I haven't written about a book for a while.
This one hit me, head on, at the right time. It is one of those novels - the teachings arrive when you need it most. I needed the teachings in this novel.
Thank you, Tommy Orange for sharing your gifts with the world.
I wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago and have just gotten around to sharing it.
Enjoy.
Oh, and go buy There, There and read it - especially if you are Indigenous. There are deep teachings There.
I finished the blog post Oct 1), posted it, and then I couldn’t sleep.
I had many dreams last
night about accessing deep, firey centres – about the places being ready but I
couldn’t quite get to the entry points.
I dreamed someone was trying to take Dante from a camper I left open and
unattended for a few seconds. I even
cried out in my dream and woke up Dal. I
scared the person away I think but I am sure I saw the person with my baby in
his hands.
I had lines come to me
like:
“My grief grabbed me by
the throat.”
and “Our Ancestors are
YouTube now” from my infection (the first line) and thinking about There,
There where Orvil teaches himself how to powwow dance by watching YouTube.
I thought about how that is the “Urban and Native” reality because our elders
are missing, in a traditional sense, and haven’t been given the traditional
knowledge because residential schools, and other colonial interferences, and I
started to feel so sad that we have to research and teach ourselves if we want
to connect to our cultures because there are so few elders left. [Side
note: I have re-read the intro and some
of the interludes and Orange makes a very good case for this way of gaining
knowledge. He suggests that as modern
people, we are no less Indian because we are in cities because cities are still
on the land – still part of the Earth – which is still connected to All Our
Relations. He suggests that we are still
“traditional” even if our knowledge acquisition methods are modern.]
Then I became
afraid. How do we know what is “right”?
I realise that this
grief, that has grabbed me by the throat, was not just for my bio-Mother – it
is for my culture. The loss felt by all
I don’t know – haven’t learned because of the shame wall built and the
disconnection from what my Spirit knows to be true: “We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which
we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from
memories that flare and bloom from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man
shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to
get rid of us.” (p. 10) Orange does such a great job of bringing up these pains
and questions in his novel…this medicine story for modern Indigenous people
in North America…I want to say modern, Urban Indians but I hear Leanne Simpson
in Islands of Decolonial Love in the piece lost in a world where he was always the only one: “ i cringed
everytime he said ‘indian.’” (p. 56) and I would die if I’d upset her.
But that’s what it is – a
medicine story for modern, urban Indians who don’t know how they – we – are. A medicine story with transformers:
traditional (Orvil and Opal with their spider leg legs) and modern (Tony and
his Optimus Prime reference) trying to make sense of the responsibility of that
role, chosen and not.
Getting gunned down at a
powwow by one of our own – intercultural violence when trying to step into – to
realise – self-actualise that longing to connect to the deepest parts of who we
are:
-dancing as prayer
-drumming as prayer
-singing as prayer
Gunning us down as we
learn – as we teach ourselves – how to pray is so fucking tragic! It’s like we destroy ourselves from the
inside because we can’t seem to agree on what to save or honour.
Even the thieves turn on
each other – so we even tear ourselves apart to tear each other apart.
One of the best weapons
of colonialism. We mimic the methods of
our oppressors.
The guns were made on a
fucking printer! They are not even “real” guns! – Like the Escheresque
argument/discussion of who is the “real Indian” in the novel from Opal with her
long name and her experiences at Alcatraz during the AIM occupancy in the early
70s, to Tony opening the novel talking about living with FASD – The Drome – to
Jaquie Redfeather, the teen mom created out of rape at Alcatraz, the daughter
she gave up, the boys her sister Opal raised, and the daughter who suicided as
an addict on the streets.
The stories of domestic
violence, alcohol, and the many, many recoveries…realities for urban,
non-urban, full blood, mixed blood people.
Dene Oxendene, in an interview with Calvin, says “…I just don’t know
about this blood shit,” (p. 150) and it makes me cry…like when Edwin Black finally
finds out what his “tribe” is after he finds out who his father is:
For
how many years had I been dying to find out what the other half of me was? How many tribes when asked in the mean
time? I’d gotten through four years as a
Native American Studies major.
Dissecting tribal histories, looking for signs, something that might
resemble me, something that felt familiar.
I’d made it through two years of grad school, studying comparative
literature with an emphasis on Native American literature. I wrote my thesis on modern Native identity,
and the literature written by mixed blood Native authors that influenced
identity in Native cultures. All without
knowing my tribe. Always defending
myself. Like I’m not Native enough. I’m as Native as Obama is black. It’s different though. For Natives. I know. I don’t know how to be. Every possible way I think that it might look
for me to say I’m Native seems wrong. (pp. 71 and 72)
ke Simpson, I was moved to write this poem:
mosaics
It’s like being half person –
but the other half of me isn’t missing;
just hovering.
It’s not even half
but fragments –
mosaic pieces in drumbeats
mortared by smoke and prayers;
and hidden under
silos
barns
and tractor treads
leading, on asphalt,
to concrete
glass
and steel fingers
pointing to the skies we are choking
with unholy smoke empty of prayers –
even for forgiveness.
Knitting whispers into DNA
through fragments tiny as beads;
call me
all of me
to the centre where prayers are made.
So I go.
And I rest awhile
to hear my grandmothers’ voice[s]
Sometimes she speaks
Sometimes she sings
Sometimes she dances on silent feet
to the music of my heartbeat
echoing hers
echoing hers
echoing hers
echoing ours as far back as the hills remember
or the grass
or the velvet on elk’s horns.
It’s all in me –
the keeper of the land –
and the taker:
sometimes at the same
awkward
dinner talk on warm August evenings.
It’s all there –
the dust in my veins
and the drum in my breath:
sometimes confidently
other times
tentative to move toward the vision teachings
without the science of genetics…
but I know better,
I’ve been told better;
so dreams speak louder than molecules…
most of the time.
R. L. Elke
Oct 14/1
We
are killing each other with weapons we create through mechanisms we obtain from
“out there” – the dark web – where Daniel found the 3D printer. We are killing ourselves with fake weapons for
fake money to pay debts that don’t belong to us. It seems that when the modern world collides
head on with our traditional world, people die. Colonialism buries us one way or
another: either through the attempted
removal of our culture or in suffocating doubt about our own identities. It has stolen our children, kidnapped our
elders. It has forced us to learn how do
powwow dancing by watching YouTube.
The
wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has
never healed. An unattended wound gets
infected. Becomes a new kind of wound
like the history of what actually happened became a new kind of history. All these stories that we haven’t been
telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what
we need to heal. Not that we’re broken.
And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given
up, to have survived, is no badge of honour.
Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient? p. 137
Maybe we don't call it resilient.
But we are still here.
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