from
China Galland
26 August 2008
…what
will really help, in the end? What will help is the technology
we’ve lost track of most --- the technology of community. The
ability to work together in profound ways.
Bill McKibben, “God’s Green Earth, Faith, Crisis,” Reflections
[i]
Dear Friends:
The ability to work together in profound ways – that’s
what you’ve given us when you responded so generously to my appeals
for the Keepers of Love. It’s vitally important for you to know
that your support is having a big impact out in the world and
that it’s growing exponentially each day.
First, you supported me through the research and writing of my book, Love Cemetery, Unburying the Secret History of Slaves. Then, this June, you responded when I asked for your support to get to Austin for the State of Texas’ public hearings that the book had sparked. I was able to bring five members of The Keepers of Love to testify and the filmmaker who’s been covering the story from its inception in 2003 and with whom I’m collaborating on a feature-length documentary. We now have over 70 hours of footage. In today's visual world we need to create video for broadcast, DVD and web distribution.
As a result of the searing testimony at that hearing, where one man spoke of how he watched helplessly as a road grader rolled over the African-American cemetery where his ancestors – former slaves – are buried, another hearing has just been scheduled for September 3, 2008 – this time in Marshall, a few miles from Love Cemetery. African-American state legislators are writing legislation for the 2009 session to put an end to what’s happening at Love which effects everyone, not only African Americans.
To build on the positive change you've made possible, we need to be in Marshall next week for this public hearing. The State of Texas has intervened on behalf of the Love descendents and many others around the state. Now we need to respond and get there to document an event that we've worked five years to bring about. This episode is key to bringing our documentary film to completion. Please donate immediately. This is the State's timeline, not mine. This story is off and running, set off by the publication of the book. Our task is to maintain the momentum and ride it to completion in a way that benefits us all and builds community.. We need to be in Marshall to keep bearing witness. This story reaches well beyond Texas. Your support is allowing us to document and create a process for people to use, a replicable model, that will help all of us to work towards reconciliation -- with the earth and with each other. We are working to catalyze a greatly needed national dialogue on race and reconciliation. The footage we have shows a community overcoming difference to find connection, it shows people speaking truth to power and telling the buried stories of their ancestors. Stories can change hearts. They open us up to a full-body change, embodiment, not just a changed mind.
"In order to have a common future we need to reconstruct our common past," Manning Marable tells us. We’ve learned from the model of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process that without truth there can be no reconciliation. The story that we are telling together models that truth. This time the stakes are higher, the possibilities are greater and the need more pressing. I’m asking for $25,000 from you, collectively, in order to return to Texas to film, to edit, to further our collaborative efforts in Marshall, to log our footage and to produce a trailer and formal proposal for submission to major film foundations. One has already invited us to submit our footage. We'll be happy to send a detailed budget upon request.
Please join me in seizing this moment to grow the
work of The Keepers of Love into a dynamic part of the solution. Your
donations in any amount are part of an ocean of positive actions that
can help tip the balance toward peace and reconciliation.
For donors who have given $1,000 or more, we are giving a day-long spiritual retreat at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm at Muir Beach on October 3, 2008, as a sign of our gratitude.
Please contact me for details at
chinagalland@yahoo.com
or call (415) 451-7497
To donate online via PayPal, you can click the
button below,
or you can send a check made out to our fiscal sponsor, C.A.R.E.
(Center for Art, Religion and Education) with Keepers of Love
on the memo line and mail it to :
The Keepers of Love c/o China Galland,
20 Sunnyside Avenue, Suite A,
Mill Valley, CA 94941.
All donations ate tax-deductible within the full extent of the
law.
Blessings on you in this pivotal time,
PS: Because none of this could be happening
without you, I want you to be able to see a very rough twelve-minute
long edit of some remarkably moving testimony at the hearing and a
glimpse of Texas politics in action at the locked gate to Love
Cemetery’s access road. It’s on a protected website.
Cut and paste or click the following link and you will find it at: http://oceanic.blip.tv/#1209877
i]
“How Big Should People Be” in Reflections, Yale
Divinity School, “God’s Green Earth, Faith, Crisis,” Spring 2007, 27.
Newsletter design by
Corey Fischer;
Top panorama courtesy of Green Gulch Farm,
all other photos are captured from video footage shot by Ben
Galland (Oceanic Productions) from top: a Texas state official, Doris Vittatoe and China, waiting for a
representative of the timber corporation to unlock the gate to the
access road to Love Cemetery. He never appeared.
Doris Vittatoe,
member of the Keepers of Love; Rev. Sampson Thompson, representing
another cemetery from which families have been locked out;