Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970
to research women’s history internationally and understand how systems of
domination established and perpetuate themselves. Her goal is to restore women to
cultural memory, to restore awareness of the full range of female experience
and contributions, power and oppressions, all that has been omitted and edited
out from textbooks and mass media. Throughout history the majority of writings
and teachings known world wide on shamanism have been from the masculine
perspective.
From Buryat Mongolia
to Gabon Africa, it was well known that the first shaman was a woman. According
to a Chukchee (people inhabiting the northeasternmost part of Siberia)
proverb, “Woman is by nature a shaman.” Yet the female dimension of
this realm of spiritual experience has often been slighted. Mircea Eliade (author
of the authoritative “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy”) believed that women shamans represented a degeneration of an
originally masculine profession, yet was hard put to explain why so many male
shamans customarily dressed in women’s clothing and assumed other
female-gendered behaviors.
In fact, women have been at the forefront of this field
worldwide, and in some cultures, they predominate. This was true in ancient China
and Japan, as
it still is in modern Korea
and Okinawa, as well as among many South African peoples
and northern Californians such as the Karok and Yurok. There are countless
other examples, including the machi of the Mapuche in southern Chile
and the babaylan and catalonan of the Philippines.
Read more.
