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the city is full of Indigenous life the city is full of medicine(s)
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bawaajigan (a dream) Lgijigan (an offering) —7
by trying ICmaybeonlythelearn weather won’t do what I want maybe we won’t know the story behind the seeds maybe it will feel lonely... there’s always next year
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ow can something be so delicate and strong at the sa quick to break under my fingers or collapse in the cold utstill, can hcd everything we’re carrying and lift it
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LAUGHTER IS MEDICINE
What’s the difference between a white ghost and a Native ghost? The white ghost says, “Boo” The Native ghost says, “Boo… aye”
What do you do with a bag of potatoes? You kookum and mooshum
What do skeletons use to make phone calls? Cell Bone. How many Natives does it take to change a light bulb? Six. One to change the bulb and five to sing the Light Bulb Changing song.
What do you call it when your bangs are uneven and crooked? Mom’s rez cut
What do you call a pile of kittens? A meowtain.
What does a mother buffalo say to a boy buffalo when she sends him off to school? Bye-son
How can you spot the difference between a regular dog and an Anishinaabe dog? Throw each one in the oven at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. The regular dog should come out tender and moist. The Anishinaabe dog will come out with a towel wrapped around his waist saying, "Dang that was a good sweat!"
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Tips for when you feel homesick for the place you escaped ~
Homesickness can be a complicated feeling when you are not sure what 'home' means for you. For me, it has been important to work on developing a sense of home that feels nourishing to me, while also making space to grieve the loss of home that I wished I had growing up. It has helped me to think about home as a body of relationships that allow us to feel held in our lives. These relationships can take place within many scales of being, in many places, and can focus on time in the present moment, or look to the past or future for solace. For me, ~ practising home-building engages many relationships and many scales of bemg. ""--/ Sometimes I start by focussing on my internal body and then moving outward, trying to build home in each stage of outward movement. Here are some relationship-building practises that have supported my process of cultivating home and grieVing home at the same time: Internal-body practises
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Develop a movement practise that nourishes your physical body and helps you to build a relationship with the body that houses your Spirit. For me, when I feel physically drained by a lot of external activity, I focus on body-nourishing movement practises like tai-chi and yoga, and when I feel a restless build-up of physical energy because of lack-of-activity, I like to bike or do strength-building high-energy exercise like going to a fitness class. Building a relationship with my physical body through movement is an important way for me to build home with my body.
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Find your teachers and healers for external support
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It's important to learn how to ask for help from the people who prove themselves to be worthy of your trust. My teachers and healers have usually proved themselves to be worthy of trust by supporting my growth and healing in patient, generous and loving ways. Their ways of offering support can contribute to any of the home-building practises I have mentioned. For example, they can be a body practitioner that helps me develop a relationship with my physical body, or a counsellor that helps me to work on building stronger relationships with my internal consciousness and with people in my life. A good healer or teacher knows when to push me to grow, and when to nourish me as I rest.
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Develop supportive human relationships ;\
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Develop a space that is your cave. A cave is a safe space that we can retreat to when the world around us is not safe. In our caves, we can grieve, feel angry, worried, or feel any other difficult emotion through to its full expression. Our caves hold us as we exert our emotions by crying, yelling, praying, saying things out loud that we don't want others to hear, or punching a pillow. Our caves are our physical homes for our bodies and our Spirits.
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Develop a mind-calming practise that works for you and allows you to quiet your mind and feel your body through stillness. Focusing on deep belly-breathing, practising guided or unguided meditation, smudging, and taking fancy baths have all helped me to develop this practise and to internal
Developing relationships with our physical Earth and non-human beings can help when we feel lonely for home, but don't feel up to trusting other humans. Spending time with plants, water, the stars and the moon helps me to give my homesickness to my land-Spirits when I am too exhausted to carry the hard feelings on my own. Spending time with my dog and other nonhuman beings helps me to practise building relationships with beings that are pure in Spirit and safe to love. I take my dog for long slow walks, I grow a garden in the summer that provides me with nourishing food and a connection to the Earth, and when I am feeling really lonely, I go 10 the lake by my house and sit with the water. These practises always help to ground me.
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Develop friendships, romantic partnerships, and familial relationships that hold you in all of these home-building practises. I put this practise at the end of this page because I have found that these relationships naturally occur for me when I am prioritizing many different home-building practises, and not solely looking for this sense of home in other humans. I know I am developing supportive human relationships when they inspire me to be the best version of myself. This version is always changing, and supportive human relationships in my life contribute to this change and honour me for the complex human that I am. To me, this is love.
-Andrea
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your nose, Inhale gently through expand making your stomach first, then your chest.
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When your lungs are full, hold your breath for a count of 3.
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rough your nose. Inhale gently chest expands Notice if your or if your when you inhale, Exhale or both. stomach expand5, through your mouth.
to breath in, try On your next first, stomach expand make your chest. Exhale and then your Practice throUgh your mouth. for a bit. reathng like this
Exhale slowly through pursed lips* and try to breathe out the air from your chest and then the air from your stomach. w” *
making your mouth into a tiny “o” shape, like when you whistle
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You can do this breath as many times as you want.
felt theory felt sense …we feel our histories as well as think them.
–Dian Million, 2009, Felt theory
Our voices rock the boat and perhaps the world. They are dangerous. –Dian Million, 2009, Felt theory
This felt sense is always there, within us. It is unifying, and yet, when we bring words to it, it can break apart, shift, unravel, and become something else.
–Sondra Perl, 1980, Understanding composing
This guided meditation for writing is an Indigenous feminist remix of a meditation created in the 1980s by Sondra Perl, one of my graduate teachers. I borrowed from Sondra Perl’s approach to helping people write from their felt sense of a topic, and learned from Tanana Athabaskan scholar Dian Million’s 2009 work on felt theory in order to create this meditation. You can have someone read this meditation to you, or you can listen to a recording of me offering this meditation at evetuck.com. If you are reading this to someone else, take your time so that they don’t feel rushed.
Perl, Sondra. (1980). Understanding composing. College composition and communication, 31(4), 363-369. Perl, Sondra. (1986). Guidelines for Composing. Appendix A. Through Teachers' Eyes: Portraits of Writing Teachers at Work. By Sondra Perl and Nancy Wilson. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
references
Million, Dian. (2009). Felt theory: An Indigenous feminist approach to affect and history. Wicazo Sa Review, 24(2), 53-76.
Move your body to an area where you can be comfortable while writing. Take some time to breathe and relax. Turn your attention to your feelings and the inside of your body. Find some quiet both on the outside and inside of your body. Ask yourself: What’s going on with me right now? Is there anything that is pulling my attention away from writing today? Is there anything in this space, or in my world that is distracting me from what I want to do, which is write? Make a list of those distractions. Now set aside that list of distractions, by turning the page, or creating a new page on the document. Now quietly ask yourself: What is on my mind? Of all the things that I could write about, what could I write about now or soon? When you feel yourself begin to answer these questions, write down all of the words and phrases that come to you. Make a list of all of the things you could write about today, or could write about soon. If you are having trouble getting a list going, ask yourself what am I feeling that is keeping me from generating writing ideas? Write what comes to you as an answer. Consider the idea that our voices rock the boat and perhaps the world. Ask yourself: What could I write about today or soon that would rock the world? Write the words or phrases that arrive. Ask yourself: Now that I have a list, is there anything else that I have left out? Anything that I could have missed the first time? Add anything else that comes to mind. Whether you have a long or short list, read over what you have so far, and ask yourself: What here draws my attention right now? What can I write about now, even if I don’t know where it will go? Select a word or phrase to keep working with in this writing session. Take that word or phrase and put it at the top of a new page or new word document. Check in with your body, with your feelings, with your body’s comfort. Breathe in and out. Get quiet on the outside and on the inside. Consider the word, phrase, topic, at the top of your new page. Ask yourself: What are all the little parts of this topic, or what are all of the little bits that are involved in this topic? What details need attention when writing on this topic? Write everything that comes to mind. Take your time to write all the associations that you have with this topic. Now having written for a while, interrupt yourself, and mentally set aside everything you have written so far. See if you can get a fresh take on this topic. Grab a hold of the whole topic, not just the bits and pieces, and ask yourself: What is important about this that I haven’t said yet? What about this will rock the world? What is at the heart of this issue? Wait quietly for a word, image, or phrase to arise from your felt sense on this topic. As you let this word or image or phrase blossom in your felt sense, ask yourself: Where in my body is my felt sense located? Where do I feel myself answering these questions from? As you begin to answer, allow your felt sense to deepen, to grow stronger. Take this word or image or phrase and use it. Use it to develop your felt theory. Ask yourself: What’s this all about? Let your felt sense continue to deepen. Continue to ask yourself: Is this right? Is this saying it? Can you feel the click or shift inside when you get close to what your felt sense is encouraging you to say? If you are struggling, ask yourself: What’s so difficult about this for me? And write the answers that arrive. Pause. Feel. Write. Keep going. When you find yourself stopping, ask: What’s missing? What hasn’t been said yet? Check in with your felt sense to see what is missing. Write whatever comes to mind. When again you begin to slow down, ask yourself: Where is this going? What is the big point that I am trying to make? Write the answers that come from your felt sense. When you are near the end, ask yourself: Does this feel complete? Have I said everything that needs to be said? Visit with your felt sense to arrive at the answer. Continue to visit with your felt sense, continue to build your felt theory, until you are finished writing for this session.
“are we?”
on a hill in West Sussex, England anglo-saxon burial mound “We are grave robbers.” “Oh, rubbish. We are scientists.”
But then I found Ojibwe archaeologist Sonya Atalay… “Museums, collecting, anthropology, and archaeology were developed within, and are deeply entrenched in, a Western epistemological framework and have histories that are strongly colonial in nature. As with most contemporary fields of study, these areas of research and practice are fully steeped in Western ways of knowing, naming, ordering, analyzing, and understanding the world. Indigenous people, both outside and within the academy, along with a number of non-Indigenous scholars globally, have struggled long and hard to bring the Western and colonial nature of these fields to the foreground. They have worked to bring us to the place we are today, where such statements are acknowledged (by most scholars) and where those who want to continue working to change these disciplines in positive ways have a space to do so.” And Choctaw archaeologist Dorothy Lippert… “To a Native person, an object may be significant both because of its human creator and because of the Native person's perceived relationship to that individual, a genetically based relationship that to this day few archaeologists can share. A non-Native archaeologist may share human characteristics with the creator of shell gorgets from the Southeast, but he or she cannot and should not claim that the traditions, heritage, and blood of that individual persist in himself or herself. It is difficult to clearly articulate the sense of identity that allows a Choctaw archaeologist to feel some sense of connection between herself and the creator of a Mississippian pot, given that the exact cultural or genetic link may be hidden in layers of time and earth. However, a sense of community does exist. In fact, it may have come into being through the arrival of the colonists who then became the "others," or ones who were not okla or "people like us.”
So, I left the field for the archives and set sights on (re)invigorating Métis material culture…
tell the objects jokes: why did the archaeologist go bankrupt? because their career was in ruins.
in a jungle in Siem Rip, Cambodia mass grave, date unknown “We are grave robbers.” “Nous sommes des scientifiques!!!”
how to rebel in the archives
whisper to the objects: nasty things! sweet nothings! co-conspire with them! tell them it was wrong for strangers to touch them without asking. revel in their revenge: “You know, I hear the former curator here died of arsenic* poisoning. What a shame…” *European and American archaeologist used to dip Indigenous objects in mercury, arsenic, and DDT to preserve them
sing to the objects (Rihanna works well here: “feel the warmth, we’ll never die / we’re like diamonds in the sky”)
I am an Indigenous (Métis) feminist and I am an archaeologist. Well, a trained archaeologist. I don’t do archaeology anymore. I was good with a trowel and even better with a mattock but I struggled in the field: I did not want to dig up graves. I’m not religious or even spiritual, but the act of digging up bones, even ancient ones, was disruptive — to us, to the bones, to the ground, to the nearby communities…and for what? for whom?
smuggle in sage, smudge the objects, locate the fire alarms and sprinklers, avoid curators at all costs
talk about them over sweetgrass tea, write fantastical stories for them
on surviving archaeology / what archaeology taught me