful read again than when I heard the author read it aloud. Though I knew the ending, I found myself hoping the net of magic evoked through the circle of stones would hold back the tide. Myths and fairytales Thus enchanted by her writing, I set out to meet Eileen Kernaghan one recent sunny morning. I had many questions in my mind: How long had she been writing? What was her motivation for writing fantasy? Did she consciously create strong women characters? As it happened, our long and rambling conversation covered these and many questions. Kernaghan is an open, down-to-earth person whose enthusiastic interest in my perceptions of her writing quickly dispelled any shyness I might have felt in meeting a twice-published SF author. (Her first book, Journey to Aprilioth, was published in 1980, also by Ace.) Kernaghan's affinity for fantasy began in childhood when she became fascinated with Greek myths, fairy tales and legends about lost times and places. She actually began her writing career with science fiction, but her lack of a science background in \"the rules of the real world\" (as she calls physics, chemistry and biology), led her back to her original passion for the fantastic. In her writing, she uses fantasy to recreate ancient times. Aprilioth is rooted in the real world of 2000 BCE as described in Celtic pre-history and myth. Although Drowned Lands was written later, it is a prequel\u00E2\u0080\u0094a story about the \"old race\" who disappeared, Atlantis-like, beneath the sea. One of the stories, \"Dhan's Song\", closely follows the Irish legend of the voyage of Maelduin. \"It was easy to write,\" Kernaghan said delightedly, \"because the plot was all there. All I had to do was fill in the details.\" Her wonderful details are part imagination, of course, but always based on what could have happened in that particular time and place. Which brings us to the role of women in Kernaghan's fiction. Women characters In Drowned Lands, there are a variety of strong women: noble Thieras, the wise sorceress, Ainn, and Ryll, the warrior-teacher. One of the most memorable characters in the book is Queen Zaidh, the ultimate seductress in whose silky arms Dhan would On the other hand, Kernaghan admits that she's become more interested in ph ing women in non-traditional roles. In Drowned Lands, the young sister of a sorcerer longs to learn warrior skills despite the convention against such training for a woman of the Grey Isles. Her brother's enlightenment about the role of women in other cultures helps to make her dream come true. But the author's presentation of the situation is not a self-conscious message about sexism. In Kernaghan's hands\u00E2\u0080\u0094as with Joanna Russ and Elizabeth Lynn\u00E2\u0080\u0094women appear alongside men as women complete in themselves, protagonists and heroines in control of their own destinies. have been forever distracted from his quest were it not for other, equally determined women. It is important to Kernaghan to balance the reality of women's lives in the book's time-frame\u00E2\u0080\u0094the bronze age\u00E2\u0080\u0094with her own interest in depicting powerful women. Much of that power, according to the author, was economic and political, and less in the realm of battle and physical prowess. For that reason, she's impatient with fantasy that portrays women as blood-thirsty warriors who compete with men. The third and final book in the series about the Grey Isles will be published in April, 1989. Sarsen- Witch will be a sequel to the story of the catastrophic flood which wiped out the ancient land. Naeri is the title character, an earth-witch and survivor of the \"dark folk.\" Living by her wits, Naeri becomes the focal point of a struggle between the dominant patriarchal society and her own matriarchal, goddess-worshipping culture. You can meet Kernaghan yourself at Neville Books located a block south of Royal Oak and Rumble in Burnaby. HANDMADE STRAP SANDALS by Janet Bristeir Made with ... \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Genuine leather strap and insole \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Natural crepe sole \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Padded insole \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 Adjustable strap $45 plus B.C. PST Colours!! Brown, Brown and Brown Phone 876-4256 for more information, and free Handmade Shoe Catalogue OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, 10am to 7:30pm \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 KIDS play space \u00E2\u0080\u00A2 FRESH produce \u00E2\u0080\u0094incl. organic NEW convenient location 10% OFF for seniors, Wed. & Thurs. 1034 COMMERCIAL 254-5044 KINESIS JuL /Aug. 88 Barbara Hayman leaves message of strength, love In the December/January '88 issue, Kinesis ran a story about Barbara Hayman and her struggle with cancer. Among other things, Jackie Brown's article described the safety net of concerned women who provided Barbara with both moral and financial support: \"For Barbara Hayman, having cancer has affected virtually every aspect of her life. But, while hers is a story of an emotional and physical ordeal, it is also a tribute to personal strength and the remarkable support women are capable of giving one another. It was that combination that enabled Hayman to overcome the fear and pain, the financial difficulties and the negative attitudes surrounding her disease.\" Barbara died at her father's home in Westbank, B.C., Friday May 27, 1988. Friend and co-worker Megan Ellis, in a letter to Barb's father, summed up her life and work here in the Vancouver women's community: \"In 1984 Barbara joined the Women Against Violence Against Women Rape Crisis Centre (WAVAWRCC) as a volunteer. After training she shared responsibility for operating the 24 hour crisis fine, providing support and counselling to survivors of sexual assault, battered women and child victims of sexual abuse. As a member of the centre Barbara was also involved in developing the training course for new volunteers, making an important contribution to what is now a highly regarded training program. \"In 1985, in opposition to the government's plan to close Vancouver Transition House, Barbara was one of the founding members of the Women's House Saving Action. That group of women occupied the house to prevent its closure and continued to provide shelter and support to battered women and their children for an additional eight months. Barbara coordinated counselling at the house and carried out the demanding task of ensuring that the house was staffed around the clock. She impressed everyone with her pragmatism and her commitment to doing what needed to be done. \"The transition house occupation seemed to galvanize Barb's already strong commitment to supporting women. After much de- LETTERS Waxing Moon Village invites participation This is just a short note to let everyone know that Waxing Moon Healing Village is alive and well. Now that spring is here, there is a new surge of enthusiasm. We are busy clarifying our direction, stabilizing the foundation and organizing a series of meetings. These meetings are designed to help in group-building and getting the work of creating Waxing Moon underway. The dream fives on. It is hoped that as soon as possible we will have the land. Support is needed to manifest this vision. A healing space where women five in harmony with nature. There are many ways to get involved in this adventure and rather than list them all liberation she applied for a staff position at WAVAW and was selected by the collective. Immensely pleased by that vote of confidence, Barb threw herself into her new role. She took on the very important but difficult task of liaison with the police and shared the weighty responsibility of the centre with her co-staff members. \"She was valued for her sensitivity, sensibility and sense of humour. These qualities remained throughout her illness, cementing her determination to return to her staff position and to the company of her WAVAW co-workers. For their part, these and other friends supported her unstintingly through her long and difficult battle with cancer. We will miss her.\" The last word is from Barb herself. She left us this letter: April 21, 1988 Kinesis: I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many women of Vancouver for your support during the past year. It has been a tough one, but knowing that throughout the year I have been surrounded by women who are ready to help at the drop of a hat (whatever the hell that means) has made it much easier. To borrow a phrase from Judy Grahn, I thank: She Who sat beside me on the examining table, arms around, sharing, tears when the diagnosis was bad; She Who jumped with joy on my hospital bed when the tests came back clear; She Who regularly came and pulled me out of my apartment so that for an hour or two I didn't feel like a sick slug; She Who spent time with me in the hospital when the hospital was the last place she wanted to be but she knew I was afraid to be alone; She Who brought me massive bunches of flowers on every possible occasion; She Who got me involved in meetings when I needed so badly to feel I belonged to something larger than my \"condition\"; She Who hosted crisis time fireside evenings; She Who wrote a gentle and understanding story of my story; She Who published it; She Who spent days cleaning my apartment so I could come home from the hospital to a clean and comfortable space; She Who said to me, \"I'm leaving the country for a year and a hall You had damned well better not die 'cause I want to see you again\"; She Whose arms have always been there for me to cry in, laugh in, explain stuff, whatever was necessary or felt good and right; She Who drove me week after week to my chemotherapy, welcoming me to weep in her arms when I really didn't think I could do She Who worked so hard at organizing benefits to put money into the Women's Health Fund account; She Who played and sang the beautiful music at the benefit and She Who listened and danced to it; She Who made me sushi and chocolate cake; She Who made sure that I always had music to take with me and something good to play it on; She Who loaned me many lovely books and finally got me reading again; She Who donated money which she needed herself so that things would be easier for me; She Who introduced me to the music that has softened so many of the rough edges; To all of you who phoned, sent cards and funny books; whose love and cheerful visits made me laugh when laughter was far from my mind. To all of you for all you have done, I thank you. love, Barbara Those who wish may make donations in Barb's name to either the Canadian Cancer Society or to the Women's Health Fund, c/o 1666 West Broadway, Vancouver, V6J 1X6. She Who hosted emergency fireside evenings of laughter and wine and good music; She Who drew me cards of love and encouragement just when they were needed the most; She Who walked me through my darkest moments and didn't even yell when I blamed her for my fear; She Who took over my job under difficult conditions and did it wonderfully; She Who, against all odds, is keeping my job open for me\u00E2\u0080\u0094a continuing lifeline; here, why not give me a call at 732-8927. That way we can have some fun sharing the vision. Blessed Be Brenda Bryan 3541 West 14th Ave. Vancouver, B.C. V6R 2W3 Controversy surrounds estrogen use Kinesis: We are concerned about a news item in the May issue of Kinesis entitled \"Estrogen helps osteoporosis.\" This short piece gave no mention of controversy about estrogen usage for osteoporosis or other conditions. Women who take estrogen for osteoporosis probably have to take the hormone for the rest of their fives, assuming that they begin use during or after menopause, natural or Some researchers state that when a woman stops taking estrogen she may be at greater risk for osteoporosis than she previously was. And, of course, there is controversy about the use of this and other synthetic hormones generally. Anyone who would like more information can find it at the Women's Health Collective. Yours sincerely, The Vancouver Women's Health Collective Vancouver, B.C. ity of medical treatments for menorrhagia/ dysfunctional uterine bleeding. b) Any research that looks at claims trivializing menopause symptoms, compares it with research results that do not, then shows that the former has unsound or nonexistent methodology. Please contact me if you have seen any information of this sort. Thanks, Nancy Walsh Box 46 Whonnock, B.C. VOM ISO (462-8470) Reader requests information Kinesis: I'm looking for any material in the following areas: a) Any studies that outline the lack of information in popular media on availabil- Maureen McEvoy ba ma (Cand.) Counselling Psychology 732-3227 Areas of expertise: sexual abuse, relationships, sexuality, depression, ACOA .KINESIS ///////////////////^^^^^ ////////////////////^^^^ BULLETIN BOARD Read this All listings must be received no later than the 18th of the month preceding publication. Listings are limited to 75 words and should include a contact name and telephone number for any clarification that may be required. Listings should be typed or neatly handwritten, double-spaced on 8 | by 11 paper. Listings will not be accepted over the telephone. Groups, organizations and individuals eligible for free space in the Bulletin Board must be, or have, non-profit objectives. Other free notices will be items of general public interest and will appear at the discretion of Kinesis. Classified are $6 for the first 75 words or portion thereof, $2 for each additional 25 words or portion thereot Deadline for classifieds is the 18th of the month preceding publication. Kinesis will not accept classifieds over the telephone. All classifieds must be prepaid. For Bulletin Board submissions send copy to Kinesis Attn: Bulletin Board, 301- 1720 Grant Street, Vancouver, B.C. V5L 2Y6. For more information call 255-5499. EVE NT GRASSROOTS CONFERENCE The International Lesbian & Gay People of Colour Conference will be held July 28-31 at the 519 Church Community Centre in Toronto. The theme is grassroots and will explore culturally diverse groups organizing and forming alliances. For further info or to get involved contact: The ILGPOCC committee c/o P.O. Box 6597, Stn A, Toronto, M5W 1X4 or call (416) 532-9868. ART SHOW OPENING You are invited to the opening reception of \"Taking Liberties\", an exhibition of handmade paper works by Margo Farr, July 30 7:30-9:30 pm, in the Bute St. Gallery at 1170 Bute St. DANCE/CONCERT The Van. Women in Music Society presents an evening of Country and Ca- jun, July 26 at the Anza Club, 3 W. 8th at Ontario. Info/childcare 681-3617. Volunteers needed. SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN'S DAY Will be observed here and in South Africa Aug. 7. Van. activities will begin at 1 pm with a reading on the steps of City Hall (453 W. 12th) of a proclamation signed by the mayor. From 2-4 pm meet at the YWCA, 580 Burrard for short speeches, theatre and song. Child care available on site. NOT VANISHING A new poetry book by Chrystos, from Press Gang. Launching on Friday July 8th, 8 pm at Octopus Books, 1146 Commercial Drive. Book signing on July 9th, 2-4 pm also at Octopus. VAN. WOMEN'S BOOKSTORE Will be celebrating its 15th birthday July 23. To mark the occasion, 15 % off all purchases that day will be offered. Regular store hours 11 am-5:30 pm at 315 Cambie St. HARAMBEE II \"Women in a Changing Africa.\" A symposium on contemporary African Women's Issues July 8-10 at The Harrison Hotel, Harrison Hot Springs. Fee $30. For more info call 736-8967 (Van.) WOMEN IN CELEBRATION Is an opportunity for women to come together through entertainment, displays, films, networks, speakers. Sept. 10 at Hastings Community Centre, 3096 E. Hastings St. For further info contact: Lynn Kermode 224-2142, Dorothy Newman 525- 7246, Leslie Stern 734-7047. ROCK AGAINST PRISONS On the occasion of National Prison Justice Day, a free outdoor concert (bands and location to be announced). Saturday Aug. 6. Call 251-6069 for information. GARAGE SALE The VLC Garage Sale will be held July 24, 11 am-3 pm at 876 Commercial Dr. Tables can be rented for $5 and VLC will do the advertising. For more info call 254- 8458. VLC COFFEEHOUSE July 10 at 876 Commercial Dr. starting at 8 pm. The audience will be treated to at least two shows by talented women from the community. Donation at the door $2-$4 sliding scale. For more info call 254-8458. WOMEN'S FESTIVAL The West Kootenay Women's Festival is being planned for Aug. 13, 14 at the Vallican Whole near Winlaw. The cost of the weekend is $20 which includes the workshops and a women's dance. Food and child care will be available on site and we are working towards making it wheelchair accessible. For more info call 352- 9916 (Nelson). K\u00C2\u00BB Ml* 5 -i > HC \u00C2\u00A73 Zr m = an\"! goods) starting August 6th! SINGLES NIGHT For those lesbians who don't enjoy the bar scene or who are just out with no place to go, there is now a chance to meet with other single women in a non-threatening environment. If this sounds appealing, we have arranged to use the VLC facilities on Tuesday nights as a meeting place to plan future events. For more info call Terry at the VLC, 254-8458. SUMMER SEX SHOW Art exhibit and performance evenings at Women in Focus, 456 W. Broadway. \"Drawing the Line\", a photo-event (see arts section for details) and variety shows totally concerned with sex. Opens Saturday Aug. 20, closes Sept. 3 with shows both nights at 8 pm. To participate and for more info, call 872-2250 (WIF) or Lorna at 253-6792. BENEFIT DANCE Battered Women's Support Services benefit dance July 6 at Graceland. Tix $7- $9. For more info and tix call BWSS 734- 1574. All welcome. BIOREGIONAL CONFERENCE Third North America Bioregional Congress Aug. 21-26 at Paradise Valley, North Ish, B.C. Workshops on ecofemi- nism, native rights and sustainable agriculture, to name a few. $135 registration includes meals. Contact NABC III, box 1012 Lillooet, B.C., V0K 1V0. WOMEN OF COLOUR Will be having a fundraising carwash July 9 at Freeway Chevron (720 Rupert St.) from 10 am-4 pm. Many hands needed as well as brushes, hoses, sponges, buckets and soap. If interested in helping, please call Mari 872-4079 (leave a message) or Margaret 736-4071. If you can't come, make sure your car does! SUMMER FUN Kids, come join the fun: swimming, canoeing, games, music and many other adventures. It's at the Little Mountain Neighbourhood House, 3981 Main St. Phone Jay Spare at 879-7104 for more info. Each two week session (9 am-4 pm, Mon.-Fri.) throughout July and Aug. is $40. Youth 13-19 may join us for sailing, swimming, beach BBQ's, the Folk Fest, Sea Fest, tie-dying and more. Call 879- 7104 for details. WOMEN'S MUSIC FESTIVAL The 1st Van. Women's Music Festival will be held Aug. 27 at New Brighton Park (N. of the PNE on McGill St.), celebrating women's talent and professionalism in today's music industry. Other events include an evening coffee house at La Quena, 1111 Commercial Dr., Aug. 26 and a dance party at Talk of the Town Cabaret, 23 W. Cordova Aug. 28. Tix on sale 1st week of July at usual outlets. Performers and volunteers interested in being involved please phone Nadine Davenport 681-3617. West Coast Women & Words presents West Word /I Summer School \si /Retreat for Women at Vancouver School of Theology, 6050 Chancellor Blvd. U.B.C. Campus PUBLIC EVENTS GUEST READINGS Audrey Thomas Monday Aug. 1, 7:30 pm Barbara Smith Wednesday Aug. 3, 7:30 pm INSTRUCTORS' READINGS Dionne Brand & Susan Crean Friday Aug. 5, 7:30 pm Eileen Kernaghan & Donna E. Smyth Sunday Aug. 7, 7:30 pm INSTRUCTORS' PANEL Saturday Aug. 6,1:30 pm Leaps & Boundaries Where the Boundaries Cross Susan Crean / Creative Documentary Eileen Kernaghan / Speculative Fiction Donna ESmyth / Fiction Dionne Brand / Poetry ADMISSION: By donation For more information: 872-8014 KINESIS Bulletin Board .\.\N\.\NV\\NN\\N>X\NX\\XV\\.\\\X^^ THE MASTERY OF TRANSFORMATIONAL HEALING July 4-14, 10am-6pm, (no class July 9). Create yourself as the source of healing for yourself and others. Mastering healing as a way of being is the focus for this intensive in the transformational movement. Limited to 12 participants. $550. The Institute for Transformational Movement, 1607-13th Ave., Seattle WA 98122; (206) 329-8680. THE AUGUST WOMEN'S INTENSIVE Three Weeks of Transformational Movement for Women Only, August 8-26, Monday through Friday, 6-10pm. Explore your passion for life in movement with other women. Transform muscular tension into creative action. Use the energy of emotion to empower you. Access natal grace, passion and aliveness. $400. The Institute for Transformational Movement, 1607-13th Ave., Seattle WA 98122; (206) 329-8680. UNLEARNING RACISM Workshop for women Sept. 16,17,18 at Camp Alexandra, Crescent Beach (near White. Rock). Wheelchair accessible. The workshop will be facilitated by Rickie Shorover Marcuse, a feminist, anti-racism activist from Oakland, California. Child care subsidies and signers available. Fee: sliding scale $20-$150. Registration: Aug. 1-15 call Celeste George 877-0514 or Antoinette Zanda 738-5236. FINDING SELF RAISING SPIRIT How many times have you wished you could change your life? How often have you thought-l wish I knew what this feeling is about?-or-Why am I doing this again and again? You want to know but the circumstances seem too overwhelming. Fear, anger and depression keep you distant from your understanding. There are simple, direct and grounded ways to help yourself. You can develop new skills. Using a few new tools, your ability to take charge will be in your own hands. There is no miracle. It is a step by step process that starts now. I am offering a 10 week workshop in Finding Self-Raising Spirit. Designed for the participants, we will focus on goal-setting, body-mind integration, creative visualization and much more. I am a feminist working for social change by supporting the individual woman to find her inner light. I also work on a wide range of political issues as a cultural/community worker, and I am a certified Hypnotist and Polarity Therapist. For more info call Brenda R. Bryan 732- 8927. VAN. HOUSING REGISTRY Is a wheelchair accessible information and referral centre offering free listings for tenants and landlords in the city of Van. This service is specially designed for those with low incomes, seniors, the handicapped and older singles. Call 873-1313. CAREER DIRECTION Meet other women and assess your career interests, skills, values and the type of person you are. Group meets on Wed., for four weeks beginning July 6, 10 am- 12 noon. Register at the YWCA, 580 Burrard St. For more info contact Counselling Services Coordinator 683-2531 local 305. HOMESHARING Single Mothers Housing Project screens and matches compatible families from the whole lower mainland, provides initial counselling and support. For free registration or more info call 278-8033. WOMEN ARTISTS We are forming a women artists centre based in New Westminster and want your participation. Some of our objectives are to promote original artwork, develop a slide registry, a resource library, a newsletter, and provide advocacy services and studio space. For more info call 520-3078. INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN WEEK I.L.W. organizing has begun. For those interested in participating, the next meetings are July 7 and July 25, 7:30 pm at the VLC (upstairs), 876 Commercial Dr. 254-8458. TEENWORK A summer youth employment project offers an exciting way for young people to join a co-operative business, learn how to run a worker's co-op and earn an income. TeenWork runs from June- Sept, and provides its members with a balance between educational activities and direct work experience. For more info contact: Cindy Shore at CCEC, 876-2123 or 875- 1098, or Bonita Dolhanty at 737-0410. SINGLE MOTHER'S SERVICES Weekly support groups in 14 locations, childcare available. Bi-annual newsletter written by and for single mothers (contributions welcome), annual conference\u00E2\u0080\u0094 organized by single mothers, seasonal events throughout the year. For more information call Single Mother's Services 683-2531 ext. 316. SUBMISSIONS CLEIS PRESS Submissions wanted for a multicultural anthology of creative writing by women on the subject of \"Women and Their Sisters\", to be published by Cleis Press. Prefer short fiction and other forms of creative prose. What issues unite us with and divide us from our familial sisters? How have our relationships with our sisters changed over time? Please send submissions (with SASE for return) by Nov. 1 to: Paula Martinac, P.O. Box 6625, Yorkville Finance Station, New York, N.Y.10128. h M \ 'I *k M \ PERFORMERS WANTED A newly forming musical comedy company of players is looking for high-energy women and men show performers, plus all behind-the-scenes persons for all-new, high profile broadway style musicals. For more info call 731-3014. I LIKE MAC PLUS Graduate of V.V.I. Printing Production, experienced Mac Plus typesetter, seeks full or part time work in the printing industry. Many instructor references. 253- 2109. Crossland Consulting Personal Management Services for Artists Individuals, Non-Profits Groups, Small Companies * FIRST CONSULTATION-FREE * Jackie Crossland 682-3109 t \L By Appointment Only Grant and Proposal Writing Bookkeeping Services, Taxes Resumes, Career Counselling Press Gang Printers 603 Powell Street Vancouver, B.C. V6A 1H2 253-1224 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WOMEN'S PRESS ^\u00C2\u00ABf Airheart is a worker-owned co-op that rfjS^S^ recognizes the importance of equality of ownership and control. Our members are also \"aware of, and monitor, political and social conditions ; globally and make that information available to customers Sp? who may be concerned where their travel money is spent. 2149VCOMMERCIAL DRIVE, VANCOUVER, 251-2282 COMPUSERVE 71470, 3502 UPRISING BREADS BAKERY Yes, Frozen Chunk Cookie Dough is now available! 1697 Venables St. 254-5635 a part of CRS Workers' Co-op A1NESIS ///////////////////^^^^^ /////////////////////^^^^^ BULLETIN BOARD GLASSIFIE KINESIS AD RATES Are going up, effective immediately. It's been ages since we last raised our rates, so here we go ... Classified ads are now $6/75 words, and$2/each additional 25 words. Call 255-5499 for info about display rates. MECHANIC NEEDED Licensed automotive mechanic with established clientele and tools; also needed, 2nd year apprentice in electronics with basic tools, to join women-oriented automotive shop in process of starting business. Call Elise at 294-5339. GET AWAY FROM THE CITY TO SUNNY POINT ROBERTS Cozy cabin, 2 bedroom, small, clean, fully equipped, only 45 minutes from downtown Vancouver. Five minutes to beach, marina, etc. Available July to mid-Aug. for weekends, or by the week. $25 per night single, $45 per night double, weekly rates also available. Call 253-3875 for more info. HOUSING NEEDED Laid back, quiet, well-trained dog and woman who feeds her need a home starting Sept. 1. Prefer East end, Trout Lake or Q.E. park areas. Would like to live alone or share house with 1 or 2 other humans. Need access to yard. Woman is 27, non-smoking, communications student. If you can help us, write Jennifer Ellis and Emma, Box 5444, Whitehorse, Yukon, Y1A 5H4. Please include your phone number. WOMEN'S MUSIC SERVICES Offers women musicians contact, jam sessions, lists music services by women, ie. bands, musicians, recording services, live sound reinforcement, photographers, music and technical instruction etc. I am here to help you achieve whatever your personal music/music service goals in a supportive atmosphere. Non-profit. Seeking: rehearsal space, more listings. Anyone wishing to assist the service in any way call 251-9067 10 am-6 pm. INDEPENDENT WOMYN'S COMMUNITY Is looking for lesbians interested in founding the 1st Canadian Homeland. We are a group of 4 lesbians who are interested in starting a corporation directed towards buying land for an all lesbian community. Anyone interested in becoming a founding member/shareholder, please contact Linda (403) 235-5169 or Marlis (403) 678-5947 or write to Independent Womyn's Community, P.O. Box 237, Can more, Alberta, TOL 0M0. First meeting planned in Calgary July 2nd or Sept 4th. Please state your preference and reply or call as soon as possible. Billets will be provided. SITKA HOUSING CO-OP Vacancies: 1 bedroom for woman with environmental allergies ($430), 2 bedroom ($540), 4 bedroom ($720). Available July 1 or August 1. Call 255-0046. \"The Brooding Rooms: Mother-and-Childhood Reassembled\"(pictured above is the upstairs hallway) by Honor Rogers will be appearing at the Presentation House Art Gallery this summer. Rogers, a Saskatoon artist, joins with Susan McEachern (Halifax), Frances Robson (Saskatoon) and Suzanne Lacy (Oakland, CA) in the group photography exhibit entitled \"Making Space.\" The show runs from August 4 to September 18. Presentation House is at 333 Chesterfield in North Vancouver. Call 986-1351 for details. CLASS IFIEDBCLASSIFIEDICLASSIFIED ALCHERINGA A wonderfully quaint housekeeping cabin for women on Salt Spring Island within walking distance to the ocean, store, pub and ferry in sunny Vesuvius. Electric heat, TV, meditation out house, and sauna access combine to make a special get-away place that is both private and accessible. Treat yourself! $25 single, $35 double, two night minimum, and special rates for longer stays. Phyllis Tatum, PO 1332, Ganges, B.C., VOS 1E0, 537-4315. (There are no guaranteed ways to avoid the answering machine but evenings and early mornings are a bit better!) FOR RENT Housemate n/s, needed to share with one other woman, ground floor, 2 bedroom apartment in house at Kitsilano Point. Beginning July or August 1. Quiet accommodation with fireplace and laundry. $335 per month, additional for hydro. Call Gail 734-3007 (leave a message). ^9r. p#*%r |L Pmtigtett Naturopathic Physician 216-2760 W. BROADWAY VANCOUVER, B.C. V6K 2G4 (604) 732-4328 WOMEN'S HEALTH CARE HOMEOPATHY COLON THERAPY GOLDEN THREADS A contact publication for lesbians over \"50 and women who love older women. Canada and U.S. Confidential, warm, reliable. For free info send self-addressed envelope (U.S. residents please stamp it). Sample copy mailed discreetly, $5 (U.S.) Golden Threads. P.O. Box 2416, Quincy. MA 002269. CRAFTSWOMEN NEEDED Seeking craftswomen who are making feminist jewelry, altar/ritual instruments, ceramics, clothing, etc.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 goddess/witch/Wiccon theme\u00E2\u0080\u0094and who would like to merchandise their products through a mail-order business. Prefer women living in B.C. but open to other Canadian women. Leave message for Patricia at (604) 732-5153 or write: P. Hogan. 1937 W. 2nd Ave.. Van. B.C. V6J 1J2. VANCOUVER EAST HOUSING CO-OP The Vancouver East Housing Co-op, with 38 units in 6 different locations in the lively East End. is now accepting people for its waiting list. Market rents are very reasonable: single units from $260- $374 (share purchase $1000). 2 bedrooms $397-$577, 3 and 4 bedrooms $482-$601 (share purchase $2000). If you are interested in working cooperatively with others and living in stable, affordable housing, send SASE to: Membership Committee. #3 -1220 Salsbury Dr.. Van. V5L 4B2. SHIATSU 101 uses for Shiatsu gift certificates door prizes, raffle prizes, farewell presents birthday gifts, appreciation gifts, supportive gifts for: new mothers, soon-to-be- new-mothers, mothers who've just lookec after 8 kids all summer, weightlifters jocks, movers & shakers, Kinesis editors and staff, treeplanters, bookmarkers (bookmarkers?!?), people who stand al day, people who sit all day, people who walk all day, people who ... to be continued next issue. Phone Astarte 251- 5409 WOMEN'S COUNSELLING My specializations include depression,! sexuality, sexual and emotional abuse, adult women survivors of childhood sex ual abuse, identity issues, self-awareness,I relationship issues, decision-making and career explorations. I work using ver bal and expressive therapies, gestalt andj guided imagery. Sliding fee scale. Janet Lichty. B.A. M. Ed. Counselling Psycho ogy. 874-6982. WOMANSPACE ON SALTSPRING Newly built, fully equipped, self-contain ed cabin on 5 \u00C2\u00A7 seculuded acres. Close to| Ruckle Provincial Park, hiking trails and sea. Saltspring is accessible by ferry from Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. $50/night double. $35/night single. Wheelchair accessible. Children welcome. No pets. No smoking indoors. Call Gillian 653-9475 or write Box C85. King R.. R.R. 1. Fulford Harbour, B.C. VOS ICO KINESIS LIBRARY PROCESSING CENTRE-SERIALS 2206 EAST HALL, U.B.C. VANCOUVER , B.C. VST 1Z8 INV-E 8904 A Kinesis subscription touches all the bases and always makes it home. And we've got ten innings. How's that for a pitch? A \"Dead Lily\" takes a swing at the Third Annual Lesbian Softball Tournament in Vancouver. ^^ o r\u00E2\u0080\u0094 \u00E2\u0096\u00A0239*te---i Published 10 times a year v-^ by Vancouver Status of Women #301-1720 Grant St, Vancouver, B.C. V5L 2Y6 \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 VSW Membership-$25.50 (or what you can afford)-includes Kinesis subscription \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 Kinesis subscription only - $17.50 \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 Sustainers - $75 \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 Institutions - $45 \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 New \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 Here's my cheque \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 Renewal \u00E2\u0096\u00A1 Bill me D Gift subscription for a friend 10 S E o i \". ..... \u00E2\u0080\u0094\u00E2\u0096\u00A0\u00E2\u0080\u0094 *~.-J"@en . "Preceding title: Vancouver Status of Women. Newsletter.

Date of publication: 1974-2001.

Frequency: Monthly."@en . "Periodicals"@en . "Newspapers"@en . "HQ1101.V24 N49"@en . "HQ1101_V24_N49_1988_07"@en . "10.14288/1.0045716"@en . "English"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women"@en . "Images provided for research and reference use only. Permission to publish, copy, or otherwise use these images must be obtained from the Digitization Centre: digitization.centre@ubc.ca"@en . "Original Format: University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. HQ1101.V24 N49"@en . "Women--Social and moral questions"@en . "Feminism--Periodicals"@en . "Kinesis"@en . "Text"@en . ""@en .