Rest in Power: Sister Ardeth Platte, by Carolina Soto

On this Sunday morning, I’d like to pay tribute to one of the most positive forces for good to come out of the religious community in the past century, Dominican nun and antinuclear activist Sister Ardeth Platte, who shed this mortal coil on September 30 while sleeping at her residence in the Dorothy Day Catholic Workers House. 

It is well beyond the scope of this dispatch to fully summarize Sister Ardeth’s life and achievements in the greater world; my hope is only to show she brightened a couple of corners. She’s been a staunch advocate for Re/Creation since our inception, sending notes of encouragement to me after reading many dispatches, and her joint email with her longtime collaborator Sister Carol Gilbert will remain on our mailing list into perpetuity. And I was fortunate enough to spend a Friday morning last year with her and Sister Carol talking out strategy and philosophy in the Grand Central Station food court.

I of course would never have gotten to know sister Ardeth if she hadn’t shared time at the Danbury federal prison with our own Carolina Soto, after which both of them were portrayed in Piper Kerman’s book Orange Is the New Black and fictionalized in the TV adaptation. Last month, Carolina in fact published a remembrance of Sister Ardeth with us, and I’d like to share it in its entirety here in honor and tribute to one of the shining lights of global social justice. -John

 Sister Ardeth Platte, by Carolina Soto

Ardeth has a manly kind of look, short-cropped grey hair, eyes that look small because her face crinkles into a giant grin that makes their twinkle more intense. She is pixie-like in appearance, and when Ardeth sings or talks about ideas that excite her, she looks like she's going to float up in defiance of gravity. At the same time, she often praised her prison-issued steel-toed shoes, saying she would wear them on the outside. Maybe they anchored her a little. You heard her coming because she was usually humming, filled with songs about protecting the sacred land, sky, and waters. No regular ho-hum hymns for this nun.  

I don't know how she does it, but a chance encounter with Ardeth is like bumping into a smile or a hug. If there is someone genuinely full of love, it is this tiny powerhouse. I tease her that her life's work to abolish nuclear weapons has made her more radiant than the sub-atomic particles that endanger the planet. She radiates. 

She might have been there a week when I heard a soft voice behind me asking if we could have lunch together. I said no, thank you; I have a reserved seat at a table with friends. It must have been an icy Catholic turned atheist tone because she said, "I am lonely, and I know I can find intelligent conversation with you. "

What I knew about her was that her last name, Platte, was called more than any other at mail-call. She received enormous amounts of letters and books from all over the world. Ardeth arrived three weeks after my time in Danbury began. 

Sister Ardeth Platte holding a picture of herself as a young nun.

I did not want a nun as a friend. I had relaxed and good relations with the Latinas, who were always open and sweet when they learned I spoke Spanish. From the beginning, my plan was to find a few sane, easy going people that I could count on to have my back emotionally and stay low to the ground with everyone else. Roz was my first real friend, someone I had art, music, books, and political commonalities with. She helped me to settle in and suggested that I apply for a job that would leave me the most substantial amount of free time. I put in my military-style request form to clean the front lobby immediately. She invited me to join her at lunch and saved a seat and a plate of greens or specialty items from the salad bar. The last people to enter prison are called last for lunch. Prison is a system of small rewards for basic human needs.

Ardeth again invited me to lunch with her, and again, I declined the invitation, but my upbringing forced me to say maybe on another occasion. Politeness training runs deep. 

Although I was reasonably quick, always making a beeline for my lunch table and friends, my room was still in the newbie rotation of rooms. Ardeth shared the newbie rotation, eventually catching me. I expected our lunch meeting would be full of stories of her bust at the Minuteman III nuclear missile site, or her relationship with Jonah House and their mission. Instead, it was a gentle drawing out of what interested me. The conversation began from there. 

Ardeth is one of those people who knows about or has an acute awareness of a great many subjects. She has a lot to say, but she knows the value of listening. Her brilliance shone in our drab surroundings.

In the mornings, Ardeth joined our eclectic group of Yoga practitioners. There were several other resisters of conscience in our yoga group. Each of the four women had earned three to six-month sentences for protesting at the infamous CIA  School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, teaching torture techniques to South American military personnel. 

I began my sentence on my mother's birthday, June 30. Three weeks later, Ardeth arrived and started inviting people to commemorate Japan's atomic bombings with a fast from food and readings first on August 6 for Hiroshima and again for Nagasaki on August 9.  A handful of us met and read a poem, passage, or a feeling written down to commemorate these terrible anniversaries. I read a passage from John Hersey's Hiroshima that I found on the common-room bookshelf. I felt lucky to find it. The administration closed the library before I arrived because of a creeping black mold; it stayed closed for the sixteen months of my sentence. The book, Hiroshima, left me with nuclear nightmares since I first read it at 15. Ardeth wrote several poems, as did Roz. We were an odd collection of eight sensitive prisoners. Our collective remembrance was that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had directly killed large civilian populations and had unleashed an incomparable evil for generations to come. From our picnic bench at the Federal Prison Camp, it was easy to see the connection between the military and the prison industrial complexes.

Ardeth also took up the subject of nationalism as quoted from Howard Zinn: "One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of the sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on September 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq. What makes our nation immune from the normal standards of human decency? …We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation." 

My new friend was 69 that year. Her testimony about nuclear weapons was compelling. The amount of precise vision, the inability for those in power to stop her vision for a peaceful future, or shut her up still fills me with hope as much as admiration. Ardeth reminds us that the first issue is the nuclear issue and that the clock ticks closer and closer to doomsday.

We became real friends when I moved into her room, number 6. I was there for seven months, half of the time I served in Danbury. We had three sets of bunk-beds and six metal lockers and three chairs from which the top "bunkies" would crawl onto their only personal living space. The occupant of a top bunk had the exclusive use of the chair. Those on the bottom bunks had to sit on their bed if they were in the room. The other permanent bottom bunkie in room six was Hope, who weighed about 400 pounds. The usual pattern is to move people from dorm to dorm, keeping people disoriented, and unable to bond. Depending on your behavior and cleaning abilities, you were eventually assigned a more or less permanent cubicle with one permanent bunkie in one of the three dorms downstairs. 

Coincidentally, room six is the same room that the Berrigan brothers, founders of Jonah House, shared in the early seventies when the camp was a male federal prison. The brothers both spent three years in Danbury Prison for burning Selective Service draft records with homemade napalm. Their action inspired an escalation of marches, sit-ins, the public burning of draft cards, and other civil disobedience acts.

As our relationship grew, Ardeth asked me if I would tuck her into bed at 7 PM each night. I sat on the side of her bed, pulled the covers up around her chin, and told her I wished her the sweetest of all dreams. I gently stroked her hair, kissed her on the forehead, and said Goodnight. It is entirely illegal to touch or kiss a fellow prisoner. Either of us could have faced solitary confinement for this behavior. Ardeth enjoyed being tucked in, and I loved to do it. Ardeth would smile and get ready for sleep and her tuck-in in the middle of steady noise, loud talking, women coming and going, and metal lockers banging shut. Our nightly ritual had a backdrop of conversation about shooting an unfaithful boyfriend, snorting boat, an embalming fluid used to get high, or how to "boost" or shop-lift using tinfoil and a baby carriage so as not to set off any alarms.

Ardeth missed a lot of excitement because the talk ramped up from 9 to 10 PM. She slept soundly until midnight when she woke to pray. In defiance of self-imposed prison rules, she slept inside the covers. No one could criticize her; she soundlessly made the bed sometime between 3 and 4 AM to perfection and ready for inspection. She liked to watch some news programs in the middle of the night when the small TV room was empty and no one was dogging the controls.

I applied successfully for the job of cleaning the front lobby of the prison down the hill from the camp. Down the hill is the term used for Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. In the Bureau of Prison's own words, we were in a federal correctional institution with an adjacent low-security satellite prison and a minimum security satellite camp. My plum job was to clean the lobby and bathrooms of the main prison. 'Down the hill.' In the summer, my hours were 6 AM until we usually finished within an hour and a half at most. You were on call for other tasks, waxing the floors for particular visits or shoveling in the winter. Mostly, I had the day to myself.

I had started work a few weeks before Ardeth, and mentioned that she should apply for a job before they stuck her with an assigned job. I don't think she thought of being an assistant chaplain but felt that they would ask her to work in education. Once a high school principal, she founded the St. Joseph Alternative Education Center in Saginaw, Michigan, a school for children denied access to other institutions. 

I heard disgruntled mumbling coming from Ardeth.

"I am going to spend the rest of my 44 months in the SHU."

SHU (special housing unit), solitary confinement for 43 months, seemed insane to me. 

"I have decided that 11 cents an hour is Judas' silver. I refuse to take it. "

She made it clear that no one could dissuade her; it was an act of principle. We discussed options. Can we talk to a counselor and let them know you will work but refuse payment? 

"Definitely not."

Could you take the pay and buy things from the commissary for those that have no money? 

"Definitely not."

Can you get your cataracts taken care of if you go to the SHU? 

"Probably not."

Can I speak to your counselor and see if there is another solution? 

"It's fine, dear. I don't mind, really. I am not taking a single piece of Judas' silver."

I decided to visit the chaplain, Sister Rafferty. Ardeth found it terrible that a nun would carry the keys for a corrupt government institution and not set the incarcerated free. Ardeth would never hold the keys like that. Sr. Rafferty had been kind and helpful to me. 

I went to Sister Rafferty straight behind Ardeth's back and asked if she could put Ardeth's pay into an impoverished woman's account. It delighted the chaplain to help. Ardeth became the person in charge of setting up for all the religious events and observances. It's something she excelled at, as she is one of the truest of spiritual people. Sister Ardeth set up and attended all religious rites except the Wiccans, who, like the Buddhists, just met in the tiny chapel.

Ardeth was a regular at Buddhist Services. I would again find Ardeth at the Native American smoke ceremonies, partaking in speaking to and holding a peace pipe, addressing nature with innermost thoughts. I needed this kind of spirituality and remained thankful to the people from the International Indian Treaty Council and the various Buddhist nuns and practitioners. They came to share their knowledge and peace.

In 2002, Sister Ardeth Platte, along with two other Dominican Sisters, Jackie Hudson, O.P., and Carol Gilbert, O.P., broke into a Minuteman III missile silo in Colorado. The nuns entered the inner enclosure around the missile silo and waited for the military to come for them. Using ball-peen hammers, they tapped on the silo's 110-ton concrete lid and on the rusty tracks on which the cover would slide open for a launch. They collected their blood over months, and poured it from plastic baby bottles in the shape of crosses onto the silo walls. They wore white jumpsuits displaying the words "Citizen Weapon Inspection Team," and proceeded to pray in front of the silo. Ardeth gave a vivid account of their singing on their knees when the Marines arrived and pushed their faces into the mud, keeping a foot on their necks and rifles pointed at their heads. Ardeth said that she could barely breathe and wiggled as much as she could to get air. The marines held them face to the ground for close to an hour before removing them to a Denver jail.

The sentences ranged from 31-44 months. Each remanded to a prison camp on charges of obstructing national defense and damaging government property. What the activist nuns had expected was a sentence of six months to a year for criminal trespass. The government showed no leniency after 9/11. They were part of the Roman Catholic "new left," articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism, and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society. The three nuns were an integral part of Jonah House, a community founded in 1973 by a group of people that included Philip Berrigan, a Catholic priest, and his wife, Elizabeth McAlister, formerly a Catholic nun. They act on the belief that resistance implies actions in opposition to unjust practices, policies, institutions, and systems. Each community member is committed to speaking out about the connection between war-making and homelessness, hunger, despair, and poverty. The particular focus of Jonah House is nonviolent civil resistance against war and the abolition of weapons of mass destruction. They had all experienced prison and took turns maintaining their community or being in actions that usually ended in jail or prison time.

Sister Ardeth Platte and Sister Carol Gilbert have together graced forty-four jails and prisons to protest and educate about the threat of nuclear weapons. They are a partnership made in heaven but were separated by the Bureau of Prisons. Carol Gilbert served her time in Alderson Prison Camp in West Virginia  They are currently activists under the International Campaign's umbrella to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, working together with International organizations to ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the United Nations. The 2017 Nobel prize went to ICAN for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons. The two nuns have been delivering and teaching the treaty to Legislators and University students across the United States.

You can also read more about Sister Ardeth’s life in this NYTimes obituary.