N’dadibaajim

 I wrote Bad Indians Book Club with flash fiction at the beginning of each chapter, short stories about Deer Woman that I just made up. They are true to what I know of her story from other Ojibwe people, although we may have borrowed her ourselves from other traditions. Adopted her if you will. In the short story preceding the chapter on memoir we learn that she's been sitting in a sweat lodge this whole time, telling her story to the young woman conducting the sweat. Did you know you've been speaking entirely in the third person, Animiki BensesaiKwe asks.

We do that right? Talk about history as if it happened to somebody else, hiding ourselves behind the conventions of objectivity and bias and there is a role for that but doing it exclusively has a cost. In Becoming Kin I used genealogies to tie people I knew to the history that I was writing about. Kerry's connection to the Middle Passage. Twila's ancestor who walked the trail of tears. My own personal stories tying me to residential schools and their afterlife in child welfare. These changes were the result of a friend's advice upon reading an early draft. You're not an academic he said, don't write like one. There's enough academic books out there. We need more of you in here. So that's what I did.

There's another piece to this.

In that short story, the young man keeping fire for the sweatlodge is wearing a t-shirt with Sabe on it that says "life, laugh, lurk." Sabe, the Ojibwe name for the being more commonly known as Sasquatch or Bigfoot, is the hide and seek champion of the world so the phrase made me laugh but then I read James Vukelich's book on the seven grandfathers and he points out that the Ojibwe word often translated as honesty, which Sabe represents, means a little more than truth telling. It asks the person to look at us and see the truth of our lives. I hadn't planned that when choosing the tshirt for this character. It just made me laugh and seemed appropriate given Kwe's own shape shifting cryptid nature, but doesn't that teaching connect perfectly with memoir? I tell a story, inviting you to look at me, and in seeing me hope that you see the truth of my life.

What you get right now is me, and I pray that as I grow, you hold that space with me, and that as you grow, I hold that space with you. May we look back on our long-ago selves with kindness and know that there were always things we should have done better.

Kaitlin B. Curtice,
Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God

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 in N’dadibaajim, I tell a story. In this episode about memoir writing we talk with authors Ernestine Hayes and Kaitlin Curtis, as well as one of the founders of the Combahee River collective, Demita Frazier, whose story is included in Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor's book about the collective, How We Get Free.   

 [Other guests included: Joy Henderson, Jenessa Galenkamp, and Robin McBurney who moderated the chat on the twitch livestream. Recommended books included: Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot, Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin Curtice, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor, In My Own Moccasins by Helen Knott, From the Ashes: My Story of Being Indigenous, Homeless, and Finding My Way by Jesse Thistle, The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir by Ernestine Hayes, One Native Life by Richard Wagamese-ba, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliot.]

So, we're talking about memoir, and we've got, I always think that we have, that I have the best panel. So, what I'll have each of you do is just introduce yourself, say a little bit about where you're from, authors, talk about your book, reflect a little bit on it, because I think the books have come out. They're not something that came out within the last couple of months, so you've had some time to think back on what Alexis Shotwell calls a snapshot of a moving target, but was and I'm struggling, because I think some of you know that I'm writing my own book right now, and I'm struggling with all of the new things I'm learning. And I would go back and I would change that chapter, and I would change this, and I would change that, and you can't do that. At some point you have to stop writing and move on to the next chapter. And so I was lamenting this to Alexis, and she had said, yeah, it's a snapshot of a moving target, and that's okay. 

That's okay. Alexis is the author of Against Purity, and that was really helpful to to be thinking about that, that what we're not looking for is a pure image of who we are and how we think. What we're taking is that snapshot of how of how we are in that moment, of how we live, and that and memoirs are just so intensely personal, and not just personal about us, personal about the people we're talking about, not only telling our stories, but telling the stories of people whose lives intersected with us. And although my story isn't strictly speaking a memoir, I do talk about my mom, and I talk about friends, and I saw something on Twitter it said, if people wanted to be remembered better, they should have behaved better. So just I will tap you to give a quick introduction of where you are, what book you read, what book you wrote, and a little bit of a little bit of reflection on on that picture of a moving target, right?

Robin McBurney [introduced herself and then left the panel to moderate the twitch chat]: So I am in Niagara Falls, and I am a teacher, and I read Helen Knott’s In My Own Moccasins, at least, I've read three quarters of it at this point, and it is a very powerful story, and I was quite impressed with her journey and what she went through. It's very eye opening. And one of the things I struggle with as a colonizer/settler is my place in the struggle for justice, and I really appreciated her words to people like me who fit into my category, at the beginning in the forward, where she said that she understands that my learning will be a byproduct of the words, but she didn't write them for me, and that it's a good thing that I will learn anyway, and that we must understand each other in order to change the world.

 Ernestine Hayes:  I'm Ernestine Hayes. I was born in Alaska when it was still a territory, and for the first several years of my life, I lived with my grandmother while my mother was in and out of the hospital for tuberculosis, we lived in the Juno Indian village, and when I was 15, my mother and I moved to California, where I stayed for 25 years without ever coming home. And finally, when I turned 40, my life in shambles, my children grown or living with their father, broke not for the last time, and homeless, not for the first time. I said to myself, let me go home or let me die with my thoughts facing north.

 It took me eight months to get from San Francisco to Ketchikan, living in my car, standing in food lines, sleeping in shelters. When I got to Ketchikan, I remained homeless from May to October, and then I got a job, found a place stay, sent for my mother, sent for my sons, and two years later, we made it all the way back home to Juneau, and I know I love it more than if I never left. 

Just like when I turned 40, I said, let me go home. When I turned 50, I said, let me go to college, because I had never even finished 10th grade. I'd gotten a GED and learned to type, and that was it. And so, at the age of 50, I started college, and it ended up several years later, I got my MFA in Anchorage and came back to Juneau and started teaching at the University of Alaska Southeast, and my MFA thesis became my first book Blonde Indian, which told story of my return. So, I think that this concept of our lives as moving targets is insightful. And I look at my work and I see that Blonde Indian was I would say, personal and cultural, and talking about my personal experience, and then Tao of Raven, I wrote that as my second book, and I would say that's more social and more and I don't mean social like “Let's go have tea,” I mean talking about our inequities and the system that we struggle against. And so not only are we moving targets, our stories are moving targets, our lives are moving targets, and our work reflects that.

 Jenessa Gallenkamp: Hey, I'm Jaeessa. Patty invited me here to be one of the civilians on the panel. So Jenessa, the civilian. I am originally from Tiny Ontario, but I live in Niagara right now, which is Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee land. For this month, I have actually read five of the books that Patty had on her list, not all with like over the last 30 days, I've read them over the course of a couple of years. But when I was taking the time to reflect on those five books that I've read, which are, I read From the Ashes, In My Own Moccasins, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Heart Berries and The Tao of Raven. But when I was reflecting on the stories, I was just thinking about how they're all very different, and each story is like unique, and each story is beautiful, and it reflects the life of the person who wrote it. But there's a lot of like, parallels and similarities, and I feel like when you're reading the books, you can really just see how colonization has affected everybody. And I hear, I've heard a lot of statistics on stuff like this, but sometimes I feel like when you just focus on the stats and the numbers, like the people and their stories can fall between the cracks a little bit. So I really enjoyed this month and talking about memoirs, because I feel like it brings back the human aspect of the story.

And then I really connected a lot with Alicia Elliott's book, which is A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, and I wasn't really expecting that when I read it. A lot of her stories reminded me of stories that my mom used to share with me when I was growing up, and went from when she was growing up. And I actually reread it for this month, and there was a particular like chapter, I think she calls them essays. There was a particular chapter where she talked about photographs and photographers. And I went to college for photography, actually, so some of the photographers that she mentions in her book are photographers that we had talked about in school, that my professors had talked about, and I still remember some of them, some of my teachers would talk about how these photographers did such a great job capturing, like the American West and like the dying frontier and stuff like that. It's like, Okay, wow. And one of the photographers that she named in her book actually had a series, a photo series on Black and Indigenous and people of color that was entitled Before They Pass Away.

 And it had me thinking a little bit deeper about some of the stuff that I had to do as a photographer and in in this class, and we had to do this one self-portrait series. We had to take five photos or something, and each photo had to represent something that was important to us, or that was, like an aspect of ourselves. So for one of the photos, I took a self-portrait, and I had, like, feather earrings, because I was like, I’m Métis. I'm gonna, like, really showcase this. And I braided my hair. And then when my teacher threw it on the screen for everybody to see, the first thing he said was, Wow, I can really see the Indian. You look like Pocahontas. And that was all sh* and then, and I'm looking back, I haven't thought about that in so long. I feel like I've walked it from my memory, but reading Alicia's book made me think about that again. Now I look back at it and I'm like, Is this my fault? Like, why did I do that? Why did he say that? And then thinking about it deeper made me think about what my responsibilities are as a photographer, and how to represent people in a way that represents them fully for who they are and not who we think they should be. And that was just, those are just my thoughts, and that was what I was thinking about, and some of the stuff that I connected with when I was reading the book.

 Kaitlin Curtis: So I'm Kaitlin Curtis. I've written two books. My first one was called Glory Happening, and then my second book, Native Identity, Belonging and Rediscovering God, came out almost a year ago. So it came out last year during covid, which has been quite an adventure. And yeah, both of my books are memoir in essay and poetry form, and so that's just my favorite style, and where I've landed, and I can't seem to get away from it. And like you said, Patty, I've struggled with the exact same stuff writing my books, because it's it is terrifying to know that you may change in major ways by the time your book comes out, you may be in a completely different space than when you wrote it. And I was thinking about that in my book Native, and I actually wrote an afterword, and it was about this. It was about I may change by the time you read this book, I may have changed. And I just want you to know that might happen. I'm just letting the reader know. So I had this in the afterward. I said, “what you get right now is me, and I pray that as I grow, you hold that space with me, and that as you grow, I hold that space with you. May we look back on our long ago selves with kindness and know that there were always things we should have done better. I can't wait to see where this journey takes us together.” Because I wanted to end the entire book with just a note to say, Listen, things are going to change again. And since I wrote this book, I have changed. And the next book I write will have other things in it.

 So there is this, this sense of finality when you finish a book and turn it in that, oh my god, this is here it is. But you just have to say, Here I am right now, and this is the best that I can give. And this is who I am up to this point. This is who I've been, and I'm offering that to whoever needs it. That's just how I've had to think of it. Otherwise, you psych yourself out completely. So you just have to breathe through it. And another thing that I include in my memoir is poetry. I have original poetry, but I don't have enough to do a collection of poetry, and so I slip my poetry into my books as a way to help us all stop and breathe as we're reading things that can be hard and heavy sometimes. So this is one of my poems that I'm going to read to us from my book, Native.

God is more language than this.

God more breath than lungs, more oxygen than air, more wind than atmosphere in which to hold it.

God is more soul than us.

God is more time than schedules, more grace than boundaries, more everything than the imaginable, and yet we are constricted.

And yet we say, language must be spoken, breath must be breathed, oxygen must revive.

We say wind is the only spirit.

This soul is the end of us.

Time rules the world.

Grace is unreachable, and everything is bound, linear and fathomed.

What then is God.

God is exactly everything that is and everything that we do not know of,

mystery stacked upon mystery,

sacred enveloping sacred

treasure buried within the pebbles of our

Earth kingdoms.

Demita Frazier: Hello, everyone. And first of all, I have to say I really appreciate being able to have this conversation across so much distance that doesn't feel really far, and I'm really grateful to you, Patty, for inviting me, because I am not, I have not published a book yet, but I'm in the presence of writing a political autobiography and the chance to talk about a few of the themes that I'm working with in terms of truth telling and talking about events and times that I haven't read a lot of books with my perspective or the perspective of other black radical women, so I'm excited about participating in this convo. I also want to say, when I reread the short bio that Patty included, want to say that I have always been and am dedicated to the role of humble servant and organizations that I work for, I really appreciate the role that we all play, doing the work and getting the work done. And so if I've been a leader in any way, been with an insistence on looking at the importance of looking at honoring the nature of the work that we're trying to do with regard to social judgment.

I just also would love to say that I've been loving hearing each of your individual voices. But then to add to the story, I am, as I said, writing a political autobiography. I did not know exactly that I was going to be doing this. Have never really thought about until recently, the unfolding story of what it means to maintain your life as a person with a radical social vision, and how you do that, living in the midst of the cauldron that we find ourselves in. Okay, so I'm working on this book, and I'm in also in the process of making some decisions about how I want to frame the book. So I guess I can stop there.

 Joy Henderson: So my name is Joy Henderson. I'm an Afro Indigenous person from Scarborough, Ontario, and I guess for me like I'm also working on my own memoir too. And so it's very interesting because as I struggle to write down every last detail, because as I'm trying to capture the community and the people in it and the feeling of it, and it's just there's no way that words can do it justice. And maybe as I get older, I can struggle to actually maybe do it again, or find another way to write another book. This one's very painful. That might be my last, yeah.

 I just think about snapshots. And it was really interesting because a friend said to me yesterday, and she said, you've come such a long way in 10 years. And I didn't really like the way she said it, but I'm like, No, I am an entirely different person than I was 10 years ago than I was two years ago, and even last year, we were all very much changed because of covid, and just how we bounced with it. And that's an interesting process, because as you struggle to get it all down, it's, what can I hold back? What should I hold back? And it's funny because, like, I was lucky enough to speak with Alicia Elliot about the book, and then she gave me some solid advice as to what to hold back, what to keep, what to put in, right? And she's been very vocal on her thoughts in terms of airing trauma and such on Twitter. And so it's kind of, it was a really helpful discussion on that. Because, again, it's not just my story. It's other people's stories too, right? And it's like my story, and how is it going to affect people like my mother or my family?

Patty:  Now, there's a couple of themes, like from the authors that we've got here today. So from Native, from The Tao of Raven and How We Get Free, which is more that's something, that's a book, a book about the Combahee River Collective that Demita was interviewed for. So not, strictly speaking, a memoir, more of a movement memoir, but a reflection on some, a very powerful time period. And I wanted to go back to Ernestine, because Ernestine, you frame your story with with Raven stealing the sun. And could you give us a very quick version of that story and how you came to frame, to frame your story around that, because there's some themes in the way you and Kaitlin framed, because Kaitlin used the flood story once you used the story of Raven. Could you tell us a little bit about Raven and why you framed your story that way.

 Ernestine: Sure, thank you. Raven brought all the gifts to the people here, where, which is now Southeast Alaska, northern British Columbia, the temperate rainforest along the northwest coast of what is now America. He brought dance and fresh water and everything, other gifts. And one of the things that he brought, was light and there were boxes of treasure in an old man's house, and Raven found a way to get in there and take those boxes and bring them into the world. I framed Tao of Raven with that story, because although I am by no means a scholar of Asian philosophy, I've always admired the Tao Te Ching. And in fact, when I first went to California, I remember in San Francisco, I was reading this book that had the summary of all the major religions of the world, and the one that sounded like what my grandmother had taught me when I was growing up was Taoism. And so, I began reading the Tao Te Ching, and it led me to the Art of War, and I saw that in the Art of War Sun Tzu’s advice to his generals about what tactics and strategy were very similar to what Raven used when he made his deliberations. And I knew I couldn't call it the Raven and the Art of War, so I fudged a little bit and called it the Tao of Raven. There are some concepts in there from because the Tao Te Ching and the Art of War agree with one another in many of these instances of advice. And once again, I'm not saying that as any authority at all, just my own personal impressions of what it has meant to me. And so that's why I used Raven and the story of the box of daylight to show that the strategies and tactics that Raven used are universal and can be used by all of us, and should be.

 Demita: Wonderful.

 Patty: Which is, like the flood story, in the way that, in the way that there was loss and then, and the flood story is really everywhere. I'm actually struggling with using the flood story in my book, because it's, it's everywhere right now. I think there's a reason why we're all everybody's talking about flood narratives, and what we can learn. Kaitlin, throughout your book, you're reflecting on different aspects of the flood narrative. How do you, How did you come to that? And how do you see where we are right now?

 Kaitlin: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I so I grew up Southern Baptist, and the only creation story I ever learned was Adam and Eve, and a very problematic version of that that I grew up learning and as an adult I didn't know until adulthood, young adulthood, like dawning on me that, oh, like, of course, cultures all over the world have creation stories, and of course, we all have flood stories, of course. And so being someone who loves studying culture and religion, when that finally dawned on me in college, I was so excited. And so when I was writing Native, I needed like a frame to set it in, because that's just how my brain works. Like I need like a large frame, and then these essays and stories within that frame, and Native is this journey of identity and belonging. And so that, to me, is a collective work. It's my stories, but it's our collective work of asking what is on the horizon for our world and for our systems and our personal lives and our communities. And I wanted people to be able to take that with them. And so to me, this flood story was perfect.

 And then my book comes out in the in covid, during covid, and I never thought this story would hit so hard, even for me as I when it hit me this is coming out when we're asking, literally, what's the world going to be like on the other side of this flood, in a sense that we are, and it became so powerful. I mean, I've been moved to tears numerous times just thinking about how in the flood, in the Potawatomi flood story, how original man and the animals, I imagine they had this time of grieving before they could even dream of what might be next. And I think that we're doing, that we're having this collective time of grieving, and then we're relying on one another to ask what could possibly be next, and and we're just seeing these things happening and experiencing all of these things happening, and can we collectively care for one another as we dream ahead to what could be? And it's just beautiful to me that we have these stories all over the world, in so many cultures and religions and ways of understanding how to dream together, really how to ask what comes next for our world and for each other. So I'm really grateful that this story is there and that it came to me, and that I get to be a part of the story.

Patty: So picking up on what you talked about, identity and belonging and collective, Demita in the Combahee River Collective, in the statement, one of the foundational things is, that Black women are

inherently valuable. And that was a foundational statement from which you guys built the rest of the rest of the Combahee River Collective statement, as we're thinking about like Kaitlin had brought up collective grief, collective imagining, because that's really what, that's really what the collective is from when I read the book, was imagining possibility and then working towards. Can you talk a little bit about that, about your experience with the collective, and how you guys did that, bringing gifts as Raven did, bringing gifts to the community, imagining what could be, and how you guys pulled that together.

 Demita: Thank you. And I'll say really briefly, what's interesting the thing about, for me, anyway of that time period is and as we're talking about memoir, sorting through the multiple layers of memory, in terms of what you experience in a particular time. And for me, as a young woman in my 20s who was breaking free of a lot of the things I think many of us struggle with regard to where we fit in our families, what we are, who we are in our families, I was dealing with all of that at the same time that we were creating a way of thinking and talking about the work we wanted to do as Black radical women. Because one of the things about Combahee that was fascinating is that it was the coming together of a the core group of six to eight women who were all at different ages, coming to grips with a need to express individual personal power in concert with other people to achieve goals, and so much kickback that we were getting because of the sociopolitical and also the cultural struggles that were happening with regard to Black men and Black women struggling for struggling and dealing with issues of patriarchy and heteronormativity. So, you've got a group of us who were unrepentant, nascent feminists, and who had been thinking about Black feminism and what it meant to be a Black feminist before we even came together in Combahee.

The thing that's really also interesting for me is that the quest for freedom was never about individual freedom. It was really about the collective freedom from the oppressions that we suffered as Black women and as black people. Okay, so there's all of that. We were all political creatures when we came together, coming from a variety of backgrounds, really, primarily, and this goes to how we were able to write together. 

We had, I think, to a person, Barbara, Beverly, and I stop one second. We are the writers. But it should be known that much of what we talked about in the two years prior to the writing of the statement, the conversations, the collective interactions between the dozens and dozens of the Black women that came through the meetings that we would hold in the conscience raising groups. It was a very fertile period, a great time of us creating ourselves. And it was not just the four of us. It was the result of engagement with ancestors. We were merely the most current. I used to say we were the current minnows. We were the most recent iteration of what it meant to try to be a Black woman surviving in this new world. And we were also keenly aware of the fact that the reason we wanted to be strong, the reason we wanted to be empowered, is because you cannot build a world with half of the community being fully empowered. And this was controversial, you think, no, and it's controversial today, but to just say, having the chance to write it, to write together, was refreshing for me, because I had not had good experiences in my educational background.

 I was a little bit precocious. I was writing for a young age, but I got punished for writing. I know there may be some of you who have had that experience where the need to express the strong you express, and then you are punished for it. So I found in Combahee, the freedom and the space to bring my gifts of understanding and observation to a place where I would not have to explain, and to use Charlene Carruthers’ word, which is, I'm so glad she's brought it to the fore to be unapologetic about it.

 For the most part, I think the other thing that was really interesting for me is and when someone several of you have talked about, what do you leave in? What do you take out? It was interesting times to be a young Black feminist in the 1970s because there were a lot of truth tellers breaking out all over, whether they were fiction writers, political writers, essays where people were very invested in bringing truth to the fore and trying to look at what did that mean and we are coming at, I remember so clearly that the story of what it meant, the story not the political or sociological picture, but the actual stories of our lives. I always was aware that there were always missing stories, and I always felt that by coming together,  I knew very clearly that in Combahee, we were writing a story that would somehow need to be written. And also was a breaking free of storylessness, seizing that narrative, creating the world that we wanted, not the world that was being forced upon us.

 One final thing I would say before I, just to not go on and on, the one thing about all of us, and I think for myself, one of the reasons I'm learning is autobiographical, this political autobiography, is that right now, a lot of emphasis creatively through the film about the Black Panthers, the film about the Chicago Seven and other and popular culture, the film about Billie Holiday. Ironically, I feel like Zelig because I participated either in those movements or in the case of the Black jazz movement in Chicago, my parents were both very involved, so I was around people like Billie Holiday, and other folk not participating, obviously at four and five years old, but being in that milieu and being exposed to ideas about Black Power, which was called, they didn't call it Black power, but really being involved with people who were race people when I was a toddler and a small child, and just hearing their voices and the stories that they would tell, because many of them are part of the great migration.

 There are a lot of stories that are not being told, that we're taking place during the what are called our social upheaval moment. And I feel like one thing that's really true, we don't get enough of the stories of those of us who were in the mix in the creation, we are excised. There’s not a single Black woman in the Chicago Seven movie. There are a lot of stories that aren't being told, and I'm just gonna tell, been telling those stories so someone said early conversation, if you had been thinking that you might be memorialized, you might have acted better. I think that's I'm paraphrasing, but I think we have to mine our experiences and be mindful about being sensitive and aware but also understanding. I think James Baldwin did it beautifully, in telling the truth in a way that makes the truth so much deeply human and deeply represented in both not just one story, but so many.

Patty: For Jenessa and Joy. You guys are both. You guys are both active in in your communities and your social your faith community, your social groups, your schools and all of that. As you listen to this, as you listen to Ernestine talking about her journey, Raven's strategies for bringing gifts to the world, and Kaitlin talking about collective grief and then, and then imagining, and Demita also about being in the midst of imagining this future we want to live in. This is what both of you are doing in different ways in your community. So maybe Joy will start with you. What are you? What is this giving you, in terms of the imagining that you're doing for the work, because you're doing a lot of work in the school board and in your community, coming up against things that are not the way they could be, right?

Joy:  It's honestly, it's a lot of it is what I'm getting is collective stories, and I am just like, I'm loving this, because I'm thinking back to my past, and I grew up in Regent Park, and there was a lot of activism going on then, and I was just, of course, a young’un there. And just watching the, it was all women led, right? And so, watching the mothers, the aunties, the big sisters lead this movement and collectively build it together, and getting all the stories, and it's just this, yeah, for me, it highlights the importance of getting that collective word, that collective, getting the people behind the scenes. And like for me, I work with youth a lot, and of course, they're often unrepresented. And any stories, every story, is certainly an education, just wild nevertheless. And this is the thing, right? And so we're left with these gaps in knowledge that is not translated and is not we're not going where we should be, because we are not collectively building stories, futures, frameworks.

And so there was that big kerfuffle this weekend, just with like school unions and such, and just because people were not being heard. And the more I hear about it, and that's my takeaway right now, is just who's not being heard? Who do I need to be heard, and who do I have to bulldoze to make space for? And that's how I often refer to myself as the bulldozer, because it's just constantly, hey, this person's not being heard, hey, this person's not being heard. And people count on me to do that, and it's really tiring, honestly. But there's also this gap, because I was having this conversation with a friend today. There's also this gap from hearing from sisters and aunties and mothers in terms of their collective movements, right? And what I need to grow from this, right? And so in order to build it not my own, to build one that's going to build off that wisdom and that knowledge, and that's so important. So, like the more stories I can read from people who have been there, done that, the better that and stronger that I can attack the issues in my little realm.

Jenessa: Yeah, I think what Joy was saying, feel like, I'm hearing a lot of just like collective, like working together and like collective work and, and I was just thinking, like, for myself, I grew up Evangelical, and just like trying to figure out what that means going forward, like, how do I move forward from here? How do I help empower like, people whose stories, like Damita said, the stories that aren't being told enough, the stories that people aren't like listening to or being like broadcast and like, with all the stuff that's been happening, weird, I think yesterday, or was it today, there was that shooting in Atlanta, and the guy, the shooter is apparently, like, the son of a pastor, or pastor or something like that. And what you do with that? Like, how do you move forward? And like, how do I want to distance myself from that and say that's not the type like person, or, I guess, Christian, that I would call myself, but also at the same time, I'm like, what do you do with what do you do with bad relatives? And it's a big question that I don't have an answer for. And I feel like I'm not the only person who can answer that, or should answer that. And I feel like coming back to just like the collective like, how do we collectively go forward from here, and how do we hear from the people who are being harmed by people like this shooter in extreme cases and make sure that this doesn't happen again? Like, how do we work together and continue on? So yeah, that's just what I'm like thinking of and trying to process as we're talking. 

Patty: What do we do with bad relatives, somebody else has been influenced by Alexis Shotwell. We talk about as Indigenous peoples, we talk about it's not just who you claim but who claims you back, who you who claim you. And so Alexis, white woman, and so she's thinking, who claims me, who claims, who claims me, who claims me? Then she realized white supremacist claimed me. What do I do with that? Like, she’s not talking about racist Uncle Frank that you see at Thanksgiving, she's talking about, collectively, who claims her, and so even though she doesn't claim them back, what responsibility does that incur on her in terms of, like, how she lives in this world knowing that this is who claims her, because you can't just pretend they don't. It's like the shooter, you can't just it would be easy to say he's not a “real Christian.” Or the churches who ran the residential schools, like any number of any number of these things, they're not “real Christian” at what point, like the purity nonsense, who's going to decide who the old ones are. So that's not really where I was going, but that's just what you made me think about them. 

But another theme that was in these books, and not just in these books, but really in all of in all of the memoirs, and it's probably an inherent part of memoirs, the idea of home, loss of home, is very familiar in all of these stories, they're all they all talk about a loss of home, and then they talk about returning home. But Ernestine talked about going home,returning home and making home are not the same, right, that you don't just go home and suddenly be at home. You go home and that's still, that's still a bit of a struggle. You build home. Can you talk a little bit about that? Ernestine, could you talk about going home? How did you build home, once you got there, build those relationships.

 Ernestine  When I came back to Juneau after 25 years, the I left two years after statehood in 1961 and so ANCSA, which is the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act, had occurred in that time. Prudhoe Bay had everything had happened while I was gone, and when I came back to Juneau, I didn't recognize, everything was new. Everything had been built since 1971 when the oil hit. But then, but then, I walked up the hill a little bit and past our old property in the village and towards the old graveyard and the mountain was still there, and I realized that for me, it was place, and I hadn't kept in touch with anyone all those 25 years, and my family was small to begin with, and my mother hadn't kept in touch with anyone either, and I came back not because of anything except I felt this was where I belonged and where I needed to spend the rest of my life.

I did want to say, to respond to some of the comments, I noted that everyone mentioned story, and I think we all agree that everything has life, everything is alive, and that includes stories. And I think that our reciprocal relationship with living stories is that stories, we are the vehicle by which stories present themselves to the world. And it cheers me to hear the stories and the voices that are finding their vehicles to present themselves to the world. 

Patty: Thanks Ernestine. Kaitlin, you had written about the mountain, and this is, you know, Ernestine had talked about, talk about physical places or spiritual places. And that's just a really beautiful and important thing to remember. And you've just moved so you are also in the process of making home. 

Kaitlin: yeah, main part. And what I was also thinking when you brought this up is that I also write about, yeah, having this for me, like this journey of writing this book, and over the last few years, has been returning home, even to my own body and to my own stories and to my own trauma in a way like naming trauma, naming some things that I never knew how to name before when I was young is, has been a way of me returning home to myself. So even making a home in my own body, in my story, has allowed me to make room to engage with the homes of other people or the homes of other creatures.

And so I also write about how like we have to help each other get home, like we have to help each other get home, home to each other. And that's the beauty of story is it's this invitation to engage someone else's experiences, and sometimes it brings us home to ourselves in a way that we can't even always explain. And now we're we moved to Vermont about eight months ago. And so all of my book, native was written living in Atlanta on Muskogee, Creek, Cherokee land. And now, now I'm in Vermont. And so it has been introducing myself and asking permission, as we are here to make a home, and getting all the creatures and all of these, all this here, but yeah, I think that has been really important to me, is learning to come home to myself and making a home there, and then letting what flows out of that be then a way to help all of us find our way home. 

Patty: I'm hearing a lot about reciprocal relationships. Yeah, hearing a lot about that. Demita, can you talk a little bit about making home because you've made home. You have made home with the collective, you've made home. I know when we talked before you were out in the very backwoods of Massachusetts, 

Demita: I had to also say, I don't know if anyone else is feeling it, but sometimes, in some of these conversations, and I'm loving this conversation, by the way, it's just delicious to be in a situation where it makes me want to cook for us. I was just thinking as we were talking, it's like someone should bring in the soup now, yeah, that we can break bread and have that part of the conversation. Yeah, that sense of home. I, it's so evocative. It's a very key part of two of the essays that I'm writing about what it means to be I love, by the way, Kaitlin, I love, by the way, when I think you just mentioned the thing about being at home in your body and embodying home in your body, it's so that resonates for me. 

Because what I was going to say is that for me, in terms of my family, in terms of my own life, history has been a constant migration, a constant moving, a constant trying to reform where we live, to make it better. My mother was a striver in that way. As a single parent, she was a hustler in that way. And so for me, the ability to drop into a new place and immediately make home, to clean it, to organize it, to to make it beautiful, to the extent that I can, to make it inviting. And I can't explain it, I guess I could, but I guess the thing I'm trying to say is that for me, home creation is probably one of the most magical things that we do. 

And creating in a hostile world, in a world that has so much that's not reflecting the very best of humanity, home, when you can have it be a place of sanctuary and have a sense of sanctuary, it's very precious. So, I think that notion of and it's very interesting, I feel like I have lived in an enormous variety of circumstances in my 68 years. And I again going back to the story, have lived amongst and with many different types and sorts of folk. And the blessing of that has been in my small little realm, my tiny world, seeing a lot of the world, and that's been very nourishing in a lot of ways. So I also want to say, all joking aside, I am Susie Homemaker. I love cooking, sewing, growing food, cutting wood. I love all the things that go into making home life? And I find it for me. It helps me as a writer. Helps me as a creator. It helps me as someone who also tries to generate a lot of energy and work towards doing good work. And you've got, I need. I have to have a place, a sense of some sense of place that is nurturing and nourishing. 

And I think one thing I should say is that Combahee was an interesting period of time in my life. I'm not I would never go back to the 20s for anything. There's no amount of money that would make me go back to that era of my life. One thing I will say, though, is that we were very bold about exploring, not always successfully, but exploring what it means to be in collectivity, to be in collective, to be interdependent, to work independent, interdependently. So, as I said, we did some things really well. We're able to have a sense of connection, and if you will, home with one another, and you'll know that Barbara Smith’s book Home Girls. Barbara Smith wrote a book called Home Girls. And one of the things about home for African American women, again, because of the issue of migration, forced migration, blight, police leagues, Babylon, these are some of the stories that from us were extremely just representative of so many stories of women that came so many of the stories of the women that came through Combahee. And finding that balance of needing to flee, but then also need to create home. That's fluidity and the flexibility your need to be able to do that. So these are some of the things that I want to work with in talking about the entire issue of home and place. 

Jenessa: I was thinking, even in my own family, like I say, Oh, I'm finding Niagara now, like, St. Catharines close to Patty. But then I'm like, people ask me, and like, Yeah, I'm from Tiny, Ontario. But then if I go back further, I'm like, Oh, my people aren't even from Tiny. We were forced off this other place and migrated to Tiny, and now we just say, most people say Penatanguishine. And I'm just like, that's just the story of so many people, so many other Indigenous people too, like a displaced people on our own land. It's just yeah. 

Patty: So how does story keep us connected? The Métis, are storytellers, right? At any like your, photography is a form of storytelling. Music is a form of storytelling, right? The Métis, the Métis fiddle, which I was introduced to in Cape Breton of all places. But those things are also part of story, about sharing history.

Jenessa: I recently stumbled upon this one author who I say she's from, like, my, like, home community, so, like, kind of Penatanguishine, like Tiny and her name is Cherie Dimaline, yeah. I'm not sure if I can, yeah. And I started, I bought one of her, just like novels, and it's just, like a fiction, but I started reading it, and the way that she ties in aspects of the community and the land and like place into her story, it just makes it like, my heart is so happy when I was reading it, I was like, this is this is my these are my people. These are my cousins. And so I just feel like story, it connects you to place and to people, no matter, like, how far apart you are. And it's wild how it just has that power. So I haven't quite finished the book yet, because I was reading a bunch of memoirs for this month, but I'm, I'm excited to keep reading it. And even when she, like, in the opening bit, she talked about, like, the like migration of my ancestors to like Pentang. And I was just like, I never thought I would read this in a book like this. And it's just so cool. It's so powerful. 

Kaitlin: That reminds me of, whenever you do a book proposal, they always ask you what your target audience is. And I think it is, like, the most difficult question for me, because I want to write books that reach all sorts of people, but at the same time, you're supposed to write to a specific audience, so I'm writing books for majority, probably white Christians. And yet, I want my words and my stories to bring healing or to speak something to many different people, and it's really difficult, but that's like the power of telling stories is that you get a chance to mirror something that someone could maybe see, even if they're not like me, even if our stories are different, maybe they catch a glimpse of something that allows them to examine a part of their own story. And I think that is something we can't even understand as we write books, is that at some point the book will take on a life of its own, and it's going to reach someone somewhere, and we may never know unless they tell us. But I've had atheists read my book, and I've had my Jewish friends read my book, and I've and I've had other people who identify as mixed read the book and and I've just been I'm so grateful because that target audience like, how do you pinpoint these things? Can my target audience be like humans? 

Demita: I'd like to make a point about something, though it might be worth it to bifurcate the whole concept of what you're looking at in terms of who you're writing for. There’s commerce, the commercial dimension, right? You're writing not to people or books,  simply just sell them, make money, etc. So that's one side, but I think Toni Morrison was right completely when she talked about the fact that she wrote for Black people, for example, that's her thing. She wasn't worried about writing for white folks. And her notion was in the same way that we universalize the white gaze and the white mind. It might be worth it to think about the fact that starting from the juncture of universalizing the Black perspective and that she, and that's what made her brilliant. She wrote purely from that perspective, which made an illumination that opened up a perspective that anyone could share. You dare anyone to read Beloved and not be touched, no matter who you are. 

So, I think that strange place we find ourselves under late-stage capitalism, where you know you have to sell something, with the commodification of it, and yet also for any of you folk who are on this call, who are, and I think it's all of you genuinely searching souls, interested in expression, interested in these are all things that are not quantifiable. And someone said recently, the most beautiful things in this world are not for sale. 

Ernestine  I'm I was sitting here wondering that. And my, I get my most treasured comments about my first book, Blonde Indian has always been when other Alaska Native people tell me that I told their story when I told my story, because we all went through so much together. We are the Alaska Native people who survived the 20th century are walking wounded. And when I talked about things that I went through and had other Alaska Native people tell me that exactly what happened to them, I felt, I felt validated. And I think that for Blonde Indian, I didn't have a particular audience, but that's the audience that I received the most satisfaction from. 

For Tao of Raven. I think I wrote that for white people. I wrote that because with Blonde Indian I had people who grew up with me in Juneau say they had no idea, white people had no idea, native people said that's exactly how it happened. After that, I wrote the next book, Tao of Raven for white people to read, because clearly they had no idea what was going on behind the dry sage curtain, and I wanted to give them an understanding of an opportunity to understand how things look from a different perspective. 

My next book that I hope to start assembling soon, when I find monk, when I can move into my next forever home, and my next book, I think is going to be more, so I went from from personal story and my culture, and then I went to the Tao of Raven about social equity and kind of political people tell me. And then the next one I think I want to I'm 75 years old, and I recognize patterns in my life, and I see myself being faced with the same lessons over and over again, and I want to learn my lessons now, so I'm gonna have to come back and learn them again. That's gonna be my next book, and so I guess that will be for myself. So, they're moving targets. It's not just our lives and our stories that are moving targets, our audiences are moving targets too. 

Joy: Now I'm thinking, wow, this is amazing. This talk, like, there's just so much wisdom in the room, and I'm just soaking it all in, and I'm trying not to get emotional. How long has it been since, like, we've actually just had a chance to sit around tables and listening to wisdom from each other and from our different, very different walks of life and experience. 

For me, I really resonate to home and oh, like it's just because I'm writing about my experience growing up in a community that doesn't exist anymore. So, I grew up in Canada's oldest housing community and but they gentrified it so it's gone, and which really sucks, and it reverberates through my life too. And I think about my ancestors, we were talking about migration patterns and being Afro Indigenous, there is a lot of migration within my family, from having not be accepted on reserves to moving to communities and then being targeted because they're Black, and it's just this on and on. So there is that place was home, and it's gone now. So it's like, how do we move forward? As there's still people from that community, and of course, we're all in contact with each other, and you pick up with that community and your home, but it's really hard nowadays, like, just with covid and everything, right? There's no community celebrations or anything. 

So it's really interesting as I navigate, and when I think about, and I'm listening to Ernestine and Demita talk about, who are they writing for? I'm like, and for me and Kaitlin too. It's like, I'm writing for my community that is, well, the physical community is no longer there. We've evolved and brought our flavor of region into, now Scarborough has me, God help them, but this is the thing, yeah. So as I'm just, I'm soaking it all in, and just I'm making notes as we're going along, because I'm like, Oh, wow, this is really interesting to know, and just also at home, being yourself too, and naming and going through that memoir and all those, I guess, items of your life, right? And just seeing, Oh yeah, maybe I should name that. 

I'm crafty too, and I'm trying to remember where I got it from. My mom is not crafty, right? But I'm thinking about like an elderly community member who would take girls around the community, and I was back in the 80s, and we'd go have our girls group in a church, and we'd sing songs, and she'd make us do crafts. And sometimes we hated it, sometimes we loved it, but that wisdom is still carried on, right? And it's really it's just interesting how it transforms, and I'm watching transformers movies a lot lately. 

Kaitlin  So when I give talks, I love giving definitions of words to people. I don't know why I just do and the definition of the word story, one of the definitions speaks to our capability of evolving, that word evolve is in the definition of a story, because the stories we tell are meant to evolve. They're meant to transform. So I think that's really beautiful that you brought that up, because that's exactly they're not meant to be static, like they're meant to change and kind of recreate and teach us things. And that's the beauty of it.

Jenessa: Right now I actually, I'm just in a bit of a time where I've taken a bit of a step back from photographing other people, just because I was lots of factors that I was feeling a little bit burnt out, and then, as a wedding photographer, covid was not the best season to be shooting, but I've been thinking about, like, turning the camera like on myself, and trying to reflect on, how do I want other people to see me and for people to see what I value? I haven't really shot anything yet, but I'm working. I'm trying to work on something with my sister right now, just like the connection between sisters and families and stuff like that. So where I'm at right now.

Patty: Kim Tallbear said, ever since she had said that, made this comment on Twitter about identity being a poor substitute for relations. That really makes me think about the way we use the word identity and memoir is about, it's about identity. It's about who we see ourselves, and how we think about ourselves, and how we reflect ourselves back into into, how the mirrors and the windows that we have that reflect us out and then that help us to see other people. But when Kim said that, it made me think of our identity existing in relationships, not in me, but in the relationships that I have as we wrap up all of these thoughts, and I've got pages of notes here, some really just neat ideas and things that people have talked about, how do our, just to reflect on our relationships and how we find identity and how we build particularly right now in covid, and we're not sitting down and having tea together, and Jenessa is drinking tea. We're not all drinking tea together. We're not having a soup that I would love to share with Demita one day, because she's probably a great cook and I'm really like good soup. 

So how do we maintain these relationships? How do we Kaitlin, you've just moved to a whole new state in the midst of a pandemic. How do you make friends? How do we form the connections where our identity sits in relationship with other people? Great question, but distillation, that's a really big question, because really, I'm reading Mariame Kaba’s book right now, and she admits in one of the essays that she doesn't like people. And I was like, Yes, I love you, because I don't particularly enjoy people a lot, but I do enjoy these conversations. Enjoy them very much. But I was just so happy to see her admit that. And yet, she's she does so much work, like all of her work is with people. And yeah, my friends used to joke that I was the anti-social worker. I need a social worker when you don't like people. And yet, there I was. 

Demita: Can I make a point about identity. Yes, this is Demita, and this has been incredibly wonderful. I'm enlivened by all of your voices. Just really grateful. I think one of the things that I learned, and this is over the arc of my life, my identity, part of the preciousness of life for me, is holding my inner self in the palm of my hand gently, because I know one thing about myself, I am constantly changing, and I don't, I don't do well with people trying to restrict my freedom to change. I realized that can no longer sustain relationships where people need me to be a certain thing for them or want to project that I feel like the most powerful thing that I've learned about identity is the [intelligible] of the evolution of the soul. That's why I think I came here. So I feel like also identity for me over my life, different parts of me have come to the fore. Other parts have receded. But as a human, I feel like my identity has become more faceted over time, with my likes, dislikes, the things you find, and I am willing to use any part of it that truly can be used for the social good, but I also don't want to be kept captive by it. I want always have the space to grow, evolve and change. So for me, she is about that. And thank you, all of you, 

Kaitlin: I love that, that's similar to my answer, I think, on a very, on a very sort of practical level relationships right now. Something that has helped me during covid is being able to have flowers delivered to certain friends and sending handwritten cards. Those are just things that have held me over the last year. Is being able to just send a bouquet of flowers that can be delivered to someone's door, no contact, or just like getting a note in the mail or sending a letter to let people know that I love them has been, for me very just a space that has felt healed. But then the identity thing, it's the same. I struggle with the boxes and the labels that I'm constantly put in. And when you become a public persona, people really feel like they need those boxes or labels for you, that’s the trouble as well. Because the beauty of being human is our like that definition of story is our capability of evolving and transforming. That's a gorgeous thing, that fluidity of who we are and what we embody, unfortunately, that that isn't seen as a good thing in a lot of spaces. It's, people get uncomfortable when they can't get you in the box that they need. And so even like people, because people do bad things like that, you got it. It's hard. 

It's hard. And so then, yeah, certain relational aspects have to be put to the side, and then you have to just trust your own journey and trust the people who honor that journey in a way. And so I think that's been where I'm trying to find myself, is to trust myself, to know my own journey, and, yeah, and to know the others I can trust. And I think covid has actually just made clear who those people are, that we are holding the space for one another's journeys, and that's the space that I have to be able to hold. 

Patty:  I've heard other people talk about sending handwritten notes. I personally have not done it. I am not a good friend. It's lovely that other people are doing it. Periodically I get messages from people on Facebook, and I just sent me a private message. So I'm just checking in with all my friends to see how they're doing. And I'm like, truly sweet. I haven’t checked in with anybody, my poor mother, I do see my mother, but yeah, I don't. I have to remember to check in on my kids.  thank goodness for the family group chat. yeah, yeah, my kids are all known, though. You can't report me to CAS for not paying cosmology. They chose me. So this is their fault, thinking about our identity and where it sits in the relationships we have with other people, 

Ernestine  it made me remember that when I was gone, like I said for 25 years, didn't keep touch with anyone, of my people. I think we can say that our lives and our stories are moving targets, insofar as it concerns the circumstances of our lives, but our identity, at least in where I come from and who I am, even though I was gone for 25 years, I my identity remained the same, and when I returned home, I was still who I was, and I still had the relationships that I had previously. Because in the Tlingit culture, our relationships are formed by our clan. And so the house that I belong to, the clan I belong to, the moiety I belong to, identifies me, and I can show back up after 25 years and tell them who my mother is, and I have a place in my community, and so I think we all carry a certain identity with us, and that identity defines and nurtures our relationships, even though it may have been 25 years since we were there or with someone, or maybe they're even gone now, but we still hold that identity and that relationship. I really want to say really quick, I colonize, smash the patriarchy, undo capitalism, resist. I might say smash patriarchy, because it ain't gonna smash itself. 

Jenessa: I feel like I have a lot of big thought, but I'm like, not sure how to broadcast those thoughts. But after thinking about just when, like Demita, and you're talking about, like identity and like holding your inner self, like gently and then holding on to, holding on too tightly to certain aspects of yourself, because, like, they change, or like, story of your life as it goes on, it can change too. So I was thinking just about that a little bit. And like, I have such a hard time with that sometimes, because it's just, I feel like, if I'm this thing, I can't be this thing. And I have a hard time taking myself out of these boxes that I get I put myself in, or perhaps like people around me have maybe put myself in, and it can be tough sometimes. But I was also just thinking after Ernestine was talking about smashing the patriarchy, that was great, but just also like the people who she hadn't seen in 25 years, but how identity holds and defines, like, our relationships, I think you said, and I was just thinking about how I'm just recently with, like, reconnecting with some like of my like Metis cousins from like Penetang. And just like, how much life I get from the chat that we have going on with Facebook and stuff like that. And it's just yeah, like, it's such a cool way to express yourself. And like, you just come in and they're just like, yeah, you're just, you've always been one of us. Like, this is just who you are, 

Joy:  I guess, terms relationships and identity. Like, I feel a lot of what Jenessa says. And just kind of like when you go into your community, and I can go back to our fragmented reach apart community, and I'm like, Oh, I'm Betty's daughter. And they're like, oh, Betty's daughter. Oh, my God, Betty. And they either love me or they hate me based on their relationship with my mom, because she was like, kinda cranky but I love her, but it's that, right? And they're kind of like, Oh, are you cranky too? But it's just when we get together, it's that is your home. And I also feel it's strange because within the Afro Indigenous community too, right? It's just instantly your home, because it's just such a place of survival. And we're here, and it's, oh, okay, yeah, no, I'm a friend of So and so and you generally know what community this person is from. And yeah, I think, like identity, for me, it is a lot of your relationships, and so I occupy lots of spaces and just in terms of, but at the same time, I don't want to click those check boxes either, and I'm hitting middle age. I don't want to hit these I'm like, I want to be the cranky middle-aged lady who's, I just want to do whatever the hell I wanted to and not be this person or that person. I just want to say the stuff that I want to say, and not, I guess, honestly, perform identity sometimes, because it feels that way for a lot of people. And I had this panel where I was kind of like, it'd be nice to not just perform, not to be, but I feel like I'm pigeonholed into like activist or child and youth care practitioner or and I find a lot of like, people, whether it's in my Regent Park community, whether it's in, like, the urban indigenous community, find ways to work in the same space as, oh, you're a social worker too. Yeah. Wow. Okay, here I am then. So I just, I don't want to necessarily be in those spaces and just make my own identity based on the relationships I've had and the relationships I do have, and hopefully awesome relationships I will have. 

Patty: 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 current 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 in Lenapehoking. Our theme is Biindigen, an original hand drum song composed and performed by Nicole Joy Fraser.  Bamaampii!

Want to add Bad Indians Book Club merch to your life? Get your Live Laugh Lurk on at Johnnie Jae's shop where she sells tshirts, stickers, tote bags and so much more. And that cover art by J NiCole Hatfield is stunning isn't it? She sells prints, cards, and more on her website.

"a journey into the wonders of reading, the questions books raise, and the connections we can make between stories—and between each other. Krawec refers to books by Indigenous, Black, and Jewish writers, and those by writers of other usually marginalized communities to construct a network of overlapping concerns and understanding, stories that inform each other ..." Review from Pickle Me This.

Order 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

Public 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.

October 18, 3:30pm (Pacific time) Moderating a panel on poetry. Will be streamed live for ticket holders. Victoria Festival of Authors.

October 19, 9am: Presenting on re-storying at the Algonquian Conference in Winnipeg.

October 29: 7:00-8:30pm at the Tweed Library in Tweed Ontario

November 17, 7:00 pm Burlington Lit Fest in Burlington Ontario.

And don't forget to join up with the Nii'kinaaganaa Foundation. Every month we collect funds from people living on Indigenous land and redistribute them to Indigenous people and organzers. You can find out more information on the website which is now powered by ghost, which means that you can become a subscriber there just like you are here!

Make a one-time donation