Chellis Glendinning

 

Chellis Glendinning (b. 18 June 1947) is a European-American writer, psychotherapist, and political activist whose involvement has spanned the movements of the late-20th and early-21st centuries – from civil rights to anti-globalization.

She is noted as a pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, weaving together insights from ecology, history, psychology, and culture to illuminate the human-nature relationship -- and she is a recognized critic of mass technological society.

Glendinning has written five books, one folk opera, and hundreds of articles, essays, and short stories. The subjects range from the psychic impacts of the nuclear arms race to the inherent disjunctures of mass society, from the effects of colonization on land-based peoples to the uprising of a village against a generations-old epidemic of heroin addiction.

Writing

The inspiration for Glendinning’s literary explorations originally sprang from the work of Lewis Mumford -- a unique American scholar, independent by both affiliation and approach, his work providing an early systemic analysis of contemporary society. Her writing has also been shaped by the themes of feminist literature in the 1970s; in particular, by the creative juxtapositions made possible with the insight that “the personal is political.”

At first Glendinning’s writing was interdisciplinary and straight-forward in presentation. In 1979 she was writing news and features for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, specializing in women’s, environmental, and nuclear issues. That same year, after the Three Mile Island accident, she joined with other mental health professionals to develop psychological approaches to breaking through the psychic numbing and denial so widespread in relation to nuclear development -- synthesizing the resulting work into a workshop model and using it to guide people in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union toward political involvement. She was the founder-director of a small institute in San Francisco called Waking Up in the Nuclear Age. And she wrote her first book, Waking Up in the Nuclear Age (William Morrow 1987), about the process that had been developed.

Glendinning’s second book came out in 1990. When Technology Wounds (William Morrow 1990) is a psychological study of technology survivors – asbestos workers, atomic veterans, electronics-plant workers, Dalkon Shield intrauterine device users, families harmed by toxic waste – in an overview of the psychic ecology of technological society.

In 1991 she was invited to join the Board of Listeners at the World Uranium Hearing in Salzburg, Austria, an international testimonial for indigenous peoples on the cultural, environmental, and health effects of nuclear development on their homelands. Afterward, from 1991 to 1994, she worked with uranium miners of the Navajo Nation and Laguna Pueblo developing intra-tribal strategies, putting on educational forums, and writing articles on the environmental and health problems incurred from nuclear development on native lands. She was also guest editor of the environmental justice journal Race, Poverty and the Environment issue “Burning Fires: Nuclear Technology and Communities of Color,” published by Urban Habitat of San Francisco.

Glendinning’s third book, My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (Shambhala 1994; New Society 2007), details the separation from nature inherent to contemporary society and its impact on the human psyche.

In the early 1990s Glendinning moved to the northern New Mexico village of Chimayó, home to a Chicano people -- part Mexican native, part Tewa, part Navajo, part Spanish – and she became a resident witness to a land-based culture in acute distress from past and ongoing colonization. She also became witness to the power of storytelling, and she developed a lyrical style that interweaves story, historical fact, and social insight in her fourth book, Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, the Global Economy and Other Earthly Whereabouts (Shambhala 1999) and Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy (New Society 2002).

Her fifth book is a further development of this style. In 1997 the New Mexico Department of Health released a study revealing that her community was the #1 area for per-capita drug overdose deaths in the US. Impressed by the courage of her neighbors in their effort to come to terms with this reality, she wrote Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade (New Society 2005).

She then wrote a bilingual folk opera, De Un Lado Al Otro, with collaborators ethnomusicologist/composer Cipriano Vigil and director Robert Castro; the subject is the current arrival of Mexican immigrants into northern New Mexico, and it was premiered at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe in 2007.

Glendinning has also written for many journals, magazines, and newspapers -- including Orion, Tikkun, Adbusters, Resurgence, Mother Jones, www.alternet.org[1], www.upsidedownworld.org[2], Earth Island Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Santa Fe New Mexican – and her writing appears in over thirty anthologies.

Activism

Glendinning’s mother, Hooker Daoust Glendinning, became active in the civil rights effort in the1950s, and as a result she grew up within a community of activists in Cleveland OH. A close friend -- her Lakota “blood brother” Randolph Scott Hutchinson whom she had met on the Standing Rock in South Dakota in 1963 -- was killed in Vietnam in 1966. She became involved in the anti-war effort at the University of California Berkeley, culminating in her arrest in the “Mass Bust” in May 1969. During the renaissance of political and cultural expression in the Bay Area in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Glendinning participated in the feminist, peace, holistic medicine, ecology, anti-nuclear, neo-Luddite, and small-is-beautiful efforts. After moving to New Mexico in 1986, she became involved in issues of environmental-justice, indigenous rights, cultural preservation, and immigrant rights -- and when the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened that industry to the proliferation of electromagnetic radiation-emitting technologies, Glendinning began to work against these.

Profession

Glendinning has been a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in trauma recovery, since 1984.

Education

She graduated from Hathaway Brown School in Cleveland OH in 1965 -- a National Merit Scholar Semi-Finalist as well as a recipient of the school’s highest athletic award. She attended Smith College in Northampton MA from 1965-67 and graduated from the University of California Berkeley in social sciences in 1969, at which time she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D in psychology from Columbia Pacific University (San Rafael CA) in 1984.

Books

My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. Gabriola BC Canada: New Society Publishers/New Catalyst/ Sustainability Classics, 2007; and Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1994.

Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. New Society Publishers, 2005.

Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy. New Society Publishers, 2002; and Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, the Global Economy and Other Earthly Whereabouts. Shambhala Publications, 1999.

When Technology Wounds. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Waking Up in the Nuclear Age. William Morrow, 1987.

Opera
De Un Lado Al Otro, with composer Cipriano Vigil, 2006. Premiered at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe NM, 15 September 2007, with director Robert Castro.

Some Articles
“Cocaína No, Coca Sí,” http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/250/1, April 2006.

“Hear Tell: Invisibility, Invasiveness, and the Cell Phone,” www.bluegreenearth.com, Spring 2002.

“Re-membering Decolonization,” Tikkun, January/February 2002.

“Fear and Loathing in Los Alamos: On the Lam from the Cerro Grande Fire,” Orion, Winter 2001.

“Off the Map: A Tour of Chimayó with Chellis Glendinning” (with Laura Sewall), Orion, Spring 2000.

“An Open Letter to Environmentalists,” Earth Island Journal, Summer 1996.

“Yours Truly from Indian Country,” Yoga Journal, January/February 1995.

“Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” Utne Reader, March-April 1990.

“Lunch on Warning: Meals You Can Make in Less Than Six Minutes,” Not Man Apart, April 1984.

Some Short Stories
“Thinking of Always Clan,” Terra Nova, Winter 1997.

“The Interview,” KUNM-FM Radio, Albuquerque NM, 1989.

Some Interviews
“The Lady from Chimayo,” Robert Allen, www.alternet.org/story/21910, May 3, 2005.

“An Interview with Chellis Glendinning,” Aric McBay, www.inthewake.org, 2005.

“Psychologist, Defender of Land-based Communities” in Jay Walljasper and Jon Spayde, eds., Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life. Gabriola BC Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001.

Awards

Off the Map won the National Federation of Press Women 2000 Book Award in general nonfiction and the 2000 Communications Award of the New Mexico Press Women. Chiva was honored with the same two awards in 2006.

Glendinning’s work has received other literary prizes as well -- including the 2002 Communications Award from the New Mexico Press Women for “Fear and Loathing in Los Alamos: On the Lam from the Cerro Grande Fire” (Orion, Winter 2001) and the 1989 New Mexico Council for the Humanities First Times Award for Short Story Writing for “The Interview.”

She was named Best Local Writer by the Río Grande Sun in Española NM in 2000 and 2003, and her 1977 Honda CVCC -- painted by Arturo “Lolo” Medina to the theme of the Mexican Revolution -- won third at the Santiago/Santa Ana Fiesta Car Show in Chimayó in 2001. In 1997 she was presented with the Zero Injustice Award, created by the Río Arriba County Commission to honor her “courageous stand in support of the customs, culture, and traditions of the Native American and Indo-Hispano people of northern New Mexico.”

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