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| Random shot of a bird in a pretty autumnal tree |
So it’s been quite a while! As a
result this post will probably be pretty haywire and involve no chronological
precision. I’d like to say that’s my modernism course exerting its influence on
me but no. It’s just me being lazy and having a shitey memory.
Several weeks ago I went to a
musical lecture by Tomson Highway, a Cree novelist, playwrite, composer and
general polymath. He immediately made me think of Robin Williams. He has so
much bubbling energy, rapid humour and even sounds like him. His lecture was
very fluid, mostly anecdotal and interspersed with music he’s composed, played
by himself, on a grand piano. He speaks a ridiculous amount of languages and
has travelled widely. He went to residential school as a child but he reported
positively that he is grateful he learnt music and languages there, contrary to
most Native peoples’ experiences in those institutions. Having already been
fluent in the Manitoba Cree dialect before he began residential school, his
language was not stamped out of him in order to repress Native culture as with
so many children at these schools.
He talked a bit about Cree
language and culture and compared them to the Anglo/Euro construction of
dichotomies and hierarchies. The Cree do not view the world as being arranged
with God at the top, Man next, Woman next, then animals, then inanimate objects.
Highway described the Cree placement of beings in creation as sitting at the
circumference of a flat circle, and when they die they don’t go up or down,
they stay on the circle (he demonstrated this by curling his arm round like a
horizontal circle, and pointing to parts of it whilst describing people,
animals etc.). Animals are not referred to as ‘it’ – they share gender-neutral
pronouns with humans, and nouns are instead split into animate and inanimate.
The body as a whole is animate, but all separate body parts are inanimate
except from the vagina, because this is where life is cultivated. When the body
dies, it becomes inanimate. This also applies to plant life, which in the
Anglo/Euro tradition isn’t seen as animate or ‘sentient.’ A tree for instance
is animate, but when its wood is used to make, say, a table it becomes
inanimate.
All this conversation was
interspersed with recitals of his compositions, ranging from a beautiful
relaxing piece written for a ballet to jaunty staccato tunes to be featured in
a musical. I wish all lectures were like this – non-linear, interspersed with
anecdotes and using different media. I would love one of my lecturers to analyse
US foreign policy accompanied by a honky-tonk.
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| Camping bus! |
A few weekends ago the Student
Exchange Club put on their annual Sunshine Coast camping trip. It was pretty awesome.
They picked us up from campus in classic yellow school buses, took us to the
ferry station at Horseshoe Bay (which looks a bit like a murder mystery would
take place there), and we eventually arrived at the YMCA Elfinstone campsite in
the evening. They fed us dinner in the communal space which was a big scouts’
lodge from the 1920s and then there was a lot of beer and spirits and peer pong
and throwing terrible shapes. The next day we were all given activities to try,
so first we went to high rope climbing (ropes strung up in the treetops that
you climb.)
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| Not-so-peaceful kayaking collision snapped by Amelie |
After lunch we went kayaking, and
while we were hanging out on the jetty waiting for our turn a lot of us thought
we might’ve seen a whale surface and blow water in the distance. We got super
excited and one of the supervisors told another one over the radio and next
thing about 20 people were thundering towards us from the high ropes area. We
decided after all it probably wasn’t a whale and felt pretty bad about that.
Kayaking itself was amazing because there was only five of us out on the still
water between sessions, with the mountains and forests all quiet around us.
Seals kept bobbing their heads up to look at us from a distance. After kayaking
we went to try archery, which it turns out I’m not terrible at like I was
expecting.
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| Gettin my Robin Hood on |
After dinner we were meant to do
the ‘Global Village’ activity which was where everyone put on some kind of
presentation or performance about their country. A few of us chickened out but
didn’t fancy being pressured into doing it, so we ran away to the cabin and
then felt bad and spent ages trying to figure out when was a good time to go
back in without being awkward. At one point we saw everyone doing the conga and
Tamsin suggested we run in and join the end like we were there all along (we
didn’t, though that would have been hilarious.) We eventually scuttled back
just in time for s’mores around the campfire, which are SO delish. If you don’t
know what s’mores are, what you do is toast a marshmallow on a stick, wait until
it’s hot through, put chocolate on top and sandwich it between two graham
crackers. Then there was more beer, Cards Against Humanity and dancing.
On Sunday after breakfast we
tackled the climbing wall, which is super hard work to weaklings like me, and
then after lunch went for a trek through the forests around the campsite.
Hanging out in the campsite before we headed back to uni, Ellen and I
investigated a squeaking noise we kept hearing from our cabin. We ran outside
and it was a tiny baby squirrel scurrying up and down and all around the
branches of a tree nearby. It was adorable.
Week 8 was pretty busy. On Monday
I had my first Agapé street outing. Agapé is a club that runs outings to give
food and a bit of company to homeless people around Downtown Eastside. We gave
out granola bars, protein shakes and socks. There were a lot of takers. We
stopped for a long time with one woman who was sat on the roadside with all her
stuff around her. She had a rat in a cat-carrier that she’d cobbled money
together to buy from a pet shop, so she’d have some company. The week before
the City had come by and taken away loads of her stuff, including the grill on
top of the cage, so she was worried the rat would get through the cardboard
she’d replaced that with. Apparently these sweeps happen all the time but she
has a lawyer coming to help her – I think there’s a charity organisation who
provide concessionary or free legal aid for poor and homeless folks. She asked
me to pet her rat and I was reluctant at first but it was really cute so I
stroked it (I didn’t die yet mum). When I told her I’m from England she said
she really wants to go there one day, but probably won’t ever be able to afford
it since she can’t pay for a house. I told her to keep dreaming and I hope she
does (and that my saying that didn’t come across across as patronising or
insensitive.)
On Tuesday I had my first meeting
with the UBC Refugee Relief group. We’re planning to raise funds to sponsor a Syrian
family’s application to immigrate to Canada. There’s an archaeology professor
who stayed with them every time she went on an expedition to Syria. She lost
contact with them in the chaos of the past few years, but recently located them
in Beirut. I’m part of the planning team and we have our first big (hopefully
big) meeting this Friday with whoever is interested.
Straight after this I ran to
catch a bus with Tamsin to a talk at Simon Frasor Humanities Institute
downtown. It was a talk on ‘Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies in North
America,’ by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who recently released a book called An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United
States. It was brilliant.
Before the talk two Musqueam
nation members gave a traditional welcome and honour song in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the language of the Musqueam people.
One of them, Audrey Siegl, talked about hope and how she had been wary of it all her life
because it seemed a dangerous thing for those facing the injustices that
Indigenous people do. She said, though, that she’d heard someone on the radio
talking about hope as something you live and enact, and that this had finally
shifted her view of it.
The talk itself was really great.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a 76-year-old Oklahoma woman of Native descent (she
thinks Cherokee - her Native grandmother died when her mother was 4), who laid
out some powerful arguments and documentation of Indigenous histories. One
striking point was her breakdown of the UN definition of genocide, and her
dismissal of the strange argument that Indigenous People in North America did
not undergo genocide because there’s “too many of them left.” Besides, 10% of
the original population is hardly a large amount of people to be left over.
According to the UN, removal of a population/group doesn’t have to be
“complete” in order to be considered genocide. She went over some other
horrible details such as the forced sterilisation of thousands of Indigenous
women during several decades at the end of the 20th century, and the
attempts by the U.S. government to get Indigenous nations to become
corporations and make their members shareholders. They called this last one
‘red capitalism’ and are apparently trying it on again. Which is gross. What
Indigenous peoples in the Americas have undergone, and one could argue are still
undergoing, is genocide.
After the talk there was a
question and answer session. During this two elderly First Nations people stood up and addressed the
audience (I think they were Musqueam but not certain! I'm also not sure whether they were elders or not.) The one who spoke
first began by saying it was good people had come out to the talk. She then
dropped the niceties and told us her personal experiences of the issues
discussed during the talk. She was visibly furious, and openly demonstrated her
pain with tears and raised voice. She’d had 4 abortions by the age of 20, seen
most of her family die, watched relatives go off to fight the Canadians’ war (there
were First Nations soldiers serving in WWI & II) and the surviving
ones return with TB. She’d been run off the road by the RCMP and so was in a
mobility scooter – which, her husband said, she’d been pulled off in the street,
again by the RCMP. She said she was scared for the fate of her people and of
the land, her peoples’ land which has been and is being stolen (B.C. is the
last unceded territory in Canada). She said that the fish and birds are dying,
the land is dying, that we needed to ‘get off our butts’ and go outside, see
what’s happening to the land and her people, and DO something. Then her husband
stood up and showed us the beautifully carved talking sticks he’d brought with
him, and told us that his grandfather used to carve Totem poles - one of which
was given to the queen of England to remind her that British Columbia belongs
to the First Nations who have always lived there.
I think the white/settler
audience needed all this. I think we were all sat there feeling proud of
ourselves for getting educated about Indigenous culture and history. To be
confronted with anger and uncomfortable truths from the mouths of the actual
people experiencing and resisting these horrors was a much-needed kick up the
arse.
I’m not sure what I can do to
help while I’m here, but I’ll find something and I’ll do it. Stay tuned to see
how that goes…
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