An age of joy – An interview with Charlie Toledo
Charlie Toledo is of Towa descent, native to New Mexico. She has been the Executive Director of the Suscol Intertribal Council, a community-based organization, since 1992 located in Napa, California. Since 1982 she has worked in alternative healthcare fields, as well as having a background in mediation for individuals, families, and organizations. She has been an organic gardener since 1978. She has a lifelong commitment to social justice and international work on Human Rights and Environmental social justice issues. She is part of the Women’s Intercultural Network, with consultative status to the United Nations.
Arwen Spicer: Based on your experience, how can an individual have an impact on healing our world?
Charlie Toledo: I think the most important thing is to focus on what you want to do. When you’re doing what you think you should do, that’s never going to be as successful as what you want to do, what you freely choose to do. It’s better to act towards something rather than reacting. When you’re reacting, you’re actually being led, and that’s what’s happening now. What’s happening at the federal levels in the United States is so blatantly horrible, but people are just reacting to it, and in that way they’re actually being led. What you want to do, really, to create social change is to think, “What calls me to use my skills or my interest or develop skills to deal with the problem?”
Poets and artists have the biggest influence in social change, and then also street theater. When people are just marching in the streets with their signs scratched on cardboard, well, okay, that’s kind of half-ass. But if you’re dressed in an outfit, you’ve got a well-made sign or a flag, that’s going to attract and stimulate more thought.
A friend did a puppet parade on their property and they invited us to come. And I was thinking, hm, what could we do? What would be our first thing as Native Americans, [to] create visibility for Native Americans? And I thought, well, it’s so exciting how I’ve been working on water and ecology for over twenty-five years. So right now, after thirty years of working, salmon has returned to the up-valley waterways, the creeks, and the whole [Napa] River. And [my friend] made this gigantimous salmon puppet. And, oh my God, the kids were just running alongside of the puppets, and there was so much energy.
I was sharing that with the local Resource Conservation District. I said, “We should start putting things in the Fourth of July parade.” And everybody started laughing, and these are all scientists. And everybody started to come up with ideas. I think that’s what creates change. When you’re laughing, that’s a really joyful form of public education, which is what changes policy. You have to affect public opinion. That’s the whole thing, the idea of moving towards what you want and then having a really clear picture of what is the outcome that you’re expecting.
AS: You often speak about the world entering a new age. What is this age and how does it differ from the previous one?
CT: So Native Americans here, our DNA, is some of the oldest in North America. So I’m talking about ancient religions, not the predominant religions of the last few thousand years, but tens of thousands of years. And in all of those religions, they look more to the cosmos. And so our solar system goes in 5,000 year cycles of a new sun. A new sun literally is born every 5,000 years.The new sun was born the winter solstice of 2012.
And I remember we had the honor of doing that ceremony because my friends from Central America... you know, people have been trying to kill my friend [a cultural leader in this religion] since he was born, and he was forced to leave the Western hemisphere. [1] So he had been realizing he wasn’t going to be here to do the ceremony. He said, “Could you say a few prayers for us?” I said, “Oh, of course.”
The fire keepers started [the fire] before sunset and we’re going to keep it to sunrise. And every two hours [the timekeeper would] rattle, and we’d sing, and then we all stood together and sang in the new song. At the time [the sun] was rising, but it was hailing. We didn’t see any sunrise. But we still did all those things. So that was just an amazing process.
Later, I asked [my friend], “I thought it was going to be some big thing. We didn’t see anything. We didn’t feel anything. And obviously, the world hasn’t changed into a happy, dancing place.” And he said, “Well, it would be like an egg coming from the chicken. That’s how the new sun was born from the old sun, like an egg from a chicken. It’s a gradual change because it’s a 5,000-year cycle.” But that made a lot of sense to me.
We’re in the Aquarian Age. The Piscian Age is kind of very patriarchal. It has a lot to do with pain and suffering. And the Aquarian Age is about compassion, joy, and happiness. One of the things that is always said is that there’ll be singing and dancing in the streets and there’ll be art everywhere. And we are starting to see that now. Even like with this puppet parade.
It always has to come to back to public education. And the biggest, fastest way to educate people is when they’re laughing and happy. When you’re teaching somebody something, they have to have it repeated twenty times. And then if it’s a child, it has to be repeated sixty times. But if they’re singing and dancing, it’s only three times. So, okay, how come we’re not doing that in our schools?
When my children were in school, I wouldn’t let them do homework, and one teacher was saying something, and I said, “Well, that’s actually against our religion.” And she just laughed at me and said, “Oh, I’ve never heard such a thing.” I said, “That’s fine. I’m going to go talk to the principal.” And so I talked to the principal and said, “This is our religion. We are an earth-based religion. They need to be outside. They need to be in nature. They’re not going to come home and do more paperwork.” My kids never fell behind in school. They didn’t have lesser grades.
[Indigenous education] is kinesthetic, and it’s hands-on and a lot of times it’s oral, it’s spoken word, and it’s also visual. I think that’s the biggest difference--and it seems to be globally: I haven’t been in any Indigenous community that didn’t do this--is that the children aren’t separated to learn. They’re with the adults, and they just do what they want and they’re taught to watch. One of my good friends, she comes from a long line of California Pomo basket weavers, as a little girl, she knew that if she was going to stay where her auntie and her relatives were weaving, then she had to be quiet. So she would just be under the table and then they would be dropping their cuttings from the willow or the tule, and she would just be picking it up under the table, kind of doing what they were doing.
The basis is that children would always be around the adults or they would even have adults, usually elders, the grandparents, grandfather, grandmothers, focused on them, but the teaching wouldn’t be in lecture; it’d be experiential; it’d be in movement and mimicking skills that they would need to grow up.
That’s one of the things I was talking about with the RCD [Resource Conservation District] because the city hasn’t been taking care of the places where we used to harvest tule, so it’s all overgrown with blackberry. I said, “I used to be able just go down and cut this 9, 10-foot tule and carry it into the classroom, and now I can’t. It’s not there, or I can’t reach it. You know, that tule is really important to cleaning out the water, again the tidal river flow.”
Then I would take it into the schools. One time I had this beautiful little basket, and there was this little tule doll in there that some child had made. And so I showed the kids. I said, “Oh, look, somebody left this.” And I had handed out tule, and a lot of the kids just started taking the tule and making their own little dolls.
So it’s all very kinesthetic, hands-on and undivided attention. Especially at the young ages, that’s when it’s real critical, the undivided attention as infants and babies. But then, like toddlers, then there’s it’s more--I don’t know what you would call that kind of learning--almost like attachment learning: they’re just around while this stuff is being done, and as long as they’re not creating a problem, they can stay there. And if they couldn’t sit still, then they could be out gathering the willow or going through the brush, harvesting the tule.
I was doing a talk at the UN around women in poverty, and I [shared an image of] this 15-year-old girl in a red dress, and she’s got this spear over her shoulder, and she’s carrying a salmon on her back that’s almost the length of her body. I said, “Her grandfather spent thirty years getting the fishing rights for their family in their traditional fishing ground that they had for thousands and thousands of years.” I said, “This is food security: that we have access to our traditional ways of living and to our traditional food sources and that the children at a young age are learning.” Instead of just being so intellectual and so “Oh my God! These are the rates of poverty and hunger,” let’s reclaim our heritage. Let’s take care of the Earth in a way that it takes care of us.
Note:
[1] Though Toledo does not cite this particular event, the 1982 genocide against people of Maya ancestry in Guatemala exemplifies the dangers faced by many Indigenous people in Latin America.
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