 My name is Sharon Thomas Yarbrough and I'm your host for Sister Power. Sister Power's vision is that women everywhere will learn to live as sisters, to respect each other's differences, to heal each other's wounds, to promote each other's progress and to benefit from each other's knowledge. Our vision is to create activities and services designed exclusively to increase women's networking opportunities and to build the knowledge and skills that lead to self-sufficiency and empowerment. Wow, I am so happy to have my special friend and a special guest and my sister, Dr. Katherine Waddell Takara, and first and foremost, you were a professor of ethnic studies and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Hawaii for 30 years. My nephew, Stephen Yarbrough, was a student in your class and he would tell his mother that your class was the one that he had the most fun and that's the class he would always look forward to and Bernice asked him why and he told her it was the stories that you would share with the students, it was the stories. So tell us, Katherine, just tell us a little bit about yourself. Okay, well, history is funny, but I was born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama. My dad was a teacher who helped, he was a veterinarian, helped found the Tuskegee Veterinary School. My mom was a professor of French and German and English. And so I guess you could say that I grew up in an educational environment with people from all walks of life, young people, students, people who were so enthusiastic about learning and opening doors to their possibilities. I was around my mom a lot on campus, it seems that I was always the observer. I was always kind of outside and inside, you know, I was kind of an outsider and an insider and I think that's part of being an artist or a writer in that you have to be a part of to experience and yet you have to assess from afar. So we had a picture of you as a youth in the Tuskegee picture, don't we? Yeah, there you are, tell us about that picture. Well, in those old days we had the group called a Jack and Jill. And so most of the Jack and Jill members went to the lab school at Tuskegee and we had various events. I even have an event where we had a luau, never knowing that I would end up in Hawaii. And also my father loved Hawaiian music, never knowing that I would end up here or that he would end up here. And so there was this tiny little subtle thread of Hawaii that filtered through my all black community. And by the time I got to high school, out of the lab school, the school was very difficult and it was difficult because half the school would have to leave early to do the harvest and start early in September to do the planting. And so it was always a challenge for the teachers in the high school to keep up with everyone kind of on the same page. It was really hard. And we got hand-me-down books and just everything was really substandard. And my parents said the only way out is to get an education. And so they sent me north with, I had some feet, you know, some input to a Quaker school, which my father knew of because he went to Lincoln University for his undergraduate work. He was actually a roommate of Langston Hughes for half a year. And he also, that was when Thurgood Marshall and all of those distinguished black people were at Lincoln University. I think it was founded before the end of the Civil War in 1862, Lincoln. So his contacts at Lincoln, plus him, had these contacts with the Quakers because it was Quaker kind of environment in Pennsylvania, Bucks County. And so I ended up at a Quaker school. And that was a really big influence on me, aside from being a shock, being the only black person at an all-white school, but they had this meditation. I mean, this quiet time. That's part of their service. And then you only spoke when you were inspired. And so that was a part of my formation, I think. So I would go between the all-white world and the black world for vacations and summers. And so it was a sense of being an outsider and an insider that started quite early on. Do you view writing as a kind of spiritual practice? I do. I definitely do. When I started writing, actually my mom, you know how mothers are, she gave me a journal every year from the time I was six or seven. They called it a diary. And she would say, Kay, did you write in your diary today after school? But I kept them all. And I have them to this day from when I was seven years old. And as I work on my memoir, which I'm starting to do now, it's so interesting to look back and see those things which I was attracted to in those early years and how they kind of snaked through to the present. Why is poetry important to you? It started out being important because I admired poets. My parents would say poetry out loud. When I was growing up, my dad would break out on a poem or my mom would break out on a poem because they had to memorize in those old days. And then by the time I got to university and to grad school and to teaching, that was a full-time job. And children, I did not have time to sit down and write long treatises except for my academic articles. That was the thing that took the time. But with poetry, I could use a few words with some symbols and some metaphors and God's grace and make the connections, the correspondences in a short and concise way that could touch people on different levels depending on who was reading it. My goodness. Can you describe the time when you first realized that creating was something you absolutely had to do? You know, my mother was a creative dresser and she was a creative soul in a way. I think that I started out by admiring beauty and aesthetics through the way that my mom dressed. Now, we could not in Alabama try on hats or clothes. Explain that. We could not. Because of segregation. They would not permit us to try on shoes. So my mother, she was a very proud woman and she liked style. She liked beauty. She was going to shop from the Sears catalog that most people shop from because of what was available. So she would take me in the summers to Philadelphia or New York or wherever so that she could stay in a hotel, a nice hotel and go shopping in a nice store and try on her clothes and create her costumes, her outfits. And then she was also part of the Javawak. That was the theater group, the Thespian group in Tuskegee. That was another thing. And then we had the George Washington Carver Museum. I mean, there was this culture that was around me that encouraged creativity and originality, I think. Where do you write? Now? Now. Where do you write? I write in nature. In the beautiful backyard of yours, the front yard. Even in Alabama, even at George School, the Quaker School, I started out as a pre-med student. And the chemistry and the organic chemistry and the calculus and all of those things, I quickly found out that those were not my calling. But I wanted to be a doctor because my dad was a vet and I had helped him sometimes on the weekends with the operations and things when his helper wasn't there. So I was fascinated by all the biology, but what it took to get there was not me. I would prefer to go on someone's scooter, motorbike, whatever, out to the countryside, sit under a tree. I had this story that I swallowed a daisy, and that was my creative thing. And I would sit out there, me and my daisy, and write. And you spoke of your father. And I don't know if a lot of people know that your father, who I was privileged and honored to meet, was a Buffalo soldier. Yes. And what does that mean? That means that he went to Lincoln, and then he worked all his way through school, as many of our people did. And he worked at the same place, which is called the Homestead Hotel in Virginia. That was where all the Cudahays and the Rockefellers and all those people would come with their special car and all their servants and all of their dining outfits. They were formal. And he was a porch boy, which meant that when they threw something on the ground, it was his responsibility to pick it up and give it back to them. Something dropped. He was always there. But as time progressed, his responsibilities progressed, and there was this one white woman, who was a Quaker, who saw how diligent he was through eight years, because he started when he was young. And so she arranged for him to get a scholarship to go to University of Pennsylvania, where he was, I think, about the second black to graduate from that school. And he was in the ROTC there, but of course those were the segregated times. And so when he graduated, when he got his veterinary medicine degree, he was called up in the Second World War, and he went to North Africa and Italy, and he was in charge of 12,000 horses, not directly, but people overall. He was overall in charge. And so at that time, they called the black units, the Buffalo Soldiers, went all the way back to the Civil War after the Civil War, when whites did not want the blacks in the military, and so they sent them all the way out west and they ended up, what, telegram system and building the roads and opening the parks and surviving with the Native Americans because they taught them how to use the buffalo in the hard winters, giving up their quarters when the white troopers would come out and they would have to be out in the cold. So it was quite a history, the Buffalo Soldiers, and now those same units, 125th and whatever, they call themselves the Buffalo Soldiers, although it's all integrated because of this distinguished service that they performed. I didn't know that. And to carry it over one little bit more, on the big island, it was 125th, I think, that went up to the top and took all the volcano equipment up there. I wrote about this in Honahoe, the magazine. So that research could be done at the top of the volcano. It was an all-black unit. That was the only ones that could get up there because they had this experience of working, clearing the national parks, Yosemite, all of those parks. That's what the Buffalo Soldiers did. Good information to know. Didn't I know that? Does writing energize or exhaust you? It energizes me. When I don't write, I feel constipated. I feel not functioning properly. And so, when I do write, it's exciting. It's exciting. All right. Well, we're here with Dr. Catherine Waddell-Takara, and we're going to take a short break. Don't touch that dial. We'll be right back. So caught up in the confusion. Nothing is making sense. I'm Dr. Sister Power. I'm here with our special guest, Dr. Catherine Waddell-Takara. And the theme of this episode is the power of the word stay woke. Tell this global audience about yourself. Okay. So, when I would describe myself, I would, as I said, insider-outsider, but I'm also kind of a humanist. I have my PhD in political science. I had a master's in French. I think that that whole thing of me being a traveler or a voyager on a journey have been very inspirational and influencing my writing and jump-starting my writing. I guess you could say I'm kind of an adventurer because when I go off, usually I go off on my own. For example, when I go to China, I've been there eight times now. Except for the first time, my Chinese is very poor, but I go by myself. And I visit people that I've met through the years, but I go by myself. I have to ride the train by myself. I have to subway by myself. And my Chinese is not very good, but the excitement of it, the adventure of it, I think just does something. Well, you are brave. How many languages do you speak? I speak two. I speak French very well. I speak English, of course. And I speak a little bit of Mandarin. I speak a tiny bit of Spanish. Oh, go ahead. And I study Latin, but it's really only good for finding words. Do you get writer's block? I think that writer's block is something that the writer puts on him or herself. I think that a writer has to be courageous and have a lot of persistence and fortitude and be used to rejection because a lot of times, if you want to publish something, it's not immediately accepted. But my counsel would be just to keep at it. You know, it's anyone that has become anyone has stuck with it. There's a certain stick to it-ness that you just can't beat it. So 30 years down the line, I'm still writing and someone else has given up, you know, 10 years ago or 20 years ago. My good for them. Do you read your book reviews? No. You don't? No. I like that. I don't because I don't want to be discouraged or I don't want to get a fat head. Both are true. All right. I like that. What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment? Hard one, Sharon. Well... Inquiring minds want to know. Well, I have a wonderful family. Yes, you do. I loved teaching for the 30-some years that I talked. I loved inspiring students and providing knowledge. Teaching them to reason and to be critical. I really enjoyed that. I think that was really important. And teaching black history and black culture and always interspersed with a little bit of spirituality or metaphysics that's all been a part of my gift or my sharing. And I call it a gift because it's not from me. It's inspired by my parents, but it's from higher. Yes. And I am ever grateful to that. I'm ever grateful to that. I was at a forum today and someone gave me a question to ask you. Wonderful. This is a question. What's the best advice you ever had about how to be more creative? I know that I can answer that. The best advice. Well, my parents always said to stick with it. They always said stick with it. They didn't necessarily think I was going to be a writer. They knew I was going to be a teacher. They knew I was different. I would wear... I would go barefoot and my mother would say, that's so crazy. That's so country. You don't do that. Or I would put flowers in my hair and she would have something to say about that. So they accepted that there was something. Yeah. But I think the stick-to-itiveness and completion have an aim, make your efforts, and complete. I love that. I think that's... Great advice. Great advice. If you didn't write, what would you do for work? Creatively, that would have to come out. And so, of course, I would teach because I teach in my writing as well. But maybe I would try something new. You know, I've tried calligraphy a little bit and I've tried painting a little bit. It didn't anything, but I think that if I couldn't write, maybe I would... Do I sing? Oh! I used to be in a little singing group. We were called the Spinettes. Wow. And that was when we were in Tuskegee when I was in the 60s, when everybody had a little singing group. But I don't think that I would be a singer. Maybe I would work with my hands and some kind of a clay. I love to make jewelry. I do do that. Oh, yes, you do. You have some beautiful jewelry on now. Thank you. And you were talking about your books. We have a couple of covers of your book to show our global audience. You want to tell us a little bit as they're coming up? Tell us a little bit about... Turmalines. Turmalines. Well, that is a book really that reflects my black heritage. It's called Beyond the Ebony Portal. And the ebony, of course, means that you go into... you would go in and witness or be a part of black life. And turmalines are very interesting stones. I like crystals and things like that because I think that they have energy. But turmalines are very hard. Next to sapphires and rubies and diamonds, the hardness is turmalines. And they're interesting because they come in different colors. And those are not all turmalines on the cover because I couldn't get but so many, but they come in a rainbow of colors and they come black, really black. And they come just in various colors, red. And that's like we are. I thought that black people were many different colors and each color carries an energy or a property. And so I layered it. And I talked about it in the introduction. And let me just say that in my introductions I really like to do research. In all my books I have introductions. And in most of my books I have glossaries because I use a lot of foreign words and all. And so... All right, let's move on and show selling... Well, it was Shadow Dancing. Tell us a little bit about your trilogy of this. Shadow Dancing right there. Selling Survival in China. Okay, well that was pretty gutsy I think because the whole subtitle, Selling Survival, could have a negative connotation but it was really a political comment on how China has been bursting ahead. And this book was written over a period of almost 20 years from 1995 when I started to go to China until 2000... Well, I finished it in 2017. And one of my interests in the beginning was to find out the influence of Africans in China and Chinese in Africa. And so I wrote in my introduction the students that I met, the African students that I met, the relationship between China going in and helping to build Africa but at the same time as many other countries taking resources out of Africa. And so... But the whole idea of ancient civilizations and I think that African and Chinese are two of the most ancient civilizations and they were trading way before anyone was thinking about stuff, you know, before Christ was born and all of that. So I like to bring out this information so that people can respect and care for each other more rather than either say, oh, well, I'm the best or I'm the lowest or whatever. There is an equality that exists or has existed that we have to continue to remember. I mean, we're all one in the spiritual world. We're all for the same, whether it's from planets or whatever you want to call it, but we all have the same stuff that stars are made of, you know. We have the minerals and we have the electrical energy and we have all of these things. So, yeah, so selling survival in China and I put the political section in the middle. Initially I had it in the beginning. I started out instead with friends and foods because that's very Chinese and then I did travel on the train mainly, train culture and the hardcore government political stuff and then I did loss because I usually do these kinds of progressions of death and the meaning of it or whatever that I can garner. And finally, generations and continuing. And so that's kind of, I like to take my readers through a series of things. For example, in love seasons, it's like seeds. And even in Pacific Raven I have seeds where... And that was the first book. And the title of that book became the title of my publishing company, Pacific Raven Press. And it became the title because I was like a black bird that flew in from afar and settled. And the Hawaiian crow, I mean, the Hawaiian black birds are not that many. I had to research that a lot. Again, coming in and making it my home for 50 years now. So, yeah. 50 years. And in our closing, on an average, how long does it take you to write a book? Well, you did say that your last book, Shadow Dancing, took you 20 years? Well, yeah, not really. What I did was I wrote along the way. Along the way. And then I put it together in about two years. What do you mean put it together? Well, I wrote every year I was there. Oh. And then when I organize, I do it by themes. It's like playing cards or something. I throw out my pages according to themes. And then I create the book. So that's how I do it. I have a 25-page glossary on that book. Now, whether... I have my copy, my autograph, personally autographed copy. Tell the people how... tell our global audience how they can contact you and get a copy of any of your books. Okay. Well, my contact information, I guess we can put on the bottom of the... of the... my card. But you can also just call Pacific Raven Press. I've been Ka'a Ava, and I will be happy to mail books out to you. You have to pay the postage, of course. Or it can be ordered on Amazon or from Ingram, the distributor. Well, in closing, tell us something about you. Well, I'm a dreamer. I like spice in my life. Even though I'm older, I still like the spice because it keeps me going. Keeps the blood pumping, if you will. I've always been a blended family in terms of ethnicities. I've married people who are not of my race. And I've had lovers who are of my race, you know. So I like variety. I think that each culture has something to offer, to give, to inspire again. And so there we have it. I've been married now 42 years to my Japanese-American husband. Harvey's wonderful. We've had a wonderful, wonderful time. This has been such a fun, fun time. There's so much more for us to go to. And again, our theme, the power of the word, stay woke. Stay woke! Be attentive. Have attention and intention whenever we start something. Intention. I love that. Thank you for joining Sister Power. We have to have you again. There's much more to say. Again, everyone, I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, Sister Power. Dr. Catherine Takar. Thank you. Oceans of Aloha, peace and love.