Sisters Camelot feeding people in the garden

…surprised us hungry bikers – on my first night in town preparing for 2013 projects at the Walker Art Center – with a delicious organic meal prepared and served from their tricked out bus/kitchen parked in a beautiful wild community garden (with bees and and rain garden) occupying a previously vacant lot just south of downtown, stop #4 of the Common Room’s “Tour of Urban Monuments to Agriculture & Seminar in a Food Justice“ bike tour lead by Valentine Cadieux – which had us meeting up at the Soap Factory and making our way around town at dusk passing by the Mill City Complex, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, the Minneapolis Farmers Market, and arriving at the Soo Line Garden most delightfully on the Midtown Greenway – an old rail line now a beautiful partially-submerged straight green super-freeway for traffic-free movement across the city on bike, foot, skate. (Sisters’ Camelot website)

Back in 1997, the founder of Sisters’ Camelot, Jeff Borowiak, needed a name for his project, and his partner was reading The Mists of Avalon, the 1979 novel by Marion Zimmer inspired by the land of Camelot and Arthurian myths. The plot focuses on Morgaine (often called Morgan Le Fay in other works), who is portrayed as a woman fighting for her matriarchal Celtic culture in a country where patriarchal Christianity threatens to destroy the Druidic way of life.  The book also describes the lives of Gwennhwyfar, Viviane, Morgause, and other women who are often marginalized in other Arthurian retellings.  King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are supporting, rather than main, characters.  The term “Sisters’ Camelot” refers to a land that truly belongs to these women, as opposed to the more traditional “King Arthur’s Camelot.” Today, we find it a very appropriate name for our collective as we continue to resist the dominant paradigm.  And no, we are not nuns.