Then you touch me and I don’t know what to do with my arms. I held my chest too tightly to your incantations and they have begun to disintegrate into syllables. It must be this room. At home, the screaming down the street is becoming constant. Here, the screaming is trapped in my throat. We erupt as grains, boiling over, searching for an easy way out of our own skins. I crack and flood inward and you and manoominitigweyaa are my only witness. What do you want? I want to be freed from defense, ingestible.

There is always someone expecting us to talk about death. I want you to tell me,
“if you can’t think or talk about death anymore:
for years. or just for tonight, I understand”. I cannot talk about death while your fingers taste like wild rice and your breath turns to sunlight in my belly. I cannot be disappearing if I insist upon a celebration in the midst of upheaval. I cannot be extinct if I refuse to let the lake settle. What do you want? I want to spend hours with your heat, talking about absolutely nothing of consequence. I want a moment to mourn the nutrients spilled, to accept this trauma as our kin, and then I want to move on. I want to live in a world where being a native woman is not synonymous with heartache and things past, but with happiness & things to come. I want to lay down and press my cheek against your soil until I can’t remember belonging to any country before or after your name. What do you want?

As part of the Graphic History Collective’s Remember, Resist, Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project, I wrote the following essay on dancing, memory, and resistance to accompany artwork by Gitxsan author, journalist, and artist Angela Sterritt. Together, our work is presented in Poster #5: The Dance of Decolonial Love.

Twelve Thousand Moons

When I am old, I will tell you I remember dancing. I remember morning ceremonies at the Squamish, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Tsleil-Waututh waterfronts, shutting down malls in amiskwaciwâskahikan, organizing all night in Iqaluit, and the Chief setting up camp by that funny little concrete flame.

I will tell you about the day we danced in front of the old rail station in North Battleford, our drums shaking the spikes from the tracks and eventually shutting down the courtroom inside. When we sang those love songs louder after the cops told us to settle down so the trial could continue, it was mourning and celebration all in one. That’s what most of us did those early days: counting our time in breaths, breathlessness, and how many round dance songs before we hit the ground.

I will tell you I remember every time they said our starvation was natural and our dispossession was progress. Every time they said our freedom was impossible, and how this made us want it even more. I remember how upset they were when we started growing tobacco and vegetables in the plots of wasteland they had reserved for gas stations.

When I am old, I will tell you I remember refusal. I remember walking around what used to be the financial district in Dish with One Spoon and re-imagining it as our own, once more, feet sore from marching but unwilling to give in to sleep. I remember the days our people were locked up for fighting pipelines, for graffiti, for sex, for smudging, for living. I remember the night we broke them out and brought them all home.

When I am old, I will tell you I remember learning to twist copper wire snares from big, rough hands that didn’t need hide mitts in the bush but wore them anyway, just to show off that someone cared enough to keep those hands warm. I remember catching my first fish, taught exactly how to knock a pike on the head so it didn’t suffer long; this is how we cherished kindnesses in a world that afforded few.

I remember the Red River and Red Rising Rebellions. I remember the earrings my sister made me with beads the color of northern lights to wear to that extravagant party with Nēhiyaw philosophers, Dene physicists, and Anishinaabe poets after the first time a Métis went into outer space. We danced then, too, and I remember waking up by the fire after a bit too much strawberry champagne, surrounded by a circle of friends telling their re-creation stories with shadow figures on the wall.

When I am old, I will tell you I remember learning about freedom beyond anthems and passports. And how we never went back once we knew the kind of love bound only by shorelines, prairie skies, and forest floors.

The dream of these twelve moons, just like the twelve thousand before and after, is freedom. And one last thing, before I forget, remember: our memories contain every future, every sunrise, you will ever need.

 

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Originally published here as part of the Graphic History Collective’s Remember Redraw Resist project. Posters are free to download for personal, educational, and activist use. See how you can use and support these posters. If you want to exhibit or publish the posters please see these guidelines.

“There have always been divergent stories of “home” in Canada. Mythic, pluralistic Glowing Hearts, on one hand, oppressive Home on Native land, on the other.

In the former, symbols dominate: empty wigwams and tipis because they don’t speak back to paternalism; sacred stories removed from their keepers to prevent carrying the memories of our worlds into the future; and Indigenous peoples themselves as tokens because tokens offer consent.”

Oceti Sakowin Camp along the Cannonball River – August 2016 (photo by me)

“The soil, the fire and the ashes are much deeper than symbols — they are teachings, attachments, memories and resurgence.

There is a truth about many Indigenous homes, inaccessible to Canadians despite the poking and prodding. The smouldering remains, that broken down car in the front lawn, toys scattered across the road: each are manifestations of our love in disarray. They are symbols of Indigenous resourcefulness, testaments to endurance against the odds and in some cases, pride.”

Read the whole article here: The Wigwam Conspiracy 

Hayden King & I wrote this piece for CBC Canada 2017.

I wrote a feature for the fabulous GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine‘s issue 7: Love, titled In Defense of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide:

“…for those of us in the wastelands – for those of us who are the wastelands – caring for each other is refusing a definition of worthiness that will never include us.”

“To provide care in the wastelands is about gathering enough love to turn devastation into mourning and then, maybe, turn that mourning into hope…”

Read the whole piece here: gutsmagazine.ca/wastelands

Accompanying illustration by the brilliant artist-writer-photographer and fellow wastelander, Fatin Chowdhury (http://www.fatinchowdhury.ca/). Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @Fatinic.

I wrote a feature for the November 2016 issue of Red Rising Magazine, a publication run by and for Indigenous people, based in Winnipeg.

On land and language:

“Our languages and lands were made for love. We have wide skies, northern lights, and thousands of chokecherry bushes to duck behind. I know it’s taboo, but if you tell me you’ve never fallen for someone because of the passionate way they speak in the dark heat of a sweat lodge ceremony, you’re not going to the right lodges.”

On desire and vulnerability:

“As Indigenous people in colonial worlds, our vulnerability is non-consensually consumed and it is rarely ours to own. Daring to claim love and desire for Indigenous bodies in the face of ongoing colonialism is a liberatory act of vulnerability. Allowing love to flow beyond the edges of our skin (in the form of touch), our lips (in the form of language), and our eyes (in the form of tears) is necessary and radical in a world where we’re taught to believe those borders are impassable. So when we love each other, it is potent enough to heal the trauma and chase away the violence. So when we love it is wider than the prairies. So when we love, the bellies of our ancestors are filled with laughter and good food. When we love each other, pipelines shut down and borders open and logging machines jam.”

Read the full piece and support Red Rising Magazine here.

“The work that we will continue to do will be relentless, and will hopefully inspire a new generation of Indigenous artists, thinkers, writers, and leaders in the community. Welcome to Red Rising. The time for our stories to be told is now!” – Red Rising Magazine Collective