It’s when they took the power away from the Council of Grandmothers, away from the wise women. That’s when the trouble started. I still remember when my Apache mama Maria told me that story. And my skin prickles every time I remember it. She said that in indigenous America and probably indigenous everywhere, the highest rule of the clan was held by the grandmothers.

Yes, the grandfathers helped to guide as well and help to particularly educate the kids and the mothers. And the women were the rulers of the camp and the gardens and how we’re getting the food. And yes, the men are often men. And it wasn’t totally binary and gender all the time with them, either two spirits and flowing gender was natural and normal as it’s always been.

But generally speaking, you know, it was the male bodied people who were the leaders of hunting and how to go to war or how to fight, how to defend. But she said it was the council of grandmothers who would decide whether it was worth it to go to war, whether it was worth it to move camp. The Council of Grandmothers, the elder women, were considered the wise ones, the precious resources of the clan, because it was the wise grandmothers who had lived through so much, had learned so much, had burst so many had raised and guided and learned so much.

It was the grandmothers who were the wise counsel.

And the way she told me the story was that when, you know, the Western, Western European. Colonists came and encroached and took over and got violent.

That the fear and the perceived need to go straight to war and to defend more aggressively. Meant that a lot of the people set aside the council of grandmothers. Now, I’m not a native person to this land, and I am not an historian. But I can feel the truth of this story. Oh, chemically, I mean archetypally in my bones that we have to our detriment.

Set aside the wisdom of the grandmothers.

In a techno speedy culture. That values competition over collaboration, that values reams of data and information over the gentle voice of wisdom that values the immediate benefit over the service to the next seven generations. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? That the wisdom of the grandmothers has been set aside.

And then I think about my Christian upbringing, my Catholic church, and I say, well, gosh darn it, look at that. There, too, we set aside the wisdom of the grandmothers. It’s a bunch of old guys running the church as it is in most Christian churches. It’s the old guys.

And then I study the early church, how it was the Mary St Mary Magdalene, Mary, Salomé, Mary, Martha, who were the the main person sanitizers and evangelists. After Jesus’s departure. But the Romans funded the other guys. Paul, Peter, because the Romans needed to tell a different story about Jesus’s teachings, one that supported the Roman rule. So here again, how many of us growing up in Christian churches were ever taught about the evangelists Mary Magdalene, Mary, Salome, Mary, Martha?

No, they became the grandmothers of the church. They were the ones who evangelized most of France, up into Spain, into Italy. It was that movement. And the Romans did put it down. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The Cathars were destroyed. The Cathars being some of the tradition that was birthed out of those early grandmothers of the church. So here again.

We have the Prince of Peace and who he really was as a feminist, as a social justice advocate, as a healer, as an empower of his followers, his community with his feminine apostles, carrying on that wisdom after his departure. And we don’t even know about it. Go to France and they remember and they know. And the churches are there, and the evidence is there.

In the first century, churches are there. The earliest churches are there because that’s where they landed and started evangelizing. Hmhm. But we don’t know about it. We believe the story that the Roman rule anchored and funded and taught. So there we have a direct rewriting of the story where it was the grandmothers of the true church that were written out.

What would it be like now in our culture, to foster and celebrate the wisdom of the grandmothers? Because we don’t die at age 61 anymore. We’re just barely getting started at age 61 now. What would it be like to activate, to support and to harvest the greatest wisdom source available to us as a culture, our wise women?

What would it be like as wise women to step up onto the dais and take the microphone and speak your wisdom into the waiting world?