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While many people encounter nonviolence as forms of protest and resistance, the constructive side of it, the part that aims to re-establish a sense of self-knowing and trust in one’s community that has been harmed through violence can be overlooked. But it is this kind of work that uplifts a community’s sense of self through a reclaiming of inner power (what we call at the Metta Center, Person Power) that offers a strong foundation for other forms of action. Constructive work on the human image is not a distraction from action, it’s a necessity.
As part of a constructive effort to challenge and offer redress for the ongoing harms of identity suppression through language erasure within indigenous communities around the world, Bay Area educator and somatic coach Margarita Acosta’s Tierra Indigena Montessori is a shining light. Their work “facilitates reparations to Indigenous Peoples by supporting them in establishing educational spaces that maintain, strengthen, and revitalize their ancestral languages and cultures through the Montessori Method.”
She makes the case that language revitalization ought to be a front-and-center topic for our collective concern, no matter which language we speak and know ourselves through. All languages enrich our understanding of our world, and concepts embedded within our various linguistic homes can help us resolve personal and global crises and challenges. Losing language is a loss of our collective potential, and its revitalization becomes an expression of our creative and collective power as well as of reparations and healing.
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Stephanie: Greetings everybody and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook. And I’m here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
So, as we know, children matter. Children’s lives matter. And as Gandhi said, if we’re to have peace in the world, we must begin with the children. And one thing that’s a bit hopeful about this is that there’s so many different models of education that are doing what’s called a constructive program to replace systems of education that see the student just as a mind and a body and having a more holistic approach to education that looks at the whole human being and what they need and how they learn.
And one of those models is the Montessori model. In fact, that quote from Gandhi is sometimes attributed to Maria Montessori. And so, on today’s episode we hear from Margarita Acosta about a marriage between the Montessori model and Indigenous language reclamation efforts in her organization, Tierra Indigena Montessori.
She draws from her and her family’s experience in El Salvador and the problem of losing local languages not only affects human communities through cultural identity, but she also makes the case of how it’s affecting us globally, the loss of Indigenous language affects us even in such issues as climate change.
So, I’m happy to share with you this conversation with Margarita Acosta.
Margarita: My name is Margarita Acosta. And I am a former educator and founder of Tierra Indigena Montessori, which is an organization that partners which Indigenous educators to design cultural and language reclamation Montessori schools.
I’m also a somatic transformation coach, working at the intersection of similar domain, people working in education, activism, environmentalism.
I think that so much of the ways in which colonization has had an impact on us as human beings is that it’s disconnected us from our bodies. And so, in order to move forward and make decisions from a place of healing and moving towards what we most long for. In the movement work, I think we also need to be doing healing work. They’re interrelated and really important to be doing together.
So, I identify very strongly with being a movement baby. My parents were activists during the Salvadorean Civil War – peace activists. And my father was a refugee in the early 80s from El Salvador who then was speaking out against the US involvement and the militarization of the right-wing government of El Salvador. And that’s how he met my mother, who was involved with the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia.
And so, they met when he was speaking at an event. And so, that was kind of their love story. And then, when I was 3-years-old, we moved to El Salvador. They were kind of sensing that the end of the war was, perhaps possible. And so, they decided to move the whole family down to El Salvador at the tail end of the civil war in 1990.
So, they kind of like worked together. My childhood was very much defined by the work that they were doing, also kind of at the intersection of education, environmental justice, peace work, all the things. So, it was a very interesting way to grow up.
I mean in the work that you all are doing, you all are very Gandhian, but I would say that my family’s connection to nonviolence very much comes from the work of Archbishop Óscar Romero. My father, you know, way before he met my mom, when he was still in El Salvador, he went to seminary to become a priest. And so, he got to study with Óscar Romero.
You know, for the sake of a story, Óscar Romero was the archbishop in El Salvador in the late 70s. And he originally came into power because he was a pretty moderate guy, you know, under a right-wing government. And so, the Catholic Church appointed him archbishop.
And then once he came into the position of the archbishop, he ended up, you know, really working with people, with the campesinos, with the working poor in El Salvador who were living under really oppressive conditions. And so, he was working with them, and then he began to speak out against the ways in which the government was continuing to exacerbate the pattern of land being in the hands of the original 13 families originally from Europe. They had all the power. And then basically for a lot of the history of El Salvador, those same 13 families have been in power until very recently. You know, in the relative sense, until a little bit after the war.
And so, the Archbishop Óscar Romero, he was assassinated in 1980. And that marked the beginning of the Civil War. And the US government was funding the right-wing government’s militarization of all that. And so, you know.
And then I actually didn’t grow up in the Catholic Church because my father, he got ex-communicated from the Catholic Church because of participating in teacher’s protests. And so, he was no longer involved. He didn’t finish seminary. But in some ways, he was doing the work I think that Jesus, you know, would have wanted him to.
And then I didn’t grow up in the Catholic Church, but the concepts of liberation theology, of like working for liberation, have been just like a part of our family history for a long time in various ways.
Stephanie: That’s beautiful. So, you see yourself really situated within a tradition of peace work, of healing work?
Margarita: Yeah. And I definitely feel like, you know, my parent’s generation of activists didn’t have a lens towards the importance of trauma healing as part of the activism. Like they were a people who were just like working really hard all the time, not necessarily eating very well. You know, in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s even, there wasn’t the same understanding of the way that trauma lives in the body as we’re starting to develop now.
And I feel like movements in present time have a kind of better understanding of how important it is to be doing the healing work and how central to the movement it is, right? That it is part of the work to do healing, both individually and collectively. And so, we can turn inward as we turn outwards toward the collective and into all the ways in which we’re interconnected with one another.
Stephanie: Beautiful.
Margarita: I went to school in El Salvador until I was 10-years-old. And I definitely was not taught about the history of what had happened. Especially the people’s version of the history of what had happened in El Salvador.
And I feel like I got a great deal of that, from my parents, thankfully. And then later on in, you know, high school and college when I became really interested and wanted to learn more. I went to an English-speaking private school in El Salvador because my parents wanted me and my sister to learn English.
And it was a really oppressive place to go to school. We were being taught about Christopher Columbus being a hero. And then Indigenous people were part of the past of the history of the country. When like I was going home and my parents had a poster that said, “Christopher Columbus wanted.”
And meanwhile, my dad’s really good friend was the chief of three of the main Indigenous groups in El Salvador, in present day at the time. You know, like Indigenous people still exist and existed at that time as well.
So, there was this cognitive dissonance that was happening for me. From a very young age, I knew that textbooks and teachers oftentimes were not telling the full truth of the history of the world.
And so, I got really curious about what are the methodologies and the tools that can actually make education liberatory and, you know, empowering for children and young people. And so, I kind of followed in my mom’s – and a little bit in my dad’s footsteps, and studied linguistics in undergrad.
I minored in education at the time and then decided to get a teaching credential with a master’s after that. And when I was still in undergrad, I was kind of torn between, do I want to kind of become a bilingual educator and teach in – like be a Spanish bilingual teacher or do I want to learn about language revitalization?
I was really interested in both of these things and ultimately, my intuition was I feel like I need to learn how to be a really good bilingual teacher, and I’ll come back to this. Back to what it means to revitalize languages.
And part of the reason why I was so interested in that is that I knew that in El Salvador, the language is very much still very much close to being extinct. The numbers are not totally clear. They keep changing, depending on who I ask. But it’s somewhere between 30 and 90 speakers that have been speaking Nawat. It’s commonly known as Nawat Pipil, which is one of many Indigenous languages that used to exist in El Salvador. It’s the only surviving one.
Stephanie: Wow.
Margarita: The reason for that is that in 1932 – so I grew up like really knowing about the history of the war where 80,000 people were killed or disappeared over the course of 12 years. And that was a horrible, you know, violent thing that happened. And I lived through part of it, right? It was in my lived memory.
And it wasn’t until really recently, actually, like in the last five years that I put the pieces together, that my grandmother was alive in 1932. She was 15-years-old. And that that’s how she lost some of her sisters. In 1932, so in the civil war, 80,000 people were lost or disappeared. During the massacre of 1932, 40,000 people, Indigenous people were killed in a matter of months.
And from that moment on, it was illegal and dangerous to identify as being Indigenous. It was dangerous to speak an Indigenous tongue. This is a severing that happened in my grandmother’s generation on that side of my family. And so, it feels like a form of healing for me to do something, to have this north star. Even if it’s not Nawat, even if it’s not my own ancestral language, how can we work towards creating within the educational system places where we can bring this back to life and heal our relationship with the earth and our identities and all the things, right?
And over the course of my teaching career – I started my teaching career at a pretty traditional public school that happened to be a Spanish bilingual school. It was my dream population to be working with. I was teaching at a Title 1 school in San Francisco, in the Mission, where I was teaching third-grade. And so, like, in that model of bilingual education, the idea was that I was 50% of the time was in English and 50% of the time was in Spanish.
Meanwhile, the school and the district were working against the bilingual program. And so, it was this constant uphill, swimming upstream of like – I know in my bones what good bilingual education looks like, and I wasn’t really allowed to do it well. And in fact, when I first arrived at that school, the first year I taught there, I was only allowed to teach three subjects. Reading, math, and test prep for reading and math.
It’s so common in schools that are serving marginalized populations for the education to get stripped down. And for anything that is interesting, anything that is actually truly worth learning, to be taken away. So, I figured out in my second year how to subversively incorporate science into my curriculum because I really believed in it. But it meant I was working as a teacher, these incredibly long hours to make it happen, right?
And so, the beginning of my teaching career was like a lot of burnout and overwhelmed. And I was like, “This doesn’t feel like this is it.” And so, after my third year of teaching, I had this amazing opportunity to – I got a new job in the DC area at a public Spanish bilingual Montessori school. And they sent me to Mexico to get Montessori trained. I was just so in love with the Montessori method.
You know, it’s such a – like coming from such an oppressive kind of learning environment and teaching environment, to then suddenly, like, okay. Being a part of a school where everyone was trying to create environments where children lead the way in their learning. Their autonomy is the most important thing. We’re trying to teach children how to make choices about what it is that they are ready to learn.
And we’re guiding them instead of taking – you know, as [unintelligible] says, like ‘filling the cup’ kind of perspective on education. Actually, letting them construct the world around them and make meaning. And as the teacher and the guide in the room, our job is to scientifically observe what it is that they’re ready for. And to gently guide them in that direction and then let them do their work, right?
And so, learning about how powerful Montessori can be in combination with language immersion. I was like, “Oh, this could be such a powerful tool for language reclamation.” And I taught for another five years as a lower elementary guide. Lower elementary being first, second, and third grade.
I did leave the classroom at one point and started working for a nonprofit that works with educators around mindfulness and wellness and somatics. And working with school ecosystems to work at the individual, interpersonal, and ecological level, of like how can we create more healing-centered spaces?
So, now I’m kind of in the beginnings of creating this other nonprofit, of like how can we design schools that are using Montessori as a method for the sake of language and cultural reclamation?
We’re fiscally sponsored by the Wildflower Schools Network, which is a network of schools that supports teacher-leaders in opening their own microschools. So, generally, very small, like generally storefront schools or in someone’s living room, applying the Montessori method in their communities.
And so, taking that kind of same model into spaces where the goal is creating linguistic and cultural reclamation schools for reconnecting, as part of the healing work, reconnecting to identity. Yeah. What else can I say about that?
Stephanie: I mean my background is I have a bit of background in Montessori education – well, I worked as an early childhood educator for about seven years up here in Petaluma because I was looking for a method that was really like what does nonviolence education look like in early childhood, in particular.
And I was led to Montessori and I also became quite enamored with – yeah, the way that you describe it. That it’s not forcing education in any way, but it’s creating spaces that are deeply spiritual and mysterious. And where children claim their full humanity in that space. And you enter into relationship, into the child’s world, and it’s quite beautiful.
The irony strikes me, though, that this is like, you know, a white Italian woman’s system of education being used for liberatory Indigenous language reclamation practices. And they seem incompatible on paper. So, I just want to have you speak to that.
Margarita: Yeah. I love that question and that’s, you know, complication of the theme. I think that Maria Montessori, she was a genius. She created this wonderful method that the sequence of math materials, for example, that she envisioned and then brought to life what’s possible for creating more mathematical understanding is like really just elegant.
And then if you boil it down to its essential elements of what the Montessori philosophy is, it’s actually Indigenous concepts, right? In so many ways, she actually took what peoples who have been connected to earth for millennia and, you know, called it Montessori – in so many ways. And there are things that really are just specifically Montessori, like the math materials and all the things.
But at its essence, these are Indigenous ways of being. And our educational system, even in Indigenous contexts, tend to be reproducing colonized ways of learning, unfortunately. And I’ll speak, as an example, the place where my heart has been yearning to start this work is in Oaxaca, Mexico. I have my dear partner in creating this organization is from Oaxaca, and he’s a Zapotec teacher. He and I met participating in these kind of exchanges of pedagogical strategies that had nothing to do with Montessori.
But in going and learning from the teachers that were participating in these workshops over the years, I got to learn about, you know, there is actually an Indigenous educational system within Mexico. And at least ten years ago – things have shifted a little bit since then, but ten years ago, there was this really severe problem which is that, you know, there’s all this linguistic diversity, especially in Oaxaca. There’s so much just – so many different variants of languages. Just, it’s really incredible what’s still alive in that part of the world.
And the Indigenous educational system was systematically – is still controlled by the Mexican government, and therefore, teachers who spoke a language, but were Indigenous, were being placed in communities where it was not their same language. And then they were asked to teach the children who spoke a completely different language and then calling it bilingual education.
And so, this idea was born out of that problem. Like, okay, how can we actually create a system where it’s the teachers themselves who get to stay in their own communities and design schools that are actually in alignment with who they are and their language that they speak, with the metaphors and the stories and the cosmology and all the things that are actually theirs?
Because the system that’s currently in place, the so-called Indigenous education, isn’t working. It’s not actually doing what it’s set out to do. And just kind of going back to why Montessori, as the tool for this task, there’s a few different reasons. Like Montessori as a methodology and a philosophy really teaches so many things, that everything in the world is interconnected, right?
There’s like a lot of teaching children about the systems that they’re a part of. And especially in lower elementary, like starting with the great lessons, which is like literally like the entire universe and how it was born is presented to children in the beginning. There’s so much potential to tell the stories from a specific community in parallel, right? To the scientific version.
And there’s so much interrelatedness. Like sometimes there’s a false dichotomy between science and Indigenous ways of knowing. There’s also science and Indigenous ways of knowing. The other one is that children have a spiritual essence, like you were saying. Like children are spiritual beings. And just as much as their intellect is worthy of development, their hearts and their spirits are worthy of development.
Montessori teaches about how the earth is sacred and living. Like, you know, when I went through Montessori training and being, you know, literally trained that in front of children we always – I mean ideally, in the world – we literally model. If there’s a spider in the room, we sweep it up and very carefully, reverently, take it outside. We don’t kill it. We don’t, you know. We don’t do the things that I feel like in many – more traditional educational contexts, you know, would be like, “Okay, no big deal.” But it was like a whole lesson on how to take a spider outside, right?
And then the last thing I want to say about the ways in which Montessori and Indigenous education are just like a beautiful marriage, are that – the concept of the child’s autonomy, right? And at the individual level, at that level of development, we’re talking about autonomy. And then at the level of the collective and adults, you know, it’s the same thing as Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, in so many ways. It’s just like a different level of development.
And so, in order to continue forward, you know, the work of continuing to create political contexts where sovereignty and self-determination is possible, what if we started with children? What if we started when they’re 3? What if we started when they’re babies? And like whatever they’re independently capable of doing, we support them in doing it independently, right? Which is so much a part of the Montessori method.
Stephanie: I spent some time in West Africa. I was part of a program called the Peace Corps. And I’m still in touch with my friends in the village I learned that there’s dozens local languages in the country that I was at – Benin. But they’re not allowed to speak those languages in school. It’s a French school system that takes them through – just like a student if they were in France, to be competing in that market in France, you know, with the baccalaureate and everything in the end.
And it’s punishable if they speak local language inside of school. I mean this is a real opportunity as well to transform that paradigm of the legacy of colonialism within school systems that don’t match the realities of what people are living in villages. I mean imagine if the school systems were in the Indigenous languages of the local area. And what would they lose? I just – I don’t know.
Margarita: I don’t know either. I think that there’s a lot of people that think that teaching an Indigenous language or nondominant language means not learning the dominant language of a place. And, you know, this thinking, it’s ironic and oftentimes gets applied towards marginalized communities and not towards communities where there’s a lot more privilege and access.
There’s children in Europe who grow up speaking seven languages, no problem. The same thing could be true of Indigenous communities. They could be speaking two-three languages, no problem. There’s studies around the mental health implications of not being connected to language and culture.
There’s a study out of Canada that showed that in communities surrounding a community where they did still speak their language, the suicide rates were six times higher than average where they no longer spoke their language. And in the one community that was kind of at the center, where they still spoke their language, suicide rates were zero, right?
So, this is like a mental health – like, you know, it’s a human – it’s a social justice issue at the individual, at the collective level. And then we can also think of it as like this is actually good for all of us. Kind of coming from the perspective of climate justice, Indigenous languages have embedded in them whole other ways of understanding the world, including local ecologies.
And so, when we lose a language – and they’re going extinct faster than species are – when we lose a language, we lose a whole way of seeing the world, whole classification systems. Like there’s – I think it’s Nordic languages that have classifications for reindeer that we just don’t – we don’t have in English or Spanish or, you know, the more dominant languages of the world.
Like there’s probably so many medicinal wisdom embedded in language, in the Indigenous languages that are being lost that could be a benefit to the entire globe. And so, it’s not just this is the right thing to do for Indigenous people, it’s actually for all of our wellbeing for there to be – in the same that monoculture is not good for anyone, like having multiple species of plants growing together is beneficial to all the plants. Like, the same thing is true in human ecology.
We need diversity. We need people to be connected to who they are. And our educational system isn’t doing that very well. There’s pockets. There’s small pockets here and there of people who are doing really great work of teaching, you know, the Indigenous history within traditional schools. There’s so much happening, right? That we could speak to. And we could do more. Like, can we dream bigger?
Stephanie: Well, thank you so much for all of this. And I’m just interested in how people can get involved in your work and lead us down that path a bit.
Margarita: Sure. You can follow our work through our website, TierraIndigenaMontessori.org. We also have an Instagram account. The three words with dots in the middle – Tierra.Indigena.Montessori. And also on Facebook. Same thing, but it’s without the dots.
And definitely, we will take donations. We are in search of expanding the network in whatever ways which includes people who might be able to support the work financially, with time, with connections. There’s so many ways to support the work, for sure.
Stephanie: Hey everybody, you’re at Nonviolence Radio and that was a conversation with Margarita Acosta from Tierra Indigena Montessori. We turn now to the Nonviolence Report with Michael Nagler.
Nonviolence Report
Michael: Greetings everyone. This is Michael Nagler and this is the Nonviolence Report for November of 2023.
The biggest issue on everyone’s mind here is a scene of great violence, though there is a little bit of nonviolence happening. And that is, of course, the terrific bombardment and now invasion of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force.
The humanitarian disaster there is just shocking, unthinkable. I’m not going to go into any of the details. And of course, what happened to the Israeli communities on October 7 was equally dehumanizing. So, we have really an extremely severe case of violence in a kind of iconic location.
And there is some nonviolence coming forward in response to it. We have ourselves interviewed Ofer Cassif, who is a Knesset member, and there are many other spokespeople, both from the region and around the world, who have posted very, very informative, insightful, and compassionate comments around the internet.
Our own personal friend, Mubarak Awad from Nonviolence International, who has been working on this issue for something like 40 years, has offered some very good suggestions. It’s in an article called, 7 Steps to End the Cycle of Violence in Israel and Palestine. You can find it through Nonviolence International, which is based in Washington DC.
I just want to quote you his conclusion. “The path to peace requires nonviolent action, not just from Israelis and Palestinians, but also Americans, the media, aid organizations, and others.” He made that statement back on October 12. So, I want to highlight that, that nonviolent action and nonviolent statements are really the only antidote to the enormity of the violence. And we should never think that because the violence is so extreme, nonviolence would not be effective. On the contrary, nonviolence can create a bit of salutary shock that opens people to possibilities that otherwise seem completely closed to them. And I will be quoting an example of that in a little bit.
Another friend of ours, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, ran into a friend of hers at a demonstration. Her friend’s name was Anna. And asked her, “Anna, why do you come here?” And she gave Rabbi Gottlieb an answer that she’d heard elsewhere also. This is a direct quote, “I lost my whole family in the holocaust. The Nazis were murderers. I don’t want us to be like them. Better to be among the persecuted than the persecutors because at least we still have our human souls.” So, that’s the key point there. We still have our human souls. And it’s possible to do that without being persecuted, of course, if one prepares and practices nonviolence.
So, moving onto one of those commentators that I just recently referred to. In this case, Thomas Friedman. He said something that I think we can all benefit from. This is a quote, “America cannot protect Israel in the long run” – I just want to repeat that. “America cannot protect Israel in the long run from the very real threats it faces unless Israel has a government that reflects the best, not the worst, of its society, and unless that government is trying to forge compromises with the best, not the worst, of Palestinian society.”
I mean, this is something we’ve experienced in our own society with, perhaps, less devastating consequences. But it brings up, you know, this dismal theory. Originally, that was applied to economics, but I think it applies to politics, that somehow voters, participants, gravitate towards people who offer them quick violent solutions. It has never worked, and it’s not working now, at a disastrous level.
So, onto some of the contrary, the counteracting events, which we need to have a lot more of. Some of them are simple protest actions. For example, some Gaza peace activists here in San Francisco chained themselves to a ship that was headed to Israel with military and other supplies.
So, of course, this kind of thing doesn’t stop shipments like that totally. They managed to delay it by nine hours, which is a good example of what I call a symbolic plus some concrete reality. And so, that is bound to have its effect.
Now, more to the point. In the region, there are now, particularly in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, there are teams of Arab and Israeli guys, mostly young guys, going around those cities with posters. It’s called, “A radical idea, protecting one another as fear reigns.” And one of them said this, “We are always told that they hate us, so we need to hate them. I always felt something was wrong there.” It’s interesting that out of context we don’t know which side was being referred to, and it is completely symmetrical. It does not matter.
So, very recently – there’s an organization called Veterans for Peace. And in the face of the destruction of half of the homes in Gaza, and I just don’t want to go into all the details. But, “as Palestinians in Gaza teeter on the brink of death without sustenance or shelter, we call for an immediate end to Israel’s barbaric bombing and invasion of Gaza. We call on the world to intervene in any and every capacity to end the ongoing genocidal attacks against a defenseless civilian society.”
And they have actually attempted to get to the Rafah crossing and get into the region, which is a very courageous and very eloquent thing to do.
Now, personally, I am a little bit against this – loosely using the term genocide. What Israel is trying to do in Gaza might well be extremely unfair and create enormous civilian casualties – children and others. But they are not, in this action at least, trying to obliterate the people of Gaza. And even if they were, that would only be a small part of the Palestinian population.
So, why am I quibbling about this? Because when we overuse the term like genocide, it loses some of its power. And we need a lot of power to awaken the conscience of people worldwide. I want to recur to the fact that, “we call on the world to intervene in any and every capacity.”
One of the great tragedies and great lessons in this conflict for me has been the complete incapacity of the international community to come forward with any constructive solution.
Calling for a ceasefire is very helpful. I’ve gone on record saying this. But only if the ceasefire is used to create a space for dialog and intervention of third parties who are willing to risk their safety for peace.
Now, there was an article by someone – an Israeli named Shimri Zameret, back in March in Resistance Studies. It’s kind of poignant, if not painful, to read this now, but I think it’s helpful. And again, I’m just going to quote directly. Back then in March, she was saying, “For the first time in decades, I can honestly say that I see a realistic path toward ending the occupation in our generation.”
And of course, this just goes out the window the minute the war happens. But one of the main points in the interview with Ofer was that as long as we’re occupying Palestine, there’s never going to be an end to the hatred and the violence. It’s really that simple.
Now, there is another very bright light, very small, but very bright that I want to cite here. The highest-ranking prelate of the Catholic Church in the holy land offered his, “absolute availability to be exchanged for Israeli children taken hostage by Hamas.” His name is Cardinal Pizzaballa. He is the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem. And he told reporters during an online meeting back in October that he is willing to do anything to bring to freedom and bring home the children. For me, that is the actual religion of Jesus at work.
And I’d like to add that in France, in London, and in Germany actually, there have been widespread well attended protests against anti-Semitism. I think the protesters in France were close to 100,000 in Paris.
They have really, really good slogans like, you know, “Non au Racisme,” “No to racism,” and other such statements. And, you know, I’ve always said, and I’ll say it again, that protests are important. They have a very significant but limited effect. We need to be able to build on them, to use the sentiment developed in them, to create more long-term and more constructive acts, but they are indispensable to arouse conscious and let people find one another.
So, I want to move on now to events in the US and our own country. Some things that have appeared recently in polls are very troubling. The respondents have agreed to, for example, “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” And we all know what happened back on January 6th.
Now, for the first time, back in March, the pollsters found that 15% of Americans agreed with this. Two years and eight surveys later, it had risen to 23%. So, it’s for the first time more than one in five Americans are open to condoning political violence. So, in another way, you could say that the chaos unleashed on congress on January 6 of 2021 is going mainstream. And this has terrible consequences for the country in ways that I think neither political party has properly appreciated.
So, what is the answer to all of this? Studies have shown for years that anti-violence training reduces aggressive episodes among students, for example. And of course, what we need to grow towards and as quickly as possible is nonviolence training, not just anti-violence training. And that is also starting here and there.
The Journal of American Medical Association of Psychiatry has shown that groups doing mindfulness-based stress reduction, at first, did better than those taking the usual medication for reducing stress. But after 24 weeks, fewer of them stuck with it. So, the conclusion is that mindfulness is harder, but it works better.
Now, mindfulness means, in their case, monitoring your physical and mental state. I hold out a brief for meditation, which means not just monitoring, but changing your mental state.
So, in this connection, you may remember a film that really got pretty widespread attention when it came out. It was called, “Doing time, Doing Vipassana.” So, that movement has today given rise to something called, “The prison mindfulness project.”
If you look at their board of directors, it’s like a roster of the superstars of Vipassana. Pema Chodron, Jack Kornfield, etc. And the statistics are encouraging in this land of mass incarceration. They now have a network of 1500 facilitators operating worldwide. There have been over 3000 downloads on their podcast from 56 countries.
They call what they’re doing, “Integral Transformative Justice.” I like that. It’s a step better than restorative justice, I guess. Transformative justice.
As usual, I’d like to share a quote with you. This time from Tony Vick, who has been an inmate for decades. He has been slowly, quietly, changing the culture, or at least the atmosphere of his particularly grim prison, by sharing food. Imagine that. And he says, “When you take violence off the table as a remedy, you open up your mind to a vast array of other possibilities.” Which is what we’ve been saying for a long, long time.
And he goes on to say, “I discovered that my supper mates and I had more in common than we ever imagined. Sharing a meal allowed us to drop the bravado and the layers of emotional protection we placed around us, and simply exist as human beings who needed to eat.”
So, when he started this, handing his tray over to other inmates, “Do you want some of my mashed potatoes” or whatever, he found things, little things changing. Like inmates would greet each other as they passed by in the hall and even smile occasionally against the coldness and steel of the prison.
And he goes on to say, “Slowly, a community formed and it became my prison family. When you know someone and know part of their story, you are less likely to cause them harm.”
I’m sure you remember the Standing Rock protests against that oil pipeline. Now three activists there, Winona LaDuke who’s a very well-known Native American activist, and two of her colleagues who had been arrested for those protests and trying to block the operation were facing a judge, Leslie Metzen, who recently dismissed charges against them. So, this is really a heartwarming win.
And she went on to say, “These cases and these three defendants, in particular, have awakened in me some deep questions about what would serve the interests of justice here. As a child growing up in the 50s and 60s, what I learned about “Indians” came from TV shows. And what I learned about history was only Caucasian history and the European view of the world was discussed. In the last 20 years, I have come to a broader understanding of what we, the now dominant culture, have done.” And she goes on to list some of the acts of violence against Native Americans.
But what particularly brings our attention to bear here is how protesters standing up for their rights, not only go against legal, but against conscience, against conscious prejudices and awaken people to their humanity. Something that we have already heard of earlier in this program, and which we’ve seen over and over again.
To carry out or even contemplate acts of violence against an individual or a group, you must, in some way, consider them less than human. You must dehumanize them, move them off the territory of what you regard as your community, if not your species.
And it turns out over and over again that the willingness to take risks, the willingness to face sacrifices without offering acts of violence awakens the conscience of the opponent to the humanity of the protesters. This is something that violence can never do.
Finally, now I want to share my thrill with you to learn about a project. You all have heard about the development goals, Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, which are all about global domestic product and so forth. Now there is a movement which started in 2022 at a summit called, “The Inner Development goals.”
And this brought together over 800 guests including a lot of big names who convened in Stockholm with thousands joining in digitally or from local hubs. So, this is a real advance over the earlier efforts called something like Wisdom 2.0 which took place in San Francisco.
It’s a kind of meeting that one hopes will lead to concrete ideas for awareness that, guess what? As human beings, we have an inner dimension. We have an inner life. We have consciousness. And this would be, again, a way of strengthening what I was just saying about how to overcome conflict through acts of nonviolence. This is the other side of that.
As usual, we always can find spots of real humanity and real light. And as we have repeated here a time or two, and it probably bears reputation a time or two more, these acts of courage, of self-sacrifice, especially for the benefit of others to whom one may not even be directly related, is showing us what we truly are as human beings.
Stephanie: I want to share one resource that is part of the Metta Center for Nonviolence and was created by your hosts, Michael Nagler and myself. It’s a book called, “Nonviolence Daily: 365 Days of Inspiration from Gandhi.” So, you can get it in a book form. You can receive it in an email every single day by signing up at MettaCenter.org/NonviolenceDaily. And there you’ll also find an audio version of each of the days with new content, just going from however the quote from Gandhi with a new interpretation.
On Day 238 we received in our inboxes, Michael and I, this quote from Gandhi. “If light can come out of darkness, then alone can love emerge from hatred.” That’s from Gandhi. It’s a compilation from a book called, “Mind of Mahatma Gandhi.” And Michael, I’d love for you to give a short commentary on that.
Michael: Well, it’s not hard to comment on this quote. It is a really basic statement of the basic, basic principle. And I think what is particularly useful about it is the criterion that we can judge every action, every institution, indeed, every thought by a very simple criterion, is this emerging from hatred or from love?
Now, that doesn’t mean that it’ll be accompanied by the emotion of hatred or love. Because what we’re talking about here are not emotions, but spirituality forces. So, along with the characterization of the two forces, the opposite forces of hatred and love, we can trace them to two opposite visions of what we are and what humanity is. The hatred side will come from a sense that we are radically separate, just as we appear on the physical plane.
So that if I have to hurt you in some way in order to get what I want, well, too bad. “Too bad aboutcha,” as we used to say. That’s how life works. But love arises from the vision of unity, that we are not merely physical beings and that therefore, on the conscious level, on the spiritual level, we are so interconnected that as every wisdom tradition has told us forever, “Any attempt to harm another is first and foremost, and more drastically, a harm of oneself.” That’s the negative side, of course.
Every attempt to do an act of kindness to another, especially if you have been involved in an altercation of some kind, you are doing tremendous healing to your own psyche. So, all of that lies behind this simple remark that we’re quoting today from the Mahatma.
Stephanie: So, you can find this book, Nonviolence Daily, at the website of the Metta Center as well as so many other resources to help improve and deepen your study of nonviolence.
Hey everybody you’ve been listening to Nonviolence Radio. We want to thank our mother station, KWMR, to Matt Watrous, Annie Hewitt, and Sophia Pechaty for working on our team to make this show possible. Thank you very much. To Bryan Farrell over at Waging Nonviolence who help syndicate and promote the show, thank you, as well as to all the stations across the Pacifica Network. We want to thank our guest today, Margarita Acosta from Tierra Indigena Montessori.
This show is archived at NonviolenceRadio.org where you’ll find the audio and transcript and links and show notes. So, until the next time everybody, please take care of one another. And as we like to say at the Metta Center, learn everything you can about nonviolence. Take care.