Charleen Touchette

A Woman of Vision: interview with Charleen Touchette

Broadcast in Women 6 years ago

Illumined Hearts Radio

Remarkable indigenous woman activist/artist/author/wisewoman Charleen Touchette will be sharing how she became a woman of visionary action, as well as talking about her book, It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl.

"Dreaming a healing through art and writing...an artist must remember her childhood to heal. Charleen Touchette's memoir is a story of survival and hope, of the agony of family and its blessings, of shame and price, destruction and creation. With the rich traditions of her French Canadian and Indian cultures, Touchette inherited a legacy of anger, alcoholic rages, violence and denial. Determined to find a better way to live, she leaves her birthplace anc culture at seventeen years old. Her journey takes her to Wellesley College, New York's Lower East Side, and Soho's art world, then to Indian Country, Navajo Nation and Santa Fe New Mexico. Abondoning the Cathlic church for Native American sweatlodges and Jewish synagogues, she has three sons, a daughter, a happy marriage and a successful career. After the birth of her daughter, she is debilitated by a strange illness that forces her to confront her past. Touchette offers a rare glimpse of the French Canadian/Metis culture and a frightening view of the power and influence of the Catholic Church" Published by TouchArt Books, paperback, 247 oages,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974654507?ie=UTF8&tag=ecoh-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0974654507

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Charleen Touchette is an artist, author, activist and mother of four living in the mountains in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she is the New Mexico Coordinator of Martin Luther King III’s Realizing the Dream Initiative. She was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island in 1954 and authored t…he award-winning It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, and NDN Art: Contemporary Native American Art. Charleen was awarded the Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award in 1998. She is Québècois, Acadian and Métis of mixed blood French and Canadian First Nation ancestry and grew up bilingual in French and English. Charleen writes on the arts, handwork, sustainability, indigenous thinking, healing and nurturing creativity at OneEarthBlogblogspot.com. She is a staff writer for EcoHearth.com where you can find her “Messages from the Earth” Eco Blog, articles for Eco Zine and Eco Op-Ed pieces.


https://soundcloud.com/makenobonesaboutit/charleen-touchette-on-make-no-bones-about-it-august-26-2018