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.