|
Dear Friends,
All of us involved in
the Keepers of Love project send you our best wishes for these
holy days and the coming new year. May peace prevail in your own
life and in the lives of the world around us, without exception.
I’m writing to thank
you for your extraordinary generosity, update you on my 2008
activities, and ask for your continued support at this critical
time. Please keep Love growing with a
donation now! We have one day more to meet our fundraising goal of
$10,000 by December 31st The successes we’re having are
a direct reflection of your generosity and the power of the Great
Mystery that holds us all.
Given the amazing
gifts you’ve provided, I first want to let you know that I’ve been
nominated for the 2009 annual "Courage of
Conscience Award" from the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA.
(Other recipients have included the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa,
Paul Farmer, Huston Smith and Julia Butterfly Hill).
The purpose of this prize is to bring support for and awareness of
the recipient’s work for peace.
The nature of this
award confirms my feeling that our work together is part of a
much larger global effort towards the truth-telling and
reconciliation that is essential for the future we long to
pass on to the generations that follow.
Obama’s election and
the UN designation of 2009 as the Year of Reconciliation
confirm
the import of race and reconciliation. However, the economic
crisis and the reality of climate change means that human society
faces unprecedented challenges. We can either wrestle with the
process of reconciliation to help heal and strengthen communities
or we can continue down this path of violence, greed and hatred.
In the short, precious time we have, we must choose the first path.
Technology will help, Bill McKibben says, but in the end, “what
will help is the technology of community. The ability to work
together in profound ways.”
This commitment to working
“together in profound ways” is key to the Keepers of Love.
Our work beg an
in 2003, with Mrs. Nuthel Britton, an African-American
elder who was introduced to me as “The Keeper of Love.” She told
me how the descendent community around Love had been locked out of
their family burial ground for 40 years.
She asked me to help her get back
in to the cemetery so that she could get it opened up for the
community, enabling them to hold their traditional family reunions
and clean-up days there. Four years later, in March
2007, after countless work parties, clearing, and the
reconsecration of the cemetery, our multiracial,
intergenerational, and interfaith group was locked out again. All
of this is detailed in my book, Love Cemetery: Unburying the
Secret History of Slaves. For More,
visit my website
Since the
release of Love Cemetery, I have been
engaged in three areas of activity related to the focus of this
book. These include:
-
an ongoing
involvement in shaping legislation in Texas
concerning access to burial grounds; making
-
a feature-length
documentary on the continuing story of Love Cemetery as it grows
far beyond East Texas;
-
creatively
collaborating with organizations and individuals who share the
Keepers of Love’s vision of reconciliation and community
building
Burial Ground Legislation: In
April, 2008, I was surprised and delighted to find out that the
publication of Love Cemetery sparked a formal investigation by the
Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Funeral Commission.
It’s illegal to prevent families from visiting, maintaining, and
burying people in their family cemeteries. In June, just as the
paperback edition of Love Cemetery was being released,
I was asked to come to Austin to provide documentation and testify.
The main donor for my trip to Austin also provided the means to
bring in Mrs. Doris Vittatoe from Marshall, the President of the
Burial association, as well as Richard Subia, a member of the
Caddo Nation, and two other guardians of a cemetery from the
Houston area. You, KOL donors, made it possible for six of us to
tell the black, white, and Native American stories for the public
record and to film it. Moreover,
precedent-setting legislation, incorporating our suggestions, is
being drafted in Texas as I write. The legislature
convenes in January, 2009.
Love Cemetery Documentary: Videos
that I had made in Texas as part of my research of Love’s story
have become the nucleus for our
documentary feature film. Begun in 2003, while doing
research for Love Cemetery, this part of our work has expanded
enormously since my book came out and the heated controversy over
cemetery access became the focus. During the summer of 2008, Ben
Galland of Oceanic Productions, my son, added dramatic footage to
the project from the Austin hearing as well as haunting images
from three nineteenth-our century beautiful urban black cemeteries
in Houston. As a part of our documentary project, thanks to a
remarkable donor and hostess, I went to Harvard to interview
renowned African American professors, Rev. Peter J. Gomes and Dr.
Allen Counter. These public intellectuals are helping us place the
story of Love in the bigger, national context. The interviews were
filmed by Brian Dowley, a veteran filmmaker who – among many other
fine documentaries – shot and helped produce the PBS special The
Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.
 On
the same trip I visited the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, a
five-acre cemetery with 20,000 remains of men, women, and children
who had been enslaved during the 18th and 19th centuries in New
York. The African Burial Ground is the single-most important,
historic, urban archaeological project in the United States. It’s
been designated as National Monument and is now part of the
National Park system. I met with the Superintendent of the
Monument who has agreed to be part of our documentary.
Click Here to watch a new
five minute trailer for our documentary with footage from the state public
hearings that the book, Love
Cemetery,
sparked in Texas.
Progress on the
documentary has been made possible by the generous contributions
of several key donors. Please help us to
complete this timely piece in 2009! We have the film
crew to do it and the time is now.
Creative Collaboration:
Throughout 2008, our creative collaboration with organizations and
individuals who share Keeper’s of Love’s vision has remained centr al
and continues to grow. We remain involved with
The Alliance for Truth and Racial
Reconciliation, sponsored by the William Winter
Institute at the University of Mississippi. The ATRR is a network
of organizations throughout the south and the east committed to
truth, restorative justice, and reconciliation. KOL, as a member,
is involved in the planning of a national conference on these
themes.
In addition to our
ongoing membership in the ATRR, I’m especially excited by the
emerging collaboration with an professor at
the historically black Wiley College, in Marshall,
Texas, the home of the “Great Debaters,” the basis of Denzel
Washington’s recent film of that title. (The teacher will remain
nameless until we formally clear the college’s official approval
process.) This professor asked me to work with her to help her
create a course based on my book Love Cemetery. It will be web-
based for broad distribution. We envision a writing and
history-based curriculum for secondary and higher education. At
Wiley, it can also be an experientially-based course starting with
oral histories. We’re calling the class “Writing History” with the
goal of empowering students to learn to value the living history
carried by their own ancestors. They will learn to document their
stories in several different, creative ways. Her students have
already volunteered to help clear Love Cemetery of the six-foot
high wisteria and iron-wood vines that once again have completely
covered the cemetery.
Finally, between
testifying in Austin and working on the documentary, another KOL
donor was inspired to take me with her on a retreat for
peacemakers in New York. Our retreat was soon followed by our
participation in the Global Women’s Peace Initiative in Aspen, CO.
The new connections made at these gatherings are bearing fruit and
furthering our possibilities for creative collaborations.
Please give as
generously as you can! The $10,000 request we’re making right now
is part of the $125,000 needed to continue KOL’s work.
The
extraordinary constellation of Obama’s election and his call to
bring this country together, the new legislation being introduced
in January 2009 in Texas, and the availability of two
prize-winning documentary filmmakers ready to complete the Love
documentary, couldn’t be more fortuitous. Together we can
contribute to the crucial work of rebuilding the “Beloved
Community” that we so deeply need at this time.
In love and
gratitude,
China
You can give to
the Keepers of Love via Paypal’s secure site by clicking here
Or send a check made out to our fiscal sponsor, “The Center for
the Arts, Religion, and Education” (C.A.R.E.) with “The Keepers of
Love” on the memo line. The address is:
The Keepers of Love,
20 Sunnyside Ave., Suite A,
Mill Valley, CA 94941.
(415) 451-7497
email: chinagalland@yahoo.com
You will receive a
letter of acknowledgment from CARE for tax purposes in either
case. All gifts are tax-deductible. The Center for the Arts,
Religion, and Education (CARE), is a 501 c 3 non-profit
organization within the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
the largest mainstream multi-denominational theological school in
the country. The Keepers of Love is made up of colleagues,
collaborators, friends, family, and members of our Advisory Board.
credits, starting at the top:
1) "The Keepers of Love," an original oil painting by Janet
McKenzie. Janet traveled to Texas to paint Mrs. Nuthel Britton
(l) and Mrs. Doris Vittatoe (r). Her ability to capture the
essence of these women and the inspirational quality of their
story is essential to my work.
www.janetmckenzie.com
2) Photo by Alan Pogue, June 17, 2008 public hearing in Austin,
TX. (left) Richard Subia, Caddo Nation; middle), Doris
Vittatoe, President of the Love Cemetery Burial Association;
(right), myself, testifying. 3) Photo by Alan Pogue, Doris
Vittatoe testifying, Richard Subia (left) June 17, 2008 hearing.
4) Photo by China Galland, November, 2007, Rev. Thee Smith, Ph.D.,
and two mothers of 1960's slain civil rights workers at the
Alliance for Truth and Racial Reconciliation meeting, Ole Miss,
Oxford, MI.
5) Photo by China Galland, November 4, 2008. The African Burial
Ground National Monument in Manhattan, Duane and Elk, the Federal
Building.
© 2008 China Galland.
|
