Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Changed the rules the very next year

When did it start?
Changed the rules
Very next year

Promised us power
Under stones
Magic incantations
Disrespect
Made superfluous.

There when the planes grounded
When the world stopped
When the greed
Strangling our people…

Geometric dangers
Akshoga* 
What to learn next?
Change the rules?

Indian Time
Surreal survivance
No start
No end.
There when….

Pehiw Wandering 24
* Grandmother in Mohawk

Didn’t seem much

I wanted nice
Simple
Logic
Didn’t seem much

I wanted to help
Make it better
Safe
Didn’t seem much

I wanted respects
Re-con-cilliation
Let ideas speak
Didn’t seem much

I wanted futures
Songs of truth
Seeds of hope
Didn’t seem much

But seams fray
Tattered rags
Made to “civilize”
Not-yet-corpses
Who keep wandering
Who keep wondering
Who refuse to nice.

NanaBjorn Wandering 24

Too dumb to see

Did it
As you set out
Too dumb to see
“Just enjoy the journey”
Really meant
-that’s all you get –

Never allowed to arrive
Unless scape goat needed.

Too dumb to understand
We measured productivity
Built our own chains
Believed the progress
Better to come
-just not for us!

Ghost ridden* 
Those stories
Heavy histories
Too dumb to see
Our existence here
Wounded with the roots of that**

NB W 24

* For some reason my brain almost always replaces gaslighting with ghost riding

** Beyonce and Jay-Z, IDRIS “American Gangster”

Killer with a calculator: Thinking about shame

Why shame so cheap?
Tried to find solutions
Left dem buildings
Left dem binaries
Set some fires
Ripped whole words
Reclaimed body
Rebuilt mind
But still #$*&@ * 

Why shame so heavy?
Tried to run
Tried to fight
Left some folks
Burned them bridges
Hid my tracks
Tested body.
But still #$*&@

Why shame?
Disciplined
Body
Mind
Spirit
But still #$*&@

Aberrant
Anachronistic residue** 
Made savage by modernity
Killer with a calculator
MacBeth
Sings same
Dream same.
still #$*&@

Always #$*&@?
But now
I know!

NanaBjorn Wandering 24

* Jay Z “Story of OJ”

** Rifkin - "Beyond Settler Time"

50 Cent

50 cent
Don’t buy much.
Can’t get work
Gotta take work.
Count yo money
Cause sometimes
21
Under cover 12

We stupid?
Temporal guardians
Gangster orators
O L D school
Economics masterclass?

No MBA
Just glad I aint MIA

Can’t get it to work?
Gotta make it work.
Vandals stole the handles?

Roll up your sleeves
All the hows
Whys
Songs of burdens share.
I text
“Medicines lit”
Fired mine
With the love of circles
Uncomfortable truths.

90 proof. Dip our arrows.
50 cent
Don’t buy much
Can’t get respect
Gotta take respect.
Counting my wealth
But I aint done yet.

Nanabjorn Wandering 24

- Nia’wen to 50 Cent, Bob Dylan, Kayne West, Mark Rifkin, Charles Eastman and the Indigenous holders of our knowledges.

Notes on Rifkin: responding experientially

As part of my explorations of the space of experiential research and policy making I am trying different experiential and creative ways to respond to academic text. These poems and the summation text before form my response to ""Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination" by Mark Rifkin.

I think that the language and subject of this book made it work well for a response in poem/rap. I listened to a lot of rap over this time and that multi-layered discussions of race, economics and hope also influenced my response to this text. This book gave words to so many things I could not yet name. He wove threads through time, traditional teachings and the thoughts of some very gifted thinkers from our Nations. I read it  "Accounting for Genocide: Canada’s Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People"(by Dean Neu and Richard Therrien) in mind - how these alignments to Hat* time are weapons against us as peoples - holding us in stasis.

We need to reclaim our temporal sovereignty and we do it by practicing - like we did in the Bear spaces - as we gather, make decisions together and solidify our relationality. We are connected peoples and we are temporally sovereign when we live our ways. When we find new/old ways where we live now! 

This experiential engagement with a text feels free - not a summary, but a wholeness. I am interested to learn from other if this is a useful way of fast info transfer or just pretentious bullshit. Let me know what you think. Aho Data Bear.

Addendum: Matt Christman of "Chappo Trap House" a great thinker of our time, who has been quiet for a year after complex health challenges has made his return to public with poetry

List of poems

*Hat in this context is a term for the settler ideas about governance, economics and time and so forth.

Coda: Deferences: responding to Rifkin

 As part of my explorations of the space of experiential research and policy making I trying different ways to respond to academic text. This poem is part of a series that is responding to ""Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination" by Mark Rifkin.

Coda: Deferences: responding to Rifkin

Missing collectivities
we mirror
skeleton economics* pg 182
Afraid.

Temporal tongues
demand audience
geography be DAMNED!
Gathering is survivance

Else
[worn out
detextured
circle deformed into cog]

So light medicines
learn silences

[shame
sha me
has me
ash me
a mesh
she ma
Not my letters
not my words
A "normal" without tommorrow]

So light medicines
and learn silences.

Data Bear Gathering 24

* pg 182

Prophetic temporality: Responding to Rifkin – Chp 3

 As part of my explorations of the space of experiential research and policy making I trying different ways to respond to academic text. This poem is part of a series that is responding to ""Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination" by Mark Rifkin.

Prophetic temporality: Responding to Rifkin – Chp 3 

Prophetic temporality
Persistent possibility
Sumac red
Don’t need chains
When roots work too.
S      I      L     E      N      C      E
Retexture possibilities
With hopes and continuities
Take up
Unfinished stories.
No longer
Economic migrants
In our own lands
“Rationalism”
Poisens failed.
Return immune
Regenerated
Gardens
Seeds
Visions
Witnessing
Lived knowing
Reconciled to now.

Nana Bjorn Gathering 24

Growing in the ditches of greed: Responding to Rifkin – Chp 3

As part of my explorations of the space of experiential research and policy making I trying different ways to respond to academic text. This poem is part of a series that is responding to ""Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination" by Mark Rifkin.

Growing in the ditches of greed: Responding to Rifkin – Chp 3

Duration Dense
Perversity
Existence
Persistence
Economic stasis* 

“Trust us”
Permanent record
-anomaly-
Failed “to develop”
Cause I aint no dry snitch

Silence
Ground deep
Emotional truth
Snotty nose
Strategy stories

Tongues
Reckon with possible paths
Mathematical necessity
Temporally sovereign
When we live OUR ways
Sense make
Together
Discern
Red paths
Faint
In days of pain.

"Disabled”
Stretched
By multiplicities
Cheeze grater world
Blooded –
No finger prints
Horizon dancer
Body a garden
Growing in the ditches of greed.

Data Bear Gathering 24 – as the skies darken for a storm that was intense and brought clouds only seen a few times before.

* pg 100 “Not yet doing something”