When I first began teaching, I had no inkling of the opportunity it would provide for my own learning. For several years, I’ve been reading First Nation writers, nourished and enlightened by the entirely different perspective it gives me, of a way of care-taking and living in reciprocity with the land. One of my guiding lights is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, musician and academic. Recently, when preparing a lesson for ‘Lighting the World’ — this term’s focus is Indigenous poets — I came across a talk Simpson gave at Brown University.
Every morning, my ancestors got up and they made life. They were makers. They made their political systems and forms of governance, they made their food systems and education, their healthcare, and food ways; and what they practised as families, they practised as communities and nations.
…They were concerned, not with making a world, but with weaving ourselves into the existing natural world and ecological processes that reproduce our planet.
…They saw life as an interconnected and interdependent collaboration with plants, animals, rivers, lakes, oceans, and all of the natural beings that make up our planet, and that make up this present moment — a present moment that is birthed from the collapsing of the future, and of the past.
This idea of connectivity resonates with me, as a way to live in response to the fractured, hurt present moment we are living in. Many of us have drawn our selves in, as a response to the pandemic, to unrelenting news of ecological emergency, migration crises, genocide, war… We are, so many of us, grieving losses personal and communal.
As I write this, I see above my desk, these words of these Irish poet and thinker, John O’Donohue:
Be excessively gentle with yourself when grieving.
I see an active gentleness in Indigenous culture and practise, alongside an insistence to speak truth to centuries of misreported history.
i am graffiti
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
i am writing to tell you
that yes indeed
we have noticed
you have a new big pink eraser
we are well aware
you are trying to use it.
erasing Indians is a good idea
of course
the bleeding-heart liberals
and communists
can stop feeling bad
for the stealing
& raping
& murdering
& we can all move on
we can be reconciled
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
she painted three white Xs
on the wall of the grocery store.
one. two. three.
then they were erased.
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
the Xs were made out of milk
because they took our food.
one. two. three.
then we were erased.
except, i am graffiti.
except, mistakes were made.
we are the singing remnants
left over after
the bomb went off in slow motion
over a century instead of a fractionated second
it’s too much to process, so we make things instead
we are the singing remnants
left over after
the costumes have been made
collected up
put in a plastic bag, full of intentions
for another time
another project.
except, i am graffiti.
and mistakes were made.
In an interview about her book, Theory of Water, on the Between The Covers podcast, Simpson talks about land, which is of great importance to Indigenous people, and which includes water.
I started to think of land as a network, as a cascading set of interconnections and interdependencies that crossed different species, that crossed different kinds of humans, and that was propelled, I think, by what we call in my culture mino-bimaadiziwin, or this continuous rebirth, this complex network, expanding through time and space. And that’s a very different understanding of land than the one I would inherit from settler colonialism, that is a territory, that has borders that are guarded, that is owned by people, that is property.
… I started to think about what I could learn from water through its embodied practice. Here’s the global water cycle that touches every form of life, every geography on the planet.
… It’s inside of me. It’s outside of me. It’s connecting me to Palestine. It’s connecting me to Sudan. And it’s something that I’m interacting with every day. So it suddenly became this powerful teacher and a way of reorganizing the way that I was thinking about the world.
I’m consoled by the idea of water as a connector. It means an ocean doesn’t separate me from the grave of my father, the grave of my brother, the grave of my mother. It connects me to my faraway first family. I remember, when my brother was diagnosed, and approximately 3,560 miles separated us, how connected I felt when I was swimming in my local outdoor pool. Immersed in the water, with air on my skin and sky above me, I had a strong feeling of being in my body and in the world, the same world my brother was in.
Louise Bernice Halfe, whose Cree name is Skydancer, is a poet and social worker, and was Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. I recently came across Halfe, and this poem, which I’d like to share here, for the way it speaks to connectivity of present, past and future, and of our embodied selves with the natural beings we share this planet with.
2 poems in one day. My solstice offering to you.
April 30, 2014
Louise Bernice Halfe / Sky Dancer
Weeds are flattened beneath last year’s tire tracks
others lay burden by the winter’s heavy snow.
The crocuses labor through this thick blanket.
I am sun drained from the bleakness
of the weeks before. Now a tick
I've carried in my hair runs up my neck,
festers on my chin.
I show it no mercy.
The lake-ice is rotting diamonds
where water seeps hungrily through its cracks.
Beneath the birdfeeders
goldfinches and juncos scratch.
Two mallards strut
crane their necks for the roving dogs and cats.
Sharptailed grouse lay low in the thicket believing
they cannot be seen, their rust-colored wings
match the frost-bitten ground.
This morning we were woken by a knocking
on our skylight, the yellow feathers
of a flicker splayed against the window.
I cradle a striped gopher, it heaves so slightly
against my palm, a leg broken
and one eye bloodied shut.
I lay it against the mountain ash and beg
it not to suffer.
This afternoon I have my hearing
for Truth and Reconciliation.
I must confess my years of sleeping
in those sterile, cold rooms where the hiss
of water heaters were devils
in the dark.
I want to walk these thickets
to that far horizon and not look back.
