Dawisijigem: Clearing Space
Aniin all,
It's been a minute and let me update you. Family health crisis. Summer travel. Foundation work. BOOK LAUNCH! All of these things are conspiring against me, and by extension you. We're going to take an 8 week break from our exploration of Ojibwe stories. Not completely, they're always going to be around in some form or another, but for the next 8 weeks I'll be re-releasing the discussions from Ambe: A year of Indigenous Reading that formed the basis of the book because they have been remastered and edited, and some of them were never released in podcast format. There will also be a very brief reflection on them and how they intersect in some way with something I'm currently reading.
You can get them in your podcast app by following Bad Indians Book Club, or you can listen here and read the transcript (which is also linked in the show notes on your podcast app).
Bad Indians Book Club: Dawisijigem. Clearing Space
I'm reading Gerald Vizenor right now, just mainlining a whole bunch of his books because somehow I never read them until recently and if anybody is looking for Vizenor in Bad Indians Book Club, they're going to be very disappointed but here we are. You may see his influence though because, along with Vine Deloria Jr, his writing has influenced entire generations of Indigenous writers. Early in Fugitive Poses he writes about presence and absence. Our past isn't just a part of history, it is history: a physical absence from the present that means people keep on discovering us. From the perspective of the discoverers there is a huge distance between our lives before colonization and our contemporary lives, a big gap of nothing with stories being told about us as if we didn't exist anymore. I mean sure we'd pop up periodically. Our inexplicable violence, the ones who are drunk or homeless, the occasional success story that is used to shame the rest of us, and of course the wealthy casino tribes. Those are the stories that keep us distant even from ourselves. And having established those stories, now that we don't pose a threat anymore, they've discovered us again and are writing us back in. Now our knowlege is mythic, craved by a world who wrote magic out of their own history and replaced it with stories of exploration and conquest. But flattering as it is, that's just an updated noble savage story for the New Age crowd.
That makes our own stories necessary. Not as an adjunct to the things you think you know about us, but as a replacement. Every chapter of Bad Indians Book Club is titled with a word in Anishinaabemowin and the original conversations have been reorganized to reflect the chapters that emerged from them. This chapter is dawisijigem: clearing space. We clear space on the kitchen table to make room for meals and we clear space on our heads to make room for new knowledge.
Let's begin at the beginning: why Indigenous literatures matter.
Episode 1 Bad Indians Book Club
Dawisijigem, clearing space
Patty Krawec: This is Patty Krawec, your host and the author of Bad Indians Book Club Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds. This podcast series, which formed the basis of the book, brought together marginalized writers and the people who read them. Dawisijigem can be translated as to clear space, and in this episode, we're clearing space to make room for new ways of thinking by talking with writers, Daniel Heath Justice and January Rogers about Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Additional panelists are: Joy Henderson, Ishkenikeyaa Waawaashkesh, Robin McBurney, and Neil Ellis Orts. The recommended book for this discussion was Why Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice.
In his chapter on becoming good relatives, Daniel writes about apocalyptic works and notes that for Indigenous people, that great unraveling the apocalypse is ongoing. This is our lived experience and that rereading that chapter again today, after the last four years, after the last two weeks.
After the last year, I saw a tweet had gone out where somebody was saying, oh, just be four years. How bad can it be? And then last week we were saying, oh, the people committing insurrection at Capitol Hill, no, there's a plague going on. Really? How? We had no idea how bad it could be. So thinking about these questions just seems so particularly prescient right now in the midst of all of this and turning to these questions of how to learn.
How do we learn to be human? How do we behave as relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? What do we learn from these ruptures? We've experienced so many ruptures, and then how do we pull it all together? How do we keep those fires burning? I hadn't had that in my mind when I chose this book as our place to start this year.
It just seemed like a good all-encompassing book to get us started, and as I reread it again, it just seemed so prescient. So I'm gonna introduce our panel, of course, we have Daniel Heath Justice, who is a Colorado born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I found Daniel on Twitter. He was actually one of the first guests on the podcast, A Medicine for the Resistance, which I co-host with Kerry Goring, who will be joining us periodically.
Daniel is responsible for my obsession with Thor Ragnarok, and he can unpack that later. January Rogers [this guest was formerly known as Janet Marie Rogers, she will be identified as January in the transcript] is a Mohawk Tuscarora writer and artist. She works in a variety of poetry styles and her seventh book of poetry was just released Ego of a Nation. I found January through her interview on the One Dish One Mic radio show got jealous and had to have her on too.
Ishkenikeyaa Waawaashkesh is an Algonquin mother, sister, and auntie. When my son was looking for somewhere to put his trailer, she said her brother might be able to help. I told her who my son had found and she says, yeah, that's brother. So we might be cousins now. I'm not really sure.
Joy Henderson is a Black Lakota writer, mother and child and youth care practitioner living in Scarborough. I invited Joy to speak at a Black Lives Matter solidarity rally early this summer, or last summer, sorry, along with Desmond Cole. And that worked out really well because Desmond, who was also from Toronto, needed a ride. So I not only had just met Joy, but now I was hitting her for transportation.
Robin McBurney is a high school teacher in Niagara Falls where she taught at least one of my children, maybe more. Her husband is also a teacher there and taught at least one of my children.
And Neil Ellis Orts is a writer and performer living in Houston, Texas. Neil and I have been disrupting each other's lives for more than 25 years, which is my longest relationship outside of my family. So we will start with Janet, who has some poetry that is relevant to our conversation, and then I'll ask Daniel to reflect a bit on two years since he's written his book, because he just finished recording it, if I am remembering correctly. So he's just been even more immersed in this book than we are. So welcome everybody. And Janet, if you could.
January Rogers: Thanks Patty for inviting me into today's discussion and I won't take up too much time with the intro 'cause you already did, you know a good job of talking about our relationship. But I am coming to you from Six Nations, the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory.
And I just moved back home in summer, the summer of 2019. So I'm still after being away living on traditional Coast Salish territory for 25 years. So Daniel, you're on the West coast there and I know the place pretty well. To kick off this evening. I have chosen a piece of poetry. Patty had invited me to share with you, and this is from my latest book Ego of a Nation and it is self-produced on my brand new label [Ojistoh Publishing]. And in April of this year, we'll be publishing our first author other than myself on the publishing label. So that's when I came home. That was one of the things I wanted to do, was to start publishing. And so I've gone ahead and done that.
There's a piece called a Who's Who. The soul of my language wanders lost upon the Lands, like a man who has died. Foreign soil with no family or protocols to carry him home. My ancestors wonder when curiosity will kick you in to do the work to find them. And remember, not one, not two, but that come from many layers and levels of people who didn't have to speculate anything.
They were already everything. The brown, olive hue of my skin colors, my character informs my choices. Never lets me take a holiday around here. People hate me because they don't know their own history or mine and believe the lies they're told. This is ours to share. I don't know who is who out there. There is violence resulting in trauma producing disruption and otherwise strong and loving relations.
We are what we stand on and lately the foundation has been shaking maybe. Trying to unearth truths. Maybe it's time. Have you claimed all your birthrights as a human? Critical thinking is waiting to dissolve the walls of excuses, keeping you from discovering. How old were you when you realized the adults didn't know what they were doing?
And when did that knowing extend to include governments and religion flirting with risk of letting go? No tension. No control. Thanks.
Patty Krawec: I feel like we should all clap or snap our fingers. That's amazing. It was really good. Thank you, Janet. Daniel, you could reflect on your...
Daniel Heath Justice: First I wanna say wado to Janet for that and just to congratulate you, Janet, on the new press. One thing that's really exciting in Canada, Indigenous literature in Canada has been carried by independent publishing and especially Indigenous independent publishing, so it's really awesome that there's another publishing venue in the country and very, it's always wonderful to hear your work, so I really appreciate it.
Yeah I've been doing the audio book for why Indigenous Literatures Matter. I'm here in in Sechelt territory here on the Sunshine Coast, and. It's been an experience. Time goes on. You look at things and you think, oh, I would do this differently, or I wouldn't have chosen this writer, or I would've chosen this writer.
Different processes happen and you always know that it's gonna be an evolving thing. I. But it was challenging in ways that I didn't expect to go throughit and do the reading myself. I think partly because a lot has happened over the last couple of years since the book came out last night, I did chapters four and five, and chapter five is the very personal family history.
And in the time since the book came out and now my dad passed away, and so it was very strange to read about him in the past tense rather than in the present tense. So that was, and it I do just doing a lot of thinking about where Indigenous literatures are today. The voices who are held up and, challenges about some voices that have been held up who shouldn't have been, but also, all of the other writers who are coming of age and whose work is coming out.
And so many of you just can't keep up. And it's nice not to have tried to be comprehensive. 'cause already it would be so outta date. But I think for me, one thing I'm really pleased about is that the conversation is still going and it's going at such a remarkable pace and really awesome courageous voices.
Not just new writers, but established writers who I think are getting renewed attention and much deserved, renewed attention. I think for a long time a lot of the established writers in this country and in the states and other places, were pushed to the side. I think that there's been a lot more interest in listening to the writers who actually were the ones who have carried this work forward for so long and often under really challenging and stressful circumstances.
If any if anything, I just think I'm more excited about where the field is going and, I'm very happy to be part of that, but I think now it's time for other people to really. To really take those conversations forward. I think I've done my part and I'll still be part of the conversations as best I can, but it's nice to have this book out and it's nice to know that there are some ways in which it's already obsolete.
Patty Krawec: One of the things when you talked about being human, and one of the things that I want to hear from everybody about you talk, you contrast Euro- Western individualism with the humanity that exists in the relationships between us. And I've heard a few people over the last couple of years talking about that, about how our humanity exists in that space in between us, and contrasting that with, the hyper individualism of colonial people.
So like colonialism. So does anybody have any thoughts or observations on what it means to be human? How we become human?
Joy Henderson: Okay. I was just thinking, I'll go first just to break the ice stuff. I just, I dunno. I'm thinking actually, just like a very recent example is with COVID itself, and you have all these people who are like, I'm not wearing a mask.
And I remember when this happened, when it first started breaking out here and my partner who is from Taiwan and Chinese was wearing a mask and he was afraid to wear a mask, of course, this is what we have to do. He is going out there at personal risk to protect others 'cause he knew he wasn't sick. And I just, I cannot even begin to really fathom people who don't want to wear a mask. It's and they always say, I'm not sick. I'm not sick. I'm like, it doesn't matter. Like you're protecting others. Like I just, for me, I have a hard time not understanding, relationship and responsibility that we have to others. And not just people, but animals and plants and it's even exaggerated my world a bit. 'cause when I'm playing a video game and I have to chop down a tree, I feel guilty, I feel horrible. I'm like, oh my gosh, I asked this tree for permission. I'm like, holy.
My partner last time he's you realize they are bits right? I'm like, I know, it's so programmed into me and I would love it. I see it programmed into other people for sure. But I would love it to become more wider, more widely programmed that we need to start thinking about our existence as a human and our humanity that goes just beyond our little individual sphere that is joy.
Or as Patty or as Daniel sort of thing.
January Rogers: I was, I always think about. If we're talking about relationship and, maintaining humanity within our relationships, I always think, and it, and maybe it is because, I'm a radio enthusiast. I would think about people as radios. We are transmitters and we are also receivers like radios.
And in relationships there's always that negotiation that goes on between receiving and transmitting who gets to do what and how much of that, and so on and so forth. But, and also I'm glad, joy, that you brought up our relationship with. Other beings like the animals and the plants and, and then I always think about in terms of relationship, we always think that it's an outside thing.
We talk about outer space and we don't realize that we're also in outer space, as a globe, as a world. So that relationship, of course, has to first, get, you, get yourself right in your own relationship with yourself, which you know. It's takes your whole life getting it right.
I'm not sure if that's the right word to use, but just in terms of, internalizing these questions, these questions that we ask of others, of the community, of, our society. These questions we ask outside of our. Maybe we just need to spend a little bit more time asking those things within ourselves.
And yes, again, back to Joy. Of course, COVID is a perfect time that affords ourselves more time to do those exact things.
Patty Krawec: Robin, I know you do some work with your students in terms of building relations, helping them build relationships amongst themselves and with the Indigenous community.
Can you talk a little bit about, I don't know what you may have reflected on as you read the book and thinking about the work that you do.
Robin McBurney: We have done a lot of talk about our relationship with the natural world and not just amongst each other, but how you need to care for and care about other beings.
And I think that relationship building is an important piece.
Patty Krawec: Daniel, you referenced a book. A story, which I've actually ordered. That's one of the books that I've ordered as a result of rereading this, that set, and I'm just spacing on the name of it, but it's said in the, in Dakota Country.
Daniel Heath Justice: Waterlily.
Patty Krawec: Yeah. I just love the picture that your example created there.
Daniel Heath Justice: It's a really extraordinary novel, and [Ella Cara]Deloria was an anthropologist as well as a writer, one of the very few women anthropologists of her time, and also one of the very few Indigenous anthropologists. And so I think she.She brought a lens on humanity, tried to get as much as possible into the ways in which our relationships are, what make us human, and how that was so deeply grounded in culture, in language, but also in land. And it's set at a time just before the real onslaught of white invasion into Dakota territory.
And I first encountered that book in a history course when I was a graduate student, an Indigenous historian, Susan Miller, who’s Seminole, taught it in her history course. And a lot of the history students were very like why are we reading a novel? And she was really insistent that fiction is not, it doesn't have to be seen as something antithetical to history, but actually it was a way of living history in the moment.
So I think that novel still, every time I read it, it's just so rich with details. But all of those details are about, they're about culture. They're about custom and about how fully embedded people are through their relationships with culture and language. It also brings up a lot of grief for those of us who weren't raised in our in, in the cradle of our cultures with our languages. And so it's a really interesting experience to see ways in which a lot of us are very far removed from somebody like Water Lily from who, who is so embedded in that community. But it's a novel. I think everybody should read. I think it's beautiful.
It's quite funny. It's quite heartbreaking in a lot of ways, and it's a novel that not a lot of people have read. In the field. And I think that's a real shame.
Patty Krawec: And when I had a workshop with Maya Chacaby, and she had said Anishinaabe it's not a noun, it's a verb. And so when we talk about, oh, Ishkenikeyaa Waawaashkesh, why don't you talk about it then instead of me? 'cause I talk too much.
Ishkenikeyaa Waawaashkesh: Yeah. So I also am really nervous. Because I haven't also done panels like this very often, so I'm right there with you, Robin. Yeah. So when I think about Anishinaabe, when and as both a learner and as a teacher and I taught Anishinaabmowin, for 13 years before I became a consultant of Indigenous education.
So I help people get to doing some of this stuff in their classes and, Anishinaabemowin is depending on who you're talking to, is between 80 to 99% verbs. We are interrelationships, we, everything is either motion or acted upon or is acting upon. There's no you actually have to noun, nounify verbs in order to create nouns.
Nothing is ever static, things. I was actually listening to, my partner is in my role now as the Anishinaabemowin teacher, and he was talking to his students today online, which everyone is hating the most because he can't interact like human beings. And so he's, he was teaching his kids today and he was talking to them about colors and how to describe that something is colored.
In Anishinaabemowin when there's either an animate or an inanimate way of talking about that, but you're actually talking about it being in that way. It's not a static thing. So if something is blue colored, it's being blue colored, it's showing itself to be blue, right? And it was interesting because I've had the opportunity to do some immersion language programs.
And if you though, for those of you who are out there who are language learners and are interested in doing the language program for second language learners, there's like middle ground people. 'cause there's lots for the beginning learners. There's a whole lot for, I mean there's fluent speakers who can speak to each other back and forth, but that kind of middle ground, there's not a whole lot.
And anyway, so I was, when I was over there and I started thinking in the language, which is not something I'm very good at. But it was really cool 'cause I almost started seeing like in, we see in three dimensions, but I started like really seeing. I don't know if I'm making any sense or I'm just blathering on, but I think sometimes when you think in a verb based language, you start to think in three dimension.
Like things stop seeing being so flat. Yeah. Anyway, that's it for me.
Patty Krawec: And you're thinking in terms of relationship. Yeah. You can't not, chair is not, the chair is not a thing. It's the thing that I sit, it's something that I sit on. So you're, yes. The language itself is constantly pulling you into a relationship and Maya talks about Anishinaabemowin, meaning it doesn't just mean original person, it means humans being it's, yes, we are action.
So not in our language, but we aren't humans. The thing being acted upon. We are action. And I just, we are always action. Absolutely. Especially toddlers. Yeah. But I just thought that was really interesting in the context of this chapter and what Daniel had been talking about in relationships.
Because if we're action, we're constantly acting upon others and they're acting upon us, which brings us to being good relatives because we talk a lot about being claimed. Or, claiming and being claimed. But that's really only the first, the first step of that. And Daniel continues on with, then if we're being claimed or if we are claiming, what do these relationships ask of us?
And he does talk about non-human relatives and the importance of reweaving these bonds that colonialism worked so, so hard to destroy. So who would like to, who had some observations or. On what it means to be good relatives, especially who we've got the reconciliation but not the truth.
And that's part of being good relatives, right? Alexis Shotwell, we talked with her a number of weeks ago. She's working right now on what it means to claim bad kin, as a white woman who claims her. And then she realized that those white supremacists that stormed capital, that's who claims her, she doesn't claim them.
They claim her and they appear to act, they claim to be acting on behalf of whiteness. And part of white privilege means that when you go to stores or when you interact with the police you're claimed by, you're claimed by power, whether or not you claim it back. And so her work right now is what do I do with that? Because that's what she's thinking through. What does that relationship ask of her? So I don't want to get too much into that. It's just. An interesting observation: that's what her work is. It's what do these, so we're in relationship, but then what are these claims? How do we act on those claims?
So Neil, I'm gonna bring you in 'cause I think you're the only one who hasn't said anything. So as we think about relationships, my friend of 25 years,
Neil Orts: who I've only met once.
All online and the changes, huh? No I wanna go back to story a little bit of what I think Joy was saying about the pandemic and the stories that we tell ourselves that lead us to the actions that we take. And I wonder about. What stories these anti maskers are telling themselves that makes them think they're going to be okay.
And some of them are very religious stories. I had an interaction with someone on Facebook who had a couple of similar ones, but one in particular, someone was quoting. the very psalm, that God will lift you up and not let your foot be dashed against the stone or whatever. I'm paraphrasing wildly, but I said, oh, you mean the very same psalm that the devil quoted to Jesus in the wilderness?
Do you know which role you're playing here now? I say you're the tempter. And Jesus answers, we don't put God to the test. And, but to her, that wasn't putting God to the test, that was trusting God. And what stories we tell ourselves that lead us into destructive behavior is fascinating.
And I don't have anything more profound to say about it than that. But it, yeah, it, I. We go back, when I was talking about story and the world is made of stories and that's part of what makes us human. Of course. I think of the Jewish American poet, Muriel Rukeyser, who has this famous line about “the world is not made of atoms, but of stories.”
And the stories are relational and they tell, they explain things, but they also I think Daniel mentions there, there are good stories and bad stories. There are stories that divide us as well. I don't know. I feel like I'm babbling now, but that, that, those are the things bouncing around in my head.
I, I was telling Patty last night, right now pandemic brain is just a bunch of balls bouncing around. But those are some of my unconnected thoughts.
Daniel Heath Justice: But could I actually jump in on, on that? 'cause I think it, that issue of story and how story can be weaponized for, really wicked ends, but still can.
Claims to relationship. And I think for me that's one thing I've been more attentive to over the last few years is the ways in which people, maybe for honest mistakes or from a level of purpose, like even kinship, can be weaponized against us. This idea that, I'm going to claim you as a relative and you are obligated.
To do all of these things for me, but not really thinking about how an insistence on being related without other people having some consent in that can be really, that can be a really wicked exercise of oppressive purpose as well. And those, those stories, stories that are false or stories that are partial or stories that are misshapen can be really dangerous.
And so I think there. More and more I do think about the ethical import of the stories and re all the way across from, our relationships, who we are, how we came to be. It's not just as easy as making an assertion or telling a story, but taking accountability for what the impacts are of that story as best we can.
Patty Krawec: You have any thoughts, January?
January Rogers: Yes. I wanted to get back to the idea of negotiating, when we're in negotiation in terms of having relationships with each other and the constant negotiation that occurs in terms of communication and things like that. It really does take skilled communication to have effective relationships.
It really does, and from my understanding, it's been my experience that the majority of the world's problems are rooted in people's inability to communicate clearly, effectively, and maybe to some degree kindly. I like the fact that Patty, that you're, that, you're not posing the question, how do we get back to being good humans, but just getting back to being humans.
And, I think that we get caught up in, again, outside sources telling us who we are. And those outside sources oftentimes are not rooted in human humanistic way of being. Institutions, for example, I'm not gonna start bashing on academia, but just, institutions, they're, they don't necessarily have a very humanistic way of operating.
And as such, an Indigenous student who enters into any kind of institution such as that always finds themselves in an activity of resistance on a daily basis. And again, that negotiation that takes place again, on a daily basis, just, for entering into those kinds of arenas, having to have a, to constantly remind yourself is what I'm hearing.
Is that true? Is that true to me? Do I, is that my truth? Is that, and then the idea of, I think there was, the word I was watching you have this contentious question. I was watching one of Daniel's YouTube interviews and there was this idea of this contentious question of who gets to tell stories.
And you're talking about stories, Neil, I don't think it's that contentious. I think it's pretty straightforward. Who gets to tell what stories? There was of course when this whole like, conversation about appropriation started to bubble up and that was, that's quite some many years ago now, coming into the fold as a writer myself, I was part of those conversations and it was so wonderful in Saskatchewan and I hate the fact that I can't remember this elder elderly man's name from one of the nations out there on the prairies.
He put it out plainly and he said, look, if you weren't there and it didn't happen to you, then you don't get to tell the story. And that is of course an oversimplification of the idea of ownership and having authority over your own voice and things like that.
And I remember, and I'll just add this one little story too, is like when I was in Campbell River at a writer's festival, that this writer's festival in in Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw territory, which is supported and very much driven by a senior caucasian senior population. They asked what do you think about people, non-native people telling native stories?
Do you think that's acceptable? And I said no. And then they just wouldn't have it. They just kept coming back to me with questions. But what if, but what? And all these different scenarios, all these gray areas that they wanted to introduce into the answer that it had already.
Given them. And I just thought look I get it. You don't wanna hear. No. So don't ask. It's gonna happen. And it's happening still. I don’t know.
Patty Krawec: I am Anishinaabe and there are Anishinaabe stories. I don't feel like I can tell because I grew up a long way from home. My family is all up in northwestern Ontario.
I was raised by my mom's German Ukrainian family down here in Niagara. I thought I was it. I thought it was the last dodo in Ontario. I thought all the Indians lived out west somewhere and I don't know, maybe in tipis or something. I dunno. It was the seventies. I learned how to be Indian by watching, we're talking about stories, by watching Bonanza, by watching Little House on the Prairie, those were the things. And then when I toured the Woodland Institute and we saw the room, where the kids hung out. In the sixties it had been transformed into the Woodland Institute was formerly known as the Mush Hole, it's a residential school in Brant. And they do tours and they're preserving the building as a historical space.
And we glommed onto a tour there. And we went into the one room and they said, oh, and in the sixties this was transformed into a lounge area where the kids would just hang out and watch tv. And it occurred to me that at the same time as they were watching, like these kids in residential school were learning how to be Indians the same way I was in my white family, because I had pictures of my dad, but I was an infant, we didn’t have an ongoing relationship with him. So just to say that even within like our identities are complicated. I am Anishinaabe, but I don't feel like there's stories I can tell because that's not my experience. So when I write about my experience, I'm very clear that this is my experience and these are things that I have learned in relationship with other people.
And so I can share that as things that I have learned, but that's my experience. So that kind of brings us actually to becoming good ancestors, which was a really interesting chapter. I, and the one, one of the things that I really took from it. Was this idea of transformation of loss that we have lost so much in some ways.
We have literally lost our ancestors. They're resting in museums and some of them, they don't even know where they came from, so they can't send, there's no community to send the bones back to 'cause they don't know what community the bones came from. So there's ancestors that are just and other relatives, right?
There's ceremonial items who are also relatives. That are in the, in these basements and in people's living rooms, they found that guy who had all kinds of stuff. Remember that old missionary guy found a fusion. His house was just full of that kind of stuff. And so that loss is real, but that's not our only story.
And I always loved Daniel, throughout this whole book. You keep doing that. You keep acknowledging the loss and then transforming it into something, into something better. So that. So that we are not just our loss. And could you talk about that a little bit? The way becoming good ancestors transforms loss into possibility.
Daniel Heath Justice: I don't know if I would say it transforms, loss. It recognizes these things. And I think that for me, that's so much of the learning that I've had over my life is that it's not if you just say. We're defiant. We're, our nations are strong and don't acknowledge the heavy weight of that loss. I think you do violence, but if you only focus on that loss, you don't see the really important work that people are doing to restore languages and to restore relations and to strengthen connections to land. And I think it's hard, right? Like the, there's a back and forth of that, that, sometimes I am more optimistic than at other times.
I think there's a push and pull there between acknowledging and grieving losses while also not only sitting in that grief to the point where you're not actually carrying forward in, in the work people need to do. And that's where I think a lot of our stories have been really important in reminding us about what we have lost and what we're still, what we're still losing and the continuing challenges. But also say, here is how people are working really hard to make things better and here are where people are doing some exciting things and making space for people to try new things.
And reminding us that Indigenous peoples have always been super creative. Have been able to take challenges, but also just new technologies and do really amazing, awesome things with them. I'm a language learner and it's the internet that has made that possible. 'cause I don't live in Oklahoma and especially during COVID it's amazing what is possible.
In some, one of my teachers is quite young and another teacher is an elder and like we, it's something that the Cherokee Nation has done. Has invested a huge amount in the creative possibilities of new technology. But we've always been those people, and that's not the stereotype.
The stereotype is that we're completely technologically averse, but we've always been really adaptive in that way. And that to me is really exciting is that we're able to. To do new things and bring old stories, give old stories, renewed life through new technologies and through new possibilities without throwing away the others.
It's that very incorporative process that acknowledges where we came from and where we're going, and who is there with us both in body, as well as in spirit.
Joy Henderson: It was interesting 'cause I'm writing a profile on a dancer and throughout their piece there was spoken word poetry from Assata Shakur and one of the lines was “weapons of mass creation”.
And that has stuck with me. I was like, yes. And I know a lot of people have been feeling, certainly myself has been feeling I just totally dragged down by this ongoing pandemic and the last four years, the last 200 years, 500 years. We really need to create, I think in order, we need to recognize the past, but I also really love the creative energy within Indigenous communities and what happens when we get together with other communities as well.
And I'm Afro Indigenous, so I am the combination of two massively amazing groups of people. And I can listen to pow music and then think of a blues song and how it would be nice. I know there's a wonderful singer and she makes this music that just combines everything, and it's amazing and it's going to be a powerful legacy to our future generations because like you Patty, I grew up far away from my nation and I grew up in Toronto.
I'm in Scarborough again, yeah, but I got to grow up with many nations. And so it's just I grew up with strong women seeing what we create together and even, and I grew up in poverty. I grew up with massive oppression coming down and every which way form, but things were still created.
So I love the fact that we reclaim through our language. We recreate, our new reality as well as am I trying to say, as well as reviving, our past as well. And so it's just constantly living together, moving forward together.
Ishkenikeyaa Waawaashkesh: I love that.
Weapons of mass creation. That is amazing. I love that. That's so beautiful. No, I was actually thinking too about the resilience of our languages and how. How they're so creative, it's like it's built into the language itself. If we don't have a word for it, you just describe what that thing does and then there's your word for it.
Computers didn't exist when anishinaabemowin was cohering itself a few thousand years ago. But we have a word for it. We have words for pens. We have words for chairs because these are the things we just do. Describe what things do and we describe how they are, our actors are acted upon.
And I think about how, like, how powerful must a language and therefore a way of thinking be if a thousand years ago and today these are still, there's still a continuity may not be in exactly the same form. There may be dialectical changes. There may be added words, some lost words, but how incredible are these ways that at least there's a continuity of thousands of years when, I'm not sure that English can say that as a language, and yet here we are all using it.
Daniel Heath Justice: When you were talking about the creative capacity, so we have a language consortium who every year come up with a list of new words for some of those things. And in 2019, I just pulled it up like there were words for battery charger. Beef jerky, boomerang, like this whole list of very random words that, that, so many.
And it's really awesome to see and I don't know the language well enough to know how they put these together, but like certificate of acknowledgement, like we actually have a word for that and I don't know why that came up in the context that it did. And computer, we have that one as well, so that ability to really create language that's alive today, community college, and to make it as relevant and meaningful. And I think that just speaks to the creative capacity and the kind of knowing creative capacity, right? Like we need a word, so what is the word? And people get together in a group and they hash it out.
They have a conversation, language speakers, they're like, here, let's do this. And they together, it's created as a community and then gifted back to the community. That thrills me to know. And I'm not good at the language. I'm still very much a baby, but it's something that I find really encouraging.
'cause that's also what our storytellers do too.
Patty Krawec: In talking about ancestors, Daniel talked about that space between the living and the dead, and our connections and that, that relationship there that we have. And then that made me think of Neil when we were talking and I had asked him, he'd given me like this very short two word bio, maybe not two words. I said could you talk a little bit more about the themes of your writing? The themes of your work? And he'd made a comment about how death and dying always seems to feature in all of his work. So then that made me think of Neil when I was reading this chapter and the things that you were writing about in terms of our ancestors who are still very much present.
So Neil, I just, if you wanted to talk a little bit about how that shows up in your writing.
Neil Orts: So even as a small child, I was very aware of things changing and things passing away that things I call it my sense of never again, that there were things that were happening, like we tore down a part of, just a part of an old barn on our farm and I suddenly realized one day I couldn't remember what was, what we kept in there or what it really looked like or what it was like to be in that room that was no longer there.
It just made me really sad. I don't know. I think I'm just wired for grief. I don't know. But yeah, I just completed a new novella that started out as one thing and became about a passing of a way of life as a sort of a subtext that just comes up over and over.
I seem to notice what is missing. Maybe some of that is because I'm the youngest of seven and I'm the very youngest of seven. So I am disconnected from my grandparents. I didn't know my grandparents, they were dead before I knew them. I was talking about family. I've been to seminary, so we talked about family systems.
I was talking to a friend about family systems, and I said something about what I didn't know about, like my mother's family. She says right there, you're already disconnected from your previous generation. And so I guess what I'm doing now is that people are, there are people not here to ask anymore about some things, and some of what my fiction is doing now is filling in gaps.
There's the line and a river runs through it. The father asks the son, you like telling stories that are true, don't you? And he says, yes, I like telling stories that are true. And he says, when you're done writing your true stories, make up some people and then you'll begin to understand what happened and why.
That it's the imagination of filling in the gaps and trying to find, the way I interpreted the line is that when you start to fill in the gaps, you start having empathy for what happened and why. At least that's what's happening for me. And yeah, there's almost always someone dead or dying in my stories.
I dunno what to tell you. I don't plan it. It's just oh, here's the dead person. I didn't even mean to plan that.
Patty Krawec: I want to bounce that over to Daniel and get your reflections on it.
Daniel Heath Justice: I feel very similar, like I'm a deeply nostalgic person. I am. I don't like change, even though my life has been. So much too, but what's been interesting like? One of the things for me growing up, was, my dad was significantly older than my mom. He's 21 years older than my mom and was the same age as my friend's grandfather. So there was always this specter of deaths around him. And he lived to be 90 and it was a really, it was hard when he passed away, but it wasn't as like crushing as I expected. In some ways because I don't remember who said it, all of a sudden he became an ancestor.
He didn't, he was my dad who was still like, he was an ancestor now and the ancestors are with us. And there, there was just this moment, it didn't feel like it was a change, but it was also a really comforting knowledge to know that he wasn't just gone. He wasn't just my ancestor, the ancestor for my, my, my brothers and my nephews.
And I think, and now that this, we have different stories about him and some of those stories are really funny and my husband and I will just say something and I'll sound just like my dad. And then that starts a round of storytelling where, you know, and my dad was, could be cantankerous and difficult. Challenging in his own ways, but he still lives on in those stories. And I've had, I've had other people in my life die, but there's just a certain way that story really has become more profound and powerful to me in this really intimate way because I see the way, yeah. And of course I'm still sad and I still have my moments, but there's so much more, he's so much more present than I was afraid he was gonna be after he was gone.
It's through those stories that we've been, that we've been telling. And of course you start reflecting on all the other ways that stories exist in our lives. And it's weird to be, I've studied story as a scholar for so long and I'm only now figuring out a little bit of what it means, right?
I knew so much more back in when I didn't know anything. I'm so much more ignorant now, but it's so much more. I used to think I knew something right? But I'm learning so much more as I get older and I'm learning that I'm, I don't need to be quite as afraid as I was.
January Rogers: I can riff off that, if that's okay. Talking about, story, the importance of story, of course story is very powerful. We've got, people say we're born with story in our veins and that sort of thing. It's quite inherent, but, I remember I was at the Banff Center and I was taking part of a residency, a non native residency poets, a poets a poetry residency. And the question was posed to our group. What do you think the future of literature is all, all about? What do you think the future of that is? Getting back to your, the title of your book, Daniel and I remember being very very spontaneous about my answer, and that was well.
As an Indigenous person, I'm not so sure I'm concerned about the future of literature. I am hoping that literature is gonna bring us back full circle to storytelling. But that's not to be dismissive of literature. Because I still see, as a writer myself, I still see the page as being a very sacred place.
Everything gets born there. And now it does, and not to be dismissive, but maybe it's this, we're in a time where we're gonna see these hybrids that adjoining of, adjoining of the page and adjoining of the storytelling and then, whatever gets born out of that combination.
And we're, we are seeing that, I, myself, I work in video poetry and, I really, would dream of mine is to make a feature film with just poetry and poetry carrying the narrative of the, and I think it's possible. All of these other kinds of collaborations and combinations that can be born out of what we choose to do with story now and carry it into the future.
And I just, I get very excited, very inspired when I start to think like that. And I just wanted to say something too about the idea of, we're talking a lot about politics. And that certainly is something that as Indigenous people, we have to, it's part of our reality. Like it or hate it.
It's part of our reality. And I had the great opportunity of interviewing John Trudel one time when I had a radio show and he was near Tacoma, Washington. I went down when I was living on the West coast, because I knew he was gonna be at this event. And anyway, we're talking about, you know what's your relationship with politics, John? I was trying to tell, I asked him about his relationship with the AIM song and politics and things like that, and he said, listen, lemme tell you something. He goes we can stay in that place and we do, we have to pay attention to our politics.That's a fact. He goes, but think of the energy that you participate in when you're, when you stay in, in the idea and the conversations of politics. Then the difference between the energy when you engage in conversations around creativity, and I've heard a lot of people talk about, the idea of being creative tonight and how important that is.
And yes, absolutely. One is an energy that depletes and the other is an energy that, that kind of is a juggernaut. It grow, grows and keeps growing with itself. And so that blew my mind. And I had to sit and walk it off for a couple of hours after talking to John Trudel 'cause he did, he blew my mind. So those are like, in terms of literature and story and things like that. And, and again, now I'm mentoring at a program at the Banff Centre for Indigenous Storytellers. It's so wonderful to see what the new storytellers are coming up with in terms of presentation and storytelling style and things like that.
So I think that it's a big world. It's a big, huge world, and there's lots of room for all of these different versions of the same thing. We're never gonna get that what we had in terms of traditional things is storytelling and traditional ceremony. We're just, it just, I just don't see it.
It's not gonna be what it once was. It is a growing, living, evolving thing and our participation in it now feeds into that.
Patty Krawec: That was great 'cause that segues us really well into how we live together, because that. Daniel writes in there about imagining what's, what exists beyond the apocalypse.
We're so used to apocalyptic films and TV shows being about the big disaster, and then, when really what's important is how do we, because as Indigenous peoples we have experienced that disaster, as and even settlers to us have experienced, the separation from their own history and trying to replant themselves in this place and some of the choices that they've made in that replanting pretty disruptive and harmful.
But there's consequences within settlers for that as well in terms of their own dislocation and severed relationships and trying to, trying to grasp per things. That maybe isn't theirs or that maybe, needs to be accessed through relationships. So it's imagining, and I think Daniel, when I first met you on Twitter, that was your handle was imagine otherwise.
And then I don't know. I think the first time when I read the book, it just skated past me, but this time I caught it and it's just that capacity for creativity and imagination.
Daniel Heath Justice: I can just briefly, I think, that. One of the things I've always been really fascinated by as a teacher is when, especially for the Euro Western students, they would say something like I don't have culture.
And like I, I'm not from Canada. I can tell you folks you have culture. It's a very different kind of culture than I grew up in, in a, in, in a largely white community. Y'all have culture. You just don't see it. Cultures belonging to those strange people over there, but act, you have a lot of culture and some of it's really beautiful and some of it's quite harmful.
And so that, I think to be able to get along and to figure out how we can be in, in good relationship with each other, I think people have to be able to see, how this, the harms in this relationship are not just harms on Indigenous people. Although I think Indigenous people definitely bear the brunt of it.
But, Indigenous people or Black people, and a whole range of marginalized peoples have had to pay the heavy price. But we all are impoverished by impoverished relations. I would love to not be wounded by, you know what, there are lots of problems with the inauguration.
Whatever it feels like. It's a hopeful moment. And then they say, this land is your land. This land is my land. I'm like, really? Really? This could have been a moment. And that's a really minor, kind of trivial point, but I think it's an it's, it speaks to that thing. But think what we could have, if we could all just be in loving kindness with one another if we didn't need to have particular walls, which are there for good reasons. If we could be honest about the histories that we've inherited and the violences that we've visited upon one another, if we didn't have that, think about what we could accomplish and just think about how liberated we could be. I like it when people are happy.
I like it when people are loved. It makes everybody. Better.
Patty Krawec: Thank you for listening. You can find me online at thousandworlds.ca where I write about traditional Ojibwe stories and how they connect with our lives, along with the books that I'm reading or feel relevant to the story. This podcast series and the book that emerged from it changed me the way that good books and the conversations about them do. Remember the first rule of Bad Indians Book Club: Always carry a book.
These conversations originally streamed live and were recorded in 2021. Editing and transcripts completed by Tiffany Hill with the generous support of Dr. Eve Tuck, director of the Visiting Lab Lenapehoking. Our theme is Biindigen, an original hand drum song composed and performed by Nicole Joy Fraser.
Baamaapii!
Excerpt from Booklist, a starred review which means the book is "outstanding in its genre": A fascinating advanced seminar about how to think, read, think about reading, and think about Indigenous lives.”
Preorder your copy of Bad Indians Book Club today in the US at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in Canada: Indigenous owned GoodMinds, as well as Amazon, indie books, and Chapters Indigo. Get it wherever you get your books.
And if you want me to zoom into your local bookstore or bookclub? Talk with you on your podcast? I can do that. patty.krawec@gmail.com For larger professional settings you can email Rob Firing at rob@transatlanticagency.com
And I've got some launch events! Click the link to register. Registration isn't open for all events yet, if you are in the area you can save the date and a link will be added when it's available.
September 16, 7pm St. Catharines Ontario: Finding Safety in a Colonial State at the Marilyn I Walker building with Dr. Robyn Bourgeois and Khadija Hammuda.
September 19, 7pm Toronto Ontario: Refusing Patriarchy at Roncesvalles United Church co-sponsored with Another Story Books, with Joy Henderson and Sean Carson Kinsella.
September 27, 3pm EDT online event with the New York Society Library and the Seattle Atheneum.
October 2, 7pm in Vancouver British Columbia: Indigenous Geographies with Dr. Deondre Smiles at Massy Books.
October 28, 6:30-8pm at the Peterborough Library in Peterborough Ontario.
October 29: 7:00-8:30pm at the Tweed Library in Tweed Ontario
November 17, 7:00 pm Burlington Lit Fest in Burlington Ontario.
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