Tag: Louise Halfe

21. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead

Theory of Water is an important, often beautiful book that outlines a Nishnaabeg theory of relationality, using water, or Nibi, in all of its forms (liquid, solid as ice or snow, gas) as its primary example. It thinks about the fundamental importance of connections between humans, and between humans and other creatures, all of whom have agency and spirit, and between humans and the land, and the way our political and economic structures violate those relations by turning everything that exists into objects from which value can be extracted. “Nibi is speaking through action, critiquing by making an alternative,” Simpson writes. “Nibi’s theory, the theory of water, is a scathing indictment of every part of the death machine that has led to this present moment”:

Nibi rains down on capitalist scaffoldings, revealing captured beings who are separated from the network of life, their value in terms of capital extracted, their bodies withering into disposability. Spruce, pine, hemlock and Douglas fir, their woody bodies destroyed into lumber or pulp. Prairies tortured into farmland. Rivers incarcerated into hydroelectric dams. Land confiscated into highways, roads, pipelines, railways, housing, golf courses and parks. Gold-silver, nickel-copper, copper-zinc, lead-zinc, iron, molybdenum, uranium, potash and diamond captured and mined. Shale arrested into oil, gas and bitumen. Salmon, herring and halibut dispossessed from oceans.

All of that destruction, torture, incarceration, confiscation, capture, and dispossession define the world we have built, the world of the Anthropocene. And by “we” I, and Simpson, mean settlers, Europeans, white people, since we’ve been in the driver’s seat for the past couple of centuries. We’ve built the “death machine” she describes. We’re its temporary beneficiaries.

Nibi is an emblem of resistence, of relationship, of giving, of the coming together Simpson calls “sintering,” a central term in her argument. Sintering refers to the way that snowflakes bond to each other on the ground, forming “a snowpack—a denser, more compact, linked formation.” “[T]he first thong a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds, actual physical bonds, with its neighbours,” she writes. Sintering becomes a metaphor that describes the intricate and powerful web of relationships formed by people in Indigenous societies, and between those people and the world around them, and between the animate and inanimate creatures in that world. Sintering might be essential to anti-colonial resistance; Simpson wonders if it “could play a role in grounding my method of solidarity, in strengthening and renewing connections across communities of struggle towards new constellations of co-resistance. Could sintering be a foundational concept for creating such constellations?” It seems likely, given Simpson’s insistence on the power of relationality.

Another key concept in Theory of Water is the shore, “a space of overlapping or interconnected worlds, of edges and zones and areas of intensive transition.” Shores “are places of diversity and abundance” for more-than-human creatures, and “places of meeting, decision-making, ceremony and diplomacy” for people. They are also “sites of constant transformation.” In the ruderal world we have created—disturbed and hostile to life, as Bettina Stoetzer argues—the shoreline is also a place of resistance: “As cottagers and homeowners use herbicide, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, ducks, geese and fish replant. As landowners rope off, curate and alter, birds, fish, insects and Nishnaabeg violate” (78). Shorelines are therefore “rich sites of mino-bimaadiziwin,” of good living, of regeneration and “synergistic knowledge” that, in contrast to the colonial death machine, “which always ends and diminishes life,” “brings forth more life.” Life was abundant in her nation’s territory before the arrival of settlers, who have built dams and waterways, disturbing the cycles and equilibriums that fostered that abundance, extirpating some creatures (eels, for instance) and causing the populations of others to collapse (wild rice) with cascading effects on the world and her people.

Simpson might be suspicious about my interest in her book. Take my use of the Anishinaabewin word “mino-bimaadiziwin,” or the fact that much of my book Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, thinks about the Plains Cree or nêhiyawêwin word wâhkôhtowin, which means “kinship relationality” according to the online dictionary I rely on, but that actually means, according to the poet Louise Halfe–Skydancer, something more like “walking bent over towards the ground greeting our relations.” “Extracting a single concept or phrase out of our complex knowledge systems, taking it out of embodied practice and placing it in text, translating it, often literally, into English, and then repeating it in all kinds of different contexts results necessarily in dilution,” she contends, leading to “complex ways of world building” being“reduced to paragraphs in studies, or to phrases, or even hashtags.” In addition, when Knowledge Holders share their teachings with settlers, their “understandings of the world are processed, depoliticized, sanitized and colonized into a form that is nearly unrecognizable.” It’s just another extractive process, one that delivers a phoney collaboration that serves to disrupt Indigenous resistance.

That argument reminds me of Stó:lō musicologist and art historian Dylan Robinson’s argument that all settler attempts at learning—about the world or about Indigenous Peoples—are extractive attempts “to understand and make accessible Indigenous ‘issues’ through settler logics.” Our bottomless appetites, our unbounded desire to consume absolutely everything, disqualify us from the kind of respectful, loving relationships Robinson and Simpson see as the primary ethical tenets of their nations’ philosophies. It’s as if, as I wrote in Walking the Bypass, we are like the cannibal monsters in Cree sacred stories, utterly devoid of relationships and defined by our hunger. For Simpson, “settlers under colonialism have never, ever been able to hear the expansive web of living things that we refer to as land, just as they have never heard Indigenous peoples.” Because of our ecocidal and genocidal behaviour, we appear to be, in Simpson’s view, people with whom relationship appears to be impossible. “Just because Nishnaabeg worlds are deeply relational does not mean we should be in relationship with everyone, and it especially doesn’t mean we should be in relationship with all the forces that attack mino-bimaadiziwin,” she states. “Quite the opposite.”

You might protest that description, but Simpson makes a good case for its accuracy, and the processes of extraction on Indigenous lands (and what part of this country isn’t on Indigenous lands?) seems to be accelerating. As I read, I was reminded of something the professor in a postcolonial literature course I took once, Jack Healy, said about what colonialism looks like from the perspective of the colonized. It is, he said, “a massive pile of black and brown bodies.” Simpson would agree with that description, but she would add the bodies of other creatures to it. That’s the reason this book is angry, legitimately so, and while sometimes that makes it hard to read, it’s necessary, too.

11. Louise B. Halfe–Sky Dancer, Burning in This Midnight Dream

It’s March. At this time in the semester, I can’t read (or reread) anything unless it’s something I’m teaching. This week, my students and I begin talking about Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream, so I got to reread this wonderful book.

Wonderful, yes, but also horrifying. These poems are scalding, a mosaic of the direct and intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools. They are personal, even confessional, although they don’t only reflect Halfe’s own experience at Blue Quills IRS in St. Paul, Alberta, not far from Saddle River Cree Nation, where she grew up; they also speak of the poisonous effects Blue Quills had on her parents and grandparents.

The volume is divided into sections which are marked by family photographs. The mostly carefree smiles in them act as a counterpoint to the description of family relationships in the poems. Not all of those relationships are damaged by residential school and colonialism, but many are, which is a sign of what Jo-Ann Episkenew describes as the “psychological terrorism” that creates the post-colonial traumatic stress response we see in these poems.

These poems are hard to read, but if they were easy to read, if they didn’t provoke anger and deep sadness, they wouldn’t be much good. What other emotions should a genocide, especially one practiced on children, generate in us?

And these poems are good. Better than good. Marvellous. Filled with pain, but free from self pity, as in the second stanza of the opening poem, “Dedication to the Seventh Generation”:

Sit by the kotawân–the fire place.
Drink muskeg and mint tea.
Hold your soul
but do not weep.
Not for me, not for you.
Weep for those who haven’t yet sung.
Weep for those who will never sing.

Silence is a recurring theme in these poems, almost a motif, which makes so much sense, since those institutions were intended to silence the children incarcerated in them. Halfe, thankfully, sings in these poems, in English and in Plains Cree, which is usually translated (where it isn’t, you can use the itwêwina online dictionary if you need to). Let’s be grateful for these poems, and for their author, who has taken such risks by publishing this book.

You might decide to take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Louise Halfe is a friend, and I’m a huge fan of her poetry, so yes, I might be biased. I’ll tell you what: find a copy of Burning in This Midnight Dream in the library, either the first edition, published by the late, great Coteau Books, or the new edition, republished by Brick Books, and try it out. My guess is that you’ll agree with my evaluation.

30. David A. Robertson, 52 Ways to Reconcile: How to Walk With Indigenous Peoples on the Path to Healing

I bought David A. Robertson’s 52 Ways to Reconcile: How to Walk With Indigenous Peoples on the Path to Healing at the airport in Winnipeg, which is a) appropriate, since he lives here, and b) good news, because it’s an important book that deserves a wide distribution (it’s published by an imprint that used to be Canadian-owned and is now part of Penguin Random House, which no doubt makes it easier to get airport shops to stock it).

52 Ways is intended for settler descendants who want to do something to advance reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples but don’t know where to start. Robertson doesn’t like the term “reconciliation”—he argues that there’s never been a good relationship we can return to—but he says that doing something is more useful than arguing about semantics, which might be surprising, coming from a writer, but which also makes a lot of sense.

You’re not supposed to read the book as I did, in one sitting, although Robertson’s friendly, even breezy tone makes that pretty easy. Instead, each short chapter makes a suggestion about things one can do, from starting an Indigenous book club, reading Indigenous comics, or wearing an orange shirt on Orange Shirt Day (all relatively easy to accomplish), to tasks that are more difficult: learning the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, reading the mammoth Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Final Report, and understanding one’s privilege. Easy or hard, simple or complicated, Robertson approaches every topic with generosity and openness. “We gave to allow ourselves to make mistakes,” he writes; “it’s the only way to improve and grow.” I’ve seen similar openness in other Indigenous writers—Louise Halfe, Willie Ermine, Dwayne Donald—and it always impresses me.

Robertson recently published an op-ed in The Globe and Mail which was in part (I think: I haven’t compared them side by side) taken from this book’s introduction. The response: racist abuse. He posted on social media about that reaction. Honestly, it makes me wonder what is wrong with people. With my people, that is. People who can’t see how they’ve benefited from this country’s ongoing colonial abuse of Indigenous Peoples, who refuse to acknowledge our history here. I suppose they can’t accept the truth.

The book’s last chapter invites readers to pass it along to others. That’s how I’ll use it. When non-Indigenous students feel shamed and overwhelmed by Indigenous texts, especially ones about residential schools, I’ll recommend 52 Ways. “Pick one thing,” I’ll suggest. “You don’t need to try to do all 52. Just pick one.” The antidote to that kind of shame, I think, is action. Robertson has set out a smorgasbord of possibilities. Which one will I take on next?

96. Warren Cariou, “Haunted Prairie: Aboriginal ‘Ghosts’ and the Spectres of Settlement”

cariou haunted prairie.jpg

I took a break this afternoon from putting together notes on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and did a little searching for material on hauntings and settler colonialism. One of the texts I discovered was this short essay by Warren Cariou, whose memoir, Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging I blogged about here some time ago. Cariou begins with a speculation that parallels my own sense of what ghosts and spectres might mean for Settlers:

spectral native figures have long been a part of the iconic vocabulary of Euro-American Gothic romances, but it seems that in recent years there has been a resurgence of the Aboriginal ghost motif in descriptions of land on the prairies. This reflects a widespread and perhaps growing anxiety suffered by settlers regarding the legitimacy of their claims to belonging on what they call “their” land. This fear can be described in Freudian terms as a kind of neocolonial uncanny, a lurking sense that the places settlers call home are not really theirs, and a sense that their current legitimacy as owners or renters in a capitalist land market might well be predicated upon theft, fraud, violence, and other injustices in the past. The driving psychological force behind these Aboriginal hauntings as they are imagined by non-Native writers, then, is as in most ghost stories the return of the repressed. (727-28)

Cariou refers to Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” as a source, among others; I’ll have to dig out those Pelican paperbacks of Freud’s writings if I intend to pursue this notion any further.

Cariou finds this phenomenon in Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning, where the author visits a circle of stones on “her” land “and is confronted there by the ghostly figure of a Native man,” a shaman, apparently; she feels pushed away from the place, and she hears a voice inside her head that says, “Because you are not worthy” (qtd. 728). For Cariou, that figure is “a reminder that the legitimacy of her belonging on the prairie is open to challenge by prior claims. The charge of unworthiness that she is confronted with is not so much a personal accusation as a condemnation of the entire settler tradition” (728). Butala, he continues, 

is not allowed to forget that there has already been an expulsion of sorts, under the auspices of the Indian Act. There is no talk of redress here, perhaps because there are no living Native people present in this prairie. They are all ghosts, denizens of a half-forgotten and sacralized past. (728-29) 

“The narrative suggests that the best thing a settler can do is respect the wishes of these spirits,” he concludes (729). The Perfection of the Morning could easily be on my reading list, and perhaps given Cariou’s discussion, I ought to include it.

Another haunted Settler text is Maggie Siggins’s Revenge of the Land. There is no ghost in that book, “but the parcel of Saskatchewan farmland in question is clearly haunted by an avenging poltergeist” (729). “While many of the farmer/settlers who live there over the years claim to love this land and want to hand on to it at any cost, Siggins portrays the land itself enacting revenge upon these settlers, causing financial ruin, marital discord, personal misery, and even indirectly the deaths of the owners,” Cariou writes (729). Why is this land so vengeful? “Revenge is of course the return of something: an injury for an injury. It has an economy which is fundamentally uncanny: misdeeds of the past create a climate in which dangerous symptoms must erupt into the present” (729). On the piece of land Siggins writes about, “injuries and injustices pile up over the years, and even though these are forgotten by successive generations of owners, the land itself seems to remember, seems to be keeping an account” (729). Two injuries or injustices stand out. The first is the breaking of the land, “the quintessential act of homestead settlement,” initiates this curse (729), but in a more directly political way, there is also “the fraudulent means by which much of the land comes to be in the settlers’ hands at all”: the cheating of Métis people out of their “government-appointed scrip land” by “unscrupulous white speculators” (729). Cariou suggests that

this colossal injustice in the settlement of the West has been successfully repressed by settler culture. But like anything in the Freudian economy of repression, for Siggins, this willed forgetting always eventually finds its way out into the light of consciousness, often dragging horrid consequences along with it. The effect of this geographical revenge is to make all of settler culture feel more than a little unsettled. (730)

That’s very close to my sense of how past (and present) injustices are repressed, and how such repression leaks out into behaviour and beliefs. 

Can “such uncanny fear be productive in any way,” or does it create “only a horrified sense of inevitability, a passive conviction that colonial sins will be punished, and [that] therefore it is not necessary to work towards reconciliation with those who have been wronged?” Cariou asks (730). “This is where contemporary Native writings about spirits on the prairies can be particularly useful, because these writings tend to focus more on the necessity of present action” (730). “Of course,” Cariou continues, “for Native readers and writers, there is no reason that these Indigenous ghosts or spirits should be frightening. Native people already have plenty of evidence in their daily lives of how the legacies of colonialism have been passed down through the generations; they do not need to summon spectres to fulfill that action” (730). Thus, although Indigenous writers do represent spirits in their work, “these spirits are not necessarily figures of uncanny terror”: they might be the wihtiko “or the skeleton-spirit Pahkakos,” but “they may also be figures of healing, ceremony, or political action. Or they may simply be ancestors. And while many such spirits do seem to address the transgressions of the colonial past, they usually do so as part of a call for some kind of redress or change in the present” (730).

For instance, Louise Halfe’s book-length poem, Blue Marrow, “is marked in several ways by the legacy of the Ghost Dance”; the book is not just a poem “but also an elaborate ceremony, designed to call the spirits of the Grandmothers to come forth and tell their stories in order to heal the present generation” (731). Much of the poem is narrated by these “unnamed ancestral spirits, who recount their stories of the settlement of Canada’s northwest” (731). These spirits “simply tell their stories and leave the rest to the narrator and the reader” (732). Another example is Thomas King’s novel Truth and Bright Water, which begins with an uncanny scene—a woman’s disappearance over the edge of a cliff (732). That figure isn’t a woman, however, nor is she, or he, “hiding the results of some terrible crime” (733). Rather, that figure, the artist Munroe Swimmer, has liberated bones of Indigenous ancestors from museums around the world, “and he has taken them back to his home to return them to the earth” (733). In this way, that first uncanny scene in the novel “becomes transformed into an aesthetic of action rather than one of fear” (733).

Cariou’s essay is short, and while it is literary criticism (and thus not quite the kind of work I’m looking for), it’s useful, if only because it confirms my suspicions about the settler colonial repressed and its return. I’ve found several other essays on this topic, and over the next few days I’ll write about them here. Even if this particular strand of inquiry is somewhat off-topic, it’s still interesting and potentially fruitful.

Work Cited

Cariou, Warren. “Haunted Prairie: Aboriginal ‘Ghosts’ and the Spectres of Settlement.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, 2006, pp. 727-34.