Hello, all, and a warm welcome to new Carrying Capacity subscribers and readers!
I want to disclose to you dear people who allow my words into your life that my wonderful editor is busy this holiday week. I’m going it alone, so please excuse errors and wonky links.
I’m not even going to try to sugarcoat this. With each passing day, the political news gets worse and worse. If you’re someone who dreads a second Trump term, you probably agree that we must not lose heart or give up on this election. (Please, Democratic leadership: be bold!) But I also think we must recognize that the next four years, or the next eight years, are not the end, or even the middle, of this story.
I heard the Indigenous studies theorist Linda Tuhiwai Smith, author of the classic text, Decolonizing Methodologies, say something along these lines at a NAISA (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association) conference several years ago. She mentioned that when it comes to resisting the damages of colonization and sustaining life in creative ways, Indigenous people have been at it for 500 years and will be at it 500 years from now. In other words, this is a long game we’re all playing. (The stability of our climate and state of the earth hundreds of years in the future is a question that weighs on this point but does not necessarily foreclose it.) If we understand the present moment to be just one notch on the wheel of deep time, how should we live?
I worry about what any of us can do to prepare for and cushion major political and environmental changes, especially regarding the state of American democracy, and I’m appreciative that I have you to talk with about these disturbing thoughts. I keep coming back to notions (explored in my previous newsletter) of local relationships and social investments. I was struck, recently, by a comment the New York Times columnist David Brooks made in his talk, "The Root Causes of Populism" at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He said the term “defiant humanism” had sprung to mind as he considered how we can react as American society and global society turn meaner, less trusting, and more autocratic. I think Harriet Tubman, the subject of my new biography, Night Flyer, displays this kind of caring grit. (And thanks so much, to those of you who have checked out a copy from the library, purchased a copy, and/or shared your reactions with me!)
Engagement with people where we are in real places, and in real time, can reinforce this stance of “defiant humanism,” reminding us that other people can be and often are good, that societies have rebounded even after the worst setbacks to safety and civility, and that we are not alone in our struggle to hold onto these truths.
In late spring, I spent the bulk of two weeks in Europe with students and scholars of art history in Rome, with writers and publishers in London, and with public history practitioners and community/culture organizers in Amsterdam. I felt recharged by these interactions that reflected a persistence of faith in humanity despite extreme polarization, ongoing wars, and recent turns toward ultra-right governments in both Italy and The Netherlands (and now France). While traveling, I found that arts and craft, large and small, “high” and “low,” reignited and reinforced this faith in humanity. Sculptures, gardens, street art, and culinary craft affirmed the vibrancy of life and strength of human ties.
A sculpture of Diana rendered as a fertility goddess in Rome’s Capitol Museum reminded me of the long-held, cross-cultural belief in the power of birth, kinship with animals, and maternal ferocity. A heart-shaped pizza crust formed by a cook in an Amsterdam café reminded me that food can feed the soul. The palimpsest-like gravestones of the Afro-Ojibwe sculptor Edmonia Lewis (who left the US and joined a women’s arts community in Rome in the 1860s) reminded me of how people can craft communal lives.
(A shout-out and thank you to Valentina Zanca of Profile Books who guided me to St. Mary’s Cemetery in a sudden rain-turned-hail storm and spotted Lewis’s grave hidden in the high grass after our two hours of looking. When we finally stood beside the grave, the sun came out.)
Times are tough. Here in Montana, my summer place and my husband’s birthplace, I can’t help but binge read/watch/hear frightening news streaming across my screens – the presidential debate, the Supreme Court rulings, the heatwaves, the global violence. But I realized during my travels that despite the chaos, I have something to look forward to each day: gifts of art that lift my spirits and spark my “defiant humanism,” and the sentences I write in an effort to do the same for others. Bolstering one another with the things we lovingly create is a move we can make again and again in this long game.
For those of you who want to read a bit more: Travel Highlights & Suggestions!
* All That She Carried made the short list for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction among a group of compelling books ranging from memoirs of childhood and meditations on places to investigations of AI’s dependence on human labor. Check them out for your summer reads! The big prize went to Naomi Klein for Doppelganger (a stimulating cultural analysis). But I did get to attend my first London garden party in Virginia Woolf’s neighborhood (Bloomsbury) while basking in a (shameless American) Notting Hill glow (final scene, pocket park).
*Touring art history sites in Rome reminded me of the first time I visited Italy after college graduation in 1992. Thanks to a dream grant from the Fitzie Foundation, I was able to travel with one of my college roommates, Rebecca Walkowitz (recently named Provost and Dean of Faculty at Barnard College!). We subsisted mostly on fresh bread, tomatoes, and cheese, walked almost everywhere we needed to get to, and saw breathtaking landscapes that still sometimes appear in my mind’s eye.
*When I was in Rome this spring, I didn’t have an Italian publisher. Now I do! Iperborea, an independent press based in Milan, will soon produce an Italian language version of All That She Carried. I’m grateful to my hosts and guides in Rome (Northern Kentucky University Study Abroad Program) and in London (my UK publisher Profile Books and the Women’s Prize) and in Amsterdam (my Dutch publisher De Arbeiderspers and the John Adams Institute).
*I recently joined the board of Tinworks Art, a new nonprofit arts and community space in Bozeman, and I’m jazzed about what Tinworks is offering residents and visitors, from western and Indigenous art exhibitions to weaving workshops to summer camps. If you visit Tinworks this summer, pause with Layli Long Soldier’s sculptural reflection: “Look at what we weather and endure . . .”
How wonderful to have found Edmontia! I hope you’re still in Bozeman mid July whe I return from my east coast sojourn…
Thank you so much for your considerate & generous work! I was especially moved you being able to visit the resting place of Edmonia Lewis. I especially love how this visit served as a reminder "of how people can craft communal lives." Communal lives are something I'm often thinking about concerning the atrocities we are witnessing. Lastly, your sojourn to find Lewis' grave reminds me so much of Alice Walker writing about navigating the high grasses & plants to find Zora Neale Hurston's grave. Thank you for sharing 💙.