Many of you have contributed to previous GoFundMe projects of The Digger Archives. This is another fundraising plea to help preserve our tribe’s history. Jesse Cox is a people’s historian of the most authentic variety. Jesse’s writings are a cross between a geographer’s intimate association with the landscape and the be-bop prosy of a Jack Kerouac. We hope to eventually share his stories of our communal past, stories of one of the first communes on Castro Street, stories of the Hearthshire Community in northern California, and — the aim of this GoFundMe — the stories of Assunta Femia, the progenitor of a transgressive gay feminine spirituality.
Jesse is 72 years old and he is struggling with the age-old dilemmas of physical and economic limitations. Jesse still is moonlighting gigs while pursuing a passion for finishing his deep history of Assunta, once Jesse’s love and guiding spirit. Assunta was both shaman and prophetess. Her legacy must be preserved and Jesse is the best person to do it. Read the memorial that Arthur Evans wrote after Assunta’s passing in 2006.
There will be much more shared in the coming days and weeks as we grow this fund. Jesse has his fingers in many pies but Assunta is top of the list.
Thank you, all and everyone!
Here’s the full GoFundMe link: https://bit.ly/GoFundMe-for-Jesse
digger feed: dinosaurs are dancing 
Excerpt from Assunta Femia: a Biography by Jesse Cox
(To support Jesse’s research: https://bit.ly/GoFundMe-for-Jesse)
The liberal and progressive American Dream in Assunta’s family and communities in West Virginia were born of existential and violent labor conflicts in the 1920s and 30s, resistance to the forces of the coal mine company town, solidarity with the Africans in their separate coal mine camps nearby, and the living memory and recent experiences of Assunta’s father and uncle, two boys who had served in the Italian Army in North Africa before they were even 16 and on returning to find Mussolini on the brink of assuming power, emigrated to America after having served in the Resistance against rising fascism and not doubting there would be certain fatal consequences visited on them by Mussolini’s state apparatus. Frank Sr and Rocco Femia arrived as immigrants and grew into a new life with absolutely no confidence in their new government and no sense that their existence is secure despite the Potemkin Village of the American Dream.![Text Box: Figure 1. Holden Coal Mine at Island Creek No. 22, West Virginia. Site of a 1960 mine fire that resulted in the loss of 18 lives.]()
In addition to the strong tradition in Assunta’s paternal family of resistance, activism, Labor and liberal progressivism, there is also a strong current of institutional religious practice. For as far back as the current family remembers, every generation of Femia’s and Fuda’s have nuns, priests and monks. It would seem to be in the DNA.
Arthur Evans’ obituary for Assunta Femia: https://bit.ly/arthur-evans-obit-for-Assunta-Femia