I have a medical condition called blepharospasm.

In my body, this manifests as a muscle twitch in my eyebrow that gets worse when I’m anxious or under stress. The twitching turns into headaches and irritation that make it difficult for me to focus while reading or writing.

My eye twitch developed over the past year, surely unrelated to the misadventures of being an urban Indigenous woman on the Canadian prairies, travelling to Paris for an international climate conference, and attempting to challenge the racist structures of academic philosophy.

Botox is the only treatment available for blepharospasm (no, my face is not expressionless and yes, I can still raise my eyebrows), but it is not a permanent solution. So every few months, I go into a clinic that specializes in cosmetic surgery and injectables for treatment. In my experience, the clinic serves a clientele of apparently wealthy, sometimes older, almost entirely white women.

As I hit my mid-twenties and note the already substantially different ways that academic men/all men interact with me as I get older, I should make it clear I’m not here to shame anyone who uses injectables or surgery for cosmetic reasons. Peoples bodies are their own, full stop. Furthermore, the chance to conform to certain expectations of femininity is crucial for avoiding increased violence for many people, something which ought to be recognized as medically necessary.

Still, the world of cosmetic surgery is a space where whiteness is upheld as the standard for women’s health and beauty (with the two often conflated), accessible only by the relatively wealthy.

An example of the type of posters I get to read while waiting for the doctor. Those “vaginal rejuvenation” posters especially amplify my twitchiness.

And so my colonial-trauma-eye-twitch brought me deeper into the wacky world of white femininity and cosmetic surgery.

The Procedure

It costs about $550 for my injections every 3-4 months, which is covered under the Saskatchewan health plan’s exception drug status. Even though the treatment is medically necessary, I’ve had trouble accessing the proper information and paperwork to get timely reimbursement, and I’ve missed treatments as a result because I couldn’t pay out of pocket.

In the office, the workers are kind, but I can’t help but fear that I will receive worse treatment because I’m a poor visibly Native woman asking for health care in a space not meant for me. I consciously dress as well as I can for my appointments in an attempt to lessen the impacts of racism on the health care I will receive. During my last appointment, a peppy young white woman walked in off the street into the fancy waiting room with bare feet and a hemp ankle bracelet, showcasing a carefreewhitegirl privilege which aggravated my twitchy eye even more.

why

Sometimes my eye twitch is a mini-manifestation of my body’s refusal to exist without complaint under a suffocating colonial order. I wish this acknowledgment made it a less exhausting and expensive condition to live with.

The Healing

main offenders

The doctors, nurses, and office workers at the clinic are all very white-skinned, most with platinum blonde hair. As a result, I rarely leave an appointment without getting comments on my hair, my skin color, and my appearance in general. 

Once, while laying back in the chair being examined for a condition that is likely a direct result of the stress of colonial trauma on my body in the first place, a nurse told me: “Your skin is such a beautiful color. It’s not brown, but just, like, the perfect tan.”

While this might seem like a compliment, it was also an attempt to separate my beauty from the fact that I am a Native woman. It was a statement meant to exempt me from the category of “brown-skinned”, as if pointing out my Obviously Indigenous appearance would be an insult. I wanted to tell her that my skin is not “tan”: it is brown, and my beauty exists because of my brownness and because I am Native, not in spite of it.

With Fanon running through my head and the doctor’s french-manicured hand maneuvering a giant needle around my eye sockets, I just mumbled, “oh thaaaanks!” and offered up the name of my favourite sunscreen when she asked.

(Is this #sisterhood???)

The remark led me to recall another incident, when I was in a similar-but-different vulnerable position with a white guy who also told me “your skin is such a beautiful color”. I wondered for the rest of that evening why – though I already knew the answer – he couldn’t simply have said, “you are beautiful”.

Native women aren’t allowed to be beautiful in the eyes of white folks, at least not in the same way as white women. Our long dark hair is a “beautiful” object of fascination in the same way they admire furs or hides. Our beaded earrings are “beautiful” magnets for white folks who can never resist grabbing at our ears without our consent, as if they expect we’re made of the same hard plastic as the little Indian dolls sold in Canadiana gift shops, and not of flesh that feels legitimate pain worthy of proper medical attention. Our skin color is “beautiful” as long as it is caramel or golden or tan and not brown while black isn’t even a possibility on their checklist of What Natives Look Like. Our features are prized as exotic objects, but to be deemed a beautiful subject in one’s entirety is still something generally reserved for white women.

Earlier this year, Billy-Ray Belcourt gave a talk entitled “Gallstones and the Colonial Politics of the Future”. He mentions how his doctor was shocked that as a young person, he had a condition that generally only occurs in older people (except in the case of Indigenous folks), linking it to the real impacts of colonialism on our physical health and on the health care we receive.

As the doctor empties a third needle into my face to temporarily freeze the colonial eye twitch I’ll endure the rest of my life, she chirps, “It’s great that you started this procedure so young: you’ll never get wrinkles!”

Today is April 2^nd, 2015 and across these lands, gatherings will be held for Cindy Gladue.

Cindy Gladue was an Indigenous woman, mother, and sex worker. The man charged in her murder was recently acquitted after a dehumanizing trial involving the showcasing of Gladue’s intimate wounds as evidence.  Just today, it was announced that the Alberta Crown has launched an appeal. For those of you unfamiliar with the case, I suggest articles by Sarah Hunt and my dear friend Naomi.

In helping to organize the Saskatoon event and communicating with organizers across the country, I am reminded that the women and two spirits organizing these actions are the same women who organize everything in our communities. The women who carry the burdens of so many and often find ourselves exhausted. The ones who are on the frontlines, who never step back from “the work” because the work is our lives and the lives of those we love.

During the past weeks, I’ve walked around feeling like I am a bubble made of delicately blown glass, ready to burst into pieces. One version of a common refrain I hear from other women and two spirits is “I am very sensitive to this stuff”. “This stuff” being the extreme colonial gender violence responsible for Cindy’s murder. “This stuff” being the systematic, deliberate devaluation and dehumanization of Indigenous women responsible for Barton’s acquittal. I think that there is no shame in feeling too much in response to “this stuff”, but perhaps that the shame belongs to those who feel too little, or to those who encourage us to stop feeling so much.

How do we heal from colonial gender violence? How do we heal from the violence when it is still ongoing? How do we heal from something that has never left us? How do we heal when we are constantly being retraumatized, even by those who “mean well”?

One of the things I find myself particularly sensitive to recently are projects that aim to deconstruct gendered colonial violence by naming and “reclaiming” slurs. While I think there are certain cases where this works well (#NotYourMascot), most times, I think that men sharing articles proclaiming “We Are More Than (insert violent gender slur here)” only serves to reproduce this discourse.

Judith Butler writes of the violence of derealization, noting that if “violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.” Violence against the unreal, the less real, the inhuman, is normative, and thus not considered violence at all. Physical violence is the embodied manifestation of what is “already happening in discourse.”

The same can be said of the media placing so much emphasis on the exact measurements of the wounds in Cindy’s body. Who do these words serve? Certainly not Indigenous women, or Cindy’s family, who do not need these measurements repeated to know first hand the reality of violence. This discourse serves only to desensitize the settler public to violence against Indigenous women while retraumatizing those of us directly impacted. Avoiding articles that do these things is one way I heal right now.

Even discourse around Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women are often hostile spaces for women, two spirits, and particularly, sex workers. Walking to a MMIW gathering a few months back, I ran into some young women who work in my neighbourhood, and invited them to the gathering for snacks and discussion. At the meeting, comments like “make sure you know where your daughters are”, “teach your daughters to dress with respect for themselves”, “if you know a woman who is working the street, call the police and they will help her” were thrown around and I felt sick, and as the moderator of this panel, did the best I could to challenge these statements. Our movements for MMIWG2S are nothing if they are violent toward sex workers and view certain Indigenous women’s lives as more mournable than others. This is part of the impetus for the #MMIWG2S hashtag, which points at the erasure of violence toward girls and two spirits.

On the other side of the fence, I had a conversation with a white canadian friend the other day and I was distressed by the communication boundaries between us. This friend is an intelligent, well-educated man, a bit older than me. He noticed I was tense and unhappy and wanted to make sure things were okay, a kind gesture that I wish people made with such sincerity more often.

I tried to explain the exhaustion of being the only Indigenous woman student in my classes, studying racist and sexist philosophers and watching it all go unchallenged unless I am the one to challenge it. I tried to explain the anger and sorrow that I bring into every class, knowing that my body is one marked as disposable, and being asked to put that aside in my analysis of the coursework at hand.

I watched him nod and squint, searching my face to understand, but the difference between us seemed to make it impossible for him. “At your age, I felt invincible. I was naive, I guess. But you know, you don’t have to live life feeling like you’re constantly pushing up against a wall. You seem so angry.”

What could I say in response to this? How can I allow myself to be vulnerable (and therefore open to both potential healing and potential violence) with someone who cannot see the blood soaking the soil beneath his feet?

I just smiled, knowing that it is precisely in “pushing up against the wall” that I make space for myself as Indigenous in a colonial world. Being two-spirit and a native woman means that I exist as transgression of borders, and the warm breath that fills my body is material evidence that the canadian colonial project has failed, oh, as hard as it tries to destroy me. Resistance forms the bonds in my DNA strands. The rage and sorrow and discomfort I feel are not things I want to wish away. The rage and sorrow and discomfort are the logical and correct reaction to the violence that Indigenous women are faced with.

In that moment, I did give up a struggle: the struggle to make him understand something he’d never experienced (and in fact, something he as a settler benefits from not understanding) and suddenly, my vulnerability turned into a warm blanket wrapped around my shoulders.

Organizing around the Cindy Gladue case has taken on a distinct feeling, separate from other MMIWG2S events I’ve been a part of.

We do this work now for ourselves and for our sisters. The gatherings planned for today are not to raise “awareness”, to get media attention, or to spend endless energy convincing settlers that our lives are valuable. These gatherings are a chance for us to cry and scream and heal. They are a chance to be around others with whom we do not have to try to explain what we are feeling, because they already know that rage, that sorrow, that endless struggle so well. These gatherings are a chance for us to celebrate our strength and our resilience, even when that takes the form of endless tears. These gatherings are a chance for us to remember that our overwhelming emotions are not weakness, but the truly human response to outrageous injustice.

We do this work to embody the belief that the lives of Indigenous women, two spirits, and sex workers are mournable.

We do this work to heal our communities.

We do this work to heal ourselves.

We do this work for Cindy.

Artwork credit: Erin Marie Konsmo