An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

This is My Brain on Colonization

2012-02-07T15:10:00.007-05:00

I was driving to work this morning, consumed with the thoughts of what I had to do today, when this seriously old song from my teenage years came on my iPod. It was the Blue Oyster Cult’s “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” from 1981’s Fire of Unknown Origin (Yeah, I know, I’m dating myself, but seriously – I’m an old woman, not gonna deny that).

You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars

I’ve been living on the edge so long, where the winds of limbo roar

And I’m young enough to look at and far too old to see

All the scars are on the inside

I’m not sure if there’s anything left of me

I turned it up very loudly. And I started to listen, really listen, to the lyrics.

Don’t let these shakes go on

It’s time we had a break from it

We’ve been living in the flames

We’ve been eating up our brains

Oh please don’t let these shakes go on

Dude. This is me and my people. We’ve been living with this thing pressing on our communities and on our bodies and minds for five hundred years. We’ve been given the shit end of the stick and told to like it. We’ve been colonized. Living with the aftermath of colonization is being through a psychic war. Especially when you are told that your people need to be “managed” by a racist piece of legislation that was forced on your communities without you being able to vote against it. When your people were cheated and betrayed out of every agreement we tried to make with the tide of newcomers, when you are forced into battle against an enemy that says it has your best interests in mind. Every single day of your life you are in flight or fight mode.

No wonder we have diabetes and strokes, depression and suicide. My family has been impacted by every single one of these conditions every single day of our lives.

Somedays I’m amazed that we’re even here at all. This speaks volumes to our tenacity and our strength.

You ask me why I’m weary why I can’t speak to you

You blame me for my silence say it’s time I changed and grew

But the war’s still going on dear and there’s no end that I know

And I can’t say if we’ll ever

I can’t say if we’re ever going to be free

In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly aware of how tired I am. Actually tired isn’t the word. Exhausted is more like it. I’m exhausted. I’m tired of being a veteran of these psychic wars. I’m an indigenous woman living in Canada, the ultimate settler paradise that exists at the expense of me and every relation I’ve ever had.

For years I could put this realization out of my mind and just live my life. I was obsessed with boys, bands, and beer. Being young and living in the downtown of an urban centre is distracting and stimulating all at the same time. I was so busy running around to bars and live music shows and chasing the cute dirty white boys there was no time for reflection. There was barely any time to stop and change my clothes. In between rock shows I’d go home and recharge on the Rez, hang out there and return to my little hip downtown life without a care in the world. I even downplayed my heritage and my history. I wanted to be just like them.

Then I grew up and kind of calmed down and started a family of my own. That was when I decided that I wasn’t going to pretend to be anything else. This is who I am, an urban indigenous woman. No point in getting all dramatic and pretending otherwise. I’m lucky – I’m a Kanien'kehakeh in close proximity to my territory. It’s cool.

However, even though I love my life and the easy anonymity of being in a big city, I’m finding other aspects of it kind of wearing.

Even though I don’t get the in-your-face racism that a lot of people who “look” more indigenous than I do – because let’s face it, we Haudenosaunee don’t fit the typical “mold” of what white people and new Canadians think of when they think native – the casual, everyday racism and sheer bloody-minded ignorance of most Canadians is driving me nuts. If you doubt this, read the friggin’ comments section of any daily newspaper when they are reporting a story from indigenous communities. Then you’ll see how “generous” and “compassionate” Canadians really are.

I love what I do, and where I live, and the people that I work with, but goddamn, some days are harder than others. Some days I love being the educator and explaining the history of my people from my perspective, giving folks a capsule history lesson from my point of view – and make no mistake, sometimes I have to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY. Some days I have endless patience and can repeat the same things over and over. Some days I do it with a bit of irritability. Some days I just want to shout, “DON’T YOU PEOPLE KNOW THAT A GENOCIDE HAPPENED HERE?” or on the worst days I want to scream and shake them all, “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU???!!!!.” But I don’t. Not yet, anyway. I’m trying to be strategic and pick my own battles, and I -- all of us -- need allies, not enemies.

It’s hard, though. And tiring.

You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars

My energy is spent at last and my armour is destroyed

I have used up all my weapons and I’m helpless and bereaved

Wounds are all I’m made of

Did I hear you say that this is victory?

I’m tired of these battles. But at this point, to continue fighting is going to hurt both of us. Being in a war is far too costly – for both sides.

We have to figure out something different.

Because otherwise, the whole dang thing will collapse.

P.S. I offer my apologies for not being a consistent blogger, but work has always been my first focus, and work was exceptionally busy the latter half of 2011. I'm afraid I will always be something of an inconsistent blogger.

P.P.S. And yes, I am a fan of 70's psych rock.

Publish Post

Listen, All of You

2011-10-03T10:59:00.008-04:00

Sewatahon'satat.

That’s how we always start a story. Tonight I want to tell you my story, my deep dark confession about being Kanien'kehakeh in 2011. About living here in Tkaronto, this place you call Toronto.

This word means, “There are trees standing in the water.” Our elders argue about what the actual translation is, but I like this particular version. The Haudenosaunee, or as you name us, the Iroquois, had moved south of Lake Ontario to consolidate our considerable power in the wake of the Beaver Wars. When we would return to Tkaronto in our war canoes, the giant elm trees that grew to the edge of the lake would mirror themselves in the water and you could see their reflection for miles out. This image manifests even now. When you cross the waters of Skanadariio, the Handsome Lake, you can see the towers of the city shimmering in the water.

People think this is Mississauga territory. The joke’s kind of on you. The Mississauga were here as our tenants. You paid them all that money for hanging out here while we were fighting the Americans for the British in their revolution. We could have beat them too, but for the British deciding to cut and run. And then what would the history of this country and this continent be?

This city is on Haudenosaunee land. The remains of our villages slumber beneath the streets of this city. To this day when a new subdivision is built or a street is dug up, shards of our pottery and our particular arrowheads keep surfacing. It is a reminder that this place is where we used to walk, where we sang and held our ceremonies and dreamed our waking reality into life, in the process called Ondinnonk. When this city dreams, it dreams in Mohawk. Even when it names itself – Toronto, Ontario, Canada – all of these are Mohawk words. You speak Mohawk whenever you name this place as your home. You speak it and you don’t even know that you do.

Sewatahon'satat . Listen, all of you.

I want to tell you my story. I moved here to Toronto in 1981 when I was 17 years old, almost 18, to go to York University. When I first started there at the school I spent nearly three months pretending I wasn’t even an indigenous girl, trying to erase my own identity. I pretended to be just a normal white girl from somewhere south of Hamilton. I got away with it, too. It’s not that I was embarrassed by who I am, I just didn’t want to have to explain over and over again, to tell the history that I know that is so woefully untold by your education system and left out of your colonial history. I didn’t want to face the questions. I was fearful of being perceived as different. I knew instinctively that I could reinvent myself, and I didn’t want anyone trying to define me. I needed to define myself first.

One of the many things that people don’t know about the Iroquois is this; our people have long been a cultural melting pot. We are not merely a nation of people bound by blood – we are a political, cultural and spiritual entity. There are six Nations in the Iroquois Confederacy – the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca, and the Tuscarora. Over time we had absorbed other tribes that had populated this area, people like the Petun, the Erie, the Tobacco, the Susquehennock, the Wendat, the Abenaki.

You called us “the Romans of the New World”, but we call ourselves the Children of Sky Woman, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island. The Mother of us all fell from the Sky and landed on a Turtle’s back and give birth to us and every living thing here. We buried our hatchets at the roots of the Great Tree of Peace and promised to join a confederacy that gave us a constitution, the Gayanashagowah, the Great Law. This is not just a story. This is fact.

We were bound together by the powerful and spiritual voice of the Peacemaker, and his faithful friend and companion, Hiawatha. The story of how this came to be is beautiful and powerful, and so amazing. It is the story of how a people overcame the deep terrible sadness of the grief and pain of the Mourning Wars. For generations we had fought each other in bitter, unending war, killing women and children in an endless cycle of vengeance. The Peacemaker gave us the Condolence Rite which stopped our tears and cleared our grief, and with this, we became whole again.

And none of you know it.

The founding fathers of the League of the Iroquois lived by three principles: first, the peace within individuals and between groups that comes from a healthy body and a sane mind; secondly, justice that comes from correct actions, thought, and speech. And lastly, the spiritual power that comes from physical strength and civil authority (meaning the power of the chiefs to make the decisions and the authority of the women who appoint the chiefs). Peace. Power. And Righteousness. These were the overriding principles that governed our nations and our Confederacy.

My people have always been interested in power. We even have a word for it – orenda, or the “soul of all things” – which I am given to understand is kind of a bad translation, as this is one of those purely Haudenosaunee concepts that really doesn’t have an equivalent in English. It is the philosophy that every human being is invested with his or her own power, a life-force that is equal parts aura, destiny, force of will, strength of character, and personal charisma. Men and women equally are expected to develop their personal orenda, to follow its pathways and exercise their abilities in the pursuit of peace, power, and righteousness – and ultimately for the benefit of the entire nation. There is also the expectation that a healthy orenda leads to balance and equanimity among the people.

We Iroquois replaced our numbers with adoption and the voluntary membership of several other nations. There is a clause of the Gayanashagowah that states, “If anyone comes to sit beneath the House of the Long Leaves and swear his or her fealty to the Great Law shall be admitted.” If you were to run DNA tests on us we would be an amalgamation of many different bloodlines. Because of this, we Iroquois incorporate so many different people into our cultural and political entity we look like any number of those who were our ancestors. Some of us even look white.

And though I can count an unbroken line of Mohawk women back to the pre-Contact shadows of the Mohawk Valley, our ancestral homeland, I don’t look like what you think an indigenous person should look like.

Thus can I get away with denying what I am.

While I was at university, I nominally studied English and political science. How is that for embracing a colonized course of study? But while I was there I had my own personal rock and roll rebellion. I embraced punk rock, with its emphasis on individuality in a community, in the us against them, in the wild thrashing guitars and the smokey clubs at night. I hung out in Kensington Market. I danced in clubs along Queen Street West. I ate Cambodian and Thai and Mexican food in the Annex. I rode my bike through the city and pretended to be invisible, just another girl on the verge of being a woman, clinging to an extended adolescence and walking the bleeding edge of alternative cool. My identity was hidden. I was only “out” as an Iroquois, as a Mohawk, to my closest confidantes. I was too cool for all those questions of identity.

Sewatahon'satat . Listen, all of you.

But this denial, this turning away, was not sustainable for me. In due course I became a mother and then a wife. I had two beautiful children and this awoke in me my sense of myself as an indigenous woman, of this place, and this time. In them I ingrained my heritage and my culture. How could I not? This line cannot be broken. I am a Kanien'kehakeh, born of a long line of Mohawk women, all of us imbuing our children with the sense of who we are. It had to come out.

We are not a passive people. We are warriors, men and women alike. We resist. We made treaties and agreements with the colonizers, agreements that predate this nation that calls itself Canada. We demand that our agreements be respected. We demand that our place on Turtle Island be left to us, for us to administer in our own way and as faithful to our traditions as we can be. We demand to be the People Building a Longhouse together, to be Haudenosaunee.

These days when I meet people I am very forward about who and what I am. I refuse to minimize myself any longer, to deny what I am. I was doing what the colonizer wanted, to make me ashamed of my bloodline, of my heritage, of my culture.

I will not do this any longer. I will decolonize myself. I will rip out by the roots those ideas that are not mine, those ideas put there by a culture that wants to erase mine, to erase our memory and our claim as the true Keepers of the Land. Your culture would crush mine. We resist. Your culture would erase our memory from the very stones of this place. These stones remember and lift up our artifacts to remind you. Your culture tells itself that it has the right to place limits on our numbers, on how we govern ourselves, tries to tell us we are as Canadian as you are are. We know that is not true. We are the Haudenosaunee, the onkwehonwe, the real people. We are the People Building a Longhouse Together and our memory of this place, of this city that you call Toronto is older and longer and still remains ours.

There are only eighty thousand of us in the entire world. But the thing to remember is this; fifty percent of our current population is under the age of 25, and our numbers are resurging. And all of us, every single one of us, know more about you than you do about us. Every one of our territories lives in resistance and demands our rights under those agreements that we made in good faith with your colonial ancestors and with you.

Sewatahon'satat. Listen, all of you.

This electric city, so infused with its global yearnings of cosmopolitan splendour, its busyness, its competitiveness, its sky-high real estate prices, its glass towers, its modern rhythms and its ancient bones, this place sings. And the song it sings to itself beneath the humming of the subway and the honking of the cars isn’t a English folksong, or a French courier song, or an Italian or Greek or Chinese song, or the songs of all the people who have made this place its home...The song this city sings is a Haudenosaunee one. This song is remembered in the very granite that binds this city to the back of Anowara, the Turtle. It’s sung to the beat of a water drum and a deer horn rattle. It is the song that my people dance in pow-wows to.

I will sing it for you now. It’s called the Smoke Dance.

Sewatahon’satat. Listen, all of you.

Inappropriations

2011-07-14T16:43:00.009-04:00

Every so often, the universe comes along and offers a cogent example of something that has been kicking around in my brain for some time but never quite articulated.

I have been enjoying Al –Jazeera online for the past few months, especially since I have soured on the right-wing collaborationist drivel being espoused by the Globe and Mail. I particularly enjoy their take on North American news, coming at it as they do from an outsider’s perspective...which is pretty much what you could say of indigenous people in the West these days. We stand on the outside looking in, refugees in our own homelands.

Al-Jazeera did a really good piece just recently on the issue of the wider culture appropriating aspects of indigenous culture. It’s here at http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/native-american-bloggers.

They actually talked a woman who has an entire blog dedicated to the issue, and I love the name of it: My Culture is Not a Trend - http://mycultureisnotatrend.tumblr.com/. She handily takes to task, deconstructs, and instructs the blogverse about why appropriation is totally inappropriate.

I have been having difficulty a lot lately with appropriation of native culture. Maybe it’s because of my age; maybe it’s because I am spending a lot of time in my own head decolonizing my thinking and looking at the rest of the world with an increasingly critical eye, but I do not have a lot of time anymore for appropriated imagery and find a lot of it racist and insulting. I always felt that, and it’s a measure of how decolonized my thinking has become in that I now constantly question the motivation behind it. Suffice it to say that I don’t deal very well anymore. It constantly amazes me to watch how much the wider culture commodifies EVERYTHING, including our clothing, our symbols and that final colonization, our spiritual practices. I used to tell myself that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in light of the extreme power differential in our relationship to the colonial occupiers, this is not flattery but appropriation.

The thing that bothers me most, I have to say, is the dominant cultures’ effort to lump all North American indigenous people into one amorphous “native American” group, practically fetishizing Plains Nations culture in this way. Using their symbols and dress seems to have become a shorthand for lumping all indigenous nations under this banner, and if your nation does not follow those pre-conceived notions of what it means to be “Native American” , then you are somehow “less” of an “Indian.”

This is especially true if you are a Kanienkaha’keh in Canada -- we don’t do the sweatlodges or burn sweetgrass or eat bannock. We have longhouse, we burn tobacco and we eat scone. But other than giving the world the Mohawk hairstyle for that fighting warrior thing and lacrosse, most people know nothing about our culture. The only thing they know about our culture is how damn ornery we are, and how active resistance has become pretty much our trademark in Canada. Most people don’t know that the term “bury the hatchet” is Iroquoian, because we buried our hatchets at the base of the Tree of Peace when the Peacemaker gave us the Great Law, or that “caucus” is a term meaning “meeting of good minds”. Caucus is central to modern democracy, and yet no one knows this. Or that the American occupiers stole the symbol of the Eagle for their fledgling nation, holding in one of its talons arrows that had always symbolized the Five Nations of the Iroquoian Confederacy. Now that is some serious-ass appropriation!

I am following both My Culture is Not a Trend and another cool blog, http://iamnotamascot.blogspot.com/. It makes my heart happy to know there’s other NDNs out there, critically thinking and questioning EVERYTHING with some humour but with the attitude of, “Enough with this shit, I’m not taking it anymore – I’m gonna educate you and tell you WHY it’s wrong.”

Because if you really wanted to channel the North American indigenous culture, then you have to take on the genocide, the suicides, the violence, the alcoholism, the diabetes and the heart disease, the poverty and the lack of education, housing, clean water and the denial of economic opportunity. If you really want it, that’s what it means to be indigenous along with our awesome clothing and spiritual means. We deal with the aftermath of colonialism every damn day.

So all you people wanting to wear the lastest hipster-styled headress or moccasins made in Taiwan -- think you're strong enough for that?

O Kanata/Canada

2011-05-01T17:50:00.007-04:00

I have to confess, this election is totally bringing out a major schizophrenic split in me. On one hand, my left-leaning, democratic socialist trade union side is going -- rock the vote, the NDP is gonna bring an orange wave of change, let’s do this! I’m gleefully giddy about the prospect of a major thumbs-down to the bullshit right-wing rhetoric the Conservative Party of Canada has been shovelling down the throat of people in this country. An NDP government would be an amazing thing to see.

On the other hand, my Haudenosaunee side is rolling her eyes, going yeah whatever. How does this matter? The settlers are voting on yet another regime that will only reinforce the oppressive systems that deny me and my people our inherent right to sovereignty and self-determination. Our rights have been dictated by the racist and colonialist Indian Act which determines what is an "Indian" in this country. In order to resist the Indian Act definition of what I am in Canada, I proclaim that I am a citizen of the Haudenosaunee and our sovereign nation, enshrined in treaties with first the British and its inheritors and therefore predates the colonials' version of nationhood.

I’m a bit conflicted, and I don’t know what I can do to reconcile the split.

However, I had a very cool conversation this past weekend with my brother-in-arms, the organizer at my union. He said that if the settlers want to give you a vote in their settler election, why not go for it? In thinking about this, I had to concede the point. This freedom is denied to a lot of people around the world, and because we live in a first world nation with all of the attendant economic privilege, we should be exercising the ability to vote. To not do so dishonours all of those people who have died fighting for the same democratic right.

It’s a conundrum.

My son, who turned 18 in December, is so excited about voting for the first time in an election, about voting NDP after carefully considering the various platforms of the parties and attending a town hall to see how the candidates answered (thanks Olivia Chow, you convinced him!). Because my son is a hybrid and truly a Canadian citizen, born in Toronto and raised in the downtown milieu by me and his white father, I do not deny him the wisdom of his choice to vote in the election. He has to straddle both worlds, as does my daughter. They are my stealth fighters against the colonial system. They get to challenge privilege from within because they look white at first glance but they are registered band members at Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. My children are my way of infiltrating and infecting colonial Canada with a very tailored Haudenosaunee virus.

So I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I have the day off on election day. I plan to get up late and wander over to the polling station and take a look at who is voting. Whether or not I will cast a ballot remains to be seen.

At this point I am saying No, even as my fervent trade unionist heart screams frantically at me, saying what’s wrong with you, there’s a major chance to change everything, and you are being a selfish resisting insurgent. But my Haudenosaunee soul says why would you vote in the election of a foreign nation that exploits, insults, ignores, assimilates and tried outright genocide against indigenous people?

And in the end, I know what my decision must be.

The hurting - Canada - Macleans.ca

2011-04-06T10:15:00.000-04:00

Joseph Boyden writes with a searing, painful honesty about this scourge. And while he focuses on northern and Cree reserves, never forget that this problem haunts every community in indigenous North America. Why don't our children want to become adults? Because it's hard to be the survivors of a genocide.

The hurting - Canada - Macleans.ca

The Settler Mentality....

2011-03-24T14:49:00.005-04:00

...and the indignity of having to buy your own land back.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of owning property. My husband and I are actually thinking of taking the plunge and becoming first time homebuyers here in Tkaronto.

Relatively speaking, the costs of buying a property go beyond the actual purchase. I know it makes good sense, but in my heart of hearts, I can’t help but think about the weirdness of having to buy a piece of land that your ancestors once roamed freely over, and in an area where once we hunted, fished, farmed, and had settlements (and yeah, I know everybody thinks this was Mississauga territory, but it wasn’t. The British bought some land from them because they happened to have moved in while we were a little occupied in the south of Lake Ontario fighting something called the American Revolution. Our ancient settlements and burial grounds haunt the GTA).

I can’t help but think… is this settler mentality? The idea that you can “own” property… it’s so fraught with colonial ideas and also the familiar conflict I have with my Haudenosaunee values and the way I actually have to live my life given the demands that living a modern urban existence place upon me. Traditionally, women held the land as caregivers, farming it for the nations and having a stewardship over it because we were responsible for feeding our people. I’m not sure, though, that this traditional Haudenosaunee mentality is the same as owning property in a city. I wonder if the modernized version of home ownership has more to do with those settlers who came here in droves looking for something to call their own, since in their own homelands only a handful of the titled few had that privilege. The so-called “frontier” was a wide-open vista of ownership to them. Thinking of myself doing the same makes me uneasy. But what else can I do? I have made my life in the city. It’s only sensible to own something that may at the end of the day see me make some money.

So now I have economic privilege, and this is what drives me to think about purchasing a home. I know intellectually that doing so would be for all the right monetary reasons, but I can’t help but wonder why I feel pushed into the whole thing, even as I kind of like the idea. Actually I would like to build something cool on my Rez but that’s not feasible given that I’m committed to living and working here until my retirement. After that we will see, but right now, it’s just a dream. And that’s a whole ‘nother blog entry, especially since I’m married to a white guy and he can’t live on the Rez with me anyway, as lovely as he is.

Maybe at the end of the day, this is going to be one of those situations where I have to live with my own contradictions and deal with the schizophrenia of being an indigenous chick in a settler-occupied land.

I Have Been "Kissed By Lightning"

2011-02-17T11:38:00.015-05:00

I finally got around to seeing Shelley Niro’s feature film, “Kissed By Lightning.” It was actually on the The Movie Network’s OnDemand service, which pleased me to no end. I was hoping it would be visually stunning and provocative, the way all Shelley’s art is, but this – I have to say, I am feeling teary-eyed and awed after seeing it. The images haunted my dreams all last night and I woke up thinking about the film, which gave me the impetus to write this blog.

I think everyone who ever wanted to know about Iroquoian philosophy and our values should watch this film. It was gentle and almost whisperingly quiet, the way Shelley’s art is, but it crept up on me and infused me with its lushly filmed, stunning visuals and the serene poetry of the story. Ostensibly the story of a woman’s journey through grief, it is actually the story of The Peacemaker and Hyenwatha, the two founding figures of our political and spiritual lives. The League of the Haudenosaunee could not exist without this profound friendship and their eternal gift to us, which is not only the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law, but the Condolence rite. The Peacemaker recognized that grief can crush a person until they are unrecognizable, and by giving us this ceremony released us from the dark cloud that descends on us when grief storms into your life.

Much of the story takes place in the winter, and this is not incidental. The Haudenosaunee have been slumbering for over two hundred years, buried in the grief and the perpetual winter caused by colonization. Spring is on its way, hopefully, shown in the mud and the open water of the river, and this is representative of the current of resistence that shapes our lives in our territories. We are waking up.

Much of the film's tone is quirky and humourous, demonstrating the way we love to laugh over things whether silly or profoundly disturbing. The soundtrack was also an integral part of the film experience, at once haunting and exuberant.

One of my favourite scenes happens when Mavis, the main character, and Bug, the guy who has been shyly courting her are lost on the way to New York City. They are sitting in their van at dusk , and while they are discussing what they should do to get themselves oriented back to the I-90, suddenly a group of warriors dressed in the clothing of the Old Days crosses the road in front of them, glancing casually at the occupants of the van before disappearing into the snow-covered bush. Mavis asks, “Did you see that?” and Bug replies, “I think they’re lost.” And so are we – lost in this world that has completely ignored us and tried to make us disappear, but we prevail, and we are lost on the way to finding ourselves again.

So many scenes grabbed my heart and wouldn’t let me go. There were a lot of beautifully filmed shots of geese, flying in formation over the snow-covered landscape, honking at each other – so reminiscent of the geese that aided Sky Woman in her fall from the heavens, a nod to our central Creation Myth. The garishly-dressed and opportunistic Kateri, Mavis’ lost boyfriend’s first wife, representative of what some of us have become. The mud-covered German Shepherd Mutt named “Kitty.” Shelley’s paintings, shown in a gallery, the series called The Peacemaker’s Journey. The American restaurant where they are serenaded by an African-American gospel group who sing a song with the chorus, “Thank You Lord for the Mohawk People.” The arresting image of The Peacemaker standing quietly on a corner in the middle of the urban cacophony that is New York. And finally, Mavis’ encounter with a real-life Jikonsaheh, the Cat-Faced Woman, an elder who lives in isolation in our homeland but points Mavis' way back to herself and her culture, and inadvertently performs a thoroughly modern, allegorical condolence ceremony for her.

This is such a quietly beautiful film. I urge everyone to see it. The pace of it is very slow, and for people who are raised on Hollywood’s idea of what film should be, it may take a while for you to immerse yourself. But sit down and do it. It is worth the journey, and to immerse yourself in a wholly modern Haudenosaunee world-view and artistic sensibility is a privilege not many of us get a chance to experience.

And now for some Roller Derby

2011-02-04T15:08:00.003-05:00

Just wanted to take some time out and pitch the Toronto Roller Derby League and the 2011 season opener, which is being played at The Hangar at Downsview Park on Saturday, February 5 starting at 7:00 pm. I have become a roller derby fanatic since my daughter Carole joined the junior league in May of last year (Feral Carole #13 Baby).

I love the speed of it, the hits, the skills, the tattoos and the fishnets, the raw punk power of these chicks. They rock and more importantly, they roll. If I was 10 years younger, I'd be in, but my knees have seen too much damage for me to get up on roller skates.

I'm gonna be there -- and if you get a chance, patronize the roller derby league in your city. There's bound to be one. You'll be damn glad you did.

Hardly Getting Over It

2011-01-20T12:23:00.005-05:00

The thing about grief is that you never know when it’s going to sneak up behind you, whirl you around, and kick you in the teeth.

It can be during the most mundane moment, or in the middle of a task that you really need to concentrate on. It can be first thing in the morning or in the darkest hours of the night. It’s fast or it’s slow, it can creep up on little cat feet or stomp into your awareness in heavy combat boots.

And then you find yourself helplessly weeping over the things that were lost, the might-have-beens, the should-have-dones. Leaving you bereft, and sad, and having to feel everything all over again.

When we were home for Christmas, my daughter got an article of clothing that was Jewel’s. In keeping with Haudenosaunee custom, we give away a deceased person’s belongings, so that everyone has something to remember them by but also so that the person’s spirit will not be tied to the earth by their possessions and are free to continue their journey. Carole got a cool, neon-green crocheted beanie which she hardly took off for nearly a month until we agreed it had to get washed. But it was so imbued with Jewel’s style and her carefree joie-de-vie that we smiled and got all choked up in equal measure.

Days can pass and I can think of her without pain. Other days hit me like a brick and the pain arises anew.

And if this is happening to me, what must it be like for her mother and her father? For her brothers and all those who knew her better than I?

There has to be a way to prevent this kind of loss.

As for me, I’m facing some surgery arising from a whole shitty crisis with my kidneys, so perhaps my outlook is not as healthy as it could be. It’s the middle of January which is not my favourite time of the year, and I wasn’t well enough to go home and catch some of the Midwinter ceremony feasts. So I think I’m just feeling blue.

Hopefully this too shall pass. In the meantime I try to think of Jewel, dancing. That always makes me smile.

Salt in an Open Wound

2011-01-04T11:55:00.009-05:00

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Christie Blatchford is writing a whole series on the issue of aboriginal suicide… “Lifting the Veil on Native (there’s that N word again!) suicide” is the name of today’s atrocity I mean column.

That she has the audacity to do this is amazing to me. It is so loaded with her smug, white privilege and consequently that hand-wringing – “Oh look, those poor NATIVES are so despondent, the white people have to rescue them” thing, which is pretty much the tenor of this article. It centers around some benevolent white policemen – her favourite fucking subject – who are trying to work in suicide prevention in the Nishnabe Aski Nation. More power to them if they can make a difference, but we have been working on this terrible issue ourselves and need to develop more of our own culturally-relevant ways, thank you very much. But since this new series comes in the wake of her so-called “expose” of the poor white folks’ problems in Caledonia, I’m feeling a tad suspicious as to her underlying motivation to write this column.

It makes me want to scream. Especially since I am so raw in light of my family’s loss -- all I can think is, fuck you Christie. You have no fucking idea. About us or why suicide is such a tragic, terribly common affliction in our communities. About the fact that our children choose to kill themselves before they reach adulthood, rather than live as indigenous people. About how fucking hard it is to deal with the realization that our people are thought of as a waste of space, as a money-sucking black hole of all the hard-working taxpayer’s money as most Canadians do – or about the fact that the most common perception is that we are conquered and dead already, so why don’t we just shut the hell up?

It’s hard to be indigenous in this colonially-occupied country, where every move that your community tries to make to lift itself out of the economic cesspool of poverty and resultant cultural stagnation is scrutinized and passed judgment on by a government agency that would rather be doing anything but working so that you could actually do something for the benefit of your people. It’s hard to try and make something of yourself when right from the beginning the educational deck is stacked against you. Hell, it’s hard when your very identity as an indigenous person is dictated by an outmoded, racist piece of legislation written up by colonizers that decides whether you have enough blood to be shoved into the concentration camp – whoops sorry I mean reserve.

I feel so raw about our beautiful little Jewel that this just feels like salt in an open wound. I know that the issue has to be more broadly publicized, that more people need to understand the realities of our communities – but why does she get to be the voice? And herein is the crux of my problem with it – that a white woman with all the attendant privilege and forum to do so gets to wring her hands and essentially wail while the subtext of her writing is, those “natives” just can’t get their shit together. To which I say, get out of our fucking way and maybe we could.

Here's a link to it so you can see for yourself.
Lifting the veil on native youth suicide - The Globe and Mail

Towards an Understanding

2010-12-15T12:01:00.009-05:00

“The reason why Aboriginal youth kill themselves at a rate six times higher than the overall population is to stop the pain and hopelessness that result from being subjected to colonization.

"You can’t understand Aboriginal suicide without looking at colonization. We, as Indigenous people, must realize that we did not have sky-high suicide rates before the European invasion (contact is too clean a word for what actually happened).

"When Canadian society says we’re sick that’s like a psychopathic killer complaining to someone he’s tried to strangle repeatedly that she should do something about the marks on her neck and see a psychiatrist about her recurrent nightmares and low self-esteem.”

-- Richard Bull, “Sweetgrass Coaching”

I don’t know what else it could be.

It’s not like we are all mentally unstable, or that we are taught to yearn for death, or anything in our culture makes us more prone to it.

There is a dark current that reaches out from time to time and drags some of us under.

I remember that in my childhood my schoolmates and I would whisper about the best methods for killing yourself with a horrid fascination. Hanging was often discussed.

I can’t say if this is still true. But it seems to be one of the methods of choice.

When you are in the depths of despair then choosing life seems so pointless. When you cannot envision a future, what is the point of continuing?

These are questions many indigenous children and adolescents ask themselves. I resolve to be there to try and tell them there are futures, there are different pathways, there is something to hold on to. Our culture and our traditions hold the key, and with them in place we can go forward. We just have to walk the warrior’s path to get there, and even though the way forward is not easy and fraught with hardship and pain, it will get better.

Because it has to, dammit. Not just for myself, but for all those beautiful children I know.

Jewel Candace-Lin Monture: A Lament

2010-11-16T12:26:00.010-05:00

On Friday November 12, my beautiful cousin Jewel woke up early, got ready for school as usual, then went to the basement of her mother’s house and hung herself. She was 12 years old.

I cannot describe the shock, the shudder of horror, the indescribable heartbreak that reverberated through two families and an entire community when this news spread like wildfire. I found out through a phone call around noon (on a day that I was coincidentally celebrating my birthday) and I thought I was going to pass out, throw up, or do both at the same time. I fell to my knees and sobbed when I got off the phone. Within two hours I was in the car with my shell-shocked kids, on the way back to the reserve to be with my family. I believe that I have cried more tears these past four days than I have in my entire life, and my life has not been without its share of heartbreak. But this, this loss of our talented, lovely, brilliant little Jewel, this has eviscerated me and has somehow ruptured something in me that I thought tougher and invulnerable to events of this nature. I was so wrong.

I loved that little girl from the moment I laid eyes on her, at a family gathering when she was about six months old. She was smiling and bright even then, her cinnamon-coloured hair so unusual in our family, and the family resemblance between her and my own daughter at that age was remarked upon by everyone. Her father is my first cousin and we thought it wonderful how similar they looked. But my own daughter grew up tall and big-boned while Jewel remained petite and perfect for the dancer she became. As she grew older she became an accomplished dancer and athlete, smart, beautiful, and funny. She was also passionate about learning our language and traditional culture, and danced in powwows in the Iroquoian category of smokedance, a graceful, athletic and fierce dance style that was perfect for her. One of my favourite memories of Jewel is watching her compete at a powwow in this category, her small frame a blur amid other dancers bigger than her, her feet stamping out intricate patterns and her arms open wide to the sky as if she could embrace it. When the music stopped she was smiling with the joy of movement and the fierce music that the water drum pounded out, and I remember clapping in astonishment at how good she was.

Whenever I happened to see her, whether at a family thing or a community event or just coming by my parents’ place because she was visiting her dad, she would suddenly appear beside me with a shy hug and a sweet, “Hi, Terri,” and I always would say, “Hello, Beautiful Girl! How are you??” and we would have a quick conversation and she would tell me what she was up to and then scamper off to go hang out with Carole or Kristen or Lilly or whoever was around.

Her Mohawk name was Gahwediyo, which means “Beautiful Meadow”, and it suited her. She seemed so self-possessed and placid, serene and so very lovely to look at. Little did we know the anguish that obviously lay beneath her outward appearance. She had already known enough sadness in her short life, having lived through the loss of her beloved older brother Craig to the coma he had suffered in a car accident and never came out of. Her parents had broken apart long before then and she had been shuttled back and forth between them, but to us she seemed to be coping well with it all. All of us adults failed her, not seeing any sign that she was in trouble. Not until it was too late, and she was already dead by her own hand.

This overwhelming tragedy is seven times likelier to happen to an indigenous family in Canada than to a white family. On my reserve suicide is the second leading killer of our youth ages 10-20 after fatal car accidents. I know that the dark spectre of suicide trails its rotting fingers over both sides of my family, and there is not one family on the reserve that has escaped this horror. I ran from the reserve when I was seventeen because I did not want to live under the dark cloud of sickness and sadness that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the place. There is so much laughter and potential and fierceness and joy on the Rez, but at the same time, there remains the undercurrent of tragedy. I have since learned that you can never run far enough, because it will always reach out to touch you at some point, to remind you of the dark legacy of colonialism that touches your family even in this modern world we live in.

I’m trying to find answers, not only for myself, but for my own children who have been left devasted by their cousin’s death. I know that whatever pain my poor sweet Jewel felt that she could no longer cope with is over now. The tragic knowledge is that she lacked the maturity to understand that it would get better if she just hung in there – this is what breaks my heart. But for our youth, it’s a much harder road than white, privileged kids would ever understand.

I have a lot of healing – and understanding – to do. In coming entries I will be talking about it. Because we need to talk about it, and I will be damned if I let another beautiful child of my family slip through our fingers because we didn’t see the signs.

In Anticipation of the Real Thanksgiving

2010-09-28T13:42:00.010-04:00

An abridged Ganyonhon:yonk -- The Thanksgiving address:

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Onkwe’shón:’a
We give thanks to the people.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Yethi’nisténha Ohwéntsya
We give thanks to our mother the earth.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Kahnekarónnyon
We give thanks to the waters.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Kentsyonkshón:’a
We give thanks to the fish.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Ohonte’shón:’a
We give thanks to the grass and vegetation.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Ononhkwa’shón:’a táhnon Ohtehra’shón:’a
We give thanks to the medicines and the roots.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Kahikshón:’a
We give thanks to the fruits.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Tyonnhéhkwen
We give thanks to the foods.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Otsi’nonwa’shón:’a
We give thanks to the insects.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Okwire’shón:’a táhnon Karonta’shón:’a
We give thanks to the bushes and the trees.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Otsi’ten’okón:’a
We give thanks to the birds.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Teyowerawénrye
We give thanks to the winds.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Yethihsothó:kon Ratiwé:ras
We give thanks to our grandfathers the thunderers.

Tetshitewanonhwerá:ton ne Etshitewahtsí:’a Entye’kehnékha Karáhkwa
We give thanks to our elder brother during the day time celestial light.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Yethihsótha Ahsonthenhnékha Karáhkwa
We give thanks to our grandmother the night time celestial light.

Teyethinonhwerá:ton ne Yotsistohkwarónnyon
We give thanks to all the stars scattered about.

Tetshitewanonhwerá:ton ne Shonkwaya’tíhson
We give him thanks the one who finished our bodies (the creator).

I have been thinking a lot about the idea behind Thanksgiving -- and not the glitzy American version or the kinder, gentler Canadian one -- but the idea that we thank everything in this marvelous creation for sustaining our lives. Not prayed for -- but thanked. A lovely Iroquoian concept that I particularly like.

I often wonder if the settlers saw us do this -- the Ganyonhon:yonk is recited at the beginning of every gathering -- and thought it was a good idea. Because it is.

Happy Thanksgiving, if I don't post here between now and then.

Toronto: A Love Song

2010-09-15T11:57:00.003-04:00

I have been extremely lazy over this past summer, occupied by my little routine of work/home/sleep/fun. But mostly it’s because I have been enjoying the fact that I live in Toronto and have been immersed in how much I love living here.

I love this city. I have always felt at home here – in fact, I have been an urban dweller for far longer than I lived on the reserve. I left that home for this one when I was 17 and have remained here, reveling in my life as an urban Indian, since that point. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I have been blessed over the course of my career to visit other Canadian and American cities and can honestly say that there is no where else I could even think about living in. I love Toronto. This is a beautiful, living organism, a vibrant and exciting place, pulsing with great expectations for the future. The thing that I love best however is when the ghosts of the past brush against me when I ride my bike home at twilight along Front Street. I can feel the vibrations of my relations here.

I often laugh when people say, “Oh the First Nations here were the Mississaugas”. Well they may have been here when the English settled the town of York, but that’s because the Haudenosaunee had moved to the south side of Lake Ontario to consolidate our power and position in the wake of the Beaver Wars. In our absence the Mississaugas moved in. Up until that point, this entire area was riddled with our villages and hunting encampments. Toronto/Tkaronto itself means “There are trees there in the water”. This is because when our hunting or war parties would come across the lake in our immense elmbark canoes, the tall elm trees that at that point lined the entire shoreline would be reflected in the still surface of the water, looking as though they were standing in the water. How beautiful and how romantic this image is to me. And I love how that word conveys an ownership to my people that we can still claim through our naming of this place.

I love this modern, cosmopolitan place, crammed with its steel and glass towers and honking cars and clanking buses. I love the fact that when I step out of my house I can hear five different languages spoken in the space of a city block. I love looking at the diverse beauty of humanity reflected in the faces of my neighbours. I love the fact that I can go within six blocks of my house and sample ten different cuisines of cultures far beyond Turtle Island. I love the bustle, the crazy intensity, the 24-hour busy-ness of this place. I love the anonymity, but also the strange camaraderie that happens with people that you see every day. I absolutely love riding my bike, dodging in and out of traffic like a modern-day warrior clinging to the back of a pony. I also love the fact that Toronto absolutely does not give a fuck about what anyone else thinks about it. Love it or hate it, it does not care. And this is why I adore it so.

Once upon a time I wrote in a short story which was my first love poem to Toronto: “…you are obsessed with finding the lingering images of Iroquoia that are scattered throughout the city, buried beneath the strata of the modern age, like fossils. The city crest, murals on the sides of buildings, the huge bronze Iroquois brave on a storefront in Yorkville, the names of streets, the wooded and garbage-strewn ravines themselves whisper to you, saying, "Haudenosaunee daughter, here we are, we have not gone away.”

Here in my beloved city the present and the past collide in me, and I think of this often as I zoom around my downtown orbit.

TEDxDU - Aaron Huey - 5/13/2010 | Owe Aku International Justice Project | Causes

2010-08-30T16:59:00.001-04:00

TEDxDU - Aaron Huey - 5/13/2010 | Owe Aku International Justice Project | Causes
This video encapsulates almost everything I have ever tried to convey to non-indigenous people about what happened to us. And this young man understands it. Please watch.

An In-valid Inva-lid

2010-07-13T11:35:00.002-04:00

So I have to apologize for my silence on the blogging front, but I have a damn fine excuse.

I was hospitalized for eight days in St Michael’s Hospital here in downtown Toronto about three weeks ago for what ended up being a bleed in my small bowel, brought on by an abscess which was ostensibly caused by some kind of parasite. It was the worst experience of my life. I was scoped, probed, x-rayed, CT-scanned, poked with at least seven different IV sites, and given three different kinds of intravenous antibiotics. It was not up there with my favourite experiences, to say the least. I also learned that I could never be a junkie because I got bored with the amount of morphine they were letting me have.

I’m just now getting back to feeling normal. It cut the legs out from under me in a way that I didn’t anticipate, and made me realize just how much I take the normal functioning of my machine, my body, for granted. I will try not to do that again.

However, I cannot say enough about the staff and caregivers at St. Mike’s. They were, like all health care workers in this province, understaffed and overworked, yet they were compassionate, caring, funny, and professional all through my entire ordeal. The nurses were everyday angels. They were tough as nails and had the healing touch. They were amazing. I cannot say enough about them and the care that I got from them. And every day I said a little prayer of thanks to the ghost of Tommy Douglas for the excellent care I received – and that I didn’t have to pay one red cent for. It’s an amazing thing when you think about it. I had state-of-the-art tests performed and didn’t have to pay anything for it. We are lucky. And I am lucky that I got sick in downtown Toronto, where the fact of my indigenous heritage wasn’t even a factor in how fast I got through the emergency triage system. I think of other people in other parts of this country who have not been as lucky, and I am truly thankful all over again.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be talking about other things – the G20 protests, the 20th anniversary of the Oka resistence, the passport snafu that the Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse team finds itself in as they try to get visas to play in an international tournament in Britain – but for now, I’m trying to be kind to myself, eating lots of good, healthy food, having a ton of naps, and going back to my Rez and hanging out with my parents by their pool as much as possible. I’m returning to work next week and I hope that my health will be back to the level it was long before I got sick.

Murder is a Crime...

2010-06-07T12:37:00.010-04:00

Unless it was done
by a policeman
or an aristocrat
--“Know your Rights” by The Clash

I’ve given myself enough time to absorb the implications of the fact that Michael Bryant is essentially absolved in the death of Darcy Allen Sheppard, and can speak about it without frothing or feeling like I may explode. I’m not going to dwell at length about the whole sordid affair, in which Bryant doesn’t even have to go to trial because it has been determined that Sheppard was on a homicidal/suicidal rampage that night and was essentially the architect of his own misfortune.

However, I have to point out that had that been the other way around – there is no damn way Sheppard would have been absolved. Perhaps at the end of a long, convoluted process – but highly doubtful. Essentially the message is, in the end, that in this country, a white dude can kill a Metis guy and have it be the victim’s fault. Somehow it always is made to be that way when the circumstances are in a white person causing the death of an aboriginal one -- the victim was drunk, or angry, or a drug-addicted prostitute who put themselves in harm's way.

I know people will argue differently, I know they will say that Sheppard was clearly bent on causing shit of some kind and that he would have figured out a way to make something happen, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the optics of the situation, and what privilege means in Kanata.

I’ve experienced this kind of thing before and know what happens when a white person kills an indigenous one.

And in this instance, it obviously means that aristocrats get treated differently.

People don’t want to talk about the wider implications in this entire incident, but I do. The circumstances surrounding each man could not have been different. Michael Bryant, born into every advantage and exercising the full entitlement that privilege bestows upon him – the education, the political position, the wealth, the seamless career but for this one little speed bump. Contrast this to Allen Sheppard– Metis, poor, shuffled around to foster home after foster home, alcoholic, full of rage, unable to hold down a job other than bike courier, and most likely determined to make someone pay for his hatred towards himself. I don’t think he could help being what he had been made into. It takes luck and fortitude and discipline to rise above the circumstances of one’s birth, and I don’t think this man could have done it.

The whole thing was definitely a tale of two cities and an almost stereotypical example of class warfare in action. While it was a tragic intersection of lives, I can’t help but feel that everything I know about justice in this country has been reinforced by this instance. And I have never felt that there is any meaningful justice for those of us who are aboriginal.

I hope to be proven otherwise one day. Guess hope springs eternal.

No Wonder Canada Won't Sign

2010-05-20T11:53:00.007-04:00

I’ve been reading a lot about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the controversy around Canada’s – and the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand’s -- refusal to sign on and finally got around to reading a copy of the Declaration to check it out for myself.

The majority of the document is a nice feel-good declaration – not a law, not an edict, not even a proclamation – but a declaration around the rights of indigenous people to not be the subject of a genocide, that we have the right to preserve our customs, religions, etc., and to address the very real aftermath of colonizatio. Article 28.1 is most likely, in my eyes, the stickler for the Harper Government (because let’s face it, that’s who is in charge right now and who is behind the refusal to be a signatory). It also has problems with Articles 19 and 26, regarding consultation of public policy and the re-opening of historical agreements, but as sure as I’m sitting here, it’s Article 28 that sticks in their craw like a giant chicken bone.

A declaration, as we know, is not a law or a statute. It is merely that – a public announcement that yeah, indigenous people got shit on, we’re sorry, maybe we can figure out a way to make it up to you. So it’s not even about concrete restitution. It is merely the acknowledgement that something happened to injure indigenous people and that the forces of colonization continue to keep them injured.

Yet the colonial occupier government of Canada can’t even bring itself to do that.

And there’s a very real reason for that.

It’s because Article 28 is all about land.

Article 28.1: Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution or, when this is not possible, just, fair and equitable compensation, for the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.

Article 28.2: Unless otherwise freely agreed upon by the peoples concerned, compensation shall take the form of lands, territories and resources equal in quality, size and legal status or of monetary compensation or other appropriate redress.

Yeah, that’s all very well and good in principle – but vast acreages in these former colonial nations still belong to indigenous nations, and settler governments sure as shit do not want to have to deal with the fact that most of what it considers “theirs” was acquired by genocide, theft, warfare, trickery, or my personal favourite, promising to hold the lands “in trust” then never paying up when asked to do so. Being asked to even look at it by the international community puts lie to every myth Canada tells the world about itself. I’m not saying that the entire country rests on stolen land, but vast tracts of it remain in dispute and other vast areas were not compensated for properly. There’s a problem here in Canada, a problem that it does not want to face. So in denial it turns away from addressing these very real issues and says nice things like the document contains elements that were "fundamentally incompatible with Canada's constitutional framework". O-Kay. Sure. We get it.

Australia and New Zealand, Canada’s sister colonial nations have subsequently signed. I salute their governments for having the courage to do so and to face the legacy of what the colonial occupation did to their indigenous populations. They have publicly declared before the world that they understand what happened in their past and are taking steps to redress the blatant injustice.

The U.S.? Well, enough said. I highly doubt their crazy fundamentalist mentality would ever allow them to see past their internalized fascism and manifest destiny philosophy to sign anything that requires them to deal with the very real genocide that happened on their soil.

And sadly, I cannot believe that this current government would ever have the balls to do so. Perhaps we will have a regime change, but until then, this failure to sign remains an international black eye.

Surviving the Alien Invasion

2010-04-28T12:43:00.008-04:00

Stephan Hawking, noted celebrity physicist was quoted the other day as saying that contacting alien life is too risky. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," he says. Any alien species might burn through the resources of its home planet and search for new areas to exploit. "Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach," Hawking says. Far from being a benign visit by benevolent aliens, it might be more like Christopher Columbus' first trip to America, "which didn't turn out every well for the native Americans," he says.

Well no duh, huh.

And who would want to be oppressed? It sucks. Imagine all those poor white people, chained and broken, forced onto little plots of land to eke out what pitiful survival they could until the galactic masters either got bored with them and finished the job or simply drifted away to another planet to reap its resources.

Oh man, who would want that?

Ask me what it was like. It happened to my people, and countless others who were the indigenous people of a place. We know all about it, and could tell you some stories. Some of us died outright. Others were assimiliated. Still others prevail.

Here on Turtle Island, those of us who remain are survivors. Survivors of smallpox, war, genocide, conversion to the colonial invaders’ religion, residential schools, family breakdown, alcoholism, drug abuse, despair and racism. We survived all of that. And it wasn’t because we laid down and took it either. It’s because those of us who survived it cultivated a core deep inside ourselves made of resistance. We were able to find ways of sheltering our customs, languages, religions, rituals, and tribal lore. We were wily, adapting to what the other culture offered, taking from that what we needed to survive, to get our numbers back from the brink of extinction, to protect the languages from being lost forever, for teaching our children the legends and stories of our Old Days and ways, and defying the colonial government when it came to take the last of our lands. We survived, and thrive today, because some of us were able to live in defiance, in resistance.

That living in defiance has shaped so much of my character, it’s hard to see where I learned it or where it began. It seems to be inherent in so many of the people that I know, that I grew up with, in my family and the community that I come from.

Defiance and resistance are as natural to us as breathing. We’re formidable, tall and strong and stony in our silence and our resolve. But when you get to know us we are funny, and caring, and smart. There’s still so much more work to do in our communities, in remaking our culture and reclaiming what is rightfully ours, but we will do it. We can’t help it. We were made to defy, and to adapt, and to endure. And maybe that’s what is at the heart of it. A stubborn, firm belief in our inherent right to exist, to be the People Building a Longhouse Together, and to know that we will prevail.

The older I get, the more I realize that my individual choices – the music I like, the books I read, the politics I choose to practice, and even my job – all of these are representative of a person who is shaped by resistance, and by defiance. First and foremost, I have always been something of a rebel yell. And remain so. Even as I live in the colonizer’s world and speak their language and bend to their rules and their tribal customs, in my heart I remain a woman of the Kanienkah’keh, of the Haudenosaunee, and that identity is born in the blood. Even if I don’t, at first glance, look it -- this is what I am. A warrior, a survivor. A survivor of an alien invasion.

Now real alien masters -- that may be a tad different.

But take heart, Stephan. It can be done!

Public Service Announcement

2010-04-19T14:56:00.005-04:00

This is completely off-topic, but I have to express my undying love and ecstatic joy for Amanda Palmer. The woman is a freakin’ Goddess, and if you haven’t experienced her, go out and get some of her music RIGHT NOW. I find myself so captivated by her, I want to write her fan mail and grovel at her feet and peel her a grape, that's how much I adore her.

That is all.

We will return you to your regularly scheduled blogging next week.

"Your People have had two hundred years more experience than anyone else in negotiating"

2010-04-13T11:12:00.002-04:00

I have been appointed lead negotiator for the next round of collective bargaining to renew the agreement at APTN. I am so honoured, and excited, and driven to get the best damn agreement I possibly can get for the membership. I can’t wait to start. I have been thinking about the process of negotiation and why I love it so. I think it’s because it’s psychological, and sportsmanlike, but at the end of the day, fundamentally crucial to formulating the ground rules that a living document can be based on. I love it. I’m really good at it. And I aim to get better.

At its heart, negotiating is a diplomatic art, a skill of finesse, persuasion, supple argument and brute force. It’s a metaphorical warrior skill. It’s supremely Iroquoian in nature. Perhaps this is why I adore it so.

We Iroquois have had a long history of negotiating, of reaching treaty agreements as exemplified by the Covenant Chain, one of the first treaty arrangements between us and the Dutch settlers, later extended to the British. The Two Row Wampum remains the basis of all our nation-to-nation agreements. We negotiated peace treaties with the French. We also have agreements, codified by wampum belts, between the nations of our Confederacy and other nations, like the Ojibway and the Abenaki, the Chippewa and the Susquahennock. We spend a long time in hammering out treaties and agreements with other nations through subtle, persuasive argument, backed up with war when necessary.

We drove mean, hard bargains. But where has that gotten us? An agreement is only as good as long as both parties are willing to live up to the spirit of the contract, and the British crown, and its descendent colonial power Canada reneged on their duty almost as soon as they were able to. Our rich, fertile lands were too tempting to resist for a land-greedy settler population, and the respect accorded to our people could not be sustained in the mindset of an expansionist, fledgling imperialist colony that saw its whiteness, its European sensibilities as superior.

So I reclaim my heritage as an Iroquoian diplomat. I reclaim that part of me that wants to bargain, mediate, and negotiate. My work as a labour activist lets me stretch these skills, forgotten and lying dormant in me. I think if more Iroquoian people were able to flex these abilities, Canada wouldn’t know what had happened to it. We should aim to empower more of us in this fashion. Because we are damn good at it. We just need to remember how.

Stuck inside of Winnipeg with these Haudenosaunee Blues Again

2010-03-31T15:36:00.005-04:00

I swear, every time I come to Winnipeg it just makes me sadder.

I love the work I do here, and I especially love the opportunity I get to visit my dear gay husband Dwayne and his band of happy mutant friends, but Winnipeg just makes me sad. I can’t get over the poverty and the despair and the outright racism I see. I am immune to its direct effects on me – nobody messes with a six-foot-tall Iroquoian woman in business attire – but what I see around me saddens and enrages me and makes me feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Is it economic privilege that envelops me? Is it the fact that I don’t “look Indian”? Just what is it? Right now I’m tanned from my trip to Mexico and I’m wearing some of my favourite Iroquoian silver jewellery pieces but maybe this isn’t enough to identify me as a member of the same disadvantaged group that I continually see getting ridiculed, told to move on, spurned in the streets, and openly ignored. I just don’t get the same treatment.

I often wonder if the answer is simply lookism, in that because I don’t look stereotypically “Indian” I get to be immune from the consequences of my status in this nation. I often wonder if that’s the reason. By virtue of being moderately pretty and moderately smart I get to enjoy a privilege that many other people of my same culture don’t get to enjoy. It’s weird. Must meditate on this some more.

In the meantime, I’m going to plug into my iPod and play some Bob Dylan and wait for my flight to be called so that I can go back to the centre of the universe and indulge myself in the security of being Haudenosaunee in my own traditional territory.

Mexican Radio

2010-03-26T15:15:00.006-04:00

I was going to have a whole bunch of pithy observations on a whole pile of things – the amendments to the Indian Act that are going to restore status to a whole pile of people – and going forward, allowing my children to have their kids claim status – the changes being talked about in funding post-secondary education for indigenous students, the alarming rise in racist remarks that show an incredible amount of ignorance regarding the history and status of indigenous people in this country....but dammit I’m in Mexico. So I’m not in a headspace to give any of these things serious consideration. I’m concerned with hanging out by the pool, how much sunscreen I need to apply, or what drink I should have now. I should be all concerned with privilege and how the burden of north American greed crushes these polite, friendly people here all working for pennies to keep the drinks flowing and the pool clean and the tile free from sand and the sagauro cactus from overrunning the carefully-landscaped areas...but I’m on holiday where my economic privilege translates into a seven-day stint in a resort in Los Cabos at the very end of the Baja Peninsula, the south-western most point in Turtle Island, or as I’ve been delighting in saying all week, the tip of the Turtle’s flipper.

But in contemplating this, I’ve also discovered that The Minutemen’s song Corona is so very fitting here...

The people will survive
In their environment
The dirt, scarcity, and the emptiness
Of our South
The injustice of our greed
The practice we inherit
The dirt, scarcity and the emptiness
Of our South
There on the beach
I could see it in her eyes
I only had a Corona
Five cent deposit

This desert landscape is beautiful and so weirdly alien to my southern-Ontario eyes, and laying about in the sun has totally lowered my IQ by several digits, so I am unable to formulate a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. Given that, we will return to our usual topics next week.

And One More Thing --

2010-03-09T10:51:00.004-05:00

-- if I have to read another bunch of bullshit racist crap from the so-called good citizens of this nation as spewed out in the comments sections of the Globe and Mail or the CBC any longer, I may go postal.

I really don't understand why these sorts of things are allowed. What is the point, what is the purpose? What is this kind of vitriol contributing to? Overall debate, policy setting -- what??? It's just dangerous, ugly poison spewing out over the web and does nothing but create negativity. It's ugly. It's essentially the equivalent of all that hateful propaganda put out by totalitarian regimes throughout history, except that average people are espousing this shit and that's what makes it worse. I don't need to see it any more. I think they should be shut down.

This is my rant of the day.

Tribalism Redux

2010-03-01T23:03:00.008-05:00

Humanity likes its tribes. We try to pretend we’re beyond that, so modern, so technologically and emotionally advanced, but the Olympics are really just a giant display of tribalism writ large. It was never more apparent to me than watching the hockey game yesterday. I found it extremely interesting that all of my onkwehonwe friends could put aside our unease and our unrest at having to be indigenous people in this colonial construct, and for a couple of hours unite with everyone else across this northern part of Turtle Island.

There we were, wearing our hearts on our sleeves right beside our settler neighbours watching the beauty of that fast, skillful game played between two political and cultural entities, those players being the true avatars of our national prowess and passion. And what a glorious victory that was, in overtime against the giant eagle to the south who played with military precision, roughshod menace, and with the heart of that rebellious spark that gave rise to their nation. But our boys were disciplined, skillful, industrious – all those things that Canadians pride themselves on. And the defining moment, with the nation’s favourite son making the most of a hastily-passed puck and firing it past the American magician who manned their net – it was truly a magical moment. It was pretty damn cool.

And the celebration afterward – I had to run to a 24 hour drug store for my stomach-flu ridden daughter and the only one still open was on Yonge Street, and I was pulled in to utter pandemonium trying to get into the store. It was a sea of red and white and complete strangers high-fiving me. I even got bear-hugged by a giant white boy in a cowboy hat – talk about symbolism. For a beautiful shining moment, I felt like this nation could escape its colonial past, embrace true inclusiveness, and become something bigger and brilliant than it actually is.

And then I woke up this morning, and everything was the same.

Oh well. For the briefest of moments, it felt like Canada could be something bigger. That we could all be something bigger. That was pretty darn intoxicating.

Such is the power of sport. Bread and circuses, sustenance for the tribes. It always goes back to that – where do your tribal loyalties lie? And what is it you will rally around, make part of your identity and your culture and your way of life?

Then I remember – hockey was originally an Iroquoian women's sport, designed to be played in the winter when there wasn’t much to do, so that everybody could get outside for some fresh air and the women could shriek and holler and trip each other on the ice, and the men could get to see what the newly-grown girls were looking like, and look forward to the spring when they could pay court. Lacrosse, the little brother of war, is the men’s game.

So hockey is now played by the colonizer with a national pride and fervour bordering on obsessiveness and considered a man’s game, when in reality... That’s why it was so cool to see Canadian women winning the gold, and totally dominating the field when they had their ice time. Now that’s what I call a woman’s game.

This Land IS My Land

2010-02-23T22:13:00.001-05:00

And in this case, wishing it wasn’t doesn’t change the fact that it is.

I was initially going to avoid the entire issue of the Douglas Creek Estates land claim in Caledonia, bordering the territory of the Six Nations of the Grand River that’s currently the subject of so much media coverage and resistance/anger/misunderstanding/utter governmental bullshit that’s been happening for the last five years, but I simply can’t. How can I? It is an undeniable fact that this land was stolen, despite our protests, despite our formal complaints and attempts to forestall the process, practically from underneath us. And in this world, where so much of our lives as aboriginal people is dictated by the statues of the Indian Act, what is left to us but an act of defiance, of resistance, of the outright fuck-you to the white culture that stole it in the first place? Seriously. Sorry for your luck you fucktard developers and you oh-so-politely racist denizens of Squatterdonia, but it’s ours. Hate to disappoint you, to point out this irrefutable fact of history, but there it is. Even your courts are reluctantly beginning to see this fact, much to the consternation of your citizens and the upright burgermeisters of Haldimand County. Even if two levels of your government is reluctant to deal with it, has always been negligent because it’s a political hot potato, sooner or later the truth of it, the utter rightness of our claim, must be heard.

The Haldimand Proclamation of 1783 is explicit in the original land grant, given to the Mohawks and the Six Nations Indians for their fealty and alliance throughout the American War for Independence, a dry historical fact that hides the reality of what happened to us. We were driven out by the one of the first genocidal wars initiated by the fledgling American government, our towns and villages burned, our crops destroyed. Our numbers, already dwindling from over one hundred years of contact, warfare and disease, were very nearly decimated. By the time Thayendenageh, Joseph Brant, had successfully guilted the British government into providing a sanctuary for our by then refugee population, we were probably about a thousand Mohawks with a scattering of people from the other nations. We were ragged, sick, and broken, huddled at Fort Niagara, refugees in our own homelands. How can Canada forget this? Because they never knew, and it suits the colonial franchise NOT TO KNOW. But I digress...

That original land grant was six miles on either side of the Grand River from mouth to source. That’s a hell of a lot of real estate. Originally it was designed to be a buffer between that upstart American nation and the comfortable colonial franchise of Upper and Lower Canada, the idea was that the remainder of the Six Nations would provide security for the British colonies and act as a defence corps against the Americans. During the War of 1812 we proved the wisdom of that decision, effectively keeping the Americans out of Southern Ontario and creating the present border, so that Canada has this weird little dip into what looks like the American territory and securing the carving up of the Great Lakes. It is no accident that the province looks the way it does. It is because of my people and their acumen at defending territory, and the wise strategic moves made by Tecumseh the Chippewa war chief and his principal allies, the Oneida of the Thames (who, yeah, are Iroquois).

Over the years the architects of the Canadian government sought to diminish the power of the Six Nations and erode that magnificent land base that the British government had left to us. As the burgeoning British population moved into the lands of Southern Ontario that were originally forested, the valley of the Six Nations proved irresistible to them. And remember, our population had crashed and was on the verge of extinction. Plus the movement onto this restricted land base took its toll on us. Alcoholism and family breakdown was rampant, as were the loss of language and the destruction of our culture, taking place even before the residential schools were up and running. We were lucky in that we Iroquois tend to be stubborn bastards, and were the recipients of several factors that allowed us to survive this period, not the least of which is the Gai’wiio, the Good Word of Handsome Lake, and the diplomatic cunning that has always served our people well. We were able to hold on to a fraction of our land base, but it was not without tears and betrayal and outright theft.

The current area in dispute, the land known as the Douglas Creek estates, is but one parcel that remains unresolved. In 1842 the land currently running south from Caledonia was requested to be ceded for a new road to provide access from Port Dover to Hamilton. This road was called the Plank Road and is now the present day number Six highway. The chiefs of the day refused. This “ceding” had only resulted in vast tracts being wrested away from us. Some areas, like the source of the Grand had gone years before and other “leases” had taken place under dicey conditions, and they wanted to prevent the remainder of our territory from being leached away. It was only through the manipulations of the Indian Agent, a dude named Samuel Jarvis (who turns out to be a freakin’ thief, so much for his identity as a founding father of the City of Toronto) that a lease was drawn up and a swath of land where the road was located and a buffer zone between the eastern boundary of the present day reserve was established, with the understanding that the money for the lands would be held in trust. Uh – not. Jarvis gave bits of this land to his business buddies and other lackeys but did NOT provide them with leases so that there wouldn’t be any evidence of his cheating, because for all his bluster, he was not just a little bit scared of the Iroquois and their fierce reputation. And well he should have been.

To this day, none of the white people who are in possession of these land parcels in question have actual deeds to their “property.” That’s because there are none. These lands were swindled.

Fast forward to 2006, and the necessary resistance and all the ugly racist response and subsequent shit that has gone down since then. I’m not going to recount it. Suffice to say it reminded me that for all of its protestations to the contrary, Canada remains a deeply racist nation founded under false pretences and built on the backs of indigenous people without acknowledgement, justice, or thanks. Perhaps that is a harsh assessment, but this is the ugly reality of my people’s dealings with Canada to this point.

When I was a child my dad would drive us around the lands of our people and point out exactly when and where we had lost this or that parcel. And I know this was a common experience for a lot of my friends on Six as well, regardless if our families were traditional Longhouse people or Christianized the way mine was. That didn’t matter because we all knew the score. We all know what happened. And that gives us an edge over the people living outside of the reserve, on our land. Perhaps that is why they are so angry. They, too, have been deceived. It sucks to think that in the middle of nice Southern Ontario suburbia there’s a big honking elephant in the room, a massive land claim that will dog development and stall progress and disrupts the safe, comfortable myth that this is your home. On native land.

Someday there will be a reconciliation, an understanding. But until the government stops its posturing with regard to our land claims, recognizes our sovereignty as the Six Nations of the Grand River – and grants this to all of the Iroquoian territories – this issue is not going away.

I drive my kids around the perimeter of the reserve and tell them the same stories that my father told me. And so it goes.

2010 Olympics Opening Ceremony -- A Canadian Fantasy

2010-02-13T22:42:00.000-05:00

For the millions of people around the world watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics broadcast from Vancouver last night, it must look like Canada is a vibrant, diverse place rich in the storied shared history of hundreds of aboriginal nations with all those intrepid European pioneers and later the arrival of displaced people from around the globe. What a beautiful, wealthy nation they have created together, rich in culture that borrows from those shared stories and the reverence with which this history is celebrated.

Um... NOT.

It is said that symbols are everything, with the national myth of a country being the most symbolic of all. I found it very interesting last night that all those indigenous people come out in their traditional finery, speak the surviving languages into the universe to welcome in everyone from the globe, and then dance happily about the stadium in what looks like a lovely display of formalized greeting. But what was very interesting to me was as the indigenous people were dancing away, they were surrounded by white people dressed in white. I tried not to read anything into it, but my daughter and my niece who were watching the spectacle with me were like, “Why are all those white people circling the Indians? Are they making sure they are going to stay away from the athletes?”

I laughed, but found myself bothered by uneasiness. And then it hit me – in a nation that does not address the legacy of colonialism with regard to its aboriginal peoples, that does not allow them full access to the kind of wealth generated by the rest of the nation, that keeps them indentured on a reserve-based system and our very existence dictated by the terms of a paternalistic Indian Act, this is exactly what was happening. Symbolically we were being kept away from the rest of the action, only trotted out as window-dressing and part of the colourful spectacle that is Olympic pageantry. It made me think of what happened to the proud Lakota after the decimation of their people post-Wounded Knee – able only to find work in Bill Hickok’s Wild West show, dancing around desultorily in their finery and looked upon as objects of curiousity, a throw-back to the past and also the spoils in a war that secured a continent for the expansion of colonial supremacy.

I have often thought of our relationship to the colonial construct government as being trapped in an abusive marriage. Seduced, betrayed, abused and abandoned. Seduced by these newcomers and their new technology, their guns and trade goods, their religion and rum, their talk of alliances and treaties and sharing the land. Betrayed by an entire system that once entrenched, denied us our rights under those very treaties we had made and deliberately cheating us out of fair settlements and compensation for our homelands. Abused by a religion that told us our ways were savage, and forcing our children into residential schools in order to conform to the colonizer’s culture, and by a parochial Indian Act that dictated the terms of our very existence as indigenous people by telling us who could claim that status. Ultimately we have been abandoned because the government of Canada does not want to deal fairly with those outstanding land claims, offering us pittances for what was rightfully ours and attempting to extinguish our rightful title to vast acreages that should still be ours. And so the opening ceremonies remove all reference to the Canadian reality and instead reach once more for the myth that Canada is a peaceful, diverse and welcoming place, and that everyone lives in prosperity and equality for all while respecting the cultures that contribute to the fabric of the nation.

Thus does the abuser wear the mask of the loyal, supportive husband and the abused the happy, loved consort.

In discussing the ceremonies with an (enlightened white) friend of mine, she told me her partner had said that he had hoped for a contingent of masked warriors ambushing the ceremonies on snowmobiles and ATVs, flicking cigarette butts at the crowd and littering the ground with empties, a giant fuck-you to the Games and all they represent. I laughed, delighting in the imagery. That would have been a much more fitting representation of the reality of what has happened in indigenous communities and exposed the dirty laundry of Canada’s colonial legacy to the world, instead of this sanitized and carefully-choreographed fantasy.

I am lucky to count among my acquaintances Taiaiake Alfred, eminent Iroquoian scholar and thinker who has written about the colonial experience and indigenous resistance and how to address the problems of governance for our people. He said that how onkwehonwe people respond to the Olympics is a litmus test for how deeply colonized we are, and I agree with him. Our own communities are divided over the issue, with those of us who view the collaboration of our people who have been turned into Olympic cheerleaders with suspicion and being told by our own people that we are too angry and not seeing the opportunity these games represent. I don’t deny that for many indigenous people they have profited from the Games, and more power to them, but for myself view the entire thing with scepticism. The amount of money poured into this thing is staggering – money that could also have run arts programs, daycares, hospitals, better transit systems, infrastructure and green job initiatives.

I myself have been sucked into the Olympic spectacle before, with its seductive glamour of competitive sport and the drama that it represents, but as I’ve developed my own personal economic/class/race analysis, I don’t think this way anymore. The Olympics have become a bloated, exploitive thing that instead of honouring the purity of athletic endeavour relies on how much wealth a competitor nation can pony up to essentially buy medals. It is the ultimate circus, distracting people from the very problems of class and race divide that oppress the majority of the world’s population, and the nations who win those medals reinforce the hegemony of the North over the South, of white over brown, of rich over poor.

In Memorium: Karl Staats 1962-1983

2010-02-10T11:35:00.001-05:00

I was overcome with an unaccountable melancholy when I woke up this morning and soon came to realize it was because of the weather. This kind of weather always reminds me of that March day so long ago when my mother called me to tell me that my friend, Karl, had been murdered when his car broke down and he gone to a house to ask for help. He was shot in the head because he asked for help. It was March 21, 1983.

Karl and I first met each other in Grade 7 and went on to be very tight friends by the time we were in Grade 13. We at first had competed against each other for grades, especially in English – which I find really ironic for two Mohawk kids to be excelling at. My competitive nature didn't want to be friends but he won me over -- he was slyly funny and whip-smart. We both loved fiction and wrote reams of poetry and used to try and outdo each other with our short stories and poems, competing for prizes and then later collaborating on work together because we admired each other’s turn of phrase and mindset so well. It was really the first time in my life I had realized that you could be friends with a member of the opposite sex and love them thoroughly without any kind of messy sex tension rising between you. It was because deep down we were brother and sister, tuned into the same kind of cosmic interests and a bone-deep conviction that our lives were going to take us far from the reserve. By the time we were in Grade 13 – he was the only guy with me, Lynx and Lorrie the last remaining Indian kids with our sights on university (when I started at that school there were over 100 kids from the reserve in Grade 9; by the time we graduated Grade 13 there was just the four of us. Goes to show you how hard it is for aboriginal kids to get into higher education). By then our interests had expanded into music, both of us freaks for Motorhead, the Ramones, Judas Priest – any kind of loud, thrashy stuff that jarred with our classmates who wanted to listen to Journey and Styx. We also liked bizarre movies, the two of us quoting A Clockwork Orange and Monty Python’s Holy Grail much to the eye-rolling of everyone else, or breaking into spontaneous song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. We were forbidden after a while from being partners when we would play euchre in our Grade 13 spares because we had a psychic connection which meant we could guess what each other was holding in their hand – and clean everyone else out for their lunch money. We hung out on weekends and traded music back and forth, along with books and bits of writing, poetry, critiquing each other’s work with suggestions that were only meant to make it better. We would skip school when the weather got better and smoke joints on the beach at Port Dover and talk about music and poetry. Karl played guitar so it was inevitable he would start a band and I would get invited to band practice, allowed to hang out and offer suggestions. God it sounds like some kind of teen movie and I guess in a way it was.

After graduation I went to York University because I had delusions of being a writer. Karl went to Fanshawe in London were he was studying sound engineering. Our contact started falling off because our lives were just going in different directions. Back then there was no internet, no email, no cellphone to make it easy to keep in contact. We tried making the effort to hang out but our schedules were just so radically different. It wasn’t because we hated each other or that there was a dramatic falling-out, it was just the reality of being in different cities with contact getting increasingly infrequent when we managed to be at home on the Rez at the same time. And you know – it is with great sadness that I don’t even remember the last time I saw him. But I remember him playing guitar, and headbanging, and I know utterly that we would still have been friends especially in light of the music that was starting to come out – Husker Du and the Replacements, Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Flag, Sonic Youth – all of those bands that were fusing thrashing, angry guitars with thoughtful, poetic lyrics and intense melodies – and also because of the books and films and theatre and art we were both being exposed to.

That horrible morning...I remember the numbing shock and the taste of ashes in my mouth, my knees buckling and sliding down the wall of the phone booth on my dorm floor, hearing what my mother was telling me but not comprehending, not understanding that Karl was dead, that he had been shot. In the head. Because his car had broken down and he had gone to a house to ask for help. And I couldn’t cry. I didn’t cry at the funeral, or at the horrible visitation at the funeral home where they had an open casket and he was as pale as only a corpse can be with a ghastly putty thing over his forehead that was supposed to mask the bullet wound. I’ve never been able to cry about it, for him, until now. And now I weep as I write this, remembering it as vividly as if it had been last week.

It was a bad footnote. Indian kid gets shot by a white man. White man claims he was defending his property. White man gets sentenced to ten years involuntary manslaughter (whatever the fuck that means) and gets out in three years (for good behaviour). Wonder what would have happened had it been the other way around? You tell me.

Three years and this murderer got his life back.

Karl is dead and the potential for who and what he could have become – god I feel so desolate in thinking about that.

In 1983 we were 20 years old, with our lives ahead of us and a future so bright it was blinding. And for Karl, it was snuffed out in an instant and only the memory remains, and some of us in mourning for all the might have beens.

Contemplating Personal Power

2010-02-06T22:07:00.001-05:00

I’ve always been extremely interested in power. The trappings of it, the scramble for it, what is power, why do we want it, how can I get it, is it just primate dynamics played out in a human forum… et cetera ad nauseum. I like power. I like how it feels, how it looks, what it means. I like it when I get to exercise it in whatever little sphere of influence I have, I hate it when I have none. It’s an interesting thing.

My people have always been interested in power. We even have a word for it – orenda, or the “soul of all things” – which I am given to understand is kind of a bad translation, as this is one of those purely Haudenosaunee concepts that really doesn’t have an equivalent in English. It is the philosophy that every human being is invested with his or her own power, a life-force that is equal parts aura, destiny, force of will, strength of character, and personal charisma. Probably the closest comparison is karma, but even that kind of falls short. Men and women equally are expected to develop their personal orenda, to follow its pathways and exercise their abilities in the pursuit of peace, power, and righteousness – and ultimately for the benefit of the entire nation. There is also the expectation that a healthy orenda leads to balance and equanimity among the people. When there is sickness, madness, or internal conflict within the tribe than some agent, whether external, internal, or supernatural has caused this imbalance and there are all kinds of rituals and songs and dances and feasts to be performed to restore the balance.

However, I am interested in orenda as a purely personal reflection of my keen desire for power. I have always wanted the kind of power that a strong ruler would yield. I joke among my friends that in the event of a world-wide apocalypse I am totally going to band together the survivors and rule an entire kingdom from a Throne of Skulls in a wild Mad Max scenario, and they believe unflinchingly that it would be possible for me to do so. Perhaps they are humouring me, but hey -- I have never grown out of that adolescent desire to be Empress of All I Survey.

However, the sad reality is that as an aboriginal woman in this country I will never achieve the kind of political or economic power that I really would rather enjoy. Sometimes the obviousness of that fact smacks me in the face. One could say it should to keep me humble, but sometimes it’s just depressing. Like tonight I was driving along the Grand River through Caledonia (or Squatterdonia, as my dad calls it) towards where my sister lives in Cayuga and I was thinking, hey look at all these beautiful houses ON OUR STOLEN LAND.

In reality I don’t want to move back to the Rez and environs, but it would be nice just for once to think – hey look at all those beautiful houses here ON THE RESERVE (not that there aren't any right now, but it would be nice if they reflected a higher standard of living, and that this was the norm right across the country).

Or to think, gee, if I ran for election into a political office, I bet I’d get elected.

Sometimes I have idly entertained delusions of getting into politics. I love politics and have always been good at the kind of office/power/group dynamics that drive a large group. I don’t think any human gathering of more than twenty people is without its own internal politics. And I’m damn good at it, at fostering alliances and talking to people and debating and/or defending positions. I love it. This sort of thing is something I was born to do, use my Iroquoian guile and power of oratory to change minds and influence decisions. This ability actually got me somewhere in my old union, but now I'm staff and can't indulge my prediliction for politics any longer.

Sometimes I think, I bet I’d be an awesome MPP/MP or hell, I’d make a damn fine party leader. But then I realize there’s no party that I would seriously join and be committed to. I’m way too irascible and even though I’m nominally an NDPer by virtue of my union affiliations, it does not suit completely. Maybe I’ll become one of those cranky weirdos that always put their name on the ballot in any election in the hopes that other disaffected losers will rally around me. Yeah, that’s it. It’s my new plan and I’m sticking to it.

But somehow I can’t help but wish for my Throne of Skulls…

Career Opportunites (the ones that never knock)

2010-01-27T13:54:00.001-05:00

One of the things about being the staff representative for a union is that you end up being equal parts paralegal, confidante, shit disturber, therapist, cheerleader, and career counselor. Lately I’ve been doing a large amount of the latter.

I was thinking about that the other day, and came to the realization that career counselling needs to be more prominent, especially in indigenous communities. We need to have role models about how to have a career. The vast majority of us come out of homes where, if you were lucky, Dad was an ironworker or a factory worker, Mom was in healthcare but more likely stayed at home and occasionally went strawberry-picking or picking tobacco (if you lived on Six, that’s what your mom did). You might have had a relative who was in the DIAND bureaucracy, or aunties that were teachers, but what about other professions? Where are all the lawyers, the bankers and economists, the designers, the professors, the doctors, the journalists, the IT and telecommunications specialists? The answer is nowhere. We all know why that is, but it’s becoming different now. It’s only been in the most recent generations where the combination of post-secondary education, movement into the cities, and family stability created the opportunity for our young people to have actual careers.

I say this because one of my roles in my career – which I bootstrapped into out of a job, by the way – is to help people when they are in crisis in the workplace, and quite often, that is when they are faced with a discipline track because of some incident that happened while they were on the job. One of my units is comprised of perhaps 85% aboriginal people, working in various positions in the broadcast industry, and when they get in trouble, the general trend seems to be they simply quit rather than let me work with them through the conflict and deal with what’s happening in the workplace. Quitting seems to be easier and solves the problem right then and there, albeit permanently.

I think that’s interesting. We have spent so much of our focus on GETTING employment that we haven’t really thought about – or prepared our young people – for KEEPING that employment. Because one of the things that happens in any job is that there will be conflict between managers and employees, there will be conflict between co-workers, and there is a mechanism that the corporate world – like it or not, in order to be employed we have to abide by its cultural rules – engages in so that people understand their obligations under their employment agreements. Perhaps our backgrounds don’t prepare us for dealing with conflict in a healthy way – these things have been broken, lost to us because of the rupture with our old ways and the demands of the colonial process. Perhaps it is because we grew up with unhealthy conflict and we can only turn away from it in self-perservation…But whatever the reason, in order for us to keep meaningful employment, to have a career, we have to learn how to work with the conflict, work through it and emerge victorious on the other side.

That is the secret that white people have, the edge they have developed over us. White privilege allowed that to happen but now they have generational role models on how to deal with it.

Navigating through work conflict is important. Now I should be careful here, it’s a generalization to say that – and how many times does it erupt in the angry white dude bringing a semi-automatic to work and solving his problems that way? But for every crazy mofo like that, the vast majority swim quite happily through shark-infested waters and reap the benefits that having a career implies. And I’m not just talking about the monetary benefits – I’m talking about the empowerment for an entire community. For us indigenous types, seeing healthy role models out in our communities is crucial. In fact, I’d go so far as to saying it's as important as breathing for us right now.

Sure it’s hard work and it’s not without its sacrifices, getting and keeping a career, but dammit we can be innovative and bring to our work our core indigenous values and our spirit without surrendering to an assimilationist model. I am quite open about telling my colleages and members that I plan to infect them with my Haudenosaunee values and ways; the dominant culture should get more of it. This culture is built upon the bones of our ancestors; we have every right to be out there working and remaking the nature of work with our own indigenous toolkit. So for those of us who are doing it, we have to become the role models. There’s generations of our young people who will benefit from it, even if right now it feels like we are toiling in obscurity.

I know it places a burden on those of us who are out there doing stuff, but like it or not, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and we have a duty to those who are coming after us. It’s all part of our continuum as First Nations people and a value that everyone else benefits from. So let’s do it. Let’s be the role models.

(God help anyone who tries to look up to me... but I suppose there’s worse things in life than being a shit-disturbing, troublemaking, shoe-loving rock’n’roll union grrl).

My recovery from Comments Sections, or a boycott for practical purposes

2010-01-13T16:28:00.000-05:00

I really have to stop reading them, I really do.

Those comments sections in the Globe and Mail and the CBC – the sites I look at the most – make me stark-raving, tear-my-hair-out-by the roots insane. I don’t know why I feel compelled to look at them, but I do. It must be the same natural inclination that causes us to look at disasters, at train wrecks, at all manner of calamity with the voyeur’s fetishistic appreciation –

I’m starting to question why they are there, what is the purpose of them (other than to make this indigenous woman freak out)? What is this fad, this desire to comment on every story, like average citizen Joe Blow from Bumfuck Idunnoknow is a qualified expert on every little thing that happens in the world? There’s got to be more accountability, too. I bet if people were forced to leave an email address there’d be less of this bullshit. Like in pre-Internet days when you sent a letter to the editor of a newspaper they would publish your full name and city where you lived. So at least you had to own what you said. Here on these comments sections it’s the Wild West, with everyone shooting from the hip and shooting all over the place – into the sky, into buildings and trees and stray dogs and me.

But I have to stop reading them, I really have to. Like an addict, I have to stop.

Because this morning I read a comment so vitriolic, so laced with racism and ugliness and bile that it still makes me want to cry hot tears of angry bitterness. In fact, I think I did. I think I actually broke down and wanted to smash something. I paced around my office like the crazed puma at the zoo that is psychotic from captivity.

The comment appeared after an article in the Globe and Mail discussing Google’s threat to pull out of China due to the censorship by the communist government. As I am always interested in how business decisions impact workers’ lives and other assorted developments, I had finished reading the article and was idly scanning through the comments sections when I read some fucking swine of a commentator – who named himself “Sooty Harry” because he can’t possibly be THAT balls out dirty – meandering about Chinese censorhip and then the improvised weapon of mass destruction --

“… Robert Pickton putting the muzzle of a gun up a Native woman’s vagina and pulling the trigger saved her from a life of degradation and drug addiction.”

WTF?

I think I may actually have seen red. I went cold all over and felt a lump come to my throat. I felt violated and desecrated all in one breath by one stupid cast-off sentence probably written by some fucking white privilege muthafucker sitting in his stupid office cubicle over in some Bay Street tower plotting to part a bunch of pensioners from their life savings.

Now, the sentence is not verbatim. I should have copied it in its entirety to be more truthful about it here, but I didn’t. I instantly notified the moderator and got the plug pulled on that obscenity within five minutes, but still – why the hell did this fucking asshole feel he had the right to pull that kind of hyperbolic verbal diarrhea? And why the hell does the most venerated national newspaper in this country feel the need to entitle its readership to the ability to spew this kind of perverted racist swill?

I had to stop reading the comments around any issues regarding all aboriginal people because the level of racism that permeates these forums proved to me that most Canadians have zero regard, tolerance or understanding for my people and the reasons for the decimation in our communities. Which is why I naively thought that reading about Google in China was going to be free from this kind of shit. Wrong.

I am going to start writing impassioned letters to the people who run these boards and demand that there be more accountability. Because I’d love to show up at the door of the motherfucker who felt he could write that comment and ask why he felt he could just blithely say shit like that without thinking through the consequences, and have him tell me his reasons, just him and all six feet of righteous Haudenosaunee warrior woman in war mode. And then it would be a whole other ballgame now, wouldn’t it?

Angry All the Time

2010-01-11T11:26:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was waiting in line at Shoppers Drug Mart and an elderly Caribbean lady, perhaps in her mid-70’s, was at the lone cashier and fumbling a little with her bag and her purse and her wallet – basically taking some time to get through the check-out process. The woman behind her, a white woman maybe a few years older than me, marched up to the cashier, put all her purchases on the counter and basically stood there tapping her foot and frowning and muttering at the elderly lady and the cashier, who was also a young black woman. She essentially pushed the older black woman aside and was acting extremely put-upon that the other woman was taking a bit of time to finish her transaction. The older woman looked at the white woman with this expression of – damn, it was heartbreaking. Resignation and a touch of humiliation and sadness. Defeat even.

The guy behind me was a young black man and I turned to him and muttered, “White privilege in action.” He looked at me with the same kind of look and shrugged. I watched as the elderly lady gathered up her purchases and walked slowly away. She was also leaning on a cane. The white woman brushed past her and wouldn’t even hold the door open for her.

I don’t know why it is but these sorts of incidents infuriate me more and more as I get older. Perhaps it is part of my personal decolonization process, a result of my own awareness and sense of outrage at the way the world is. Perhaps it is because I am starting to get tired of these years of struggle and have no patience for the visible signs all around me of white privilege in action. I’m starting to realize that I have an inner rage inside me that I have to keep clamped down on, only it’s becoming more and more difficult as time goes on to contain it. No wonder I have hypertension and have to take drugs for it. No wonder it’s a prevailing condition among indigenous and African peoples in North America. I bet if there was no colonial system that’s propped up by the twin pillars of race supremacy and capitalism we wouldn’t be having this disease.

I never thought of myself as a particularly angry person but it’s always there, just below the surface, waiting for little incidents like the lineup at Shoppers Drug Mart to fan the flame into an outright inferno. One of the reasons I got into being a union activist was that injustice makes me crazy. I felt that if I could fight in the workplace, where I spend most of my time anyway, and advocate for other people, at least I could feel like I was doing something and not just bending over, waiting to take the corporate boot up my backside.

The other thing that I’ve got to try and get a handle on is the burning rage I feel when I find myself driving through a particularly well-heeled neighbourhood. Where even five years ago I would think, “Wow, look at the beautiful houses”, now all I can think about is “Wow, look at that wealth on our stolen land” while thinking of some of houses on my Rez. Intellectually I know this is a waste of time and gets me nowhere, but the resentment and the envy and just how crazy this fact of reality makes me is starting to feel poisonous. Dangerous, even. This is the kind of thing that eats away at a person like cancer. Or gives them cancer. Or a stroke.

Intellectually I know this thinking is futile and that I should just let it go. This is why I take yoga, why I meditate. To try and work through this shit and let it go. But dealing with things, working through the anger, is hard. It just feels righteous and easier to be angry. It’s not though.

Being angry is exhausting, and in the end, what is the point? Better to work around it. Educate, resist, lead through example. And in the end, I hope it’s easier for my kids. I probably unconsciously chose that path for them by having their father be a white man. They will get the easier ride in life because they will have white privilege working for them instead of against them – until they open their mouths and announce the fact of their Haudenosaunee DNA. That makes me feel a bit better. I’ve successfully infiltrated by the best means possible, launching my own onkwehonwe ambassadors into the world. I hope they don’t have to be angry all the time.

People always say “but you don’t LOOK like an Indian…”

2010-01-04T12:17:00.001-05:00

On the weekend I had the pleasure of hanging out with my family for my niece Lilly’s 9th birthday party. I saw several of my cousins on my mom’s side of the family that I haven’t seen in a while, got to exclaim over several of the new generation and how big they are getting, and to dandle one of our newest family members in my lap for awhile (who coincidentally turns one on the same day as my sister – look out!). I also got to see one of my aunts, my mom’s middle sister, and of course shoot the shit with my brother, my sister-in-law, my sister and her husband and assorted other family members. Looking around the room the family resemblance is obvious – my mother’s family are very stockily built with wide, round faces, skin with an obvious yellow tint, wide, mobile mouths and loud, happy laughs. My father’s family are very tall – none of the men are under 6 feet – which is where my height is factored in but I look mostly like my mother’s side of the family.

I have lived off the reserve since I was 17, and have forever gotten the reflex remark on the part of new acquaintances, colleagues, and just-barely-met people who say, “You’re Indian? But you don’t LOOK like an Indian…”

First of all, what the hell does that mean? I don’t look like Disney’s Pocahontas? That’s not what most Indians look like anyway. And I don’t look like any of the stereotypical ideals of what an Indian woman is supposed to look like anyway. I’m 5’11”, I wear black almost exclusively and my hair is –well, it’s whatever colour I want it to be. And no, I don’t look like you think I’m supposed to because I’m a Kanienkehah’keh and we don’t look like Lakota, or Ojibway, or Cree or Nisga’a or the Mikmaaq. We’re a DIFFERENT people. Our language is different, we are related to the Cherokee more than the Ojibway or Algonkin, and besides, we’re the Children of Sky Woman and the proud followers of the Gayanashagowa. We call ourselves onkwehonwe, the real people. So that tells you something of my culture right there.

On my mother’s side I am privileged to trace my lineage in an unbroken line of Kanienkehah’keh women straight back to the Mohawk Valley and from there – who knows? On my father’s side I know there is a French woman – my paternal grandfather’s mother was originally from Montreal – a scandal at the time but probably more common than not – and my paternal grandmother’s grandfather was, according to family legend, an English nobleman who abandoned his New World family in the Mohawk Valley when he learned that his older brother had died and suddenly he inherited the family fortune. So see you around, nice Mohawk girl, it’s been nice knowing you, but cheerio and all that… My mother’s great-grandfather was a red-haired, blue-eyed white child who had been adopted by a Mohawk family and raised so thoroughly in our culture that he never spoke a word of English. I’m sure there are more settlers scattered throughout my family.

When you think about it, the reason that I am an “Indian within the meaning of the Indian Act, chapter 27, Statues of Canada (1985)” has nothing to do with that proud, fierce lineage of Mohawk Wolf Clan women on my mother’s side but everything to do with the fact that my father’s family stayed firmly on the side of the Indian Act that enabled them to keep registering its members to the Upper Mohawk band at Six Nations.

The reason I mention this, though, is that I have been thinking a lot about blood quantum. I’m not comfortable with the concept. I truly believe that it is the colonizer’s tool to actually destroy us. By determining Indian status through blood quantum the colonizer gets to define what a “status Indian” really is. And for a good portion of the colonial history we got registered that way because of who our father was, totally separating the Haudenosaunee from our reliance on tracing lineage matrilineally. That was obviously designed to weaken the proud Iroquois -- you can thank that bastard Duncan Campbell Scott, architect of the Indian Act and the residential school system for that (one day I’m going to look up his grave just so I can spit on it, but maybe that’s just being too hostile). He knew what making us realign our tribal membership by the father’s side would do to us as a people. I don't think he realized about the power of the aunties and the grandmothers on the fathers’ sides, though, because most of our people held on quite firmly to their beliefs as Iroquoian people quite happily, no thanks to Duncan Campbell Scott (*ptooey*).

But I’m alarmed at how many of our people are hung up on blood quantum and the unnecessary qualification of how much “blood” you have, as if that’s somehow going to make you a better person. O-kay. It has nothing to do with your blood but everything with how you live in your culture and the values that have instructed you, informed you as a functional, onkwehonwe person with all of your duties and responsibilities, and how you live in the world.

And yet in the wider culture there’s an interesting phenomenon at work, where I constantly get people telling me, “I just found out I had a great-great-grandmother/grandfather who was __________(insert tribe here), what should I do to claim my status?” For chrissakes, do I look like your community’s membership clerk? But in all seriousness, I’m glad for you that you take pride in this fact of blood, in this reclaiming of heritage, but I hate to disappoint you – unless your family back on your territory claims you as one of their own, and you work diligently to learn the languages, to learn our ways, to live on a reserve or community, you will never seriously be able to be a true part of indigenous culture. The colonial construct will not allow it. They want you to be a citizen of the colonial corporate franchise, not a proud member of an Indigenous nation. How else are they going to get the tax dollars out of you and your property?

This is why I think we need to re-vision the way we determine membership to our Bands, to our nations. We could base them on the Gayanashagowa, which basically states that “ If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace and make known their disposition to the Lords of the Confederacy, they may trace the Roots to the Tree, and if their minds are clean and they are obedient and promise to obey the wishes of the Confederate Council, they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.”

This picture is me with my mom and dad. Guess we don't look Indian to most people...I

Going Native

2009-12-27T23:18:00.000-05:00

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 kind of 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 all over again, Pocohontas in space – any number of post-colonial settler narratives that attempt to assuage white guilt. It was like hit us over the head with your metaphor, James – the natives live in harmony with their planet and regard themselves as part of the biosphere, not separate or given dominion over it, but as just another part of their planet. They wear feathers in their hair and are fond of bows and arrows, ride horse-like creatures and obviously have some kind of tribal structure that includes a chieftain and references to an animistic religion.

I found myself being horrified by the overtly militarized colonization efforts; there was not even any attempt made to defend the human incursion onto a different planet where strip-mining almost instantaneously takes place; there was no real diplomatic efforts made, there was not even an acknowledgement that perhaps six hundred years of colonial oppression on Earth may have taught them something. There was just Manifest Destiny in outer space. It made me feel sick to my stomach. And then the whole idea that they tried to introduce a “school” and conveniently teach the natives “English” – Jesus Christ, how fucked up was that??? They may as well have just had a Christian missionary there as well, since the “savages” obviously required their souls to be saved. What was next, residential schools and the introduction of alcohol?

Don’t even get me started about the sexy female alien and her obvious “importance” in the tribe because it can’t be just an ordinary tribal chick, she has to be a “princess” and be the one who accepts the white boy, thereby signalling his worthiness to the rest of the people. Give me a break! While I do acknowledge that attraction between different peoples is a given – the whole history of the Iroquois being representative of this fact (an Iroquois woman chooses who the father of her children is going to be and that’s nobody’s business but hers), the idea that her status has to be elevated is strictly a settler thing, given as they are so fond of hierarchy. In a tribal world, that shouldn’t matter, but in a settler narrative it damn well does. Her “value” conveys legitimacy to the white dude’s efforts to make everyone think he’s worthy. Gag me.

I wish it had been a better story because certainly a movie like this doesn’t come along very often – there was definitely $300 million worth of CGI and custom-built sets on that screen. But gorgeous eye candy does not a great movie make. And certainly I didn’t enjoy having to sit through nearly three hours of a white dude being a saviour to a “savage” people because they have to be shown how to save themselves. Essentially he gets to go native while retaining his white privilege. Good one. I bet everyone wishes they could do that.

Sick of fascist apologists, or why I’m tired of hearing the “it’s not my fault, I didn’t settle here and oppress your people” argument that I get

2009-12-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

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 Torontonian, Peter Watts, got arrested, pepper-sprayed, sucker-punched in the face and thrown in jail for the dubious crime of “assaulting a border guard” while he was attempting to LEAVE the USA. Apparently he had to spend the night in a freaking Michigan jail and was then unceremoniously dumped at the border sans computer, notebook, or winter coat.

Seriously. Notwithstanding the fact that the border has always made me antsy/angry/anxious and full of any number of resentments, a good portion of which have to do with the entire colonial construct of the border concept anyway, especially to a righteous Haudenosaunee citizen (which I plan to get into at another time)… However, accusing a full-on science geek with trumped-up charge like that points to just how bad the fascist jackboot has gotten without anyone noticing!!

And to make matters worse, all of the blogs and newssites that are reporting on this incident have a disturbing trend to them. There are any number of people in the various comment sections basically blaming the victim and saying “he had it coming.” What? Excuse me? Asking why you are being searched on YOUR WAY OUT OF THE STUPID COUNTRY is grounds for getting the shit kicked out of you and forced to defend your innocence in a foreign country’s legal system? WTF people!!! Think about it. How stupid is that? Smells, sounds, and feels like fascism to me.

Ask the people at Akwesasne or any of our nations how they feel about crossing the freakin’ artificial border every day and see what they tell you. Ask them about intimidation and invasive searches and being targeted and held unlawfully. Fascism is alive and well and insinuating itself, deeper and deeper like an insidious virus, into both of these colonial construct countries that pride themselves on their liberty and justice for all. I call bullshit.

But what’s worse are all these apologists. Defending fascism’s right to make all people suspect, to claim that they were only doing their job, that they have the right to subject a person to an unlawful search and then whale on their head for asking why. I hate that more than anything. You freaking mealy-mouthed collaborators!! People have the absolute right to question authority, especially when authority makes baseless accusations.

It’s the same as people saying, “I didn’t ask to be born here” and “You should get over it” when indigenous people start to question a system that denies us our rights, denies us the liberty and justice for all that other (white) people get to enjoy, and a system that brainwashes all of us into thinking “If I just work hard enough I’ll get ahead and become the CEO/win the lottery/get picked up for the NHL/become a famous movie star”. No one wants to examine the oppressive systems of colonization/capitalism/race-based social supremacy that makes things they way they are. No one wants to understand why privilege exists in the world. No one wants to look at the great human migrations forced around the world by colonial capitalism and why people are uprooted, torn from their homelands. It’s not just friction between tribes and the struggle for resources. It is a widespread, ongoing capitalist system that is responsible for oppressing the vast majority of human beings. But people –specifically people in the comfortable First World -- don’t want to look at these systems. They just want to be able to buy that flat screen tv and watch the frickin’ hockey game and not worry about all that shit. That’s for them freaky pointy-head geeks to think about.

Utah Phillips, the great American folksinger and trade unionist once said “the state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. Freedom is something you're born with, and then one day someone tries to deny it. The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free."

Right on, brother.

Pretending to be dead

2009-12-10T07:22:00.000-05:00

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 random occurrence meant to me... I could spend the whole day in savasana. Maybe that’s my characteristic laziness coming to the fore, but seriously, I could.

I don’t even mind the contemplation of death. After all, we spend much more time – an entire eternity – being dead than alive. It’s the fate of us all. Sooner or later we will all experience it. So if twisting your body into weird pretzel shapes is intended to help you feel alive and prepare your nervous system for the serious meditation work which enlightenment requires (this is, after all, the real intent of yoga), then the yin to that yang is obviously thinking and preparing for death. And after a number of years on the planet, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is it. This is Heaven, this is paradise, this is the happy hunting ground – right here, right now, in this body, at this point in the continuum of time, for me as an individual human animal. So learning to be present and in the moment is my lifelong work. And sometimes, when I pretend to be dead that’s when I feel most alive.

I’ve often wondered if being Kanienkaha’keh has anything to do with my comfort around the whole concept. I remember how close and real death was among us growing up. One of the coolest things about growing up as a Haudenosaunee is how real everything is to you. Nothing is shielded, nothing is considered off limits to children. Birth, death, heartbreak, illness, conflict, joy, grief – all of these things are open and expressed, all of these things are right there in front of you. Every Iroquoian funeral I’ve ever been at, there’s babies crawling beneath the coffin, the kids hang out and play around where all the people are sitting in the room at the visitations and wakes. Children are present at births, at grave illnesses, at all of those primal rites-of-passage moments that the dominant culture, from what I’ve observed, tends to shield their children and even each other from these very human realities under the label of “privacy”.

Children are, after all, going to be the people at some point, and most of the families that I knew believe you are not raising children, you are raising adults. There was a lot of benign neglect from my parents. Not neglect in a survival or nurturing way, but we were left alone for long periods of time, with my older cousins assuming the responsibility for me and my brother’s safety. I remember long periods of time of hanging out in the bush doing nothing in particular, just sort of playing – some of my earliest memories are being out with my cousins and playing down by a creek or in the barn without any adults around at the age of four and possibly younger (Side note -- some of the very few non-indigenous people who share a similar experience were from northern communities, and then they were mostly male).

People freak when I tell them that, and get weirded out when I tell them I’m sad that my own children never got as much of that unfettered free range playtime as I did. But that’s Iroquoian parenting for you. Too much supervision is considered stifling, negating the necessary work of becoming an independent, self-reliant Haudenosaunee person with duties to fulfill. I’ve always been chagrined and yet secretly proud of that core Iroquoian value – that everything and everyone – plants, animals, microbes, water molecules, sunlight and people -- has a duty to fulfill as a resident of Turtle Island. It goes back to peace, power, and righteousness. Those who want the rights and privileges that being alive entails must embrace their responsibilities and fulfill their duties – “pick up their medicine”, as the translation from the Mohawk goes.

I ruminated on this a lot during savasana in class last night. I hope that when the time comes I meet my inevitable death with the same kind of equanimity that I have on the mat. I’d like to think so... but there’s always the meat and what it wants, and no matter how disciplined your mind, the body has its own ideas. But all of us cross that bridge when it comes, some by choice, some by the random vagaries of fortune...it all comes down to whether or not it’s a good day to die, as the Lakota used to shout upon entering into battle.

My own people used to compose a death song upon battle so that the enemy knew exactly who it was they were taking out. I think maybe I'll start doing that metaphorically. My song has a lot of wailing guitars in it with a definite psychedelic sound...the sound of a life lived in the journey.

CBC News - New Brunswick - 1st-degree murder charge in N.B. teen case

2009-12-09T09:12:00.000-05:00

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.

Extirpation. Sorry, Mr Prairie Chicken

2009-12-03T16:18:00.000-05:00

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 speak about everything else. We are the only ones to know that everything else is alive. Deer know they are alive, eagles and bears and turtles and insects too – but human beings are the only ones who know that everything else exists and is to be honoured. In the speaking of it, we honour its existence and its place on the planet.

And that is why we give thanks to everything, from the water rushing over the land, to the plants and berries, to the animals, straight on upward to the stars. We honour the life force that creates us all. We honour nature. We honour our evolution.

And in the speaking of this evolution, this incredible intertwined biosphere, we acknowledge our duty as human beings to live within it, to be of one mind with the planet and its bounty.

We have failed in our duty. All of us human beings, we have failed.

We have so sadly negated our responsibility to the earth, done terrible harm to this incredible planet, this jewel that shines so softly in our little corner of the universe. I think it’s because our species can’t live beyond our little lives. Hell, most of us can’t live beyond our next meal. So how are we supposed to think about the consequences of our actions, about how our dependency on petrified dinosaur poop and the subsequent plastic and toxic chemicals is going to affect our next seven generations, let alone the millions of other creatures along for the ride on Spaceship Earth?

People always say, “It’s not my fault that this is happening. I didn’t ask to be born.”

Well for fuck sakes, you’re here now, deal with it. This is ultimately the problem with mankind. No one wants to take responsibility for anything. Capitalism conveniently preys upon this tendency, saying in its seductive whisper, it’s not your fault, just buy something and you’ll be happy, and then people say it’s not my fault, I’ll just buy something... And so it goes. More plastic, more cars, more waste, more people...more more more and suddenly... no more prairie chickens. Or passenger pigeons, or dodos. And soon on that list, polar bears. Siberian tigers. Right whales. Cod. Salmon. The list goes on and on and on. Talk about bad karma, mankind is going to be burning off that extinction shit for a very very long time as dung beetles of the first order.

Sometimes I think we should just die of an infectious plague, or an asteroid crashing into us, or giant space insects coming and devouring us, because we suck.

I apologize to you, prairie chickens. It’s all of our fault.

Tribalism is the new Black

2009-12-01T12:10:00.002-05:00

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. And then my mother was appalled. My 13 year old daughter, on the other hand, swears like a blue streak and wears black eyeliner and band t-shirts already. So I guess it’s a matter of what A) passes for fashion in your zeitgeist and B) how comfortable you are with anything.

But what watching this young trio of baby dykes reminded me of was how you can pick out members of your own tribe – and I don’t mean the indigenous nation of your birth – but the tribe with which you identify. For me, it has always been urban bohemian music freaks, the wider tribe of which encompasses musicians, punks, Goths, metalheads, artists, photographers, skaters, writers, computer geeks, bike couriers, radical fairies, djs, music store nerds, comic book artists, web heads, crazy cat people, designers, coffee junkies, yoga instructors, latter-day hippies, eco-freaks, labour activists, social justice advocates, graduate students, potheads and psychedelic experimenters, science fiction nerds, and other fringe dwellers. You can spot ‘em a mile away. And feel comfortable around them.

Tribalism is one of those things that is as old as our species. It’s a survival technique and the way humans have lived for much of our existence. Families organize into clans which organize into tribes which organize into nations. And I don’t mean “nation state”; my definition means the tribal organization which believes in its own sovereignty and allies itself with other nations to form confederacies – can’t help what I already know!

Most people in modern Western culture have no experience living in a tribal organization. We all know what colonization did to the vast majority of tribes here on Turtle Island, where the settlers saw us as competitors for the land resources and an evolving capitalist marketplace saw our collective communism as impediment to a free market economy. The surviving people, my own included, are a pale shadow of the powerful and healthy tribes we once were. Even as I hate to admit that, it’s true. We are nothing like we once were.

But we still feel the pull, the need, the essential ability to form and be in a tribe. Being in a tribe means you have a primary loyalty to a group that really cares about your personal survival and your future success, because that in turn strengthens all of the tribe.

Most of my non-indigenous friends don’t have anything like a tribe. They come from nuclear families that are weakened by economics that force movement and mobility away from each other, a very weak extended family – I can’t count how many of my friends say they envy me knowing and loving most of the members of my vast and sprawling Iroquoian family – a social circle that is more about proximity and shared interests than loyalty, and then – what? Loyalty to a hockey team? A corporation? A rock band? A country? I guess that’s what passes for tribal living for non-indigenous people. But how do you find comfort in those structures in a world as chaotic and as harsh as modern environments can be? Who do you go to for that wider sense of security and a sense of loyalty and belonging?

I think we should all build our own tribes. Tribes based not on blood but on networks that extend to other families and worthy people… A group of people that you are loyal to and who are steadfastly loyal to you. Isn’t that what we all want from life?

I should start gathering one around me, I could be the tribal matriarch. Two winters ago I was convinced that the environmental apocalypse was at hand and I was totally ready to start getting all Road Warrior with a group of people. Maybe I should revive my plans.

P.S. The picture is a recent photo of part of my extended family, taken last summer.

Shirtless Onkwehonwe Boys

2009-11-29T21:49:00.001-05:00

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 indigenous male eye candy was a pleasure to behold. And I can’t deny the weird pleasure I had at thinking, here’s a way of looking at indigenous people beyond the obvious stereotypes. Well, actually I shouldn’t say that, there’s still the noble-savage thing going on by virtue of the fact that they turn into wolves, but again, how cool is that? The fact that they have this ability to protect their people and tap into this magical power is pretty awesome. Perhaps it’s just more of that whole spiritual stereotyping thing again – all that stuff about the sacred four directions and the peace pipe et cetera ad nauseum – but I was thinking, this is really nice to see, indigenous people portrayed in a positive light. They weren’t drinking, they weren’t terribly poor, they were all beautiful and powerful and cared for one another in a very tight, very community-oriented way... Kind of how we would like to see ourselves if the obvious post-colonial bullshit didn't exist.

Then I entertained myself with visions of millions of rabid white teenage girls descending upon indigenous communities all over America trying to find their own little Jacob Blacks only to be met at the edge of the reserves by scary, menacing, mean-eyed Indian girls, and that made me laugh to myself as I was driving home. Now there’s a frightening prospect! All the girls I grew up with on the reserve would kick their asses if that happened, and from what I know of my nieces and younger cousins, that hasn’t changed much.

I was never into indigenous boys growing up – I saw them all as my brothers and as my family members, so there’s obviously no erotic spark there when all the boys on your reserve are family.

I was always a sucker for the dreamy poetic Jewish boys, the soulful dark-eyed Italian boys, the intense dirty white boys. If they played guitar, rode bikes or made art of any kind then I was a goner. Those were the kind I liked, never giving the guys in my community even as much as a once-over twice. They just never did it for me. If I was fourteen years old right now I might be thinking differently. But a friend once told me – I am not cut out for a homocultural experience, and it’s true. Got too much of the oddball, the misfit in me. Back in the old days I probably would have been the crazy old medicine lady hanging out at the edge of the village by herself. Jikonsaheh, She is the Cat-Faced Woman, feeding the warriors and encouraging them into battle out of her spite and rage at everyone who pissed her off. But that's another story.

No point in whining about the what-ifs. I embrace my cute aging white hipster boy who I married and can look with delight upon the young indigenous boys who have been flung into movie stardom by virtue of their chiselled bods and think how nice is it that they all had dark hair and dark eyes and tawny skin, that they obviously didn’t look like blond, blue-eyed All-American boys. It made me happy. And isn’t that what a movie is supposed to do?

Face-to-face with the post-colonial reality

2009-11-25T11:57:00.001-05:00

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 elders begging in the streets, in the obese beaten-down women pushy wailing children in rickety strollers, in the freaky facial deformities that are the stark reminder of fetal alchohol effect, in the poverty and the jaded hopelessness that pervades through the city like a black miasma. It was depressing, almost too much for me to articulate.

Maybe as a sheltered Haudenosaunee from Southern Ontario I get to be spared the worst of our post-colonial reality. Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones, insulated as I am through a combination of luck, a functional family, an education, a well-paying job. I am incredibly fortunate when I think about it. Born into a family that functioned, that was not battered too badly from the loss of culture and our language, a family that was able to adapt and prepare its members to function in the white man’s world. Because seriously – all of my family is capable of doing that. We are lucky. None of our progenitors had to go to residential school because they were able to figure out a way to send their children off the reserve to be educated and they in turn came back to start the education system on the reserve. We also value a higher education and finding employment, to make ourselves into model citizens that retain the core of our Iroquoian ways. My entire family is extremely proud of our heritage and work in ways to let that be known. In fact, my family name precedes itself, opening doors in the aboriginal world in a way I wasn’t really conscious of until now. It’s kind of cool. And the noble history of the Haudenosaunee precedes itself as well. People were telling me, “Where would we be without the resistance of the Iroquois?”

However, if I had to live there I would be spending my entire time plotting and scheming and scrimping and saving to get the hell out, to launch myself into orbit. But I shouldn’t be such a snob about it. Everyone tries to do their best with what they have. It’s just that the post-colonial deck is stacked against some of those beautiful and bright APTN workers, especially the young women.

And what beautiful girls they were! God I loved them – they were so cool and eager and ambitious, you could see the flame burning in them and I want them all to shine with supernova brilliance. I want them to burn gloriously like stars. I think they are capable of it. Moreso than the men. I don’t know why that is but it seems to be a reality of our people, the reality of all of us who have been colonized. Or maybe that’s my own personal projection, but still... I know they can do it – they just need to be given some time and the grace to be able to.

I want to say to those beautiful and bright girls that I met, come with me, come to Toronto, we’ll hang out and do cool things and buy pretty clothes and shoes and bags, and you will have a beautiful life, you will be a star...But like me they will find a city that becomes their home, and close to their families, close to the place that sustains them and where the bones of their ancestors lie, and I can’t make things easier for them. I wish I could, but they have to learn in their own way how to be a modern indigenous woman in Kanata. I can only hope that they will.

Charter for Compassion

2009-11-17T14:35:00.000-05:00

Charter for Compassion

This is important and everyone should sign on.

It may be a defining moment in the history of our species.

Another flower is uprooted

2009-11-16T11:46:00.000-05:00

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 murdered. It is dangerous to be an indigenous woman, even more dangerous to be between the age of 10 and 28.

I hate this postcolonial reality more than I can say. It terrifies me and enrages me. And so I pretend that it won't happen, that it can't happen, and that it will happen to someone else. And I'm sure that there are five hundred and twenty-one other mothers who thought the same thing.

I will whisper a condolence for Hillary Bonnell, and hope with everything in me that her killer is brought to justice, and we will know why she had to die.

Sovereignty and the Colonial Occupier Government

2009-11-10T11:55:00.000-05:00

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 eliminating our nations because we stand in the way of settlement. The continuing settler monologue shifts focus, taking on a blatant racist cover to allow Manifest Destiny – and this is not just an American ideal, but a Canadian one as well, couched in friendlier terms as “exploring” and “settling” and “unifying” the west –to continue as an unchecked philosophy that extinguishes the people who were already there and by extension, their inherent title to the land.

I discovered this excellent quote taken directly out of the Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal Peoples that would go a long way in explaining the relationship – if anyone bothered to read through and understand the damn thing:

Canadians need to understand that Aboriginal peoples are nations. That is, they are political and cultural groups with values and lifeways distinct from those of other Canadians. They lived as nations - highly centralized, loosely federated, or small and clan-based - for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. As nations, they forged trade and military alliances among themselves and with the new arrivals. To this day, Aboriginal people's sense of confidence and well-being as individuals remains tied to the strength of their nations. Only as members of restored nations can they reach their potential in the twenty-first century.

Let us be clear, however. To say that Aboriginal peoples are nations is not to say that they are nation-states seeking independence from Canada. They are collectivities with a long shared history, a right to govern themselves and, in general, a strong desire to do so in partnership with Canada.

I am not so naive as to expect that we would declare ourselves a separate country and secede in bloody, anguished revolution; in fact, Canada is damn lucky that as children of the Great Peace, we don’t believe in blowing up ourselves or innocent bystanders; we believe in the tenets of the Peacemaker and a pathway that seeks peace, power, and righteousness – the peace between individuals, the power that stems from a recognized, lawful leadership, and the moral authority to govern. In this, are we not inherently Canadian? Are not our goals the same as the colonial occupier government? I always chuckle when I say that, but truly, to the Iroquois, it is a colonial occupier government and remains so until it lets us in. The reason there has been resistance and land reclamations in Iroquoia is because we are defending the last of our territory, the defense of which we believe is lawful in that we have never surrendered this land and it is the right of a sovereign nation to defend itself. However, we are always open to negotiations. Maybe they would like to join our Confederacy, to come in under the House of the Long Leaves. Now that would be a truly interesting development.

This is why I am interested in the petition that the Gitskan have put before the government of Canada, to essentially disenfranchise their entire population from the Indian Act. While bold and interesting and radical, I wonder if they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. Is this a revolutionary attempt to control their own resources, land, and membership base, to truly embrace self-government, or is this a short-sighted means of getting some dollars now? And would they introduce their own form of taxation in to their members? What about people who were not on their membership lists but are living in their territory? What are they going to do about them? And lastly, how will they define who is a Gitskan and who is not? Will you be able to apply to be a Gitskan in the same way you can apply to be a Canadian? True nationhood confers these rights, so it would be interesting to see what they do about it.

In the meantime, sovereignty begins with the self, and this self is looking forward to an intense hot yoga class tonight. Also I am looking forward to visiting Winnipeg next week, where I will be Queen of the Indians for a weekend. More on that later...

FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE

2009-11-02T12:56:00.000-05:00

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 bringing them to justice. Only the pain and the suffering felt by these women’s families and all of us left behind in their communities. And this burden of suffering is done in silence. Because that’s what we do, what we have always done.

I say that we have to be silent no more. We have to be loud and angry and vocal about it. Because this has to stop. This is utter bullshit, that these women remain missing.

And of course there’s this weird perception that they somehow brought it on themselves. They were working in the sex trade, they were out a bar, they were hitchhiking…That somehow they were asking for it. There’s this underlying ugly reality to all of this that pisses me off so completely, that somehow indigenous women aren’t good enough or smart enough or worthy enough to remain safe.

Every single one of these women was a daughter, a sister, a mother, a friend, an aunt, a cousin. These women meant something to someone in their lives.

This just makes me want to find out who is responsible for each and every one of these disappearances and torture them with my bare hands in all of the messy methods recorded by the Jesuits in the Relations. I hate feeling this way. But this is part of the reality of being onkwehonwe in this stolen country. Our lives obviously do not have the same value as a white woman’s.

I found this dry but completely correct quote from “Mapping Violence: A Family Violence Prevention Planner” put out by FREDA:

“The destruction of indigenous cultures and communities has resulted in an intergenerational cycle of violence which is marked by the high levels of sexual abuse within Aboriginal communities, and the internalization of violence among those who are affected. This internalization is evident in the high levels of substance abuse and suicide rates within the communities. However, the situation is also compounded by the extreme poverty experienced by Aboriginal peoples both within and outside of reserves, as well as their sense of disenfranchisement and dependency.

"For Aboriginal women, the experience of violence within their communities leaves little choice. Faced with the lack of available services and resources, many women leave the reserve to escape the abuse. They come to urban areas in search of safety only to be further victimized by poverty and the abuse they face on the streets. Many turn to prostitution as a way of survival. It is estimated that the mortality rate for girls and women in prostitution is 40 times the national average (Davis, 1994). The suicide rate for adolescent Aboriginal girls is 8 times the national average of non-Aboriginal adolescent girls (National Forum on Health, 1997).”

There’s a quote from the Cheyenne that I always remember: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors or strong its weapons.”

Andrea Smith writes in her book “Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Genocide” that the continued abduction, rape and murder of indigenous women is a sign that far from being over, colonization continues, with its final goal that of genocide in order to complete the task of settlement. The original people must be removed from the land in order that clear title can be transferred. As long as there are indigenous people here that “ownership” can never be clearly claimed. And what better way than the removal of those persons who confer lineage, heritage, and culture?

We should have a condolence ceremony for every single indigenous woman on that terrible list, and for every single other woman in this country who is missing and murdered. We should have a means to remove this terrible grief. The Peacemaker was wise in giving us the condolence ceremony; grief causes more misery and moves people into doing terrible things, to seek revenge and to burn your entire life away in hatred. I don’t want to do that. I want justice and sanity to return to us, to our communities, and I want the families of these five hundred and twenty-one women to have some peace.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.

Metallica, my sister, and privilege

2009-10-29T11:54:00.000-04:00

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 and go. Back in the day I actually used to travel around to see them, in the same vein as roadtripping to see the Grateful Dead, but I haven’t done that in years. I’ve always wondered why I love Metallica so much, but I think it’s the pounding, driving double bass drum -- it sounds like a water drum amplified by a million decibels and double-timed. They are a very Iroquoian band – concerned with democracy and personal power and righteous soul-searching, and also how to wade through this modern world that wants to crush the warrior spirit out of us. But I digress.

Anyway, the first night I took my daughter and turned her into a convert, and then second night I teamed up with my sister, because she has to go – no question. I got her addicted, I have to help feed the monkey. So of course the band is in top-form, thrashing through a beautiful performance that gave me goosebumps and I was headbanging so hard I still have whiplash. Our seats were right below the private boxes in the ACC, in section 118.

Now a word about those damn private boxes – I hate them. I hate that bullshit crap about “If I can afford it, I should lord it over the unwashed masses because I am great and powerful”. Every fiber of my Iroquoian being rebels at elitist shit like that. I don’t give a damn how much money you have – you are still a human being that breathes and farts and sleeps and how is it you get to think you are better than the rest of us? Where the hell do you think you are, ancient Rome in the Coliseum? Dining on canapés while the gladiators fight it out for your amusement?

Anyway, it was during a literally firebreathing version of “Blackened” that I started to notice that the knobs in the private box behind us were flinging beer around. They had first doused a bunch of guys to my left, about two rows down – how they hell they managed that I’ll never know. And then I got sprayed with warm beer. I turned around and yelled, “Hey, why not try being considerate, you fucking jerks??” which may not be the most polite opening salvo, but come on, they had been jerks for the last two songs.. I turned back to the show and it kept happening, upon which I turned around and glared at them for a whole two minutes, maintaining eye contact with the jerkoffs until they looked away. They were all white men (of course) between the ages of 28 to 35, with their prissily dressed girlfriends all looking as bored as shit and huddled off in a corner of the booth.

But by the time the band ripped into a full-throttle rendition of “Enter Sandman” they were back at it again, and this time doused my sister.

I should say a word about my sister. While younger, she has always been tougher, louder, more-opinionated, braver and bolder than I will ever be. I know that freaks out a lot of my non-native friends, who think I am the toughest, loudest, most opinionated, bravest and boldest badass Iroquoian girl out there – but they’ve not met my sister. Or a lot of the other women on the reserve. Iroquoian women are tough. They don’t take shit and woe betide you if you try and get between them and something they feel is right. Why do you think the whole Caledonia resistance thing happened? Or Oka? Or any of the other places where Iroquoian people feel wronged? It’s not the men, it’s the women. I was scared to death of most of them while I was growing up and I’m one of them!!! In full-on battle mode, Iroquoian women are terrifying.

So my sister tells them to quit fucking around and behave, and of course they don’t, and more beer flies around, this time getting the guys in the row in front of us, and my sister picked up a three-quarter full cup of whatever they had lying around on the ledge in front of their private box and heaved it at them, catching three of them full on in the face!!! She soaked them! It was totally awesome. You should have seen their faces – it was like never in a million years did they ever expect to get their shit thrown back at them, much less by a woman. They got all huffy and my sister is like, “You wanna go? Let’s go, you fucking assholes!!!” and then the dudes in the row in front of us, two of whom looked like bikers, got behind her and they completely backed down. It was totally cool. They were completely deflated. By the time the song ended, they were gone. Talk about getting the eff out of Dodge – the damn Indians are coming!!

At the end of the show my sister looked around and said, “Hey, where did they go?” I told her they probably had to leave to get the last GO train to whatever suburban shithole they had climbed out of and we started to laugh, and one of the biker-like dudes tapped my sister on the shoulder and told her that she was awesome, that he was glad she had stood up to those assholes and that he had her back anytime, and we left the show laughing hysterically, and couldn’t stop, being all exhilarated from the show and the adrenalin rush of battle.

But of course the whole thing made me think about privilege, and the sense of entitlement that comes with it. Why do people behave like assholes? Because they think they have the right. They don’t see that living among other people, living in a city or in a community means you have to live WITH them, not against them, and that it doesn’t do anybody any good to behave like an asshole, to put yourself at the head of the line and constantly take without giving. But they keep trying to do it, and because there’s no one to shut them down, they are successful. It’s like there’s this whole myth in this culture that rugged individualism will see you through, and to hell with everyone else. This is why I despise the political process that I see at play in this country – it’s just the elites battling it out. My pork barrel party is better than your pork barrel party, and meanwhile everyone else is going hungry and looking elsewhere for sustenance. And the other thing that drives me crazy is that these overprivileged and overbored people believe inherently that they have the right to tell you how you should live.

Coming from an onkwehonwe background means you never think you are better than anyone else. In fact, most of our cultural myths and stories make sure you don’t get a big head and think of yourself as better. But hey -- we know that all Haudenosaunee are the toughest, loudest, most-opinionated, bravest and boldest people out there, and together we will collectively kick your ass.

Skanadariio

2009-10-26T16:45:00.000-04:00

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 was to observe the course of a hurricane, powerful and devastating. Yet our traditions from the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law, make it very clear we were interested in peace. We call it the White Roots of Peace, the Great Peace, the Tree of Peace. Everything relates back to living in harmony with each other and with the earth. Even our greeting – “se:koh, skennenkowa” essentially means “How’s your peace?” We call our great cultural hero, the architect of the Great Peace, the Peacemaker, who lived by three principles: peace within individuals and between groups that comes from a healthy body and a sane mind; secondly, justice that comes from correct actions, thought, and speech. And lastly, spiritual power that comes from physical strength and civil authority (meaning the power of the chiefs to make the decisions and the authority of the women who appoint the chiefs). These were the overriding principles that governed our nations and our Confederacy.

However, contact with Cartier at Hochelaga in 1534 and then the subsequent disaster with Champlain firing on the Mohawk at Ticonderoga in 1609 – suddenly this seems to turn the Haudenosaunee into a lean mean fighting machine, a Spartan-style military society that suddenly ruled over the territory with a fiery fist, intent on ruling the territory and controlling the beaver trade. In fact, subsequent reading of history tells us that the Iroquois are responsible for eradicating or absorbing up to at least 30 different nations to rule over a wilderness empire from north of the St Lawrence in the East, the Mississippi Valley in the West, and down through to the edge of the Cherokee territory in North Carolina.

It’s actually interesting to figure out how swiftly and intensely the entire culture threw its weight behind such a military venture. Suddenly women spend all of their energy raising children and growing the corn to fuel these military expeditions; the men train from a very early age to become warriors and walk the warrior’s path, wasase. I admire the discipline of a people who can just switch direction like that and pour all of their energy into a common, united purpose. I salute my ancestors for their ferocity and discipline... and I utterly grieve the reality that colonization has completely fractured us today, perhaps fatally. I can’t imagine us getting so completely behind a cultural program that designed us for dominance, to spread the White Roots of Peace beyond our borders even if it had to be done by flint and fire. So many of us would rather not bother thinking collectively, living instead with our flatscreen tvs and our SUVs and contentedly bickering over the tobacco trade that while lucrative does not fund our communities adequately. Sometimes I wonder if we are broken to the point of disintegration.

But then I think of some of the people I know from my community and how vibrant and alive and amazing they are, and figure maybe it’s just different now, that our wasase, our personal war dance, has to be different. Maybe we spread our Haudenosaunee-ness outward like a virus, infecting subtly at a cellular level. Maybe it’s enough that I can sit here in an office tower overlooking my little sliver of Skanadariio, and simply by my being here and working at my job can influence a culture that tried to forget about us and thinks we have gone away, but here we are.

Maybe that’s enough.

Federal reserves

2009-10-22T11:23:00.000-04:00

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 that we cling to, our feet planted firmly into the earth with roots that run so deep it physically hurts to tear yourself away… and even so, every so often you have to go back to breathe its air and replenish your soul.

How did that happen? My own people were refugees before we settled on our reserve, refugees in our own homeland. We were the broken survivors of a genocidal war that forced us out of the lush lands of the Haudenosaunee, burned out by the Town Destroyer and the violent birth pangs of a new nation whose Manifest Destiny spelled out the end for all indigenous people. The weight of that, when I contemplate it fully, hurts so much it’s like a wound that lacerates down into the muscle and how could I possibly still feel it? I was born seven generations after we put down roots along the Grand River, but dammit, I still feel that pain. And the land that we have left, so crowded with our burgeoning population and tangled with weeds and the hulks of rotting cars… How did it happen that this is all that is left of the territory that we once ruled over with a fist forged from flint and fire?

I recently read a new book for young adults (I vetted it for my daughter) by Sherman Alexie, the Absolutely True Story of a Part-time Indian (god I love that title) and he writes that reserves are like concentration camps, where they put the last of the Indians. They didn’t have to use gas, they just gave us residential schools and alcohol and bad food. They were hoping we would all die there and then the camp would grow over and they could put up a shopping mall over our bones. But it didn’t happen. We survived that too.

So now we love our reserves. I think it’s really hard for non-indigenous people to understand that. Take the crisis in Kashechewan, when their water system completely broke down and there was flooding… Pundits and ordinary people were saying, For Godsakes, get the eff out of dodge already, just move. Easy for them to say. That is what a culture for which it’s all about real estate and not about the land says. Take the easy way out, buy a new place and you can start over again. But this is not what indigenous people do. This was the last of this peoples’ territory, where the bones of their ancestors lay buried beneath their feet and the heartbeat of the earth was felt for them in that place. They had no choice but to stay there, inasmuch as a nomadic people is forced to be in one place for all eternity, but that’s another story.

For myself, there were things about the reserve that drove me nuts, nuts enough to leave it behind me at the age of 17... but I also love it. I always go back. It’s in my heart, a place that I know is there for me, where the bones of my ancestors are buried and where I know I can go and hear the heartbeat of the earth channeled through the rhythm of rattle and water drum at a longhouse social. And that's not something to be given up lightly.

Being Invisible

2009-10-20T18:43:00.000-04:00

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 city there’s an expectation, an acceptance, of the exotic, the newly-emigrated, the multi-cultural and the differently skinned, and people want to hear their story. But this is my city, this is my territory. Why do I have to explain all the time about being an indigenous person? And more than that, a functioning, funky downtown denizen?

It’s interesting to me that even casual encounters like this one mean I have to educate. I spend a lot of my time in this culture educating people. It’s alternately fascinating and infuriating. I mean, why should I end up being a freaking ambassador for all indigenous people? What are we, invisible? And this lovely young woman was from Cambridge, of all places, up the Grand River a ways and you’d think she at least would have the faintest idea of the fact that we’re still here and not some freakish museum artefact.

Guess not.

I’m fascinated as to why that is. But I think about something my kids have complained about, something which they raise vehement objection to and which means they have to educate and explain. In the course of learning their curriculum at various points in their schooling, indigenous people are looked at as a part of history, a people that are essentially extinct, that exist only in the dry pages of history and as preserved and as artificial to them as a museum exhibit. My daughter was especially vocal about it. She feels that this has the effect of diminishing her entire vibrant and beloved Kanienkaha’keh family and the reserve, the community that she is completely aware of as she and her brother grew up with a foothold there, a knowledge of the place and their family’s history and by extension, the story of the Kanienkaha’keh at Six Nations. Both her and her brother raise the objection that they are here, not extinct, that they are indigenous and that they and their family thrive.

Indigenous people have to be invisible to the rest of the culture. It has to be that way. How else can you be comfortable about the fact that the very land upon which you stand was stolen, cheated, and made a commodity? It suits the dominant culture to pretend this. Then you don’t have to deal with the very messy reality of land claims/reclamations/residential schools/teen suicides and all the other dirty secrets of the colonial corporate franchise. Then those “aboriginal” people are an abstract and invisible. Extinct. Or if you do encounter them, it’s the drunken relic on a street corner, the empty-eyed drug-addicted prostitute whoring for her fix. Or those filthy people living on those god-forsaken hellholes up north and we may as well send them body bags when the pandemic erupts because what else is there to do? They are already dead.

I guess it comes down to the fact that I refuse to be invisible. And so it comes down to this: being plugged into this culture means that yes, I have to be the freaking ambassador, at least in my little corner of Tkaronto, for the Kanienkaha’keh nation. Maybe I’m not the best one my people could ask for, but at least I know something of my culture and our ways, and can explain it. At least the colonial corporate franchise couldn’t take that away.

I may not know everything, but I know this. I can tell you a story, a story about a people, with a strong, intensely democratic political system, an emotional tie to the earth, an oral tradition that has survived, and a dynamic culture that exists despite the attempt of the dominant culture to silence us, to make us invisible. And that counts for something, damn straight.

Forgiveness? Maybe not

2009-10-18T20:11:00.000-04:00

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 the Longhouse. That was resistance to the max. My parents dragged us to church every Sunday from the time I can remember until I was about 13 and started to raise objections about it. But when I think about it, my parents were probably bored with the whole deal by that point anyway – it was 1975 and I think the zeitgeist got to them. However, I knew I couldn’t seriously follow any religion that couldn’t reconcile all that shit about Adam and Eve with the evidence of the fossil record and Darwinism – when I was 6 years old. I got married at Mohawk Chapel though but that was mostly to please my dad, not because I was actually believing in it.

I went to a meditation workshop yesterday taught by Noah Levine, who is my total idea of a hot teacher. He’s one of those American Buddhists, a nominally Jewish dude who overcame youthful addictions and criminality to become a tattooed, thoroughly cool follower of the Buddha. I could listen to him in a guided meditation for days.

However, it was during the metta meditation – the practice of sending loving kindness – that I ran into an unforeseen difficulty. In this meditation, you breathe in and then breathe out, May you be happy, may you be at ease, may you be free from suffering. His instruction was to practice this first on yourself because the first person worthy of this is you, because you cannot love others until you love yourself. He spoke of forgiveness and compassion for yourself, and I found myself inexplicably weeping during this. The entire thing made me feel so uncomfortable that it made me weep, that somehow I wasn’t worthy of the kind of compassion that I am completely willing to bestow on other people, on complete strangers. I became a lot happier when we were then to direct this meditation outwards.

In the discussion afterward, I observed to the class that I had found it so much easier to bestow loving kindness to other people than it was to myself. He said that this is common in the West, were the Judeo-Christian tradition of sin, in which you are born out of sin into a sinful world seeps into all of us, part and parcel of the memes we breathe. But in a flash of insight, the kind that happens so rarely that it is like a lightning bolt, I realized that for me, this was an ugly bit of my internalized colonization that I had to rip out by the roots. I am not worthy of self-love, or forgiveness, or loving kindness, because at the essence of myself, I am an onkwehonwe woman trying to pretend to survive in a city in occupied territory.

Surviving in this colonized culture means you have to accept certain ideas as true, even unconsciously. The idea that somehow your birth culture is an inferior one, one that failed in the march to modernity is one of those toxic ideas floating out there that we onkwehonwe unfortunately are forced to breathe in as part of our capitulation to survive in a country that robbed us of our sovereignity, our political power, and our land.

Even though I know intellectually that no culture should be considered inferior, that all of humanity thrives in diversity and difference, it’s one of those pervasive ideas that ooze through the West like poison. And I have drunk this koolaid and now it is a part of me as well.

After the class I went and talked to Noah about it, and he told me that for several of his students who come from cultures like mine that survive under a cloak of racism have the same problem, and that it’s almost like they have to do extra time on the cushion to root it out, and that it becomes a part of the practice. He told the story of his father, noted Buddhist scholar Stephen Levine was told by his teacher that part of moving through all of these internalizations is to forgive the people that have oppressed and abused you and yours. He said his father was like, “Forgive Hitler? I can’t forgive Hitler.” But that by looking at Hitler and the Nazis as abused children who were acting out their own internal pain and rage he was able to get through it.

But how the hell do you forgive an entire system, a way of belief that oppressed your people and continues to oppress them? I’m not sure I have the fortitude to push through this, to become a bigger person – an enlightened being that lives in compassion and forgiveness. I’m not sure I can do it.

I think, however, I will continue to investigate my own mind and use the practices of Buddhism as a way to get to know myself better. Maybe this will be my life’s work.

Meditations on why I do yoga

2009-10-16T09:42:00.000-04:00

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 brother has always been a bit of jock, what with all his hockey and baseball and golf playing antics, to say nothing of his semi-physical job. But nope, he's 44 and earlier this year -- whammo. Welcome to the blood-taking calorie count for him. So that kind of spurred me to think -- better get active sister or you are next. Number three was the myriad aches and pains I've been having lately. For heaven's sake, no one tells you that being in your middle 40's creates these weird twinges and downright annoying spasms in your feet, knees, hips and back. Plus I was tired all the time and I know that if I get my kapha body up off the couch my pitta soul will thank me for it (digression -- I picked up some Aruyvedic lore and have always thought that "pitta trapped in a kapha body" described us Iroquoian people to a T). So back to yoga I went.

I'm practicing a form of bikram-inspired yoga, a North American hybrid called moksha yoga. I've been taking a bunch of classes at the Moksha downtown studio and it's a beautiful place -- all eco-friendly interiors and clean lines, my kind of space. Of course, there's the lithe 20-something yoga gurls running around in their tight little Lululemon outfits and their neurotic energy, but I just hang out with my shorts and tank top and don't give a fuck about the fact that I'm six inches and probably a 100 lbs bigger than the biggest of them. I stopped caring. After all, I'm 45, I've got a husband and kids and a house and a dog and a car -- all of those things you can literallly feeling them vibrating for -- and I could give a shit what they think when they look at me. Actually in the shower I've been tempted to say, "Yeah, this is what you're going to look like after two pregnancies that put 60 lbs on you, 30 of which you have never lost and then two rounds of breastfeeding!!" but why scare the poor children. After all, yoga is about compassion...

But last night I had a really great teacher who wisely counselled the class that it should be about friendliness, and humour, and compassion, and not about achievement and competition and success, because after all, what are those things really? And it made me smile and even though I sweated probably 20lbs of water out of me -- it lingers with me today.

Which brings me to my main meditation today. My (white)brother-in-law actually asked me this on the weekend -- How do you reconcile that form of belief with your indigenous spirituality?

And besides worrying about why he felt he could ask that question, I've actually ruminated on this very topic for a long while. It comes down to this: my culture is about adaptation. This is how we survived. We have a long history of adopting other people into our clans, those persons replacing the ones we lost to war, starvation, disease. I don't think you can actually call those of us who are Iroquoian pure bloodline Iroquois; we are the sum of all of those years of adoption and assimilation of other tribes, other peoples into our own. And even if we call them Iroquois, who can say what those people who were adopted have brought into our culture? Our genius for survival is our ability to adapt. Our genius for resistance and political savvy and powerful people is that we harness all of that internally into our beings and project it outward into the world, onto the Turtle's back. We are a traditional people living a postmodern experience and culture-jam it back. It's a survival technique and it works. Even though there are only about 100,000 Iroquois people (this figure literally made me weep) in the entire world, we are here and we survived, coming back from the brink of extinction, and we continue to prosper. We will continue to survive and adapt. We are Darwinian in the extreme.

This brings me back to my personal belief around meditation/yoga/liberation. In the old days, work was your meditation. Working in the fields, pounding corn, making clothes and weapons and tracking animals, even walking the warpath -- this is all about turning off the mind, getting into your body, and becoming something other than yourself. My dad used to say that when he plowed a field it was like a meditation; hours could pass in the blink of an eye, there was only the earth, the sky, and the hum of the tractor. Now that I live in a city and the work is not physical but mental I need/desire/crave that exercise of the body that shuts off the mind. Even if it's for a little while.

So I'm feeling fairly great today. A little sore, but energized, alert -- happy. And ready for the challenges of the day.

To Yoga or not to Yoga

2009-10-15T15:39:00.000-04:00

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 Bears -- jovial, slow to anger, and once you anger them, get out of Dodge. Totally my Dad and his Anderson kin. Weirdness. But hey, being in a Clan is a large genetically-connected family so hey -- you're bound to get some traits that go beyond your family.

Anyway, the reason I got into this is -- I'm prevaricating on the yoga thing. The mind is willing but the flesh is weak in this case. I snitched aspirin from the first aid kit in the kitchen here at work but it wore off and maybe some ibuprofen is needed. I am a firm believer in harnassing the power of chemistry to better your existence. It's always been my excuse for my experimental drug usage.

But yoga is the exact opposite of ingesting. It's all about detoxifying and concentrating -- preparing the body for enlightenment and thus the ultimate liberation. So what to do...

But at least I bought a coat for Winnipeg. That's saying a lot.

Somewhere Along the Line I figured I should do this

2009-10-15T11:45:00.001-04:00

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 ravenous consumer of art, and adept at adaptation. So there you go.

Here I plan to rant, rave, explain, educate, pontificate, muse, ruminate, and otherwise bleat out my ramblings to the uncaring universe. All because I can.