Biography sister dorothy may

Brazilian activist (1931–2005)

Dorothy Mae StangSNDdeN (June 7, 1931 – February 12, 2005) was an American-born Brazilian Catholic nun and martyr. She was murdered in Anapu, Pará, in the Amazon Basin in 2005. Stang had been outspoken in her efforts on behalf of the poor and the environment and had previously received death threats from loggers and landowners.

Life

Born on June 7, 1931, in Dayton, Ohio, but naturalized Brazilian, she entered the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur community in 1948 and professed final vows in 1956. From 1951 to 1966, she taught elementary school classes at St. Victor School in Calumet City, Illinois, St. Alexander School in Villa Park, Illinois and Most Holy Trinity School in Phoenix, Arizona.

She began her ministry in Brazil in 1966, in Coroatá, Maranhão. Stang dedicated her life to defending the Brazilian rainforest from depletion by agriculture. She worked as an advocate for the rural poor beginning in the early 1970s, helping peasants make a living by farming small plots and extracting forest products without deforestation. She also sought to protect peasants from criminal gangs working on behalf of ranchers who were after their plots. Dot, as she was called by her family, friends and most locals in Brazil, is often pictured wearing a T-shirt with the slogan, "A Morte da floresta é o fim da nossa vida" which is Portuguese for "The Death of the Forest is the End of Our Lives".

I don't want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.

Death

On the morning of February 12, 2005, Stang woke up early to walk to a community meeting to speak about the rights for the Amazon. Ciero, a farmer Stang invited to the meeting, was going to be late. Ciero was a couple of min

By Edward Judge | Contributing writer

On Feb. 12, 2005, a 73-year-old Catholic nun was accosted by two strangers as she walked to a meeting along a dirt road through the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. When the men asked if she had a weapon, she replied that her weapon was her Bible, and began reading to them from the Beatitudes. One of the men then shot her in the abdomen, and she fell forward on the ground. He then shot her again in the back, and four times in the head, ending the remarkable life of a truly remarkable woman.

The woman was Sister Dorothy Stang. Born in 1931 in Dayton, Ohio, she joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in 1948, and from 1951 to 1966 she taught in Catholic grade schools in northeastern Illinois and Phoenix, Ariz. Feeling called, however, to serve God as a missionary among the poorest of his poor, she answered the call and went to Brazil in 1966. There she worked in Amazonia among the impoverished people, tending to their spiritual and physical needs and helping to open some 39 schools. She also fought to preserve the rain forest through a sustainable-development program that gave landless peasants small plots of land to be farmed in ways that avoided deforestation.

She thus earned the ire of powerful beef and agribusiness interests that cleared the forests for cattle-raising and commercial farming, as well as loggers who felled trees for hardwoods, and even local workers concerned that their livelihood depended on these enterprises. Faced with death threats and increasing danger, especially after ranchers put a price on her head, she refused to either leave or back down, and often wore a T-shirt reading in Portuguese “The death of the forest is the end of our life.” A local rancher, whom she had accused of illegally starting fires to clear forests, was later convicted of paying the assassins that ended her life on that fatal February morning.

Her death sparke

American interior decorator and socialite

Sister Parish (born Dorothy May Kinnicutt; July 15, 1910 – September 8, 1994) was an American interior decorator and socialite. She was the first practitioner brought in to decorate the KennedyWhite House, a position soon entrusted to French interior decorator Stéphane Boudin. Despite Boudin's growing influence, Parish's influence can still be seen at the White House, particularly in the Yellow Oval Room.

Early life

Sister Parish was born Dorothy May Kinnicutt on July 15, 1910, in Morristown, New Jersey. Her parents were G. Hermann Kinnicutt and May Appleton Tuckerman. Parish was born at home in a four poster bed. Her paternal grandfather was Francis Kinnicutt, Edith Wharton's doctor and close friend. In addition to their New Jersey house, the family had homes in Manhattan, Maine, and Paris. She was given the nickname Sister by her three-year-old brother Frankie.

As a child, Parish attended The Peck School in New Jersey, in the fall and spring. During the winter, she attended Chapin School in New York. Later, she boarded at Foxcroft School in Virginia.

Parish was a debutante in 1927. Once she had completed high school, her parents expected her to marry, and on Valentine's Day 1930, Kinnicutt married banker Henry Parish II at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan.

After the wedding, the couple lived on East End Avenue in Manhattan (in an apartment done by a decorator), followed by a farmhouse on Long Lane in Far Hills, NJ which Parish decorated herself. In decorating the Long Lane house, Parish found her own sense of style. She painted wood furniture white and used cotton fabrics such as ticking stripe. She experimented with brightly painted floors. Parish's new home was lighter and more casual than other high society homes of the 1930s.

Parish

(b. 15 July 1910 in Morristown, New Jersey; d. 8 September 1994 in Dark Harbor, Maine), one of the most influential interior designers of the twentieth century, whose most famous work was done for the Kennedy White House.

Parish was the daughter of stockbroker and antiques collector G. Hermann Kinnicutt and homemaker May Appleton Tuckerman. The only daughter, she grew up with three brothers. Her brother Frankie gave her the nickname “Sister,” by which she was known her entire life. The family was privileged and owned homes in Morristown, New Jersey; New York City; Dark Harbor, Maine; and Paris. Her forebears included the famous Puritan leader Cotton Mather and Oliver Wolcott, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The comfort in which she was reared would influence the types of clientele she served as a design professional. Her father graduated from Harvard and with his uncle formed the brokerage firm Kissell, Kinnicutt; later it merged with Kidder, Peabody and Company. In 1920 the family moved from Morristown to Mayfield in New Jersey, where her room was the only one decorated in a French style. This helped shape her decorating taste.

Parish’s formal education was limited. She graduated from Miss Chapin’s School in New York City after the eighth grade and attended the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, from which she never graduated. According to Parish, efforts to broaden her education through fencing, dance lessons, and piano lessons proved fruitless; she described herself as “untalented and graceless.”

In 1928 she had an epiphany while visiting the family apartment in Paris. “Something stirred in me,” she later said. She went from room to room, seeing the place in “new, more careful ways…. I realized that a deep, abiding belief in all things inherited, and all things of lasting quality, had been awoken in me. I was finally beginning to understand beauty and the role it would play in my life.