A Time to Reweave*
*Note: “A Time to Reweave” and “A Time to Study Law” are excerpts from “Womanspirit in the High-Tech World,” an address given at the First National Women's Symposium, 1989, sponsored by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Northeastern State University.
The 1990s will be the decisive decade, when humanity will either call Earth “Mother” again or perish. To survive, we must reconnect the Web of Life. People of reverent spirit everywhere are saying it: scientists, theologians, educators, artists, poets, sociologists, the man and woman next door, the kindergarten child who, when asked his greatest wish, said “I don't want to die.” It is a time to reweave, a time when women are coming into our own. As Native people often say, “The Grandmothers are coming back.”
Whatever our ethnic, cultural or religious roots may be, women since the beginning of time have been “weavers,” weavers who work from a spiritual base. We know how to take diverse strands of life and spin them into a pattern. How to listen to the whole web at once and mend small tears that occur. If the web should be damaged beyond repair, women, like our sister the spider, know how to ingest the remaining strands and spin a new web.
We are doing that. Consider women across the country who represent major strands of the web: women working in health, history, government, law, literature, family, holistic healing, spirituality, economics, education, art, conservation, and so on. Diverse in many ways, we are unified in our determination to ensure the continuance of life. There are men who support us in our work, as we so often support them in theirs. This cooperative trend among women and between genders is a hope for the future.
But in the worlds society at large, people who call Earth “it” are still dominant and still rending the web at a deadly rate. Contending with them, with their disdain virus and the damage it causes, can be very wearying. That's why I've given you a corn seed for remembrance—a gift from Selu, the strong, who fed the people in body and in spirit. Although eternally giving, she brooked no disrespect, not even inappropriate curiosity (much less sexual harassment). When disrespect occurred, she quit cooking and gave the law instead. This is a principle worth pondering for women today.