Reflections & Musings: President's Dream Colloquium Fall 2016

When I have heard a speaker I cannot immediately respond. I need a period of time, days maybe weeks to let the ideas percolate, rise to the surface like bubbles from the mud. In some instances, that bubbling indicates fermentation, even fomentation. In other instances, each bubble breaking the surface is like a light bulb going on, each bubble blurting a new idea or perspective into the air.

Chief Joseph, on the day that he spoke with us, was saddled with a personal sorrow, but charged spiritually with saying what needed to be said, despite his own sadness. I was not sad when I first sat down in the crowded theatre, eagerness potent in the air. But I was very sad by the time I left, and overwhelmed with a great deal of guilt.

Chief Joseph did not impose this guilt. Chief Joseph is a very kind man. He is deeply spiritually and he embodies a combination of kindness and pragmatism. What he mostly spoke of was – love. Not just between peoples who have a gulf of misunderstanding between them; but of a sanctity and reverence for everyone and everything – each other, the earth, the divinity of place. When Chief Joseph spoke it was not of abstractions or vague ideals, but of essential values and truths. He said that when the residential schools were created (well, even prior to that – assimilation, Colonization), the first victims were love and kindness.

These words touched me, but so did guilt.

Reconciliation #1 – Understanding

For the next couple of weeks I argued with myself, held myself by the throat and forced myself to look into a mirror. But, I argued, I am not responsible for the atrocities visited on First Nations peoples. I was not even a Canadian until 2010. I had nothing to do with this. And, as a British citizen, nor was I responsible for the grievous events visited on this and other countries, cultures, peoples in the name of the British Empire. Both in Britain and in Canada these things predated me. The barbarity that continued as I lived in each of these places – I did not know. I simply did not know this was going on.

I was ignorant, despite the fact that where I grew up in Canada, First Nations people lived on reservations. There was nothing in the school history books out of which I learned my Canadian history about the distressing and egregious history of Indigenous people as a result of their relationship with non-Indigenous. When I left England my teacher had warned me to stay away from the “Indians”, they still being very wild people, she said. My mother was terrified of First Nations people as a result of the hair-raising stories (most untrue and meant as a cruel teasing) my father told her from his experience of dealing with First Nations people as a police officer.  When we came to live here, the town was surrounded by reserves. Not knowing any better, we presumed that situation as normal.  My mother pointed out that we lived in a neighborhood of immigrants – all from somewhere else – and that we preferred to be together in this same place because we found comfort in being with like others. So it is with those natives, she said, they are on the reserves because they want to be all together. They are comfortable that way.

Reconciliation #2 – Harmony

 I am listening to the stories of residence school survivors and I go home with a burden of shame. I am feeling that my accustomed “white privilege” has blinded not only my eyes, but my mind and emotions to the burden that they must carry. But, really, my white privilege is not always so evident. Britain is still based on a class system and I was born into one of the very lowest classes. By the time we left England to emigrate to Canada we still did not have an indoor toilet. And we shared the one down the bottom of our yard with another family. My brother and myself, the two siblings that were born in England, are now, in our aging, developing all sorts of medical problems as a result of the malnutrition and exposure to viral diseases that plagued us as children in England. My father was insistent (and sometimes physically brutally insistent) that we didn’t speak “English” in Canada – the English with which we had learned to speak and communicate.

I am rationalizing. I know it. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, comparing my own experience to that of First Nations people who have suffered systemic racism and cultural cruelty. Just that not all non-Indigenous people reap the assumed benefits of being non-Indigenous. It’s like a lottery, I suppose – we didn’t know life was a lottery, we didn’t even know we had entered nor received a ticket, but we did and we have a winning ticket in our hands.  Didn’t pick this ticket but it is what it is, whether I want the prize or not, and I am doing the best with what I have been awarded, trying so hard not value my winnings over another’s lesser prize.

Reconciliation #3 Rapprochement

But, as I search my heart further . . .

Where does it hurt? That’s a question that civil rights icon Ruby Sales learned to ask during the days of the civil rights movement in the USA. I don’t think we ask that question anymore. We scarcely know how to ask that question. It’s certainly not a question we ask in public. But “where does it hurt?” would help to get at the human dynamics that we are living and dealing with today – all of us.

I think we need to be resilient to live in our world. We need to help make a resilient world. We need to have a luminous vision, and we need to see the potential within ourselves to be generative. We need to give voice to courage and creativity, even if the seeds and roots are in trauma and hurt. Because only then can we grow, only then can we be open to community.

 Reconciliation is relational. Truth is relational. Even if, initially, I think that I don’t have to own the history of what happened before I was here, history that I had no active part in, I belong to others and they belong to me. We are always about community. We are, after all, social beings. When we are brave enough to ask that question: where does it hurt?; then perhaps we will be brave enough to claim that belonging.

Reconciliation #4 – Lifting Up

I guess it starts with listening . . .

For each and every one of us there is a story to our listening, to our hearkening. Our listening started in some singular place.  It travels, evolves, right out to the edge of breath.

Michael Yahgulanaas spoke of how art opens windows to the space between (our)selves. How we need to step through those windows, those doors, that the space which is created between the object and the viewer is the space we need to inhabit.

So too, I think, there is a place between ourselves and another, a place where we say our story and they say theirs; and in that place, if we listen for it, we can hear where the stories blur and braid – theirs and ours. We can hear the story of our own listening.

Listening to Our Listening

My listening has been shaped and tempered –

bent around particular beliefs,

warped by expectations,

(un)historic histories – untruths.

Can I find in myself, in my own culpability,

a willingness to touch, and be touched by the wounds.

The residential schools, the racism, the injustice . . .

the NOT listening.

If I truly believe in that place,

that place between you and me,

that place of stories . . . . .Then,

our conversations could be like that of birds

as they flit from branch to branch in the forest.

Call and response.

Co-creation.

Trading warbles and intimate overtures

back and forth.

Or river murmur, fervent bank-enclosed whispers.

The flowing of words, and silences

in that wet, fervent place

between shores.

When our listening truly opens,

surely we will be carried to new knowledge, new understanding.

Open our ears, and we open our hands, our bellies, our hearts.

But listen to my listening.

In those very places where I am defenseless,

and you are hurting.

Where there is a door ready to open.

And a window where the view is clear.

Where we bear witness,

each to the other.

Listen to our listening.

To what the river says.

What the skies say.

The trees, the be-flowered fields.

And those birds.

Listen, and the stories we share

will open places in us,

fierce places,

that we have never heard before.

And my ears, my true ears,

will listen . . . and listen.

Response to Speakers: Reconciliation #5 - #12

Reconciliation #5: Michael Nicole Yahgulanass

Reconciliation #6: Wab Kinew

Reconciliation #7: Manulani Aluli Meyer

Reconciliation #8: Stephen Reicher

Reconciliation #9: Rupert Ross

Reconciliation #10: Jennifer Llewellyn

Reconciliation #11: John Burrows

Reconciliation #12: Wade Davis

Being a story-teller myself, I have reveled in how, each week with our First Nations co-hosts, story has been used naturally to inform, entertain, and to educate. I cannot think of a single thing either of my grandmothers ever told me. I know next to nothing of my extended family. I certainly have no oral (or even written) history of how we came to live in certain places throughout our own history, nor what kind of people they were. Who were the people and where were the places that made our family before I came into the world? I don’t know. I didn’t realize that I had that loss until this course. Yet, our First Nations families refer constantly to aunts, and uncles, and grandmothers and grandfathers. They tell stories about them, and tell stories they were told by them. Every time they speak, they can speak to lineage, and ancestors, and times and places of being. Each of them seems to bring to the table a piece of the ‘knowledge puzzle’. They have a collective memory and knowledge; they can reach back to their parents, their grandparents, even their great-grandparents for teachings that help them to live their lives in a good way.

I mourn that I do not have that. Yet again, it is more than apparent that truth and reconciliation is a lot more than just what non-indigenous Canadians must do to make things right. But also that we now live our lives in such a wrong-headed fashion because we have lost our connection to the land, to the environment, to the process of showing respect for those that came before us. We’ve lost our connection to our ancestors (in the broadest definition of the term).

Where First Nations have been doing it right (despite all the pain we have rained down on them), we are doing it wrong. However you wish to define ‘it’. We need to pay heed, pay attention, pay mind, and pay heart. 

Listen.

Serendipitously, I stumbled upon this narrative poem by Elizabeth Woody, a First Nations poet writing in the publication: Tea and Bannock Stories: First Nations Community of Poetic Voices (a compilation of poems in celebration of First Nations aesthetic practices, such as poetry, songs, and art, that speak about humankind’s active relationships to Home Land and her Beings)

It has been said of Woody that “Woody’s poetry acts as a tool for rebuilding history, reconstituting dignity, and communicating culture”. She, herself, says “And it is through my own story and stories of my family and my circle of people that I become whole . . .From each telling we . . . become strengthened, released from a sense of isolation. We [feed] ourselves with these stories.”

Listen.

Walk (excerpt)

Imagine your warm hand in palms folded over the reach and cupped.

Hands are the size of one’s heart.

Four hearts fold into the work of touching and mixing.

It is hard to walk the distance with the aging dog.

She limps and one eye weeps constantly.

In recollection, the placing of a gift is artful. The way the colors match

inside the house and how perfect the order of high desert moves the light into slants, then absence of shadow. This design is superior. To make a basket hold water pull its strands taut and fine.

In this basket the hands firmly pull the fibers together. With each turn of the wrist is honed skill, method and practice. To give the container seals the agreement for plentitude.

Reconciliation #13 – Listen to the Stories

I have grown to love the elders that came to us. I so wish that my own culture valued elders so respectfully. And acknowledged that they have wisdom that it is our folly to ignore. It is obvious that elders are the ‘heart’ of First Nations epistemology. They are the gatekeepers of wisdom, knowledge, and history. They hold a profound intelligence about traditional teachings, ceremonies, and healing practices. I loved how they sat on the couches, sharing our feast, simply exuding harmony and respect. I loved how they taught us that the eldest elder is our Mother (Earth). We are so rich now to have been included in their circles.

Reconciliation #14 – Wisdom

“The range of the human mind, the scale and depth of the metaphors the mind is capable of manufacturing as it grapples with the universe, stand in stunning contrast to the belief that there is only one reality, which is man’s, or worse, that only one culture among the many on earth possesses the truth.

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, “There could be more, there could be things we don’t understand”, which is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right.”

                                                               ~ Barry Lopez

O siem.