This conversation might be new to you, but it's always been relevant and ongoing, and it's often a reaction of something your people have caused. It's often complicated by outsider intrusion and historical erasure.
By Terese Marie Mailhot, Contributor Essayist, Columnist, Indigenous Mother In the midst of the debate over Joseph Boyden's ethnic ambiguity, Konrad Yakabuski wrote a misguided Globe and Mail article in the author's defence originally titled "Joseph Boyden's lynching should set off alarm bells." I wasn't sure what was more surprising, Yakabuski's nearsightedness or that he seems willfully ignorant that First Nations' right to sovereign definitions on identity are an essential part to reconciliation. I'd like to address Yakabuski, and all the Yakabuskis out there, who should consider First Nations people, women especially, before they speak. I'd like to take Yakabuski out of his quaint, frolicking, necktie-wearing lifestyle, where he seems to pontificate over the aesthetics of downtown Toronto more than he ever contemplates missing and murdered Indigenous women, and ask him to step into the life of one of us. Did you know, Yakabuski, that my cousins were called "chugs" in high school? Never mind their parents' sobrieties or lifestyles; native kids were simply identified, without their consent, as "chugs." It's in reference to alcoholism and its assumed prevalence in our communities, as if white communities don't have a problem with substance abuse -- but never mind that. Did you know, Yakabuski, that I've been heckled and my First Nations friends have been sexually harassed when they take public transit in Vancouver? Men have asked me, "How much?" and it didn't matter if I was wearing a zipped-up hoodie, and it didn't matter when I was 12 years old, either. My Salish features are a detriment after a certain hour, on certain streets, in certain cities. I'm not telling you the worst. I will tell you about the taxi driver who sexually assaulted a friend going home. And that her inability to come forward with her story was directly related to her identity. RCMP have approached young native women assuming they're prostitutes, and those women are sometimes accused of solicitation when they're simply waiting for their rides. When I was assaulted, I reported the crime against me, and the police did not make eye contact; the police questioned me as if I were the culprit of my own victimization. This is widespread across North America. This conversation might be new to you, but it's always been relevant and ongoing. Ah, Yakabuski, I'd also like to mention on my first day at junior high in Agassiz, B.C., I sat in the front row as my new teacher explained to his class that they should "tolerate" First Nations students. He said it with a smile, as if he was doing us a service. Teachers put some of my smartest friends in special education courses because of their rez vernaculars. I dropped out, mostly because I was maltreated and highly intelligent. There's more, but I'm resisting the urge to frame this as a melodrama. First Nations women's lives can be brutal, heartbreaking, and short-lived, and I am just trying to give you a glimpse. I'm sure you're familiar with the statistics, but I'm trying to give you something more. The reason why I'm glossing over a few experiences First Nations women have been subjected to is to lead into the very reasonable idea that our criticism of Boyden is based in the knowledge that it's insensitive of a man to assume an identity we can't escape -- an identity we carry on our backs, in our blood and hearts, an identity we die for -- an identity I am so proud to carry. It should shame you, and anyone like you, to think our criticisms aren't based in our sovereignty, a thing that is necessary for true reconciliation. It's not based in any new liberal rhetoric. This conversation might be new to you, but it's always been relevant and ongoing, and it's often a reaction of something your people have caused. It's often complicated by outsider intrusion and historical erasure. You wrote a piece on First Nations identity with a preface that stated your kind typically takes, "... pride in shunning all labels, attachments, causes and collectivisms." You know most Indigenous cultures are built on collectivism, right? Journalists know this kind of thing, right? Your implicit bias makes your contribution to this conversation a large zilch. I shudder to think Globe and Mail thought your insights were a contribution. No, not all First Nations women experience the very horrendous things I named, but collectively we care that it's happening to us. You should take a seat, and listen before you speak on us again. Collectively, we need to defend ourselves from people like you, who degrade our identities, politics, theories and criticisms. Collectively, we have engaged in a meaningful discourse on Boyden, which is not a "lynching" but mostly a proposition for Boyden to come in and publicly engage in a dialogue that could positively benefit people who are searching to reclaim a history erased by our own government. Collectively, there are too many beautiful things to name about the generosity our communities have given to Boyden and several other authors who are inspired by native history. You should take a seat and listen before you speak on us again.
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BY EMILY PAULINE JOHNSON
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim, And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim. The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould, Glint through their mildews like large cups of gold. Among the wild rice in the still lagoon, In monotone the lizard shrills his tune. The wild goose, homing, seeks a sheltering, Where rushes grow, and oozing lichens cling. Late cranes with heavy wing, and lazy flight, Sail up the silence with the nearing night. And like a spirit, swathed in some soft veil, Steals twilight and its shadows o’er the swale. Hushed lie the sedges, and the vapours creep, Thick, grey and humid, while the marshes sleep. Source: She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 1997) BY EMILY PAULINE JOHNSON
An Etching A meadow brown; across the yonder edge A zigzag fence is ambling; here a wedge Of underbush has cleft its course in twain, Till where beyond it staggers up again; The long, grey rails stretch in a broken line Their ragged length of rough, split forest pine, And in their zigzag tottering have reeled In drunken efforts to enclose the field, Which carries on its breast, September born, A patch of rustling, yellow, Indian corn. Beyond its shrivelled tassels, perched upon The topmost rail, sits Joe, the settler’s son, A little semi-savage boy of nine. Now dozing in the warmth of Nature’s wine, His face the sun has tampered with, and wrought, By heated kisses, mischief, and has brought Some vagrant freckles, while from here and there A few wild locks of vagabond brown hair Escape the old straw hat the sun looks through, And blinks to meet his Irish eyes of blue. Barefooted, innocent of coat or vest, His grey checked shirt unbuttoned at his chest, Both hardy hands within their usual nest— His breeches pockets — so, he waits to rest His little fingers, somewhat tired and worn, That all day long were husking Indian corn. His drowsy lids snap at some trivial sound, With lazy yawns he slips towards the ground, Then with an idle whistle lifts his load And shambles home along the country road That stretches on fringed out with stumps and weeds, And finally unto the backwoods leads, Where forests wait with giant trunk and bough The axe of pioneer, the settler’s plough. Source: She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 1997) by Billy-Ray Belcourt
LOVE AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS 1. he told me he was into natives, but he couldn’t love the traumas hidden in my breathing. 2. how do you tell a ghost that It’s already dead, that it’s a body is a fairy tale you stopped reading a long time ago? 3. what happens when sounds start to work like bandages? 4. sometimes love feels like vanishing, like taking apart pieces of yourself and giving them to someone who can’t use them. 5. what happens when decolonial love becomes a story you tell yourself after he falls asleep? 6. i tell him: you breathe us. we are in you. look at the blood on your hands. 7. queer definition: knowing your body is both too much and not enough for this world. 8. i asked the earth to hold all of me and it said i can’t, that it was too tired to keep all of us in the world anymore. 9. sometimes not loving is the most radical thing you can do. TOWARDS A THEORY OF DECOLONIZATION 1. forget everything you’ve learned about love. 2. investment is the social practice whereby one risks losing it all to be part of something that feels like release. lose everything with me. 3. indian time is a form of time travel. a poetics of lateness. 4. i never liked goodbyes, but some of us aren’t here to stay. 5. superstition is a mode of being in the world that keeps ghosts like me in the living room. 6. the afterlife is the after party: a choreography of mangled bodies. 7. i made a poem out of dirt and ate it. Billy-Ray Belcourt, from This Wound is a World, Frontenac House Poetry, 2017. by Billy-Ray Belcourt
here, no one is birthed only pieced together. i tire myself out pretending to have a body. everyone worships feelings they don’t have names for but no one is talking about it. love is a burning house we built from scratch. love keeps us busy while the smoke clears. history lays itself bare at the side of the road but no one is looking. history screams into the night but it sounds too much like the wind. cree girls gather in the bush and wait for the future. in the meantime they fall in love with the trees and hear everything. in the 1950s my not-yet mooshum ran away from a residential school in joussard, alberta. as an adult he kept coming back despite knowing heaven is nowhere near here GOD MUST BE AN INDIAN
god must be an indian, he said. for so many of you speak like the sky. maybe I am a figure of speech. maybe my body is an inside joke that we’re all in on. now is the time for metaphor. give me a gender, but only if it is something like a candlelight vigil. remember: grief is a way of making claim to the world. my kookum asked: is there something indian about crying? tonight, i will take my former lovers in my arms and convince them that i am not a graveyard. in the dark, none of us have names and no one is sacred. god must be an indian, he said. this is not a love poem. — by Billy-Ray Belcourt, from This Wound is a World, published by Frontenac House Poetry. by Billy-Ray Belcourt
the creator is trans and the earth is a psychology experiment to determine how quickly we mistake a body for anything but a crime scene the product of older crime scenes. there is a heaven and it is a place called gay. gay as in let’s hold up a world together. gay as in happy to make something out of nothing and call it love or anything that resembles a time in which you don’t have to be those shitty versions of yourself to become who you are now. one day i will open up my body to free all of the people i’ve caged inside me. i want to visit every tim horton’s in northern alberta so that homophobes can tell me sad things like i love you your hair looks nice you have nice cheekbones until someone kills me and then the creator will write my eulogy with phrases like freedom is the length of a good rim job and the most relatable thing about him was how often he cried watching wedding videos on youtube. homonationalism, aimirite? my grandma thought there was a portal to the other side in her basement but it was all of the women she had ever met praying in a circle that she would give birth to a world without men only women made from other women’s heartbreak. by Billy-Ray Belcourt
YES, I am weird looking. Yes, it does make me a better writer. But what if despite being weird looking and a good writer because of it, I never write a novel? I want desperately to write a novel so as to realize my full artistic potential. Not only am I a weird-looking writer, I am also a writer who is queer and NDN. What could be queerer and more NDN right now than the act of writing a novel? We are all bearers of the brutal inheritance of history and this is being revealed to us with each passing month; to me, the novel is the most hospitable form to tell a story about how despite my ability to diagnose the horror behind what animates the world, it still feels awful to exist. I could write an unduly long novel about the burden of being a person in Canada. I could write a novel about how taxing it is to talk to white people who are afraid to say the wrong thing to me. Even better, I could write a novel, in vignettes, about all the outlandish things white people say to me when they are trying not to say the wrong thing to me. I tell everyone who will listen about the experimental novel I want to write. I tell them it will pressurize form and narrative and ask the reader to do a lot of work; I want to write a novel that will not disappear the labor that goes into writing it. I tell them the novel will register the blood and sweat and tears of writing at the level of typography. I hate the idea of writing a novel teeming with dialogue and description, I confess to everyone repeatedly. I will not shut up about how I want to write a novel about what it is to write novels in this day and age, which means that I want to write a novel that interrogates ideas and idea-making. The novel will be like a child to me and thus I will be like its mother. I want to be a mother terribly, to give birth to words and to treat them all equally on the page. My friends say encouraging things to me:
When I tell strangers or acquaintances about the novel that I have not yet given birth to, they say things like:
I am upset with my friends who do not have the guts to tell me that no one gives a fuck about the novel anymore. Why do they withhold from me the cultural belief that novels are like damp firewood, untenable no matter how much gasoline you throw onto them? Social media killed print journalism, so why not the novel too? Why do I feel more like an artist and less like a writer when I tell people I am working on a novel? I am writing from my deluxe dorm in the Cassiar Residence at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. I was invited here to take part in a residency that coincides with an Indigenous Art Intensive. When I arrived on the weekend, I was picked up from the airport by a fellow poet and, predictably, he asked about what I was working on (I asked this question myself at least a dozen times in the subsequent week). ME, NOT-YET A NOVELIST: (In a coy tone) I think I am writing a novel, but that is still to be determined! I was up all night yesterday turning over an idea that came to me out of the blue. HIM, NOT A NOVELIST: (laughter) That’s why I don’t write novels—they keep you up at night! Sure I have read novels and thought, I could do this too! What are you writing about? ME, NOT-YET A NOVELIST: I want to write a novel that expands on what “the NDN novel” can be and do. No one is really writing novels that take the novel into uncharted waters. There’s nothing wrong per se with the NDN novel as it is, but there seems to me to be an opportunity to have the form articulate what language cannot, especially when that language is not our ancestral tongue. HIM, NOT A NOVELIST: That sounds to me like a fair assessment. Whenever I try to write a novel it always descends into a meta exercise (laughter). ME, NOT-YET A NOVELIST Right. I guess what I am trying to say is that I want to write the first-ever postmodern NDN novel in Canada. The Okanagan is subliminal and this does not change because I am not yet writing a novel. I am such an unfree person, will writing a novel make me freer? There is so much an NDN has to say to properly render the diminished life he lives—will a novel afford me enough space to do this? What if I wrote a novel and I still did not like what I saw in the mirror? Worse, what if I wrote a novel and it did not make NDNs happier or want to live fuller lives? If I don’t write a novel, no one will know how unhappy I am. .BY BILLY-RAY BELCOURT
After Saidiya Hartman Everyone’s uncle thinks that they are the world’s most handsome NDN, and no one says otherwise. Rez dogs roam about without having to perform emotional labour for humans. They eat where they are welcomed, which is everywhere. Most who live here do not know that they are in the ruins of a sick experiment that failed. Teens blaze to feel the euphoria of being outside of memory. We all bathe in the sociality of the hangover. It is not that no one has time for themselves, it is that they are always playing cards or talking about Connor McDavid or carpooling to bingo or babysitting their brothers’ kids. We all owe something to someone, so we congregate under the pretense of debt, and this is always-already. We all joke about falling in love with our cousins, but we are all perpetually falling in love with our cousins in a platonic way, because we grew up together and no one was alienated by the tyranny of the couple form. Vehicles pass through in droves, but no one looks, so we drown together in the freedom of utter anonymity. BY BILLY-RAY BELCOURT
Loneliness is a kind of dysphoria with the world. Loneliness finds me drunk in an old Billy-Ray Belcourt poem. What is important is that wherever I am my brother is perched on my cheekbones. We are 23 and already too old for our own good. Last night felt like our last night. They always do. That is what makes night nightly in our amnestic village of two fugitives. In a car without headlights, the night is a lukewarm mouth to sing into. We, my brother and I, are wedged between personhood and all that is earthly. Our speech loop-de-loops and zigzags and grows wings but is not an insect. (Our speech is headless). The Ministry of Historical Ignorance turned our ontological pangs into a bed of nails. The Ministry brings us to our knees. We lick the walls dirty in a house of spoiled subjectivity. Silly us. We thought a fever was light breaking apart inside our skulls. |
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