The women of Appalachia - fearless and still fighting

[theHandpuppet]

Do you know of an Appalachian woman who deserves to be recognized for her achievements and/or activism? Email [e-mail] and tell them about your nominee, including their name and a couple of paragraphs detailing their accomplishments.
For the complete list of women whose names are in the current database, please visit the link provided below.

Appalachian Voices
http://appvoices.org/appalachianwomen/

Fearless women settled Appalachia – and are still fighting for it.

Alongside men, they plowed fields, put up food, kept the family and faced conflict.

Women like Mary Draper Ingles, taken hostage in 1755 by Shawnee Indians, hiked 500 hundred miles of wilderness barefoot to find her way back home, founding the settlement that became the city of Radford, Va. Women like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, who in the 1900s organized women for the labor movement. Women like Judy Bonds, who fought the coal industry’s destruction of mountain communities in the 21st century.

Women have played a major role in the labor and activist movements in the coal-bearing regions of Appalachia. In 1965, Ollie “Widow” Combs laid down in front of the bulldozer that was preparing to strip-mine her Kentucky farm. She spent Thanksgiving in jail, but her protests led to strip mining legislation in 1967 in the Kentucky General Assembly. Ten years later, Widow Combs was invited to the White House for the signing of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977.... MORE at link above

[Tanuki]

1. Jean Thomas, the "Traipsin' Woman" and founder of the American Folk Song Festival,

was from Ashland and celebrated Appalachian culture throughout her life. She was influential in preserving traditional music and folklore and bringing it to a new audience. Thomas was also a photographer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bell_Thomas

http://www.folkways.si.edu/american-folk-song-festival-jean-thomas-the-traipsin-woman/music/album/smithsonian

[theHandpuppet]

2. Wonderful stuff!

I see that Jean was born just a few miles down the road from me.

[Tanuki]

3. Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Keller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Keller

..."Her novels include Summer of the Dead (2014), Bitter River (2013) and A Killing in the Hills (2012), a mystery series featuring prosecutor Belfa "Bell" Elkins, a crusader against the illegal prescription drug trade thriving in rural America. The series is set in the fictional town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, a "shabby afterthought" of a town, according to A Killing in the Hills, which won the Barry Award in 2012 for Best First Mystery Novel.

Keller won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her three-part narrative account of the deadly Utica, Illinois tornado outbreak, published by the Chicago Tribune in April 2004. The jury called it a "gripping, meticulously reconstructed account of a deadly 10-second tornado".[1] The Tribune has won many Pulitzers but Keller's prize was its first and remains its only win for feature writing.

Keller was born and raised in West Virginia. She graduated from Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and earned a doctoral degree in English Literature from Ohio State University. Her master's thesis was an analysis of the Henry Roth novel, Call It Sleep. Her doctoral dissertation explored multiple biographies of Virginia Woolf (A poetics of literary biography: The creation of "Virginia Woolf", Ohio State, 1996). She has taught at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago.

Keller was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University 1998–1999. She has served four times as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes. Her reviews and commentary air on National Public Radio and on The Newshour (PBS)."

[theHandpuppet]

4. Book recommendation: Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed

University of Illinois Press
Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed
Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice

Awards and Recognition:
2014 Silver Winner in Journalism/Investigative Reporting in the Nautilus Book Awards; Runner-up in the general nonfiction category in the Green Book Festival

Personal stories of women's environmental activism in Central Appalachia

Motivated by a deeply rooted sense of place and community, Appalachian women have long fought against the damaging effects of industrialization. In this collection of interviews, sociologist Shannon Elizabeth Bell presents the voices of twelve Central Appalachian women, environmental justice activists fighting against mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on public health, regional ecology, and community well-being.

Each woman narrates her own personal story of injustice and tells how that experience led her to activism. The interviews--a number of them illustrated by the women's "photostories"--describe obstacles, lawsuits, and tragedies. But they also tell of new communities and personal transformations catalyzed through activism. Bell supplements each narrative with careful notes that aid the reader while amplifying the power and flow of the activists' stories. Bell's analysis outlines the interconnectedness of Appalachian women's activism and their roles as wives and mothers. Ultimately, Bell argues that these women draw upon a broader "protector identity" that both encompasses and extends the identity of motherhood that has often been associated with grassroots women's activism. As protectors, these women challenge dominant Appalachian gender expectations and guard not only their families, but also their homeplaces, their communities, their heritage, and the endangered mountains that surround them.

Thirty percent of the royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to organizations fighting for environmental justice in Central Appalachia...

... "A groundbreaking collection of life stories from women in the struggle against mountaintop removal. These extraordinary stories are luminous with the courage and moral passion of these women as they struggle to protect their communities, families, land, and cultural heritage."--Betsy Taylor, coauthor of Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice

MORE at http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/55gxp5kh9780252037955.html

[theHandpuppet]

5. Early life in Syria molds human rights advocate

This is an amazing story (with photo album). I hope everyone will take a few minutes to read this interview with Nahla Nimeh-Lewis.

The Charleston Gazette
Monday, September 22, 2014
Early life in Syria molds human rights advocate
By Sandy Wells, Staff writer

She left the incessant danger and bloodshed in Syria and Lebanon at age 26. In America, in Charleston, West Virginia, she started fresh. She made a name for herself as a civil rights activist, a priority prompted by the tragedies she witnessed almost daily in her homeland.

She tries to keep the sadness at bay, but it tugs at her. She talks tearfully about the murders of her 5-year-old brother, her uncles and neighbors. The government put her outspoken father in jail.

In 1977, Nahla Nimeh-Lewis joined her mother and brother in Charleston. She spoke not a word of English. She spent eight hours every day in the library, reading books with a dictionary to learn the language. She watched television to learn about our culture.

Always, she dreamed of returning someday to Syria. Not now. Not ever. Every day, on the Internet, she checks on family members suffering through the turmoil there. They are safe. So far....

- See more at: http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20140922/GZ01/140929949/1101#sthash.Vbbb37r7.dpuf

[theHandpuppet]

6. She Took On Big Coal: Mining Crisis in Appalachia

She Took On Big Coal: Mining Crisis in Appalachia
The making of an unlikely activist.
By Tamara Jones

UPDATE: Stories of mine safety concerns after the explosion that left 29 miners dead, and of tough new EPA regulations on water quality in mountaintop-removal mining, have filled the news. Here, a profile of activist Maria Gunnoe, who has been taking on the big coal companies, such as Massey (the company whose miners are trapped), over mining procedures and environmental fallout.

Grabbing a late lunch at a deserted Chinese restaurant in a tired West Virginia town, Maria Gunnoe piles her plate with greasy noodles and wontons, her voracious appetite belying her compact frame. Between bites, she holds forth on the cause that consumes her life: what she sees as the rape of Appalachia by the mighty coal industry. “They depend on two things,” Gunnoe believes, “our people being uneducated, and our people being poor.” She has been both. Now she is neither. And for her, silence is not an option.

A grassroots activist who declares, “I’m not an environmentalist, I’m a survivalist,” Gunnoe can spend hour after hour quoting the Clean Water Act, indicting regulatory agencies and describing the selenium levels of mutant two-headed fish in polluted streams. Just shut up, her own husband has been known to beg her.

Gunnoe, 41, is petite and girlish, 125 pounds of sinewy muscle in jeans and hiking boots, with the chiseled cheekbones of her Cherokee grandfather. A diamond stud dots the cartilage at the front of each ear, and the frames of her reading glasses are filigreed with tiny peace symbols. The corners of her deep-set brown eyes turn downward, giving her a look of perpetual sorrow, and her tanned hands sport two Band-Aids and a thumb ring, but no wedding band. Her marriage is fragile. That, too, Gunnoe indirectly blames on the mining companies....

Read more of her story at: http://www.more.com/news/womens-issues/she-took-big-coal-mining-crisis-appalachia