Is Cree the Sexiest Language?

Happy full moon.  Put out a plate for Grandmother moon (Kookum tipiskàw pîsim) tonight.  I took this photo after finding this broken doll in some grass. 

Sometimes I get so many thoughts and books going it stops me until I get it out someway.  So today is my dump of the thinks drumming around in my head. 

I started the book "Dataclysm" by Christian Rudder I am an openly economist person and I like data so I admit that this book was a high probability like for me (except sometimes people use data wrongly and then that hurts me deeply).  One point from this book that has me thinking was that with conventional histories we see the stories of the powerful or exceptional and that the ordinary lives of people are lost.  Rudder contrasts this with the story that we can tell with big data which allows us to see "ordinary lives" if not specific ordinary lives and he sees this as an opporunity to democratise our fundamental narrative outside of the WEIRD narrative (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratized).  Given how the invention of statistics created new ways of seeing people and how government responded - think unemployment/povery statistics, dehumanizing the individual and the response - I am very interested in seeing where he goes with this book.

I also finished another article by bell hooks "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination" where she talks about how blacks construct versions of whiteness and how this is not-likely how whites think the narritive goes.  Where whites may see themselves as the saviour/pureness blacks could see whiteness as representing "terror".  This piece is from the late 1980s where the idea of terrorism would have been quite different, so that reading those sections is a little hard.  As an aside, I had this issue when I went to get Top Secret clearance and was asked about ties to terrorism and I thought about asking "how far back are we talking?"  Given the constructions of the rebellions as terrorism and treason - my family was in all that.  hooks basically says that until blacks have the same right to talk about whiteness as whites have to talk about blackness there is no free space for discourse.  I think her analysis could equally be applied to white/indian discourse in our country and provides a very useful mental contruct for futher analysis.

I started reading "Up Ghost River: A Cheif's Journey throught the turblent waters of Native History" by Edmund Metetawabin and have just gotten to his mother's choice to send them to the residential school following a lot of time spent with the preist.  That is one thing that really haunted my about my grandfather, he was put in the school.  He was three and would have had so little memory of his family and culture.  S was three when the Residential School Appoligies came out and it tore me up to think of her at that age leaving me to be put in that kind of abusive place.  The tearing sorrow to know that your parents put you there.  How much was tost.  How much we still are not talking about around that loss.

I also started "Me Sexy" by Drew Hayden Taylor and then I realize that I am a book slut.  Opening one after the other and flitting between them.  This book is an "exploration of native sex and sexuality" with essays by prominant aboriginal writers on these themes.  The cover is like a bodice ripper where the virginal, alabaster skinnned, blue eyed fragile beauty is saved/stolen/redeemed by the savage, wind swept broody impossibly muscled native/savage man.  I have to admit I have read a lot of these books and this author does a nice deconstruction of why white ladies like to read these novels.  The essays I have read so far are thoughtful and some of them very funny - how do you find out how much public hair indians have without coming off as a pervert?

An essay on pre-christian Inuit sexuality describes the mask dance and the different functions for children and adults.  In the dance, without warning, a strange  with giant genitals being would come into the space and begin to clown around.  For children the being is intended to be scary.  This is so that children learn how to handle fear by watching the reactions of the adults around them, either laughter or screaming, which teaches the child that a lack of reaction is not appropriate.  You can't freeze in that environment or you will die.  "The idea is that if you can handle fear then you can handle most of the other strong emotions that you will encouter in your life.  You will learn that emotions will come and go and that you can deal with them."  For the adults the show makes fun of the body/sex and is meant as a reminder that sex is just a physical act.

There is also a very funny article on why Cree is the sexiest language, an article on how residential school abuse has affected expressions of sexuality, lots of refferences to how the arrival of christianity and their conceptions of sex/sexuality are still reverberating through our culture and a piece about being an indian lesbian (of course with beaver jokes).  I really appreciated all the varried voices in this volume.  I have also got lots of weird looks as I read in the elevator.

I think these pieces are all woven together for me in their attempts to open new spaces for diologue to address the previously unspoken. This also leaves me wondering if there are some conversations in my life that I need to shut down.  There are lots of new things I want to explore and are some of those old things holding me back?  When I was a teenager I fell down stairs a lot.  I don't any more, but each time I take the stairs I fear falling.  I am trying to be more concious about not spending my mental energy on those kind of echos and focus on now.  There is so much interesting now to explore.    Pâtimâ