An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

Or the key to saving the savages is to become a savage and show them how to save themselves. I saw Avatar today. And while I cannot deny how breathtaking the movie was, how seamless the special effects imagery and how mind-blowing the depiction of a fully-realized alien biosphere was, I had a major problem with the story. Not the least of which was the whole white man as saviour thing. That was just plain insulting. I normally love this kind of thing, with cool special effects and world-building visuals going on, but I found this movie just bugged me. I couldn’t turn off my critical mind and just enjoy it. It made me feel schizoid -- on one hand I thought it was visually breath-taking but mostly it just creeped me out. And that had everything to do with the story line. I think Cameron was attempting, albeit clumsily and in a heartfelt way, to be anti-colonial, anti-imperalist, but some of the assumptions that the film made were unsettlingly racist. It was Dances With Wolves a...

I’m a huge science fiction fan. One of my greatest pleasures in life is reading and thinking about science fiction. Some of the more amazing books have planted ideas and concepts in my head and I love chewing over these ideas, thinking about them and dwelling on different scenarios so different than this reality. From the time I discovered the genre at around eleven I have been a fan, gobbling these books down at lightspeed and spending an inordinate amount of time lurking in Bakka and the science fiction section in bookstores. Being a science fiction fan is kind of like being in the closet in a way – you don’t really want to out yourself in certain social settings, but once you do, it’s extremely liberating. So I’m coming out now – yep, I’m a geeky science fiction freak! Soon I suppose I’ll be attending conventions and wearing a Princess Leia get-up… but I digress. The reason I mention this is that one of my favourite writers, marine biologist, amazing storyteller and fellow Torontoni...

The best thing about going to yoga is the time spent in savasana – corpse pose. Every yoga teacher I have ever had calls it the hardest pose to do, which I suppose it is. The reason for its difficulty is because you have to lie flat on your back, eyes closed, muscles relaxed, and pretend that you are dead. A lot of people in this wired world, their nervous systems all jacked up on too much caffeine, too much wireless technology, sleep deprivation and general culture-driven neurosis get up and flee when this pose, which traditionally ends a class, is talked through by the teacher. You can practically feel their relief as they exit the room. I find it extremely relaxing. I don’t fall asleep at all – ostensibly you are supposed to meditate, and I suppose what happens to me is a form of meditation, although it’s more of a rumination than anything else – I chew over snippets of thought, things I have read, things that have happened to me during the day, things people have said, what a rando...

CBC News - New Brunswick - 1st-degree murder charge in N.B. teen case A relief to the family... and to those of us who seek justice for missing and murdered aboriginal women. But this is SO WRONG. I can only wonder at this. I have twenty-three first cousins, nineteen of them male. I can't imagine what would make one of them spark off into this kind of atrocity. They are really more like my brothers than my cousins, we are that close. And I know it is this way for many of us who come from First Nations. Poor little girl. A child missing, a family torn asunder. Tragedy.

1. to remove or destroy totally; do away with; exterminate. 2. to pull up by or as if by the roots; root up: to extirpate an unwanted hair. I always feel ashamed when I read news of yet another species’ extinction. This time it’s the prairie chicken. Okay, I suppose I should take some comfort in the fact that it’s only the Canadian version of said beastie and that there’s some remaining on the American prairies... where it’s still open hunting season on this fowl because apparently there’s a sustainable population. Sometimes I hate my own species. How the hell did we naked vulnerable apes end up ruling this planet, running amok with our crazy-ass breeding ability, our tool-making, our fire, our shit fouling the beautiful earth that has given us everything? How is it that we have managed to be so damn destructive? In the Gany’honyonk, the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address, we say at the beginning it is an honour to be a human being. This is because we are the only animals that can spe...

Last night I was waiting for the Esplanade bus and noticed a trio of baby dyke young womyn, all in their very early 20’s. They had extremely cool eyewear, short boy haircuts and one of them was wearing a black t-shirt that proudly proclaimed “Cunts” in silver writing. I loved how happy and at ease they were; two of them were unashamedly holding hands and the other was bouncing up and down with excitement, jabbering at her friends with lots of hand gestures and smiles and laughter. I wanted to ask them where they were going but figure it’s none of my business, and also why would they care if some old lady thought they were as cool as shit? I also think it’s amazing that young women can casually wear t-shirts that say “Cunts”. Back when I was in my early 20’s I would have died of embarrassment rather than wear something like that. Hell, it took me until my late 20’s to be able to wear the Nirvana t-shirt that says “Fudge-packin’ crack smokin’ satan worshippin’ motherfuckers” on the back....

I took my daughter to see the second instalment in that ridiculousTwilight series, “New Moon”... while I think that the main premise of the book is an obvious celibacy metaphor, I always find cultural phenomena to be interesting and so endeavour to check them out. I’m actually responsible for turning my daughter onto the whole thing because I gave her the first book 3 Christmases ago, before it was a cultural phenomena – so sue me, I had read the back of the book and figured my-then 11 year old voracious reader would appreciate it. When she went absolute apeshit for the books I figured I’d read them just to get an idea... Kind of sorry I did, the author is obviously an amateur and they weren’t the best-written books in the universe, but there’s no denying the attraction of the whole series for teenage girls. Which brings me to the second movie instalment... It’s one thing to read about all the hype around pretty little Taylor Lautner and his posse of Quiluete boys, but the lovely indi...

I just spent the better part of last week in Winnipeg, dealing with that lovely and burgeoning example of the best of aboriginal promise, APTN. I had a lot of fun – their membership is bright, brave and willing to do a lot of things, and they shine with the brilliance of promise and the novelty of speaking in our voices in a way the majority of Canadians have never seen before. I salute them and their youthful courage, their ambition and drive. They made me feel proud. But you know what... I have to say I found Winnipeg incredibly depressing. I shouldn’t because it’s probably the one place in Canada where the indigenous reality of this country is reflected in the population, but damn, the in-your-face clarity of our post-colonial reality was too intense, too heartbreaking, too concrete for me to celebrate what should be a success story. The evidence of our degradation and colonization was everywhere, in the methed-out skinny teenagers with scabs all over their faces, in the rail-thin e...

Charter for Compassion This is important and everyone should sign on. It may be a defining moment in the history of our species.

CBC News - New Brunswick - Dental records confirm body is missing N.B. teen This makes me so sad, and desolate. Another indigenous flower, cut down before she could finish blooming. I can't help but fear for the safety of my own child. She's 13, a newly minted teenager, bright, bold and beautiful, another in a long line of strong Haudenosaunee women, a rock'n'roll rebel girl who dresses in black and likes loud guitar rock. She's already evincing that serious Mohawk badass attitude. And the thought that her ancestry makes it four times more likely that she will be victimized somehow makes me shudder in fear. Intellectually I know that it's the same odds as a plane falling out of the sky on top of her, but emotionally I can't help this fear. And this fear is shared by indigenous mothers everywhere. Our daughters, our precious flowers, the rich resource of our people, are four more times likely than white girls to be raped, to be beaten, to be abducted and murd...

I have been ruminating on my friend Audra’s main focus of study for a couple of days now. She is currently a professor at Columbia University where her main focus has been on re-shaping the notions of sovereignty for indigenous people. She always makes me think about what it means to be a sovereign people, and what that does for your sense of identity. I often think of sovereignty in Mohawk terms – we understand that our Confederacy formed alliances, political and military, with the other sovereign powers at the time of Contact and our political understanding of how we deal with foreign nations stems from that. However, colonization seems to have shifted the settlers’ idea of how they perceived us. Suddenly we were no longer allies; we were a nation that had to be subdued, conquered, or failing that, remade into a lesser version of the whites who had suborned our economic, military and political systems. Suddenly there is no talk of allies but talk of subduing, of remaking, of eliminat...

Everytime I see that figure, my vision blurs and my throat tightens and burns with tears, and I feel my heart begin to pound. Five hundred and twenty one missing or murdered indigenous women in this country. If this was proportional to the rest of the population the figure would be 18,000. What would happen if there were 18,000 missing or murdered white women in this country? There would be screaming and gnashing of teeth and police forces pressed into action with task forces and resources dedicated to finding these women or solving their murders. The media would be on the story night and day, we would be inundated with their pictures and their stories and everyone would be saying, we have to do something, we have to stop this atrocity. But because it’s indigenous women there is only silence. Because these victims and their families are powerless, because it’s just another Indian – there is only silence. No outrage, no questioning, no resources put behind finding the perpetrators and b...

The other night I got to go see Metallica. Twice, actually – they did a two-night stand here in Toronto. They have been one of my favourite bands for a very long time, ever since someone handed me a cassette of “Kill ‘em All” back in 85 and said “This band will change your life.” They are, for me, why people will beg, borrow or steal for the live concert experience, for the high and the exhilaration of being in a huge stadium with thousands of like-minded people getting off on the prowess and sheer performance of excellent musicians. I love going to see a Metallica show. It’s always fun for me because a lot of onkwehonwe seem to adore Metallica as well. I always see people from my community, sometimes even my extended family. I took my sister to see a show in Pine Knob, Michigan when she was 16 (don’t tell her but it was so I could borrow my parent’s car – that was the condition) and got her hooked on them as bad as any drug. So whenever they come to Toronto we make it a point to try a...

When I look out my (new) office window, I can see a sliver of the lake, Lake Ontario, and observe its many moods. Today it looks cold and metallic, silver blue and wave-capped in the wind. I think about the lake a lot. It’s a focal point to my people, part of the territory that we have always considered ours. Skanadariio, beautiful shining water, some days as calm and placid as a mirror, other days dark green and angry, surging and powerfully mean. Due south of Toronto is Rochester, originally a Seneca town, launching point of our northward trading and warring ventures. We used to control the waterways in our part of Anowara (Turtle Island) in giant war canoes made of elm bark, massive and menacing. The Ojibway had those sleek little birch bark canoes that were fast and agile, but we had elm bark canoes, made to hold war parties and transport goods and people over long distances. I think a lot about the military tradition of my people. I read once that to observe the Iroquois in battle...

One of the things that makes me happiest in life is when I see another onkwehonwe person, regardless of their nation, looking healthy and happy and bustling around the city in the same inimitable fashion as me, just going about their business, going to work or getting a latte or grocery shopping or just going about their day the same way as everyone else here does. Because let’s face it, we’re a minority in this city that sits sprawled over our territory, all concrete and steel and glass shining on the edge of the lake like a spaceport city from a fever dream. I always want to run up to the Indians I see and go, sekoh innit! We’re so cool, we’re so plugged in and progressive and we flew away from our reserves like a supersonic jet engine, aren’t we awesome… Because it’s hard to leave the Rez. I don’t care where or what kind of Rez you come from, that little patch of earth has become the last of our territory and the tie that binds us there is like chains of unbreakable steel. The land ...

I had a massage today and spent the whole time on the table explaining about being Mohawk to a young beautiful woman who, while good at her job, knew nothing about the fact that yes, there are still Mohawks in the world and yes, we function well in the city and get massages from time to time. Side note – I’m a vain creature and so devote a lot of my time to getting my hair cut and dyed, and manicures, and pedicures, and facials and massages, and doing yoga and looking for fabulous handbags and shoes, and the coolest ensembles. Because I’m just that way. But also, I contemplate a lot what my friend the glorious Audra Simpson, Kanienkaha’keh scholar and thinker and fellow-girl-about-town says: Sovereignty begins with the self, and that self should be presented stylishly. But why is it that every time I go somewhere, I have to explain myself? I guess people are curious, and I suppose if I was Irish, or Australian, or Burundian, or Tibetan I'd be explaining myself as well. But in this ...

The Buddha taught that all suffering arises from the aversion to pain and the pursuit of pleasure, and that because we have been born into this sentient, sensitive body, we are doomed to suffer. The way forward and freedom from suffering is to learn equanimity, or the Middle Way. I’ve always been extremely interested in Buddhism. There is something beautiful and truthful in its austere discipline, free from the worry about sin and God and all manner of dogma that has always bugged me about Christianity. And because I am always interested in learning about spiritual pursuits I have been investigating Buddhism, off and on, for about five years now, actually before I got serious about a yoga practice. A side note – I have rejected Christianity pretty utterly. I was raised an Anglican but what is any form of colonizer’s religion to indigenous people but a capitulation, a recognition that if we didn’t convert it was completely over? That’s why I’ve always admired the people who stayed in th...

I ended up going to yoga after all. Let me digress a little and explain -- I was a headstanding, Sanskrit-chanting, blissed out yogini chick for about a four-year span of my life -- my late 30's early 40's. Then, for a lot of reasons (which I will not get into here, but suffice to say it had to do with my marriage almost breaking up, being in a funk about my work, changing gears and getting an actual career, and repairing my marriage) I went on a two-year yoga hiatus wherein I didn't even think about it. But recently a lot of factors brought me back to the mat. Number one, changing jobs and getting an actual career that makes me incredibly happy was the first thing. I am actually in a place where I can get out of my head and back into my body because I'm not all tied up in knots about the fact that I hated my job so much. Number two was my younger brother getting diagnosed with the dreaded-but-sadly-expected diabetes. I always thought I'd be the first one because my...

I've been having a low-grade headache all day. It feels like a low pressure headache, the kind I'm susceptible too. It makes me grumpy. And being grumpy is not a good thing for me. I tend to direct grumpiness outward. I think it's a Wolf Clan thing. Most Wolf Clan people I know are grumpy just by reflex and we like to let people know it. Just so you can participate in the pain as well. Hey it's a pack thing! I once read a "clan horoscope" thing that talked about the traits of people in the various Haudenosaunee clans and it was actually hilarious, because the two clans I'm most familiar with -- Wolf being my own (and all my mother's family) and Bear (my father's mother's family -- just go along with it) were preternaturally right on. For instance, it said that Wolves are generally kind of arrogant, know what they want and how to get it, and are quite generous even though they will always remind you of just how generous they are -- bang on. And ...

I've been musing for quite some time how I want to do this. I think it's simple really -- I can, therefore I should. I think being a modern indigenous person in occupied territory needs to speak about the experience. And I'm a rock'n'roll kind of gal, I think/feel that I should. It's important. If not me, who else. About me: 45, wife, mother, daughter, Haudenosaunee of Kanien'kahakeh persuasion. Or for you non-speakers (which compromises probably 99.9% of the population) I'm a full-blooded Mohawk woman from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, the last remaining congregation of all the six Iroquois tribes (and some of our more fortunate allies like the Delaware and the Mississauga) in the entire world. I live for rock'n'roll, indigenous rights, worker's rights, my large and extremely cool Mohawk family, shih tzus, cats, cool books, art, photography, film, and yoga. And I am, by virtue of being Mohawk, opinionated, stubborn, political, a ...