Settler Relations

Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman, Weaving the World into Being” (2007), Lauren Raine

What I love so much about how King articulates “Thought Woman” is his parallel with her to Robinson Crusoe. Immediately off the bat as she navigates her way across the territories that King describes, he lets her self-determine as “Robinson Crusoe […and] in charge” (318). The significance here, is that King is turning the negotiations of Crusoe, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s same-titled novel, on its head.

No longer is Crusoe the ‘discoverer’ of a ‘vacant’ or ‘empty’ island, turning it through the clever manipulation of the land’s many-resources into a civilized(ish) fort and home. This manipulation of space and time is a long-since criticized relic of a certain type of history in literature—Colonial Literature. What happens then, when Thought Woman becomes or embodies a Crusoe-like way of moving about the land—putting flowers in police officer’s hair, criticizing and critiquing how they exist in this space? The parallels become a speaking back to the histories of Colonial literature and the way that the settlement projects of North America draw so heavily from these canons in their effort to legitimize the deep violence they were responsible for.

Pushing or expanding this idea of Crusoe into a decolonizing lens is a tricky subject. I am fascinated by King’s use of him especially in relation to Thought Woman. Specifically, the idea that Crusoe creates a simulacra (LINK), or attempt at modernism through his treehouses and family-driven religion. Recent literary scholars have broken apart Crusoe’s role in early-colonial modernism. I cannot escape this idea of the’ almost-civility’ that Crusoe inhabits (things are close to being civil and modern, but still almost ‘savage’) in relation to how Green Grass Running Water is so often challenging, undoing, and going back in popular means of story-telling. King is joining scholars like Karen Lawrence (1992) in their effort to chip away at the legitimacy and efficacy of Crusoe as a grand figure of modernism and capital–effectively decolonizing these Western Canons.

This embodied playfulness or trickery that King continuously uses in the novel, not just through Coyote, I argue, but through almost every one of his characters effectively begins to talk back to traditional or Western schemas.

I think to the ways in which Thought Woman is represented in the many oral traditions of indigenous peoples, and am struck by the imaginig of spiders and webs in relation to her. Keeping the deliberate, strong, well-planned, and often beautiful webs that spiders create in dialogue with Crusoe’s own ‘almost-modernity’, lets us see another means to an end that King is toying with. Thought Woman’s hand in creation and beginnings can be read as natural forces talking back to the colonial dogma that Crusoe brings. What better dismantling of such a western script as Crusoe seemingly ‘dominating’ and ‘controlling’ nature in his elegant and modern treehouse (humanity laboring and turning the tree into a home) than Thought Woman’s literal creation of nothing—a web and universe?

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel, and N. C. Wyeth. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Scribner, 1983. Online.

Karen Lawrence, ed. Decolonizing tradition: new views of twentieth-century” British” literary canons. University of Illinois Press, 1992. Online.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. E-Book.

Raine, Lauren. Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman, Weaving the World into Being. Digital image. 2007.

I came across the “four old Indians” (1094) as I was in the midst of organizing the 5^th Annual F-Word conference, an organization on campus which is committed to showcasing queer, feminist, indigenous, and decolonizing research at the undergrad level. This year’s proposal of hopeful students span academic disciplines, but a topic that bears repeating is the Highway of Tears , BC’s highway 16, which runs between Prince Rupert and Prince George, wherein over 40 women (although experts consider this a low estimate) have gone missing, many of whom are aboriginal.

These coincidences are flag holders and placeholders to me, pointing me in a direction to embark in. I cannot get the image of transit, of hitchhiking, of strangers meeting stranger out of my head as I read King’s words. The four old Indians are met on the side of the road, Norma states that they “better give them a ride” (1094). In this moment, our meeting of them is that of a stranger on a highway–filled with the speculative and infinite possibilities (not unlike a hyperlinking) that strangers provide.

  Sam and Dr. Patterson intelligently  examine the ways in which their naming parallels the medicine wheel’s colours (Mr. Red, Mr. White, Mr. Black, and Mr. Blue) , and I think this is a fruitful endeavor—indeed, this post originally started off as a response to this.  (). Once again though, my own relational understanding to the text and my whitness comes into play. I deleted the original post because I recall a moment of my own coming into learning about indigenous ways of being at an Idle No More informational session at UBC on January, 2013. There, I was shown sacred teachings and stories around the medicine wheel by an indigenous woman. With this lesson, so graciously and beautifully shown to the small room I was in, came a grave warning of cultural appropriation. The woman teaching us explained how many years she had spent on the medicine wheel, how our understanding of it comes not just from pedagogies of knowing, but also from pedagogies of embodied learning—that is, ways of learning which supersede contemporary ways of coming to understand knowledge.

With this warning of how medicine wheels are at risk of being reduced or reified by white bodies, particularly in academic contexts, I have repositioned my way of understanding the four old Indians and medicine wheels in a context that I do feel comfortable talking about, that is, contemporary indigenous land claims. A staple of my blog, Glen Coulthard, the Yellowknives Dene scholar teaching here on campus at UBC speaks wonderfully about a four stage process of opression regarding indigenous land claims (and he spoke this particular clip at the same conference where I first learned of medicine wheels). I wonder if we can read his contemporary scope of the “four cycles of indigenous struggles for land” in relation to the fours old Indians, a re-iterating scope and endlessly toiling amount of pedagogy and work circulating and recirculating around our ways of knowing the land, indigenous bodies, and indigenous knowledge production.

I am struck then,  with what happens when we introduce trauma (a current obsession of mine—the cultural production that trauma ‘permits’) like the murdered and missing women, or the theft/misuse/deliberate revisions of historical contexts around land to indigenous works like King’s text. Coulthard articulates very eloquently the ways that these colonial powers are circulating. Thinking (or feeling) through how King understands elders, parents, youth, and children to be operating within the medicine wheels at points of harmonious synchronicity in relation to say, Coulthard’s discussion of a colonial cycle which propagates and dismisses indigenous land claims as erroneous, naïve, and unending is a way for me as a white settler to begin to come to terms with how I relate to the medicine wheel and the four old indians—both perpetually not welcome to its histories and performances, while also, just by being here on this land, interacting with it from my own cycle or ‘wheel’ (what Coulthard is speaking to).

Work Cited

(Bonita Lawrence on Indigenous Studies and Anti-Racist Studies)
Official policies, laws, and governing doctrine are important works to be examining in our criticisms and investigations of colonialisms and Canada. The Indian Act’s racist, sexist, and violent history continues to enforce how our government defines and relates indigeneity. I am currently fascinated with the interactions of ‘official’ policies, specifically the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, and ‘unofficial’ policies such as Canada’s idea of itself as a “cultural mosaic”.

What interests me about the Multiculturalism Act is the way it is wielded by the Canadian nation state to form a visage of inclusivity. Indeed, my first encounter with the act was in elementary school, where we were taught about it in comparison to the United States’ melting pot ideology (pdf). All of the rhetoric the act deploys reminds me very much of a certain Canadian set of optics—apologetic, polite, embracing of cultural diversity. These tactics on one hand make Canada seem like a very liveable place while on the other, making critical discourses around say, Canada’s violent and erasing past (and contemporary direction) of colonialism, hard to have. Section 3.1 (f) of the act states that the act will “encourage and assist the social, cultural, economic and political institutions of Canada to be both respectful and inclusive of Canada’s multicultural character” (Canadian Multiculturalism Act 1988). This becomes a sort of flattening of race and ethnicity to ‘work together’ and build this cultural mosaic of hybridity and nationhood.

Bonita Lawrence, a Mi’kmaw woman, and Enaksh Dua work together from both sides of Aboriginal education and anti-racist education (respectively) to pose dialogue on how the two are seen to be at arms with each other (pdf) in their article “Decolonizing Antiracism” (2005). Overwhelmingly the anti-racist pedagogies they cite and view “has maintained a colonial framework” (136). That is, it does not work to acknowledge that being indigenous is different from being a person of colour in Canada. A multiculturalism act that puts all races and ethnicities on an ‘even’ playing field in hopes of mutual recognition, visibility, and benefits does not do a justice to the complicated ways to how race and indigineity relate and intertwine themselves, particularly through the lens of a nation state.

I wish to draw a parallel of what Lawrence and Dua place as a missing of the mark by the academy to not work decolonization into its anti-racist pedagogies, and what I position as the Canadian public for failing to make this connection as well. Amnesty International’s response to the culture of violence and silence against Indigenous women permeating throughout Canada was published in 2004 (pdf). It traces a violent set of inaction from the Canadian government, media, and citizens in the murdered and missing women across Canada. The report seethes that “[v]iolence against women, and certainly violence against Indigenous women, is rarely understood as a human rights issue” (4). This functions as a reminder that the Canadian public has a heavy-hand in ignoring, normalizing, and producing violence against Indigenous women.

These moments of intervention by activists and scholars such as Lawrence and Dua, or organizations like Amnesty International begin to paint a broader picture of the ways in which Canada is operating under a cultural mosaic which, like physical mosaics, covers a dark and derelict base—Canada’s own continuing erasure of indigenous peoples. I see this sort of masking of all races and ethnicities as ‘one’ uniform and ‘knowable’ thing to be a direct parallel to Coleman’s position of a certain type of white supremacy–that is, the mosaic appears to us to be white because it is mirroring and paralleling the histories of white supremacy and colonialism our nation is built upon.I think it is no accident that these fictive constructs are reproducing dominant powers and sensibilities–whiteness dominates and affects how we come to understand even anti-racist studies if not intervened upon.

Works Cited

Amnesty International. “Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence Against Women in Canada.” Stop Violence Against Women (2004). Web.

Canadian Multiculturalism Act Statutes of Canada, c.9. Canada. Department of Justice. 1988. Department of Justice. Web.

Henry III, William A. “Beyond the melting pot.” Time 135.15 (1990): 28-31. Web.

Lawrence, Bonita. “Race, Ethnicity & Indigeneity | Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies | York University.” YouTube. YouTube, 21 June 2010. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.

Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua. “Decolonizing antiracism.” SOCIAL JUSTICE-SAN FRANCISCO- 32.4 (2005): 120. Web.

Williams, Lynn. “The Indian Act (1876 to Present).” News for the Rest of Us. Rabble.ca, n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2014. Web.

“I planted him in this country
like a flag.”

-Margaret Atwood, “The Journals of Susanna Moodie” 

I first heard of Susanna Moodie, as I suspect many English majors hear of Susanna Moodie—through the poetry of Margaret Atwood. I was nineteen and backpacking through Montreal. I had just been broken up with and thought it a good idea to leave my province for another one. I spent a lot of time at the Grande Bibliothèque, poring over Atwood’s poetry and books. I was determined to have a Canadian experience and what better way than to explore Canada on my own, through the eyes of one of our most celebrated authors. Susanna Moodie was thrown at me, at a time when I was feeling alone, destitute, confused. I took out her Roughing it in the Bush  (1854), and never returned the text. This is a confession, I think.

I am not trying to draw a direct comparison towards moving across Canada as a nineteen year old and Susanna Moodie’s complex negotiations of emigration. I am, however, interested in the ways that these two ideas of leaving, coming to new space, re/defining the self in relation to this space, and starting anew can be read as distinct parallels. Thinking (or feeling) through these ideas laid out to us of second Edens and empty and negotiated lands draws me to her introduction where she describes the “Salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country” (Moodie) (emphasis added). I am fascinated by this idea of proximity in the works we are examining. What does it mean to be close to the country you have left? How does physical proximity factor into what ‘home’ can or should become? She writes in Chapter 11 of a fear that moving away from the ‘mother country’ becomes an “approaching ill” (Moodie). She goes on to say that this fear“strove to draw [her] back as from a fearful abyss, beseeching [her] not to leave England and emigrate to Canada” (Moodie). In this way, proximity becomes a way of talking about ownership. This image of a vast, “unwasted” Canada that she explores again and again only becomes less terrifying as she lays claim to it, settles it.

This double idea of an Eden at once beckoning the many English subjects who develop a “Canada mania” (Moodie) and also offering the harsh and cold realities of the earth after the Fall begin to come to light in her introduction. It is a true testament to the Enlightenment that this text offers explicit ways of knowing or coming to know Canada as a settled space. Both absencing and ignoring the fact that Canada was not absent, not ‘unwasted’, but was home to many complex and wildly differing nations and peoples before contact, Moodie’s work begins to rewrite Canada through this proximity to knowledge. Only by getting far enough away from England, and close enough to a “real” or “factual” account of settling Canada does Moodie begin to at once complicate the ideas of Eden (eg by pointing to the “cold winds and drizzling rain” in Chapter 2) , as well as paint Canada as the tax-free paradise that immigrants might come to expect. Indeed, though it is a rough gift, an “empty” “unsettled” Canada is built by Moodie as a gift from god.

The resurrection King performs of Moodie in the café scene in Green Grass, Running Water (1993) can be read as a delicate and complicated investigation of power in-text. Achilles Mbembe, a post-colonial scholar speaks to great lengths of what “conviviality” looks like in his “On the Postcolony” (1991). I turn to his complicated reading of colonialism and Africa because I think the ways in which King reanimates Moodie is a toying with these notions of conviviality (friendliness or ‘liveliness’). Moodie is brought back in a satirical way (as is King’s specialty). Immediately he renames her as “Sue” (184), and has her explain in a contemporary context that her and her companion Archie have been “roughing it” (184) in dingy hotel rooms. What King is doing here is acknowledging the deep-histories that Moodie summons in the Canadian literature canon, and toying with them, making them unrecognizable and ‘unconvivial’. Mbembe speaks of satire and humour in the discussions of postcolonialism, pointing to an unfriendliness or satirical changing in works to alter or challenge overarching stories of power.

Margaret Atwood came to speak at UBC two years ago about zombies. I remember asking a rather pretentious and long-winded question on the nature of zombies to her—she wasn’t too interested as I recall (and I don’t blame her the question was maybe reserved for a paper and not a Q&A). I am once again reeling with the thoughts of what a zombie in-text can look like. If we can read Moodie’s reconvivial state in Green Grass, Running Water, as a zombie-type character, then there is perhaps room to think about the ways in which Canada as a consumer of Moodie’s work in our building of “Canadian canon” (which also includes Atwood’s work) works in the same ‘mindless droves’ that zombies do in our ongoing history of ‘forgetting’ or ‘making invisible’ First Nations peoples.

Works Cited

Thinking through how we define, or relate to home was such an interesting idea and each person in this class parsed through such convincing, beautiful, and entirely different ways of challenging home.

I’ve sorted my thoughts into four separate ideas. Shifted/Lived/History/Future

Shiftedness- I love the idea that home for many of us is always changing, both in terms of the physicality of it, but also in terms of the emotive context. I think to the movie “Garden State” wherein Zach Braff’s character recalls a moment of ‘going home’ wherein his parents’ house no longer feels like home (conversation starts at 1:05). He operates here, at a loss—home becomes defined as what was and what could be. Natalie Portman’s character accounts that her parents’ home is still her home. Keeping this video in dialogue with our own thinkings of home lets me see the myriad of ways in which we encounter ourselves in relation to home. It is not static, and even if it is (in Portman’s case) there is a sense of change on the horizon, a ‘not yet, but soon’ if you will. 

Lived-  A complicated sort of idea that kept coming up for me while reading everyone’s blogs on home (and how well-written they were!)  was this idea of the contemporary–the current. Some students called upon a feeling of ambivalence or complicatedness of things becoming home but not quite there yet. In this way, home becomes a sort of acted upon imagination. It is constructed, and worked on, and always negotiated upon. Home doesn’t happen upon us, it is fashioned by us. Thinking of these tensions of negotiations in relation to indigenous sovereignty makes these feelings even more complex. Negotiating a lived home on stolen or occupied land(s) makes home a complex notion, a violent notion. An ability to call space home is presupposed on years of systemic and state-sanctioned oppression and genocide.

History- People, including myself, speak to a past that must be summoned or acted upon in order to create home. It is hard to see where we’re going without first seeing where we were. Childhood homes, first homes with roommates or partners, dormrooms, these are all built and negotiated upon a before. I wonder what the imaginative possibilities of a history-less home looks like? A home that exists devoid or separate from a relation to your past. Thinking/feeling through this idea leads me to a question of homes. Is it possible to hold several homes at once? Neither being more important than the other, and all circulating around a point of being in the world?

Future- This idea of homes makes me think of how many people in the class were looking forward to changes, or speculative relationalities that would reinforce/repatriate/rebuild homes for them. Whether it’s the idea of a partner, or a child coming into their lives, there is a sense of change and want in our understandings of home. Future then, allows us to take up a home in a form that is not physical. Emotive, or affective homemaking becomes a future-home, one which isn’t built from woodframes and steel bars, but from a hope, want, desire, or expectation for change.

Works Cited

Belliveau, Elisabeth. “Home.” Cartoon. Don’t Get Lonely Don’t Get Lost. Wolfville: Conundrum, 2010. Print.

Churchill, Ward. Struggle for the land: Native North American resistance to genocide, ecocide, and colonization. City Lights Books, 2002.

Garden State. By Zach Braff. Dir. Zach Braff. Perf. Zach Braff and Natalie Portman. Fox Searchlight, 2004.

I like this question and what it’s asking. This question, like a hyperlink, is a careful invitation to stray off the path of what is easy–to read linearly, it is a call to re-imagine these stories as more than opposing dualisms. So let’s click away, explore what these stories could mean in relation to one another. Vladmir Nabokov, a favourite writer of mine once wrote in one of his lectures that “all great novels are great fairy tales“. What he means by this (I think) is the sense of affect and possibility in-text, in story telling. King, I think, in his very purposeful reading of the two stories, is playing into the hands of these dichotomies–that the Genesis doctrine is an instructive way of being in the world, while the Earth Diver story is collaborative. King, always the trouble-maker and truth-teller, is pointing these dichotomies out to us, highlighting them. From here, the reader (or listener) has a choice, to take things at face value, to make the easy choice of reading these two things as on opposite ends of a spectrum, or interrogating these peculiarities, asking why King has made such a point to separate the two.

Indeed, the histories that Christianity has on Indigenous peoples across this land is severe and grave. I think to Dr. Daniel Heath-Justice, a two-spirited and Cherokee contemporary theorist here at UBC, who traces and delineates the ways in which a Christian doctrine is implicitly linked to the subjugation, moralization, and ongoing colonization of aboriginal peoples, and specifically, two-spirited peoples. The complexities of two-spiritedness are not to be dismissed ,or written off. Too often in academia, two-spiritedness is conflated with queerness–and how easy to draw parallels between  a “queer two-spirited” sensibility and a Christian moralizing while looking at say, the fights against same-sex marriage in the contemporary American landscape. These two things are not the same, however. Many nations had differing roles and understandings of two-spiritedness, and indeed, there has been a resurgence and reclamation of the term by contemporaries like Heath-Justice, but I do not wish to flatten the lived-experience of many peoples whose identities transgressed, and were entirely separate from a Western queer experience- many of whom were situating inside and outside of the gender spectrum, for example. But I digress, my point here, is that like King is showing us, the parallels we can draw using a “good vs bad” or “us vs them” mentality leads us on a dangerous path.

What I think is a more fruitful venture in reading or re-reading King’s two stories, is keeping them in conversation with a contemporary Native American landscape, wherein assimilation, colonization ‘mixedness’, and erasures are the lived realities of many. Indeed, King himself exists at a juncture which Canadian writer Fred Wah might call “living in the hyphen”; he is both Cherokee and Greek. The point I’m making here, is that there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ story telling here. King hyperbolizes the tones of the two stories to show one reading of them–that the Genesis story is harsh and authoritative while the diving woman story is much more laid-back, relaxed. An important point he makes while telling the falling woman story in his Massey Lecture reading of it, is his joke that naming the woman (he fluctuates between Blanche and Charm) might be decided by “someone you trust”; someone who “might lower your taxes” (King 2013). In this moment, King is pointing at the complexities of group-story. He’s nodding his head at the issues at hand of telling, re-telling, and listening to stories. My mind raced when he made this seemingly flippant joke, thinking to all the ways in which stories aren’t all created equal. Anyone can tell a story, indeed, but not everyone listens. Entire stories have been told and devoured by politicians like John A MacDonald, our first prime-minister who passed the Indian Act .

It would be easy to read the two stories as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but this is a blunder. Holding the two not as opposing ends, but rather, as complicated and intertwining systems that can both  be believed at once holds a key to a more nuanced understanding of story and story-telling. If we can move past the idea that if we take one story to be a truth, than the other is just a story, and embrace the multiplicities of being in the world, of having complicated ways of understanding our own being in the world, which draws upon both stories, or neither story, or yet one hundred more, we start to see a certain gradient set upon us. Things need not be black and white. I am struck then, with the ways in which indigenous land claims across Canada have cited their own stories in their fight to reclaim land or treaties (pdf). This offers yet another parallel to the multiplicities that unfold when we merge and meld stories-weaving tales and legends into legal documents, much like a Genesis melding and yielding to a falling woman.

Works Cited

“Cherokee Nation.” Cherokee Nation. Cherokee Nation, n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan. The Limits to Union: Same-sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002. Print.

Heath-Justice, Daniel. Daniel Heath Justice: Imagine Otherwise. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Feb. 2014.

Indian
Act,
R.S.C.
1985,
c.
I‐5.

Justice, Daniel Heath, and James H. Cox. “Queering Native Literature, Indigenizing Queer Theory.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 20.1 (2008): n. pag. Print.

Pitzer, Andrea. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Pegasus, 2013. Print.

Roger William V. British Columbia and Canada. BC Supreme Court. 2004. Woodward and Company. David M. Robbins, n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

Wah, Fred. Lecture. Standing in the Doorway – the Hyphen in Chinese-Canadian Poetry. Richmond Public Library, Richmond. Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. University of British Columbia. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

He had found the scissors, rusting and shivering among the basil five years later. He was fourteen and he had forgotten of these things, had forgotten of the horn-rimmed handle, how cold the shears had been, how weighty their whole body was in his hand, as though they had purpose.

He had meant to find the newspaper that the delivery girl always tossed haphazardly into the bushes and instead he had found these and the smell of old metal. He ran his hand through his untamed hair, feeling the cold dew from bushes kneed and knit itself down into his scalp. This was a morning in his hometown and he felt entirely unremarkable.

It was his town, he decided, which made his hair grow the way it did. All its small syllogisms and judgments, there’s no way hair could grow without being self-conscious. The physicists and theorists of the day had written large books about this, his brother would tell him. That things observed became different, changed the way they were, how they acted. This wasn’t the town’s fault, its observations. It was a small place. It was on the edge of a river and the edge of an ocean. There was water on nearly all sides, and when you stare at water long enough, the horizon melting into the waves, you don’t have much else to stare at but your neighbours. This town pretended to be ancient. It reveled in the iron clock in the ‘old district’, which was really just six or seven shops that had been there before the ‘60s. There was farmland there, and these farms, like all farms, smelled of dirt, and old wood, and made the whole town believe it was older than it was. Farmers and Fishermen, a whole culture of working and getting—flinging a lure off a ship, landing into the freshly-tilled land, the clay-red of it obscuring and obfuscating the fishing line.

He would find out, years later, that the cannery his grandfather opened and loved like beach glass was home to people whose lives he would never quite get close enough to see. There were record books and photographs that his father had kept, in one of those overwhelmingly-fatherly traits of hoarding family history. Canneries, it seemed, were employers of the people my town loved to forget, chose to forget. The Chinese men whose head-taxes would fund heady estates and municipalities—force my town to grow its borders, encroach on the reserve just 2 miles south.

And the reserve, oh the reserve, how my town hated it, how they would turn their noses up at it, the nerve of it to exist so close to their picket fences. My town was, and is white, whole streets and neighborhoods of white. The people here have forgotten what the sign of a reserve is or was or will be—that this land that they hold so dear, build large concrete slabs and bronze memorials of tractors and fishermen and god knows what else in memory of a history that they’ve constructed, wasn’t always ‘theirs’. A totem pole stands at the center of my town. Its carver not from around these parts, though no one seems to know that too well. The Tsawwassen nation did not build poles like this. And yet here it is, standing, like the cannery poles do now, mall remnants of what was, or what could be—only apparent if you know what you’re looking for.

And me, and these scissors and how I had cut my own hair in a bowl cut as a child. How I had taken the heavy dullness of these scissors and snipped around my whole head, except the back, which was hard to reach. My mother had come home that day and stared at me with a stern look which covered a laughter at the sight of me. She asked me why I had cut my hair this way, what I had done with it. I smiled and showed her where I had planted my own hair, told her I was growing my boyfriend out of the ground. My father had taught me about growing the week before and I knew of the bloodline of this small town. Her smile was gone by then, as she stared at small lumps of soil in her garden. She had taken the scissors from my hand. I never knew where she put them. I had looked.

Some things don’t grow in the soil. These were lessons I would come to learn. No matter how fertile or how well you tend to them, some crop always spoils. But here, in a garden I’d almost forgotten about, were a pair of scissors, growing and pulsing their whole being up and out, across the narrow streets of my hometown.

Works Cited

“Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society.” Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society RSS. Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

Tsawwassen First Nation. “Tsawwassen First Nation: Land Facing The Sea.” Tsawwassen First Nation, n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014.

my house was not always like this. listen, come close.

I was seventeen the day that death came here.

and it was good before then because I was not aware

of things or many things, I should say, and the way that

I was not aware was that I could feel with my whole heart

the way I wanted to. the heart knows what it wants

my mother had told me and I felt

like wind on ice, and I had never thought this momentum to stop.

I remember well his voice, and the way

I realized his eyelashes stretched on forever and against my breastbone

and things were good and I was good and

I was seventeen and the whole town that I lived in was at my door

and they told me how they were new there

and how they saw me in the lamplights at midnight with him and oh

what thoughts they had of me and oh they brought a sense of

this to me and my house.

they told me names for who I was and who I am and what this meant

and oh what history my family had in this town and oh

how they hated to see me here, as though I had never been here

or if I had been, how abhorant it was to be, or to be seen.

I grew vines around my veranda

and from then on I was beach glass all shaded and smooth,

widdled and made

undone from what I was and what I would come to be. Something to be

collected by this town, worn around their necks,

to ward off evil. an evil I was. death had come to my house.

****…***

I wrote this piece with mixed feelings. I wasn’t sure what my role was, memorizing and reading King’s story. What are the histories involved in white settlers appropriating and re-telling indigenous stories? Once a month a group of friends and I get together to trade clothes and drink wine and read from something that we’re working on. I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded with some brilliant and smart artists and writers so I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to read to them my re-imagining of King’s story of evil coming into the world. I wrote it in a lot more succinct and deliberate way the piece but while I was on the Canada Line to my friend’s I began to re-write it in verse-poem form. The idea and meaning behind my relational understanding of evil or the introduction or realization of it was made knowable (or tellable) to me by reading it through the lens of an introduction to heteronormativity. Thinking in terms of a time when I was not aware of what my queerness meant in the world was perhaps a time that I could relate to King’s ‘pre-evil’ time. I still feel complicated with this story and welcome feedback/criticisms on it.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “I’m not the Indian You had in Mind.” Video. Producer Laura J. Milliken. National Screen Institute. 2007. Web. April 04/2013. http://www.nsi-canada.ca/2012/03/im-not-the-indian-you-had-in-mind/

Oswald, Ramona Faith, Libby Baiter Blume, and Stephen R. Marks. “Decentering Heteronormativity: A Model for Family Studies.” 2005.

Question 7:

This comic for me, conveys many of the ways that technology augments and mediates cultural production Much like high art can only exist by the denigration and dismissal of say, graffiti, technological advances in social media are at risk of being constructed as frivolous or arbitrary in comparison to ‘frontline’ activism. In fact, many cultural critics have leveled social media as a new means of faux-activism or “slacktivism”. The dangers of painting all social media or technological orality with such a broad brush is that it begins to erase, undo, and minimize the ways in which these moments of technological augmentation function both as the signifier and signified of activism. Idle No More and the Indigenous Nationhood Movement have used Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr to tell a particular stream of narratives about land-rights, histories and futurities. This polyphony of stories around indigeneity then begin to disrupt or decolonize the settler colonial belief that aboriginal peoples are one singular and knowable group. In such a way, the ‘freedom’ granted by the Internet, and the low-barrier means of publishing (or micro-publishing) without going through review panels, publishing houses, editors, and critics allow grassroots organizations to reach a wide and diverse audience.

I am struck by a recent feminist, anti-racist interrogation of “selfies”—a self-taken, self-published photo of oneself on social media platforms which challenged the idea that those taking the photos are narcissistic. Indeed, the black feminist writer Dulce De Leche tweeted late in 2013 that “selfies are the only place [she] see[s] women like [her]” (2013). This opens up a radical reimagining of the technology of image acting as oration—we hear and see stories of representation through image. We can of course, extrapolate this into the ways in which people used the hashtag “#feministselfie” coined by De Leche through other social media ventures as the permeability of image into text—picture into story. Once more, the oft-denigrated, social media ventures of self-representation can begin to be read as doing what some of the best stories do; looking the oppressor in the eye and saying we are still here.

What these oralities are doing across their business of story telling is pointing to an imaginative future, a possibility, a point B that may not ever exist in a way that we can expect (or suspect). The late queer theorist José Muñoz positions   “[q]ueerness [as] that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing”(1) (2010) . He likens this idea of something missing, of speculating and imagining to fill in this missing piece as ‘futurity’. In this way, I think examining the hyperlink as both a concrete and physical actor in technological pieces like blog posts, and as a metaphor for imag(in)ing indigenous existence is a fruitful exercise. First, what it does as a physical manifestation in blog posts, is lend itself to intertextuality. It does what physical text can only attempt to do in citations and footnotes—pushes us onto more and more, never yielding, and always hastening. The hyperlink in blog posts (or youtube posts, tweets, etc.) makes a community around text, invites other voices in, and indeed, invites us, the reader, in to be part of it. It is at once an education as it is a beckoning. This need not simply be tied to the idea of academia, but websites like Idle No More’s begin to push us to Facebook events of very real ‘front-line’ activisms, petitions, news sites on land claims and settlements. The hyperlink has teeth to it. It is about more. This brings us to the metaphor of the hyperlink in orations. There it sits, royal blue and expecting, asking us to click, to continue to explore. The hyperlink before-clicked then, can be read as an imaginative speculation—it could take us anywhere, bring us to anything, perhaps even download a .pdf uninvited (ugh, the worst). It creates its own fictive network of possibility and desire. The moment between the clicking of the link and the revealing of the information it conceals is of all the importance in this practice of storytelling, for it is in this moment that the reader becomes implicated in the story. Both being asked to imagine where to by the hyperlink, and the moment of being invited to here by the eventual location of the text; the text becomes extraordinary.

J. Edward Chamberlin positions in his book If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories (2004) that stories tell us “how to live, and sometimes how to die” (4). If we are to take this as a leading point in reading his work, then, we are given a sense of futurity in-text. Stories don’t just point us to a sense of where we came from, they point to a possible ending point as well. In this sense, stories operate as hypertext—never quite arrived, but always in a state of arriving.  This is a peculiar state to be in, this business of storytelling. Chamberlin navigates this peculiarity well in his exploration of infinity, stating that it is “’a place where things happen that don’t.’ That’s the place of story and song” (1678). Infinity then, is as much of a hypertext as the story is. Each represents endless possibilities, much like orations, and their various interpretations expel.

I am struck by the possibility that story and hypertext represent a place marker to record histories as well as to imagine a future of say, indigenous sovereignty. These moments in time come with complications, however.  Thinking through the benefits of ‘publisherless’ orations—Tweets, Twitter, Tumblr posts, etc. poses a graver question. Who is enabling these posts to exist free-of-charge? What are the implications, particularly for groups like Idle No More of publishing or orating on a free website like Twitter which sell user-generated information to advertising companies? Is there a marketable type of activism? The theorist Lauren Berlant  points to this type of neoliberal off-loading as a “cruel optimism” (13). A hyperlink if you will, whose limitless or ‘eternal’ futurity is bound to and by capitalism (and I will venture forth that it is also bound to and by colonialism—after all, what types of mercantilism were introduced and proliferated from ‘contact’?).

Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren Gail. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Print. 

Berlant, Lauren. “Supervalent Thought.” Supervalent Thought. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If this is your land, where are your stories?: finding common ground. Random House Digital, Inc., 2010. E-book.

De Leche, Dulce (Bad_dominicana). “selfies are the only place I see women like me. unlike whites, I dont have entire industries made in my image. #feministselfie” 21 Nov 2013, 10:49 a.m. Tweet.

Idle No More. “The Movement.” Idle No More, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Indigenous Nationhood Movement. “Statement of Principles.” (2013): n. pag. Indigenous Nationhood Movement RSS2. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press, 2010. Print.

Munroe, Randall. “Photos.” Cartoon. XKCD. XKCD, 8 Jan. 2014. Web.

Rotman, Dana, et al. “From slacktivism to activism: participatory culture in the age of social media.” CHI’11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2011. Web.

Hi and welcome to my course blog for English 470: Our Home and Native Land. The course intends to sort through histories of past and present colonization on indigenous peoples across Canada, placing storytelling as an embodied act of history-making at the forefront. The course is augmented by the Internet, using blogs, twitter, vlogs, skype, and other collaborative technologies to foster online community and education.

I, as a settler on this land, living, nourishing, and educating myself full-time on the traditional and now-ceded territory of the Tsawwassen First Nation, and part-time on the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam Nation, have a strong commitment to understanding what settler privilege looks like. Further, I’m greatly interested in the ways in which ‘reconciliation’ operates from Canada, keeping in conversations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that began this September, and the grass-roots organizing delivered by protests and activisms such as Idle No More.

What this means for me in this course is a constant engagement with indigenous academics, particularly those at UBC such as Dr. Glen Coulthard, a Yellowknives Dene scholar, or Dr. Dory Nason, an Anishinaabe and Chicana teacher in the English department here. Centering the voices of indigenous peoples while doing research about histories of ongoging colonization is a top-priority for me, as well as investigating artists, story-tellers, healers, activists, and other community members of indigenous nations such as Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, a Blackfoot and Sámi (pdf link) filmmaker.

I am very excited to be critically engaging with these texts and online spaces in order to help my commitment to a decolonizing sensibility, particularly one in the academic space of UBC by investigating my own reasons for being here as a white settler, and reading the stories of the bodies and peoples who came before me, and continue to exist and resist across these lands.

A photo I took during one of the UBC First Nation Student Associations marches for the Idle No More movement.

Works Cited

Coulthard, Glen. “Glen Coulthard : Idle? Know More! Idle No More.” YouTube. Idle Know More, 25 Jan. 2013. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

García, Alma M. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997. Web.

Idle No More. “The Movement.” Idle No More, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.Musqueam Indian Band.

Kim, Jennifer. “Read All Over – Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers.” Vancouver Is Awesome. Vancouver Is Awesome, 13 June 2012. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Little River Band of Ottawa Indians. “Anishinaabemdaa.” Anishinaabe Culture,  Anishinaabe History and Ceremonies. Anishinaabemowin Program, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Long Standing Bear Chief. “The Official Web Site of the Blackfoot Nation.” The Official Web Site of the Blackfoot Nation. The Blackfoot Nation, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014

“Musqueam: A Living Culture.” Musqueam Indian Band, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Nason, Dory. “Dory Nason: Indigenous Feminist, Chicana Badass. Anishinaabekwe.” Twitter, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

“Sami Self-Determination: Land, Resources and Traditional Livelihoods Self-Determination and the Media.” Ed. John B. Henriksen. Gáldu Čála-– Journal for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2011. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Tailfeathers, Elle-Máijá. “A Red Girl’s Reasoning (Excerpt).” YouTube. YouTube, 26 Mar. 2012. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. “Welcome.” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Tsawwassen First Nation. “Tsawwassen First Nation: Land Facing The Sea.” Tsawwassen First Nation, n.d. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

Yellowknives Dene First Nation. “Yellowknives Dene First Nation.” Yellowknives Dene First Nation, 2009. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.