Springboard: 23 Passages from Rocking the Cradle of Civilization
Available at: Amazon
Rocking the Cradle of Civilization is the story of Prairie Wind, a young Lakota Sioux woman who learned as a little girl about the extermination of the vast herds of buffalo that once thundered across the prairie. She learned as well about the virtual extermination of her own Lakota people. Whereas other children in America visit Disney World, Prairie Wind and her classmates visited the mass grave at Wounded Knee.
She travels from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to a university in California, where she explores the twin fields of International Human Rights, and the Climate Crisis. With her brilliant mind and her background as a Native American, she graduates with a law degree which will enable her to speak in court rooms around the world.
Prairie Wind and her husband William—Oneida Iroquois from Upstate New York—spend three months on the islands of Tahiti and Mo’orea in the South Pacific. For the first time in their lives, they live where two cultures—French and Polynesian—coexist in racial harmony. They are liberated from the daily racial oppression in America. Further, the sea around the islands is a marine sanctuary, where life is protected, not plundered.
They return to the Rosebud Reservation—she as a lawyer and he as a doctor—to work with their Native American people during the four tumultuous years of the Trump administration. They become the parents of a little girl, and then of a little boy, both of whom rock in a handmade cradle under the care of their Lakota Sioux grandmother.
During the course of the story, Prairie Wind builds a team of young people from many countries and many cultures—the First Global Generation in Human History—who weave their schools together, share their climate research, and build a powerful network with a global plan. These young people are not waiting any more for the politicians who make empty promises. They work together—students in Siberia share their research on wildfires with students in California, in Indonesia, in the Congo—so that they can develop their own plan for the Renaissance of the 21st Century.
New schools. New laws. A new economic system. Freedom from the shackles of racism and war. Not in 2050. Not in 2030. Beginning today.
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In the classroom, I often give my students something to read as a springboard
for great classroom discussions, and further student research.
Thus I have put together a second book, Springboard,
as a companion book to the novel.
May these 23 passages from
Rocking the Cradle of Civilization
serve as a springboard for the young people today
who confront the enormous challenges of the 21st Century.
Prairie Wind is fiercely determined
as a student, as a bride, as a young mother,
to restore the health of Mother Earth,
and to build a Global Generation unprecedented in human history.
Her story—your story—is about our world today.
She hopes that you will join her.
Because she is going to win.
* * * * *
Book categories: Climate Change and Clean Energy