<<<Back to Table of Contents
Nestled on 22 wooded acres backing onto the Balcones Canyon Land Preserve, Alma de Mujer Center for Social Change is changing the way we look at social activism, cultural exchange, environmental stewardship and personal healing.
Alma de Mujer was established in the early 1980s when Genevieve Vaughn, an Austin-based philanthropist, purchased the land on the recommendation of her friend, Marsha Gomez, an artist and teacher at the Dougherty Arts Center. Gomez became the first director of Alma de Mujer. Around the same time, Gomez, who was heavily involved in Native American activism, met other women in the movement including Winona LaDuke, Mililani Trask, Janet McCloud and Agnes Williams. In 1985, they formed the Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN) to foster dialogue and cooperation between indigenous women across the continent and in the Pacific Basin. Their efforts have had tangible results in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, in the legal battle of two Shoshoni sisters to acquire their ancestral lands and in other indigenous struggles. (The sisters won their case in 2008.) In 1996, Alma de Mujer became the IWN’s home base when Vaughn donated the land to the organization. Alma is now the headquarters of IWN’s magazine, Indigenous Woman. Though as a program of the IWN, Alma de Mujer’s focus is on Native American women, they do offer classes, programs and events for people of all ethnicities, in part to preserve Native American culture as well as to raise up new activists in the community.
This past June, girls aged 9-to-13 attended Alma’s Young Girls Leadership Camp, where they were introduced to indigenous ways of understanding our place in the world, our relationship to the land and to each other, through drumming, dancing and creating dreamcatchers. For 16 years, Alma has also offered Environmental Learning Camps to train teenagers in environmental stewardship via a Native American perspective including instruction in “the four directions.” In Native American tradition, each of the four compass directions – north, east, south and west – is associated with specific colors: white for north, black for east, yellow for south and red for west; and also such qualities such as wisdom, personal truth, balance, respect and so on.
This year, under the leadership of former director Ana Lara, Alma de Mujer established an artist-in-residence program. Applications are open to indigenous women and women of color who are artists, writers and curators. Applications are available starting in November and are due between Jan. 1st and Feb.15th, 2010. The program supports both a writer and visual artist during the month of June. Alma’s artist-in-residence program differs from others in that participants are not required to produce anything tangible, though some may do so. Lara says the goal is “ ... to provide a space for [artists] to incubate, to stare at the sky ... ” Under Lara’s leadership, Alma also established a Native American-inspired council which functions somewhat like an executive board but in a more egalitarian fashion without presidents or treasurers. The Council serves in an advisory capacity while fiduciary and other legal responsibilities are handled by the Board of the IWN – a separate entity.
Under Lara’s watch, Alma also built a medicine wheel garden designed by Doris Green, a space based on the “four directions” with herbs and other medicinal plants. Donations of soil, plants and precious stones poured in from The Natural Gardener, It’s About Thyme, Nature’s Treasures and Cobrahead. Alma has also established medicine gardens at People in Defense of Earth and Her Resources (PODER), Resistencia and Monkey Wrench Bookstores, and now offers classes to the general public on creating a medicine garden and healing with plants. In May, University of Texas architecture students and volunteers built a beautiful bridge across the creek that runs through the property connecting Alma’s two land masses. There are also hopes to establish a low-impact walking trail through land that sustains many species of wildlife including the endangered Golden-Cheeked Warbler and the threatened Jollyville Plateau Salamander – a species that exists only in northwest Austin.
Alma now faces a change in leadership as Lara heads off to a graduate program at Yale University. The new director, Maribel A. Garza, a former school librarian and UT graduate student in cultural studies in education, will focus even more on educational programs, working to encourage teachers and school districts to see how nature can be used in core curriculum to teach math and science with powerful hands-on learning. “I [have] worked on ways to teach the curriculum, to show that you can teach math and science in a way that honors the earth. Why can’t we say that? Honor the earth. That we respect a tree? It’s a big thing.”
But Alma isn’t all about education and activism. They also offer several social gatherings each year including their annual Valentine’s Day “Alma Love,” a Mother’s Day Brunch and seasonal celebrations. “2010 will be the Year of the Woman at Alma,” says Garza. “We are matriarchal and really looking forward to exploring that.”
Underlying all of Alma’s programs is the intention to provide a healing space. “A primary focus is on healing our community through art, culture, environmental education and herbal medicine and creating sacred space where that can happen”, Lara explains. Garza concurs. “It’s definitely a safe place. Alma is really safe for everybody: different colors, ages and sexual persuasions ... It’s really about healing ourselves as women, empowering ourselves ... and then doing the work that we do: nurturing, organizing, being solution-oriented. Because we feel like we’re in a real crisis in the world. It’s hard to find spaces of loving and being.” Garza and the advisory council are working hard to make Alma de Mujer just such a place.
MORE INFO
Alma de Mujer
13621 FM 2769, Austin, 78726
For information on events + programs
512.258.3880 |
indigenouswomen.org/Table/Alma-de-Mujer-Center-for-Social-Change/
For more on the Indigenous Women’s Network visit: indigenouswomen.org