Volume 16
Support the families of Felicity Swafford, Frank "Pancho" and Cisco, and Kweli Amaru Shakur; podcast ponderings; queer-trans ecologies symposium; horse shaped snow angels.
ACTION ITEMS
Felicity Anne Swafford died on March 2, 2023 at age 25, leaving behind her 2-year-old daughter, Vivianne and “a plethora of friends and family (and truly anyone who ever met her) that love her deeply.” On her gofundme she is remembered as “[lighting] up every room she entered with her infectious laugh and a beam of a smile.” All proceeds from her gofundme will go towards supporting her daughter as she grows up without her mother’s physical presence.
SUPPORT FELICITY SWAFFORD’S DAUGHTER HERE.
In February Frank “Pancho” and his son, Cisco, were gravely injured in a house fire. Their gofundme was started as a means to cover medical costs as they recovered. They were both in medically induced comas for several weeks before Cisco passed away on March 6 and Frank followed on March 7. Most of Frank’s injuries were sustained trying to save Cisco. Unfortunately, Frank was unable to save his mother who was also in the house at the time of the fire. Frank had also recently lost his wife to Covid. Frank and Cisco leave behind family, both immediate and extended who are mourning the tragic loss of four family members in a short time.
SUPPORT FRANK “PANCHO” AND CISCO’S FAMILY HERE.
Kweli Amaru Shakur passed away on the second Saturday of March. In an instagram post, Kweli’s family member, Nalo (IG @nalodaring) remembers: “[Kweli] was harmed by a relative at 4 months old, changing our lives forever… my sister K’la took care of Kweli and compromised so much of her life to care for his injuries and new disabilities, watching her son grow up in a near vegetative state for the rest of his life.” and on gofundme they write: “One thing K'La and Kweli's mother-son connection showed the world is the cosmic love they shared. A beautiful act of care, nurture, and resilience. With your contribution, K'La and her family can focus on their healing without a financial burden.… It truly takes a village.”
SUPPORT KWELI AMARU SHAKUR’S FAMILY HERE.
FUNDS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT FROM PREVIOUS VOLUMES:
OSCAR CORONA’S FAMILY IS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT
DAYANA BUSTILLOS HERRERA’S FAMILY IS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT
ANDREW STANDIFIRD’S FAMILY IS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT
TYRE NICHOL’S FAMILY IS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT
TIABI RAUF’S FAMILY IS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT
BRANDON’S MOTHER IS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT
LINDY CHRISTOPHER’S FAMILY IS STILL SEEKING SUPPORT
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
For this volume we wanted to bring you two podcasts that spoke to us recently. We keep an ongoing playlist of every podcast mentioned in the Digest that can be found here. If you have any listening recommendations please send them our way!
by Eliana Yoneda
There was a time when I thought I would be a social worker. I completed a single quarter of a graduate MSW program before dropping out. My father was one reason I dropped out. By the time I was enrolled in grad school he had been in the throws of a manic episode for the better part of five years. During my two-hour commute to and from campus I would talk to him, gauge his wellbeing, try to piece together the frayed edges of our relationship. He always did good phone. In class I would learn techniques for working with clients that I would then try to implement during our calls. None of them really worked. I was too close to the problem and also too far. His mania was rooted in layers of grief: the loss my mother, his father, his mother, his childhood. So much of his reaction to the world could be traced back to his imprisonment in Manzanar at the age of 3. I could not touch these original wounds, they were buried too deep. I would spiral: if I could not manage to help this one person whose circumstances and life story I could piece together into a fuzzy understanding of why he was the way he was, how was I supposed to help those whose lives I had no context for?
And how do you fully understand someone else’s context? A single human being contains lifetimes filled with cause and effect. My program didn’t feel like it was providing me with tools for understanding a client’s circumstances as much as it was giving me indicators to prove that a client was or was not ‘succeeding’ within the American (read: White supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist) condition. I was reminded of all of this and more while listening to this episode of Invisibilia.
It is the story of the healing that is possible when practitioners take the care necessary to understand a client and/or community’s context: social, cultural, emotional, physical, historical. In this case, that of a community of Cambodian immigrants, survivors of genocide. Clients who had watched their families murdered by the Khmer Rouge.
It is the story of a Cambodian therapist, Bopal Phen, who also survived the genocide. A therapist who is part of the community and understands how their communal trauma informs beliefs, behavior, relationships, and patterns of diagnosis; who weaves together therapies that really do work (like CBT) into culturally relevant practices (like Buddhism); and who understands the importance of building trust over time and meeting immediate needs (because how can one unpack the trauma of genocide while also trying to simply survive within America?).
Since listening I have thought a lot about those few months in social work school and all the twists and turns that have landed me in the death/grief space. How these are things I have context for. I have thought about some of my classmates and social worker friends who I know are out there doing the good work within their communities (I bow to you).
I have also thought about how we learn history and whose stories we know. How easy it is to not know anything about each other, ourselves, our people. I have thought about immigrant communities and how terrible things are happening all the time. Right now. How it has only been fourty-four years since the Cambodian genocide ended and how that isn’t any time at all. I have thought about how history sits on top of us–like the ghosts in the podcast–and all the ways we learn to live with its presence.
by Resham Mantri
I came across the Mushroom Hour podcast through a share someone made about Patty Ononiwu Kaishian or Queendom Fungi on Instagram. Kaishian is a queer mycologist, a professor, and an activist. Sometimes someone’s whole vibe on Instagram is just so good that I crave to hear more, so I googled her in my podcast apps and found The Mushroom Hour episode she was on, Ep. 101. She was also on this episode of Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness which was great:
Another time I was washing dishes in my kitchen, I tried another episode of the Mushroom Hour, and I had to skip it (wasn’t for me). But the next episode I found was Episode 148 featuring Olga Tzogas of Smugtown Mushrooms. which was great!
The intersection of the world of fungi, queerness and activism is a world I’m completely here for. Both Kaishian and Tzogas are scientists who are just as open at what they do not know as what they do know. I love hearing people talk about what they do not yet know. Mycology as a science fascinates me because of the vast interconnectedness of the organisms as well as the way we keep learning endlessly about new species and the amazing lessons, questions, and medicines they reveal to us. Then there are all the lessons about our interconnectedness both within our own species and across species we clearly need to learn from fungi. Kaishian speaks honestly in the podcast about the proclivity of the scientific and even the mycologist community to deny the existence of queerness within the natural world, and has found a way to combine both queer theory and mycology in her work. Both Kaishian and Tzogas are mycologists who find ways to return and do work in their countries of origin, Kaishian is from Armenia and Tzogas is from Greece. Kaishian is the co-founder of the International Congress of Armenian Mycologists and uses a diasporic Armenian mycology practice to also call attention to fungal diversity within Armenia and grow a more complex understanding of Armenia within the larger international community. Smugtown hosts educational opportunities to learn about and eat mushrooms in Greece while learning about the potential of Greece beyond just as a beautiful beach destination.
I relate to feeling both exhilarated and also isolated in my early days of being an undergraduate in college taking science courses when I was pre-med and later on as a computer science major. When I graduated and worked in computer science I ended up at IBM for a few years, which was an unfortunate place to work if you were as endlessly curious (and femme-identifying, gender discrimination abounds within tech then and now) as I was. I did not then identify as queer, but in retrospect I brought my own particular brand of Gemini questioning-everything queerness to all of my 20s. I experimented, and I ultimately left working within computer science but I often wonder what things could have been like had I found either the confidence or the community to truly explore what I still feel are endless queer possibilities for technology and computer science.
I recognize within these mycologists’ work what excites me so much about our own little Community Death Care Digest. A cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary, inter-generational way of understanding Deathcare within our larger society and culture. Here we believe deathcare and activism work are dependent on each other, we cannot do deathcare without understanding our role within systems of oppression that already exist and affect how so many die. We also integrate our deathcare and activism practices as a way to imagine our collective survival into the future. Here we imagine Community Deathcare as fully informed by our creative art practices, our individual ancestries, and by all our infinite gender expressions. Finally we realized it was impossible for us to individually provide deathcare in our communities without also calling attention to (and fundraising to offset) systemic failures that do not allow our community members to die with dignity.
OFFERINGS WE LOVE
We learned about the Queer & Trans* Ecologies Symposium through Patricia Kaishian’s instagram (Queendom Fungi mentioned above in Resham’s podcast recommendations). Kaishian will be presenting at the symposium and although parts of the symposium will be virtual, we kind of dream about being in Minnesota for all queer ecology things and also attending the Queer Ecologies Dance Party (whaaa?!) on the last day.
When: March 23-25
Where: hybrid! IRL at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Price: FREE!
MORE INFO & REGISTER HERE