Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
Finding hundreds of children’s bodies at the Kamloops residential school ground was a ghastly piece of news to get yesterday.
There are many burial places like it. More horror.
I’m just sad about it. Indigenous people on twitter have asked white people to just be still for a while and not make it about them.
Get the babies home. That’s all I can say.
Well, another Naqba – the anniversary of the day the newly hatched Israelis started booting the Palestinians off their land – has arrived. Keith and I went to the demo but we’re both pretty easy to overwhelm thanks to the pandemic so we didn’t hang around longer than it took to watch the parade go by, but there were at least 2500 people there and there were literally hundreds of flags and signs, it was super colourful and people put a lot of effort into the signs. Everyone was masked, it was kind of a condition of showing up.
We parked at Edmonds and Skytrained in, and then sprinted home again – we left when the cops started flashing lights at the end of the column, although everything I’ve read in the news indicates it stayed peaceful. You can understand how the local cops would be a bit sensitive at the moment with bodies dropping left and down the street from here.
Anyway, what the Israelis are doing is war crimes and Hamas is trying to mount a defence that is not really working. I don’t want Canada to be supporting Israel in committing genocidal acts over several generations as outlined in David Ben-Gurion’s fucking diary and I understand the nutgrinder Trudeau’s got himself in on the subject and candidly I don’t care. Not in my name.
More Indigenous erasure, reporting by the incomparable Niigaan Sinclair.
From FirstPeoplesLaw.com.
It’s capitalism in a pink bow, but it means something to some people.
Read, imbibe, and he’s got a smoking hot POEM about Settler Saturday as well. I acknowledge it, I do.
But if I wrote on my blog every thought I have about Indigenous life, peoples, lands and communities I’d never shut up, and it would STILL be one ww’s uninformed saviourite opinion so I’ll stand behind M´étis writers like him. Also, he lives in MST country. kind of a neighbour….
Support her Patreon.
Follow her on twitter @wordglass.
Trenchant, funny, disabled and salty af. I have given her a tiny amount of money in the past; anything you can spare will keep her writing and better able to help support her family, some of whom are also disabled.
Reading or spending?
Reading (put ’em on hold at the library if you’re broke, buy ’em second hand, buy ’em new):
Birdie
In Search of April Raintree
Shadows Cast By Stars
Sanaaq
Son of a Trickster
The Marrow Thieves
Spending:
Check out Indigenous owned galleries and local Indigenous artists or check out the Indigenous beaders on twitter, they’re amazing….!
May I introduce you to the far flung collective Salmon Nation?
Give if you feel moved.
Is it time to re-read the recommendations of the Reconciliation Report? It’s a time commitment, but so is reconciliation.
For your interest and so that you can enjoy one of the most engaging and intelligent voices on #NativeTwitter #IndigenousTwitter, here’s Dr. Zoe Todd with a course she designed.
Indigenous Charity of the week: Toronto Council Fire
So for 2021, this blog is going to change up a bit. There will be at least one drafted post that goes live every day. (I’ve started pre-posting awready.) The hope is that I will put together useful or historical facts or just … information that’s easy to find arranged by subject PLUS post a song every day.
Now this involves many different KINDS of posts; some will be PDF’s, some MP3s, some videos, but there will be a song a day. I thought about posting it to youtube, but…. it’s a toxic waste dump that I have virtually no control over. And yes, some of the song posts will be from previous posts, but there will be a particular category: Song a Day 2021
And then, if I have the energy, I’ll write about laundry and cooking and grandson goo and boring domestic shit and progress on my writing projects — that none care about but me.
The point is that I am going to highlight my lifetime of achievement because I’m tired of always thinking to myself that I haven’t accomplished anything in my life. Taken all together, why yes I have. I was autistic and had ADD and mental health issues the whole time, too.
I’m considering password protecting my content or at least some of it, and I’m considering moving the blog to a VPS, after non-definitive discussion with Jeff.
I’m also thinking about money and immortality, a lot, but it’s nothing bad. I just want to eat steak for a thousand years while I drink beer and write nasty shit about misogynist slurs like Jordan Peterson.
By the way mOm the cat poets are Lu You and Liu Zhongyin
EDIT. This was brought on by thoughts of geobonding – the way a language spoken on a land for a long time in some ways becomes a land. I am envious of those who speak a language which has been on the land for a long time, because it has depths of richness and resonates in ways that English, the language that records its colonial history, cannot. There are about 35 at-risk languages in BC alone, and the death of a language is part of the extinction that is genocide.
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It is your land – or you belong to it, after a while the distinction blurs – because every syllable of your language matches in magic the staccato calls of birds, the falls of rock, the crashing ocean, the dear familiar taste of this corm or that other, your particular delicacy. Only those friendly voices, who speak as you speak, and understand as you do, can share those nuances with you. This is what your language is. Each time you kill a language, my dear human, you are killing a small but measurable way to look at the world. Do not be an idiot! If a people live on a land for 50 years they forget the poor children (in capitalist terms, and even then it’s charitable) they stole it from. If they live on it ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand years, ah, then strange things start to happen.
They have sung there for 30,000 years. Their land has felt the resonance of their ir/reverant voices for 30,000 years,. You say it isn’t theirs. Of course it is. They’ve been putting their people in the ground, or elsewhere, for that long; birthed and suffered great wounds and triumphed and been wrong to the point of extinction on that land, and then been kicked off of most of it or transposed entire.
Then they experienced that moment, which you are not allowed to co-opt, you with your fucking lawyers, god damn them all and I say that as an atheist so you hell-coupled miscreants will attend me, when you, with all of your people, have been ground up in the Malthusian sequelae of geopolitics, and weather, and religion, and war, and disease, and alcohol or opium or speed, and all of you are thrown into history like pretty stones into a rock polisher. When you come out, you are bright and shiny and new, for the house organs of capitalism likewise wear you down, and tell you that if you do not look like the rest of the world (however defined, but since humans are racially all one big playground, it’s really the same everywhere – the local rich) you will be Othered until you have the sense to kill yourself or otherwise die young from generations of trauma.
But. Life’s not fair. Your enemies (demonstrably trying to kill you = enemies, pull on your beard as you may) co-opt everything about your people that they think is cool (an ever shrinking target as your blessed elders die), conflate it with sex and race and linguistic ability in a new language, and with skill and speed and a keen eye for the main chance, mock and countersue and vilify and beat and rape and jail and drug and abuse the living shit out of you if you even dare to whimper in the courts, or in any way upend the folkways of racism, Jim Crow and apartheid and the hell-coupled residential schools, so you have to get creative about how to keep fighting, but in the meantime everything you love about your culture you must keep alive (and even some shit you hate, but hey, tradition.) There is no one else.
So please be poor and mount court challenges to systemic discrimination against white people, while being among the last three hundred people who speak English, on Earth, while living in Nigeria with no clean water, before you pour verbal abuse on people who are in exactly the same situation, now, with just.the.names.changed. Your inability to understand with any human feeling or compassion the responsibility placed on the holders of a language in jeopardy transforms you into an enemy, always, until you free your mind. For even if I grant that you have the right to the land, shelter on this challenging planet (which no uncoerced indigenous person ever shall), by killing a language you have committed a crime against humanity, and of spreading the blame and shame of it across an entire country, every colonial government must stand accused.
