This is a site where I explore and experiment with/in digital space to develop a presence and visibility for my interests in poetry, herstory, oral tradition, Indigenous language recovery, Indigenous history, genocide, dehumanization, refusal, and transformation. To learn more, read on…
As an interdisciplinary poet, historian, culture and language activist, Indigenous rights defender, Indigenous feminist and teacher, my interests are varied. A good amount of my productive output doesn’t fall easily into traditional publication categories. Where does one locate, on a traditional university CV, a poetry and land-guage recovery and reclamation project–and the publication of it–when it is located on a 20 foot canvas tipi, and the intended audience is a circle of Indigenous knowledge keepers, peers, and spiritual advisors, Indigenous leaders, Indigenous activists, and Indigenous youth? Where does one place the outcomes of embodied songs and dances from a crucial gathering, in which these actions are the most relevant vehicle of dissemination through which Nde’ isdzane (Indigenous women) perform their justice and legal lens. Where does one place the publication of a pictorially written law statement, painted around the tipi like a mural, hand-made, informed by and created with elders and mentors in a protected creek area on a First Nations’ reserve?
Indigenizing my inquiry further, and deeper, my practices have shifted, questioned, and transformed traditional notions of ‘Native American’, ‘American Indian’, ‘Indigenous’, analytical, intellectual, legal, and artistic production.
Thus, here in this digital space, my goal is to sketch, play, imagine, and work out ideas, concepts, and relationships, and/or concerns and interests which I care about deeply, and which have lingered about over a decade, but are not as visible to those who are looking for my ‘impact’ figures in Google Scholar. I don’t really consider my academic writing anything more than a skeleton of my actual imaginative, critical, creative, and intellectual production.
So, this site will be a place to wonder about, wander about, roam about, meander about, shrug about, thump and bump about, and query about … things that don’t go away and which linger, sustain, keep showing up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning.
There are many things I’m concerned and curious about, and so I’m going to just linger in here, retreat to here, meet myself for dates here, lounge about here, stretch my legs here, do some mental yoga asanas here, and make this my important perch and tree house where I can organize and get stuff done.
I have an issue I’m addressing here about time, and not enough of it for my intellectual dream work:
In the last decade, I made decisions about which projects needed prioritizing. I hope I made the right decision, though I struggle with anxiety that I didn’t. Part of my research process involves building and rebuilding many possible ways in which certain problems (based on analyzing the evidence) and letting the evidence tell me the story. Trouble is, (and its really good trouble for a poet and a historian) there are always so many possibilities! Due to the grave human rights dimensions of my experiences in the last decade, and being a first-hand witness to irreparable trauma and harm in El Calaboz, and in several connected communities, this ruminating of mine is quite purposeful, cautious, full of care and concern for lives, land, water, and communities in jeopardy.
About re-envisioning time and space:
I’m using this space, then, to test/see if I can visualize/imagine this as a peaceful ‘canvas’, a different kind of ‘sanctuary’ to write and think, and retrain reinhabit recall reacquaint my deep core self to my mind, my spirit, and my sensibilities. To think and write well one must relearn to relax, trust, and let go of the learned inhibitions that entomb a poet and her-historical thinker, working in and among communities experiencing life-threatening processes, that are the human coping mechanisms we like to call ‘resilience’.
About unlearning self-censure in the post-Patriot Act and DHS dispossession of my home village.
But, what happens when we become overly skillful at self-censure, in order to protect, that we also become habituated to a normalized climate of waiting. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for a collective group to reach consensus. Waiting for the political climate to shift. Waiting for the energy and motivation to return. Waiting for the right signs from the publishing regimes. Waiting for the violence to stop, or at least pause. Waiting for the courage, the time, the perfect circumstance, the momentum, to address the the evidence to return.
Like a portable, personal, and quiet room I’m setting up my imaginary ‘room’. In this space, I can journal, draw, sing, meander, hashtag to my heart’s content, link like there’s no limits, chart, map, mess up (make and leave messes as they are without over-handling or managing them). This is my place where rules and time fall away… Where time slows down… Where my desires to create new ways of forming knowledge–on subjects and issues which both disturb and motivate me to engage, visualize and take action–is made possible, and can exist as it is.
This is a crucial form–what happens in this space. I’m not going to put artificial boundaries on what happens here. That is, it is a form of publishing differently, non-traditionally, and inviting different, non-conforming introverts to be here too.
At the root is my decision, after a decade (2009-2019) to break the real and felt embargoed, contradictory, conflicting relationship I’ve had with law, human rights, Indigenous rights systems, –as a poet and a historian and a witness. At the root is my deep discomfort with the lingering illness caused by silenced non-recognition for the dehumanized, the emptying zones of abjection for the privileged and the punished, and the necropolitics in the eye of the ‘hurricane’ of El Calaboz during three legal processes, 2009-2019. Here I am reclaiming a decade of personal writing and ruminating, while I was waiting for signs to give me a sense if naming names and addressing evidence was going to be a protected act of academic freedom–here in Canada.
This is about what I actually learned about the fundamental lack of protection of non-recognized non-person Indigenous peoples as they/we protected, defended and made a stronghold to keep the US government off ancestral lands.
This is about rekindling my goals, as a poet and historian, and that by claiming this space as an extension of home-lands and my reclaiming of my Indigenous mother and father land-guage(s), that I will excavate many unpublished pieces of writing, re-think their utility, re-tool them, and mobilize them. A decade of embargoed knowledge on thorny matters relative to an insider’s perspective on walled dispossession, memory, and violence witnessed is long enough. I’m ten years older, and everything is telling me to disrupt the western etiquettes of embargoed knowledge. There is no more time for waiting to tell the story…about what happened in El Calaboz. In ten years, things got so. much. worse.
This will require different forms & new languages, different memory & radicalized archival strategies. I’m here. I’m back. I was always inside a very large cage. El Calaboz, its past and its recent history, helped me understand why and how I was born inside a very large cage made especially for Lipan Apaches. Begin here.
