The Seed and the Story: Alive Inside Documentary. What Can Be Done Where You Are?

Image of Henry from the film.

Earlier last week a friend called my attention to an online preview of the documentary film, Alive Inside.  Produced by Ximotion Media, the film follows social worker Dan Cohen as he brings IPods filled with music to residents in a nursing home.  It’s not long before the patients—many of whom were previously silenced by dementia—begin communicating again.

The clip that’s been circulating online features Henry, a man who’s confined to a wheel chair, is virtually nonverbal, and doesn’t even recognize his daughter who visits him daily.  After he’s given headphones to listen to Cab Calloway, one of his favorite musicians, his eyes light up and he begins to sing along.  It’s not long before he’s speaking again, expressing how music encapsulates feelings of love and humanity. Social worker Dan Cohen seeks out the expertise of neurologist Oliver Sacks and together they investigate how music affects our brains in the most profound of ways.  The patients aren’t cured of their dementia, but they do find news ways to communicate, which clearly provides a huge dose of hope to the family members and staff who care for them, an oft under-recognized casualty of the illness.

Chances are that you have, or will, care for someone with dementia. Watching a loved one lose their ability to communicate is one of the more difficult things any of us will face. The fact that music remains so powerful in the lives of those with dementia will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s grown up with music, be it in church, on the radio, or in juke joints.  Music is a link to our past, a connection to former generations, and can encapsulate hope for the future.

In watching the film preview I was reminded of all those times as a child when we visited area nursing homes to sing to the residents, many of them joining us and singing along to songs decades old.  I thought about how my own grandmother, fully overcome with dementia, didn’t always know where she was but could remember every word to the gospel songs her husband once sang as a song leader in the rural Chickalah Church of Christ.  And I remembered how her roommate, a woman who often mistakenly brushed her hair with a sock, was the one who had to remind me of many of the melodies that afternoon when we broke out the old hymnal in their room in Stella Manor.   I’m sure you have similar stories.  Music is a bridge builder across years and generations and possesses a mysterious power that is beyond our ability to articulate.

The producers hope this film will be more than just a moving story. They want it to fuel a grassroots movement of everyday folks thinking of ways they can bring music to their own loved ones and others in area nursing homes.  After all, we are surrounded by Ipods and other forms of technology.  Too often they’re just sitting in drawers gathering dust. The film begs the question: How can we use the technology we take for granted to reach out to our elders? And, of course, the bigger question becomes: what are each of us doing to care for the aged in our community?  I’d love to hear what you’re doing and other ideas you might have that can help all of us transcend generational gaps. You can watch the film clips at http://www.ximotionmedia.com.   And for those of you who care for the aging in our society:  thank you.  Your job is one of the most important in all the world.

You can watch the preview below.  You can learn more about the Music and Memory Project by clicking here.  

Alive Inside Trailer from Michael Rossato-Bennett on Vimeo.

The Seed and the Story: ARVAC and VISTA, Folk arts and the War on Poverty in Arkansas.

Click on the photo to connect to ordering info via Amazon.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

Alongside researching the history of Chickalah and Harkey’s Valley, I’ve been reading In Service to America: A History of Vista in Arkansas 1965-1985.  Written by Marvin Schwartz, this 1988 publication traces the VISTA organization throughout the state.   I’ve been particularly interested in the work of this organization in central Arkansas, including the creation of a craft co-op, which served both Yell and Pope Counties.

Created in 1965, VISTA was an outgrowth of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  This national legislation sought to provide lasting and locally based solutions to struggling communities.  Operating much like a domestic version of the Peace Corp, volunteers in the VISTA program received a subsistence wage and lived in economically poor areas where they worked in partnership with community members to generate economic initiatives and help residents gain access to health care and adequate food.  VISTA volunteers, many of them college age, worked to help create grassroots programs which focused on local needs, thus making each VISTA program unique to its region.

In 1960 approximately 40% of the population in the river valley was living below the poverty line.  Illiteracy, inadequate housing, and unemployment were rampant.  One of the first VISTA programs in the nation was the Yell County Economic Opportunity Program, a pilot recipient of an OEA grant.  The organization was soon absorbed into its larger sister organization, ARVAC (Arkansas River Valley Area Council), which hosted numerous national and local volunteers.   ARVAC formed programs such as the Housing Development Corporation, an organization utilizing the rural tradition of barn raising to help low income families secure homes, and ARVAC Rural Folkcrafts, a network which provided a market for rural quilters, white oak basket makers, seamstresses, and other artisans, allowing them to sell their traditional wares and earn a living for their families. Another organization, Counseling Associates (formerly known as ARVAC Community Mental Health Program), began under the ARVAC VISTA program and operates independently today.

In its early days VISTA brought in volunteers from around the nation, but in later years became more focused on long-term, locally based volunteers, which helped the programs thrive.   From the beginning, the goal of VISTA programs was to become self-sufficient. ARVAC stuck around and quickly became a model of successful VISTA organizing.   ARVAC’s craft co-op, which began in 1975, continued throughout the 1980s, as did housing initiative, which later became known as Universal, INC.

Schwartz’s book features interviews with a few river valley VISTA workers, including the late Myrtle Cress who worked in Ola and Betty Burnett who organized a housing co-op in Dardanelle.  It also highlights the work of Lou Vitale who was instrumental in founding the crafts co-op. I’d love to learn more about the creation of these initiatives, how people felt about the work, the craftspeople who sold at the co-op, and the use of the barn raising tradition in area housing initiatives.   Were you affiliated with VISTA?  Did you or someone in your family sell crafts at the co-op?  Perhaps your house was built utilizing the barn raising tradition?  I’d love to hear more.   An extra special thanks to Mike Luster of the Arkansas Folklife Program for introducing me to this book.

Also please don’t forget we’re still working on compiling stories of plants and seeds for our book on stories and gardening in the area.  We’d love to include your story!  To learn more visit us here.  To read a little bit about the backstory of the garden book read this column.

Friday Video: Seed Swap Documentary

From Seed Swap Documentary

This week’s Seed and the Story column looked at the organization Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (CAAH) and the annual Seed Swaps currently taking place throughout the state.  This afternoon we will be posting a radio piece which will air on KUAF today  profiling voices from the swap last year in Russellville.

In keeping with this coversage of CAAH, today’s Friday Video is a trailer for the film, Seed Swap Documentary.  Produced by Zachariah McCannon, the film documents the early days of the CAAH organization and the work of anthropologist Dr. Brian Campbell as he organizes the first seed swap in Mountain View, Arkansas.   According to the film’s Facebook page:

This documentary film uses the development of a seed exchange and agricultural biodiversity conservation project in the Ozark Mountains as an ethnographic lens to explore the seed saving subculture of the region. 

To learn more about the film, follow the project on facebook here.

To read more and to keep up with screenings around the state, visit the film’s webpage.  It looks like there will be screenings coming up this March in Fayetteville, Hot Springs and Eureka Springs.

And don’t forget there will be a swap this Saturday in Russellville and one Sunday in Conway.  Go here for a full listing of swap dates and times. 

“Hand of Man” Video About Mountain Top Removal

Music for the Mountains cd. Released 2011.

The band Magnolia Mountain recently released a video for their song “Hand of Man” about the horrors of Appalachian mountaintop removal.  The song appears on the Music for the Mountains compilation cd, which was released last year (to read about that project go here).

According to the band’s web page, the video took about a year to make. It’s filled with footage detailing the destruction that comes from this form of coal mining, including reference to high cancer rates and polluted waterways.  The video takes its cues from a long history of Appalachian organizing.

From Jeff Bigger’s post in the Huffington Post:

The Hand of Man” takes the listener to White Star Holler in Kentucky, where seven generations of mountain families have struggled to defend their lives and livelihoods from the toxic fallout from coal company destruction:

White Star Holler was my home
Shared the crops that we had grown
Shared the water from our well
Shared the life we loved so well
Coal men brought the mountain down
Leaked their poison underground
Mother, neighbor, friend, and son
Cancer took them, every one  (to read the whole post go here)

The band is asking that this video be shared far and wide to spread the word about mountaintop removal.  Want to know and/or get involved?  Visit I Love Mountains.org and be sure and check out the work of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

Yes! Magazine’s Breakthrough Fifteen: The Power of Storytelling, Vulnerability, and Community Action.

Henry Red Cloud, Yes! Magazine. Photo by Dan Bihn.

If you’re a frequent reader of the Boiled Down Juice, you know that Yes! Magazine is one of our favorite publications.  With the tag line  “powerful ideas, practical actions,” Yes! showcases and explores the concepts and people on the front lines of democracy, social innovation, and community action.  Back in November they issued their winter publication, The Breakthrough 15: The justice warriors, eco-innovators, happiness architects, and change artists who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.  

I recently picked up a copy (a little late, I know) of this special issue dedicated “to the power of the 99 percent—and to a group of people who aren’t looking for leadership from those with entrenched wealth and influence.”  The main goal of this special publication, Yes! claims, is to profile “a group of people who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.”

I especially love that the introductory essay, written by Madeline Ostrander, highlights the power of storytelling, noting that “personal stories remind us that others face the same difficulties and vulnerabilities we do. We discover our own power when we realize we aren’t alone.”  It’s this focus on difficulties and vulnerabilities I find particularly important.  Too often the media portrays activists as larger than life, endless whirlwinds of ideas and energy, when in reality they’re fragile humans who experience frustration and confusion just like anyone else.  Most importantly, their ideas and strategies have been forged within these frustrations and confusions.  We need more stories that illuminate this gray area between observation and action.

Ranging from the stories of Henry Red Cloud, the director of Lakota Solar Enterprises which provides renewable energy to poor Native American communities, to Lily Yeh, the founder of Barefoot Artists, an organization using the power of art to transform neighborhoods, the magazine is diverse collection of portraits of people recognizing and utilizing their skills in their own communities.

For the rest of the week we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the people featured and the work they’re doing.  Some of the people we’ve discussed before, such as the amazing work of Grace Lee Boggs, but some were new to us.

You can read all the profiles here on Yes!   Tell us if you’ve read this issue and what you enjoyed.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Friday Video: Creation of the Film “Acceptable Limits” by See Rock City Productions.

From Kickstarter.

This week’s Friday Video comes via a suggestion from friend, folklorist, and writer Rachel Reynolds Luster who passed the video our way this morning.  For several months now we’ve been researching the history of Arkansas Nuclear One and following discussions regarding nuclear sites throughout the country. To see other posts about this research go here. 

This video film is part of a documentary film project entitled  Acceptable Limits about the believed health and environmental effects of a 54 year old nuclear fuel processing plant in east Tennessee.  This video comes via Kickstarter where creators of the film are spreading the word and inviting those with an interest in the project to help fund the production of the film. If you are unfamiliar with Kickstarter and their grassroots funding methods, go here to learn more.

For those who are supporters of the nuclear industry and leery of activists who question the industry’s safety, you might feel there’s some bias in this film’s research. Here at the BDJ we are particularly interested in research projects that explore some of the lessor told stories of the nuclear industry and the complexities surrounding their presence in communities.   This film appears to posses the potential to do just that.  We welcome debate on these subjects and counter discussions.
From the Kickstarter site here’s a bit of backstory about the film:
Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) has been the main employer in the rural valley town of Erwin, Tennessee for decades. On the edge of the Appalachian Trail, the facility sits on the Nolichucky River. Initially, NFS brought much needed jobs to the area, hiring those with little education at pay rates far exceeding any of the factory jobs in the area. For 54 years the neighborhood factory has accepted weapons grade Plutonium and Uranium from around the world to create fissionable nuclear fuel for our Navy’s fleet of submarines and aircraft carriers.

When tests of the water in the area showed rampant contamination, Michael Abbott Jr., an East Tennessee native, and his best friend Cosmo Pfeil decided to investigate how this pollution could be allowed to happen. They ended up embarking on an exploration of what the word “community” means to citizens of an Appalachian town dealing with the devastating effects of 54 years of nuclear contamination. Through interviews with former employees (some who were there as long as 30 years) now dealing with serious health issues, neighbors of the facility who watch white smoke billow from the stacks in the early hours of the morning and blow towards their homes, it became clear that there was a problem and that people in this town were sick and dying.

A university study, requested by environmentalists, is being conducted to determine uranium levels in the water and soil in the area. An interim report from the ongoing study states that NFS-derived uranium is present in the water and soil samples taken in Erwin and that the “quantities are likely to be very considerable”. The study also states that “The results also demonstrate the entry of groundwater discharges of NFS-derived enriched U into the surface waters, and point to serious questions about the scope/extent of groundwater contamination near the NFS facility.” To keep the full synoposis, visit their Kickstarter page here.

Here’s the video.  If you are intersested in learning more about this film or helping to fund their research (you can denote as little as one dollar to the cause) be sure and visit their Kickstarter page to learn more.  

If you have a suggestion for a Friday video please let us know.  We love hearing from readers.

Something You Should See: The Natural State of America

From the film's webpage

Last week at the annual conference of the Arkansas Anthropological and Sociology Association, Dr. Bryan C. Campbell, professor of visual anthropology at the University of Central Arkansas, played a short clip from his upcoming documentary about the Newton County Wildlife Association and their ongoing fight to keep their forests free of toxic herbicides. The tiny bit of the film that we got to see was incredibly compelling. Beginning with the history of the organization’s founding in 1970, the film focuses on this highly effective and active resistance movement in the Ozarks, detailing how every day people are able to organize and fight to keep their forest safe.  Unfortunately today they face a new host of challenges.

The preview of the film is now available online, and you should really check it out. To watch the preview click here.

The film will be shown at all major film festivals in Arkansas and throughout the nation. To keep up with developments related to the film and to find a viewing location, be sure and become a fan of the film on facebook.  To do that go here.

Dr. Campbell runs Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (think I have posted about this before. If not, I should have!). They preserve agricultural folkways and engage in seed conversation and seed swaps across the state. Check out all the information by clicking here. If you are a seed saver you would love to attend these gatherings.

And, for a little extra info, Here’s a nice article about Dr. Brian Campbell and his work with the Seed Bank at UCA.

“The Gulf Between Us” Terry Tempest Williams tells stories from the gulf oil spill

Yesterday writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams was interviewed on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez regarding her recent piece about the gulf oil spill. Explaining her reasons for writing the piece she said, “And I just think it’s really important that, at this anniversary of six months, that we begin to really hear from the people on the ground. And that’s what my purpose was. You know, I have a pen. I’m a writer. I was home in Utah thinking, you know, what can I do? And I had to go. I had to see it for myself. So it was about ground truthing. It was about bearing witness. And I don’t think bearing witness is a passive act.” To hear the interview go here.

The piece, published in Orion Magazine, tells the stories of a handful of gulf residents whose lives are directly affected by the spill. Although Williams calls Utah home, she wants to call attention to the stories we are not hearing about the situation in the gulf and the familiar reality of production taking precedent to living creatures and the land that sustains us:

Continue reading »

Farmer and Seed Advocate Percy Schmeiser on Democracy Now!

Percy Schmesier is a Canadian farmer who has spent decades fighting seed giant Monsanto in an effort to protect regional food systems, heirloom seeds, and farmers’ autonomy against cooperate seed ownership. He is a 1997 recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (often referred to as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize), the subject of the documentary Percy Schmeiser: David versus Monsanto, and travels around the world advocating for farmers’ rights. His work addresses issues such as patents and the right to private ownership of seeds and seed research.

Continue reading »

The Rural Assembly and the Rural Compact.

Today I came across an organization called The Rural Assembly and I am so excited about their work and I think you will be too. The Rural Assembly is a part of the Center for Rural Strategies, an amazing organization whose fingers are all over most of the rural sustainable movements going on these days.

The Rural Assembly

According to their webpage, “The National Rural Assembly is a movement of people and organizations devoted to building a stronger, more vibrant rural America.” At the core of their work is the Rural Compact: “The National Rural Assembly encourages individuals and organizations to endorse the Rural Compact, a basic statement of principles for building a stronger rural America that improves opportunity for all of us.”
Continue reading »