by Daniel Swenson
I came across the “four old Indians” (1094) as I was in the midst of organizing the 5th 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