Where my Privalage got too?

I don't want to write this post.  It is too raw still.  Even thought some of it happened a long time ago.  As I was getting ready to write, it pulled out the Winnepeg Boyz. and rather that my usual page I came to a differnt one and a new song "So Far" which says it so eloquently "life ain't fair.  hey we all been there. I don't care if you a thug or gansta or a square.  a crooked system is a broken society."

This week was report cards and it brings up a lot for me as I have to go in and defend my parenting.  That's how it feels really.  I am laying a lot of other stuff on those interactions, years of bad school experiences myself, years of talks about S and calls from the social workers about if we need money for stuff, that my kid is dirty..... but it is deeper now.  Now I worry about having my children taken away from me.  I know that is some deep neurosis on my part, but it is also blood memory.  This is my secret fear.

I can hardly write this, this is my deep shame, but a few years ago, this week in fact, we got a letter... due to a stolen credit card number and a bill that didn't get moved over to the new card number we missed paying the bill for two months, this lead to a visit by the insurance company who pulled our house insurance.  This lead to a very hard year trying to understand what happened and how we could fix it.  A lot of fear for me.  Deep anxiety. 

http://www.creenisgaa.com/

This expereince broke something in me permamently.  I thought my education, high income level, whiteness, hetness, "normalness" should have protected me.  It did not.  I cannot trust institutions the same way anymore.  I was lucky I realize, compared to a lot of people.  Poor me, not having to deal with that reality until I was almost fourty.

I am tired after having to defend myself and my parenting for years.  We first took S to a phyciatrist when she was three.  It was clear she was not right.  The phyciatrist told us that she was like that because Joel had depression and I had anxiety.  We were bad parents! (the same Dr later wrote a letter that this obviously bright child was clearly suffering from Anxiety.)  All the teachers that told us she did not like school cause we were not postive enought or supporting her enought.  We were told we were just imagining her challenges. 

As I have learned more about indigenous history, my family history, all those people trying to work with the government in good faith to have those petitions go missing.  To have efforts to organize government be seen as terrorism.  To have the church and land agent working to bring people in and settling them on your land.  To fight in the courts for years to get land back and to get nothing.  To be dehumanized, to have your culture raped.   Reading things like "Half Breed" by Maria Campbell about how the land agent controlled peoples lives, cut women off from their property and rights and took away the children.  I am still privalaged but it is something I am less willing to sink into.  It doesn't give me the comfort it used to.

I always dress for those school interviews.  It is interesting how the suit pulls rank.  I could be a horrible person, but I get treated better when I wear it.  This time with my suit I wore my muklucks.  I spent so long trying to be normal hoping that would keep me safe, hoping that it would keep me under the radar, but it doesn't work, so I am working on being less afraid.  I am working on understanding my truth and enjoying the voices of those who are sharing their truth.  So go listen to Mary Lambert now you know my secret too.

Finding a middle path - the story of the jingle dress

 I wish there were more Elders I could access, but geography and circumstances sometimes limit me.  I really appreciate those Elders and others who are sharing their voices through books and blogs and youtube.  The past few nights we have been watching Making Regalia by Juaquin Lonelodge on youtube.  

After going to powwow last year Runa wanted a jingle dress and I wanted to learn more about how to do this.  Some sources were very stern on the proper way of doing this and making sure that this was something done with great reverance and ceremony.  I was surprised watching the videos by Mr Lonelodge how casual he was.  I also really like that he is making things for someone specific and not just as examples for the show.  It struck me that this is really the perfect moment of tension between "traditional" indiginaity and the modern lives of indians and metis.

 

I was waiting to learn the "right way" to do this.  I wanted some kind of unchanging indian 10 commandments brought back from on high.  I am an economist and I love to find the right way, the most efficient way.  That is very pleasing to me.  In practice this experience of thinking about the dress helped me forge a sort of middle path that keeps the mindfulness in our activities - if they are indigneous activities or not, but also balances that with the everyday realities.  Before we started S's moon time dress we did a smudge and spent some time together quietly to think about what we were going to do and why, but as we sew I am watching tv.

 

I like this youtube series and reccomend it if you are looking to take up beading or regalia making.  While the presenter is a little slow in parts to my taste,  he is very thourough about each step and he clearly explain why.  I like how he constrasts traditional techniques with modern ones (with appologies to his grandma - R loved that) and I appreciate his perspective on taking your time and remembering that these items can be passed on so that it is worth putting in good work now.  The youtube channel this show is on also has some other things that look interesting in particular one around drum making.  Don't be afraid to make stuff and make mistakes.

Negotiating Difference Through a Youtube lens

 Last night I tried to engage the girls by retelling one of the other stories the Elders shared.  I asked them what they thought it meant.  Runa said she thought it meant you should not trust people with poisen bread.  Seems like a fair life lesson if a less nueanced view than the story seems to suggest.

 

R was given a book about paralympians at school and she makes us read it often.  I have a phobia about amputations and try to be cool about it, but it really made a mark on her.  The last two nights she made us look up some of the sports on Youtube and watch people playing them and while I have my hangups, she has a world where injury is not the end of movement and difference is a part of live.  That is way healthier that my hang ups.

I feel this role to not translate my predjudices onward very strongly sometimes.  In some things I am pretty aware of my predjudices and can be active about this process but in others....and how many others?  I really value that part of having children and their push back on how I see the world.

Activity Wednesday - The Rought Faced Girl

Last weekend we finished our follow up to the Rought Faced Girl story.  I think this was a great family activity as it involved negotiation of working styles and ideas for the story.  It was hard at first for the girls not to just tell the disney follow up story and pushing them outside of that narrative was good.

I appreciated that we got to think about the original story some more and to talk about what the characters would do next based on what we already knew of them.  It gave us an opportunity to compare and discuss our different drawing styles and abilities.  Beside is my tipi heavily influenced by the original drawings in the story which I really liked.  R enjoyed drawing the nauty sisters.

S drew the inside of the tipi "sky palace" and was concerned as she drew a very modern interior with a dishwasher and tv.  That led to a good talk about how indians aren't only in the past.

I would reccomend this activity.  Take a book your family likes and make the follow up.  We have now had the pleasure of reading this new story together and R was very proud that we made a book together.  I also like that we have a new piece of family lore that we can enjoy over the years.

Stories come together

I went to the Kumik today for the teaching and to meet with the Elders.  The teaching was on the story of the Rough Faced Girl.  I like the version today even better than the one we read and I reviewed here.  In the story today it is the sister of the invisible man that brings the younger sister back to her unscarred form.  I like the caring of the sister more than the salvation of the invisible man.  It speaks to the power of woman and does not put Rought Faced Girl in an unequal power relationship with invisible man as the other story could.  I geuss I need to ponder rought faced girl some more over the next days.

 

I appreciated the Elder who took the time to point out the details in the story and to help us learn to interpret and listen.  Even that part of story telling has been very comprimised.  They shared some other stories that require more thinking before I write here.

 

The girls and I wrote a follow up story to Rought Faced Girl where the jealous sisters use majic to transform the Rought Faced girl into a frog so that she will miss her wedding to invisible man.  The sister of invisible man helps to turn Rought Faced Girld back and turns the bad sisters to stone.  It was hard to get them out of the disney interpretation of the follow up story.  I think it was a good exercise for us to work together and interpret a new story.  I will put up some of the pages soon.  We all did drawings for the book.

 

I was also very blessed to have time to sit with the Elders today.  I worry that I talk too much most of the time, but I especially felt like I should have listened more today.  Finding wise ears seems so rare.  Why do I talk so much?  I appreciated their thoughtful questions and insights.  There is a lot to work through in their words and I will think on them for a long time to come.  It is also good to just share about the challenges of reclaiming a culture and finding a good path through life.  I think a lot of my work to come will be around how to help S navigate the next couple of years and how to not get complacent about her teachings in this area.  I need to sit with her regularly and work through the book I created for her.  I have started creating her dresses for her first moon time and we even did a smudge and prayer before starting - S stood on her head most of the time.

 

While it sometimes feels like only a little gets through to her as she hangs upside down while we do circle time or read, that other day she was given the job to learn something new on her day off school and she watched a video of a guy that did not like cats and thought they should all be neutered.  It really upset her, but she turned to me a couple of times during the evening and asked "How can this guy be an Elder?  He is not very thoughtful."  It is good to see those little glimpses that things get through and she is applying the teachings.

 

While I can get caught in all the things that are wrong in my life, those moments, the teachings and the stories that other share are so important in maintaining a healthy place for myself.  They are reminders to find the right balance between pushing myself when I need it and nurturing myself when that it what is best.  There is a lot that is good in my life and our daily dinner practice of sharing these moments has been really important in getting into a mindset of gratitude.  It is the same with the laying down of tobbacco in the morning and taking that moment to remember who we are connected to and to draw those voices around us as we move through out day.

 

We were reminded that tonight is full moon and that we should put out a plate for Grandmother moon.  What are you greatful for today?

The Post On Posts

After S was born I took a job working on "Canada's Action Plan Against Racism" because I wanted my work to be something meaningful so that I could explain to my little person why I left every morning.  I really enjoyed the intellectual challenge of this file as we tried to work through how to report and measure racism. 

During this time I read a lot and a trio of novels expressed the optimism of that period for me.

 

Nation by Terry Pratchett which explores the relationship between an island boy and a victorian girl both cut off from the worlds they knew as they both realize what they may have held as truths were not as clear cut as they thought.

Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead where a nomiclature specialist is brought in to rename a town and must struggle between it's past as a haven for free slaves or it's "future" as the next technology city.  While the main character's inability to see himself almost leads to his death.

 

 

Slave to Sensation (Psy-Changelings, Book 1) (Psy/Changeling) Nalini Singh In this series she explores a world made up of humans totally focused on their minds and shape shifters who are the embodied "other" with "animal" passions.  She uses this construct as a means to explore multiculturalism and the negotiation of difference.

 

These novels impressed me with their attempt to outline a post multi-cultural world that moved on to the negotiation of other kinds of differences.  I found these narratives fascinating as we tried to take intersectionality into account as we did policy and reported on progress.

 

Yesterday I read bell hooks' essay "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance", where she speaks to the comoditization of "otherness", where we consume other cultures to provide spice to our unrelenting white culture and that this consumption allows people to feel that they have moved beyond race (aren't racist) while not actually mutually and meaningfully engaging the other.  This also reminded me of some of the work I have read on the magic black person where the black character is only there to provide support to the white character and allow the white person to fufill themselves.

 

In both these cases the "other" is comoditized into something safely and easily consumed by the white viewer and may even be a nostalgia for the "pure" representation of the "other" prior to colonialization.  She notes that while this may allow the voice of the non-white "other" to be consumed by a larger audience overall it also denies voice to a specific person(s).  "Booty" was brought back by a white girl and white rappers bring the grit to us.  We can have the black culture without giving anything back into it or actually enaging with it.  bell hooks suggests that until we move beyond the comodification of the "other"  we cannot have healthy diologue as a society.  We need to get to post - comoditization.

 

It struck me that each of these three books could be easily read within this context rather than/or as well as being post-multicultural, in that they could be seen as post-comoditization allegories as well.  Is it this post -comoditization that makes these works feel post multicultural?  Which one comes first?  In Nation, there is literally no market as there is almost no on left alive.  In Apex Hides the Hurt, comoditization is so open and ludicrous that it a parody of itself and no longer a real thing.  In the Nalini Singh books there is a contrast between the shape shifters who are focused on family and protection of a way of life (wild and free from environmental degredation) where there is enagement in the market with the aims of supporting these outcomes vs the humans who create their children in labs and will quite literally sacrifice these children for the greater good or market outcomes.

 

This narrative struck me as also applying to the larger question of claiming indigenaity.  Indian are definitally a consumable "other" and have been since contact (savage dark beauty, indian princess, strong warrior).  What is our role to support healthy mutual exchange with the dominant group and how do we reclaim power when the interaction are clearly comoditization?  How do we stop them?  And more personally, where in my life am I "consuming the other"?   

 

 

The Year of Reclaiming

I have spent the last year learning to be/think/see from a Metis viewpoint.  The last piece of my puzzle were the Elders I met when I went to the Kumik.  Some government departments bring in Elders and have a special place where aboriginal employees can come together and speak to someone/smudge.  The Elders I met listened to my whole story.  Just saying it all out loud was pretty powerful .  For all the good and the bad, it is my story. 

I got the distinct sense that my story was not a new one and rather than focusing on my question about whether I could call myself Metis, they asked me questions about how I was coping in life overall given the stresses with Joel being sick and S being challenging to manage at times.  Their response was far more powerful than any words would have been.  I was as I was and there was not a lot to talk about there.

They answered my other specific questions about how to manage those older people in our lives who are being problematic without being rude to elders.  They said "sometimes you need to live in different teepees."  I asked about my feeling that I should be doing more to fufill my potential and they focused me back to what I was dealing with at home.  Those pressures need to be the focus for me now.

From that meeting I took the courage to "come out".  We went to our first Pow Wow.  We started doing circle times every week and putting down tobbacco every morning.  I tried to talk and read more to my children about their heritage.  I started learning Cree.  I learned to bead.  I have been reading a lot.  Thinking deeply.  We lost our cats and used the teachings of the ancestors to work through that with our girls.  We wrote their names into the middle of our circle with the other departed ancestors.  That was helpful to the girls to have that ceremony.  Every circle time we remember them and the others that have passed.  They are still in our lives.

I am going back tommorrow to meet with those Elders again.  That meeting is what really go me started with this blog, thinking about how much had changed over the past year, how much I have learnt and how much some focused listening by strangers opened a space for me to be brave enought to call myself truly... I am Metis (Ojibway).  I claim that.  I still need to learn so much about what that means, but that is the journey of life and I am trying not to rush that part of it.   Don't be afraid to reclaim your truth.