The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering

In the early 1980s, near Mount Shasta, California, author Sharon Mehdi met a beloved Karuk medicine man named Charlie Red Hawk Thom. Charlie said he was going to tell her something she must promise not ever to forget:

"Men have taken the world as far as they can. It's up to the women to take us the rest of the way."

In 2004, when the world was askew and getting askewer every day, Sharon wrote a little story about two grandmothers who stood in the park to save the world. It sold many thousand...