(Destiny Kinal gave the following talk at a Pennsylvania gathering of Unitarian Universalists in September, 2010)

I came across a review in Orion magazine from a decade ago that William Kowinski opened by stating an opinion that resonates today.

"By now it has dawned on some purveyors of deep ecology, sustainability, biodiversity, biophilia and the New Paradigm that these concepts were operating principles in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans decimated the peoples and cultures that practiced them." (Review of Linda Hogan's Power in Orion, winter 1999.)

I'd like to add bioregionalism and organic farming to that list. We are rediscovering what had been true for millennia before a brief interruption of several hundred years.

Or several thousand years.

Scientist Leonard Shlain asked in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess what happened about three thousand years ago that the existence of a female deity was so erased, and with Her fall, gender equity. He hypothesizes that writing and reading in a linear fashion, rather than the oral histories that indigenous people the world over used to collect their histories, skewed our brains to the left brain, the rational, scientific bean counter.

With this imbalance, he proposed, we literate humans came to favor a way of thinking more natural to the masculine sides of our nature and discount the input of the right brain, our more feminine side of our nature.

Or was it the industrial revolution, which busted apart communities in such a brutal way that we may only be starting to recover our senses?

The possibility that indigenous people might exist on this continent who lived a way of life diametrically opposed to the way Europeans reckoned had never occurred to those who came as conquerors, seeking wealth and dominion.

One people were exploitative, seeking to wrest riches from the earth, flying the flag of private property under the name of a hierarchy of kings and merchants, seeking dominion over nature and all her creatures as the Christian Bible told them was their god-given right and duty.

The other people--the ones who had their homeland somewhere intimate on this continent that came to be known as North America were not uniformly a gentle people either. But they recognized Earth as their Mother, and who but a cad would tear apart their mother to fatten their wallet?

But a deeper difference lay between these two peoples, one that persists today: many of the tribes of North America are matrilineal people with countless generations of legacy coming to each through their maternal line: name, clan, heirlooms, property rights, and ritual.

Many archaeologists hold that all agricultural societies were matrilineal, out of the observation that women hold the same relationship with the earth that they do with their bodies, bringing forth life. Thus in a matrilineal culture, women elect the chiefs to represent their interests and unelect them if they are not doing a good job.

If this might be so, then when and how did Europeans become patrilineal?

Again, many academics and theologians conclude that it was the appearance of a sky god about five thousand years ago. These desert people--the Egyptians, Jews and Arabs of an earlier time--are devoted to a deity created heaven and earth but who lives in the heavens, while pagan people, often indigenous and native, and animists in Asia focus their devotion on earth and the male and female deities who inspire life on earth. Sky god worshippers produced holy scriptures that not only erased the feminine but are often misogynistic.

Thomas Berry, the theologian, says that the twin values systems of capitalism and Christianity, have generated the nightmares from which we are unable to awaken. If we do awake, Berry continues, we seem unable to re-imagine our way into fresh dreams to re-create the world. Christianity commanded mankind to transform raw material into profits, the parable of the ten talents. Man has dominion over creation. The concept that fallow land, a wild river are actually occasions for sins against god were man not to transform these vacant possibilities into meaningful projects.

European women arriving here on this continent, having endured death and hardship to leave their homelands and to settle in as partners with their mate, must have been incredulous when they considered their state: they could not vote or own land, they could be beaten by their husbands, and if they left him, they had no rights to their children! If recalcitrant, they could be burned as witches or institutionalized.

I am no less incredulous today. As a woman in her mid-60's, I have become inured to being devalued, as I have left my fertile years behind. The invisibility that descends on a women about 45-55 is a blessed relief for many. And yet a persistent burr chafes away under my saddle.

Our boards are still filled almost exclusively with men, who should step down and offer their seat to a qualified woman. When I have presented this to sympathetic men, they say, "My wife wants to stay home." Well good for your wife, I say, what about many other women who would like to sit in that seat, to be mentored and sponsored?

Let those men who appreciate what is at stake, stay at home and watch the children in the evening while their wives enjoy a larger perspective on behalf of the community.

When I attend a powwow, young men defer to me, ask me to take my place at the head of the food line, call me grandmother, jump up to offer me a seat, listen respectfully when I speak.

The Reinhabitory Institute asks how we will become native to this continent, how we will work together--Asians, Africans, Europeans--to learn from each other and from the indigenous people, to move toward harmony in our home watershed.

A grave self-fulfilling fallacy seized us intellectually a few years back called the tragedy of the commons. This school of thought observed that native Americans from both the North and South American continents raped and plundered their own environments.

Over time, we must acknowledge, people have been bought, to work against their deepest values. Repeater rifles, bounties on buffalo hides, trade goods, alcohol, the bad example of unscrupulous traders--corrupted native values. Some women have a shameful history as well of siding with male supremacy against their own kind.

I am suggesting that you enter a sort of meditation on a koan being proposed by reinhabitation. How would we unravel our European histories of conquest, first by Romans then by Christians, to return to a sense of what our own clans might have been like, to puzzle out what it might have been like to be a matrilineal people. And why would we undertake that exercise? Is it too late for that kind of speculation?

I am not going to become Destiny X as many Black Muslims did when confronting the same conundrum, with fewer intervening years to erase their family histories. Does giving a child the mother name for a middle name, as the Portuguese do, help? Perhaps.

While I do not have a prescription for adopting the values of a matrilineal way of life, I can see many reasons to consider it.

Both the Lenape and the powerful Iroquois Nation have lived a matrilineal way of life for millennia, as long as their own records remember. Chief Paul Waterman told us that if his people's way of life were destroyed, they would cease to exist as a people.

Matrilineality arose for some reason on this continent; it is native to this continent.

Perhaps the Iroquois brought matrilineality with them when they migrated across the land bridge from Siberia/Mongolia around the time of the last ice age.

Many native American cultures have unraveled in the presence of the lethal cocktail of Christianity and capitalism. We can't blame our forebearers who--whether in Ireland or Germany, Italy or Spain--cut down their own Druidic temples in their primal forests and accepted the principles that have led us to these times, traced through patrilineal family trees and enforced through a patriarchal view of women and their place.

In thinking about the early American history of conquest, I can appreciate how confused white men must have become in attempting to purchase land from native Americans. It was not only that the concept of private property was unknown, that lands were used communally for their highest use, but also the question of ownership: did the land really belong to no one or did it "belong to" the women?

Who had the rights to sell it? And if no one did--an unimaginable thought--then why not simple conquer the people and take the land? Wasn't it the divine right of the European people to do so?

My novel Burning Silk imagines a European people whose guild--raising silk--preserved the scaffolding of a matrilineal society: women, responsible for raising silk, passed the secrets down from mother to daughter. Men were in charge of raising mulberry, the preferred food of the silkworm, and marketing the silk. The women channeled the power; the men exercised it responsibly on their behalf and on the behalf of the family and guild.

We have to turn this ungainly ship around 180 degrees in a relatively short time, the space of a single lifetime, less than one century. I believe it's happening, as Paul Hawken observed in his book Blessed Unrest: many small movements are transforming pieces at a logorhythmic rate. This movement is as yet unnamed and uncounted. In our country, perhaps the Obama election showed its size. Perhaps the fact that thousands of watershed restoration groups have risen up addresses it as well.

And so the task we are addressing right now in both the Penn-York Valley and the East Bay of San Francisco is community building.

If we are to learn to reinhabit our homes on San Francisco Bay and the Susquehanna River--one that was once the great center of hegemony Carantouan (Karen-twan,) then our first step must be to expand and consolidate community.

The Reinhabitory Institute is going to be operating in the Penn-York Valley, with another pole in the San Francisco Bay Area. The crossfertilization that we imagine will occur between the rural east and the urban west is incalculable at this point, but we believe it will have considerable transformative power.

I am asking you to join with us in creating a larger community, one that is already powerful but largely invisible because undefined, because community is the necessary structure of significant social action.

What are the lessons we can take from our observation of the age and gender equity produced by a matrilineal society?

*A Women's Council, a formal structure, is a potent force for focusing change.

*Structuring children's awareness of their ancestors can be done in two separate charts: the patrilineal and the matrilineal.

*Devotion to a deity--if you are a practicing family--should be distributed between the feminine and masculine aspects, however YOU design this: either a neuter deity with no gender, or the Mother and the Father, or other ways to embody a Creator.

*Public governing boards should be pressured to practice gender and age equity.

*Brainstorming to accomplish these objectives and others should be encouraged in every milieu.