Tansi friends! I wrote an essay on an Indigenous power couple, Renee and Joel, & their gorgeous decolonial love story.
It was so much fun to interview & write about Renee (Rama) and Joel (Dakota/Ojibwe), who met at a moccasin-making workshop 10 years ago and have been together ever since. As the legend goes, Joel was so absorbed in Renee he didn’t even finish one moccasin.
…they believe holidays on the Gregorian calendar have become (and perhaps, always were) forced and a little fake: “time together”, marked on some colonially-prescribed schedule, as though love and care need to be haphazardly wedged into a capitalist framework of productivity to be prioritized. Indigenous folks in Canada have never needed an excuse to gather around our loved ones.
Here’s “The Secret of Decolonial Love“.
Erica Violet Lee 