Unsettle

Editorial note: Again, the Posts from En Route that I will post frequently are an experiment to capture daily scenes that will inform a forthcoming book combining memoir, ethnography, and academic theory to give an account of my path to and through advocating for anti-colonial Indigenous science and sexualities. This post is an excerpt from the original “Posts from En Route” published in the volume He Sapa Woihanble (Living Justice Press, 2011) by the then Oak Lake Writers Society. We have recently changed our name to the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society. Since this was published over a decade ago, I would change some of the language today. My friend and co-editor of that volume, Craig Howe, located a copy of the manuscript for me since my books are all in storage at present. He was so helpful that he “pulled off the side of the highway” and found it on his laptop. He is always bombing around the country roads of South Dakota. Again, I will record these vignettes directly to the Substack platform instead of using audio editing software. Thanks for coming along on some of my rides around the planet.

Oak Lake Field Station, South Dakota, 7/27/10

Oak Lake writers are working on a book about the Black Hills. As a Dakota, the Hills are a place I drive through from California, home to the east and back again. I leave it to a Lakota to speak of their sacredness. I’ve known them as Black Hills Gold dreams committed to legend or to small white boxes in the dime store jewelry case. In my mind are raggedy tourist traps, a hyped motorcycle rally, the U.S. military, and fake dinosaurs to amaze kids who’ve hardly been anywhere. “Great Faces, Great Places” chirps in my head: South Dakota’s license plate logo rings a reproduction of the four dead men’s granite-carved heads.

One summer at midnight, I saw all of it punctuated by forest fires. Hulking black landforms with orange glow-balls tucked between. Then I drew the wood smoke in deeply like a sacred thing or intoxicant until I had to let it go. Six months pregnant with no place to stay. Evacuees filled hotel rooms all the way to Pierre. The winds were warm and strong. They pushed through the night quicker than cars slowed by haze and disorientation. In yet another summer’s night, I drove west into Rapid with bolts hotter than sun zigzagging the sky and striking the land all around. Those are the moments when the hills out-stand their twentieth-century market and empire formations.

Brookings, South Dakota, 7/28/10

I drove south to Flandreau last night to meet my uncle for dinner. A steakhouse with fans whirring and a view of the Big Sioux, moving like syrup to the top of its banks. I wanted to touch the river like when I was twelve, but I am not afraid now.

The boy stroked, an eel between

the struggle—the current of river pulling me. River coursed my body.

Put the boy’s hands on me.

I slipped in the flow to the bank. I rolled out the brown water.

Water rolled from me like blood. I stumbled under a full, hot sun. Ran to the old woman’s house.

Impregnable,

my body, the loot in the dark.

My uncle told stories of townspeople and their tribulations. He softened things a bit. He made me laugh and sometimes wince. If I could write fiction, I would change everyone’s identity and I would make it all seem profound, which it probably is. We hugged goodbye in a parking lot crowded with shiny trucks below a heavy canopy of sky.

I haven’t been home in five years. I’ve flown many times over and back, but I didn’t touch my feet to the ground or to the water. Driving north again, over I-29, thunderstorm clouds like celestial bodies loomed too near to earth: majestic with their potential for killing. The clouds made me think of the alien ship stalled over Johannesburg in the District 9 film. But the smell was of home—sweet grass and rain in the air. Filled with pleasure and sci-fi beauty, I was struck by two thoughts. I can’t keep blaming the land for the people or temporal people completely for the land. This is a beautiful place despite the imposition of row crops, colonialisms, and unsustainable lives. And second, I prefer living en route to being “rooted.” Being “routed” keeps here strange to me and brings the beauty through.1 When I was a child, my vision was filled with gold-headed rows of corn, higher than my head, stretching farther than I could walk. It was bad magic like fields of poppies in The Wizard of Oz.

A Nomad’s Sleep2

North American plain, stark in the sun.

The wheat color blinds like snow. Two sisters embrace under white-breath screams, a hectic sky.

This day, one is leaving.

Closed in the dark rib-cage of a plane,

She shoots over Shannon, Tehran, towards Delhi to a hastened sunset, sudden morning.

In the nomad’s comfort of flight & disorientation, she sleeps between stars and lights dotting Earth, seven black miles beneath her. She dreams:

Running the circle of the dance grounds. Dancers come in, gray-haired women, old men.

Speed past; don’t get in their way as they dance in like Grand Entry. The circle elongates

to the size and brightness of Dakota fields. Run! Run!

They are close behind. In mouth, runner’s

spit thickens. Reaching in to pull the sinews out like the spider’s sticky thread, mouth-water beads in black, white, and red

filling cheeks. Spitting handfuls. Can’t get all the beads out.

Can’t get out of their way. Old people dance slow.

Run fast! They are close.

In the sky of India, the nomad wakes certain: flight’s in her story. The story predictably tethers her.

Atlanta International Airport, 8/17/10

It strikes me that I am suffering in my own small way the wages of empire. I have had an offensive week with the airlines: over- full flights, cannot maneuver for bad weather, missed connections, exorbitant fees to change a ticket. I couldn’t get home to catch another plane on the same sorry airline.

Several full-body pat downs: best to pack under-wires and go to the airport breasts sagging. I wait for the day that the disciplinary minions—the TSA workers—want to stick their metal detecting wand between my legs. I will walk from the terminal that day and give up flying. I am almost there. The old woman in uniform did all but that today. “Do you want a private room to do this?” she asked. “No.” They should do it in front of everyone. We should all see what it’s come to. And besides, I am not ashamed that they make my body the object of interrogation. I have nothing to hide. An old woman pressing my clothed chest with the back of her hand doesn’t bother me. It’s the whole context that bothers me.

Inside the terminal, long lines at the help desk. More overbooked flights, missed connections. I have pictures in my head of Russian breadlines in the 1980s. Military is everywhere here, uniformed soldiers and sailors. When all we do is pay for war, this is what we get. No regulation, no passenger rights, and strong, young bodies in a time of high unemployment trained to detain and kill roaming the concourses. I don’t know why they’re all here in Atlanta, but the sheer number of them looks imperial. The soldiers in their digitized camouflage have serious, unreadable faces. The navy boys in spiffy white suits and blue scarves smile and they swagger.

I am inside the high-security, air-conditioned building. I have food before me and a four-dollar coffee. I have a 500-dollar plane ticket in my purse. I have a California driver’s license and a gold credit card. I am one of the lucky ones in empire, but that doesn’t mean I feel safe. It just means I am more comfortable for now.

Cyberspace[at]LBL.gov, 9/20/10

“We walk around drenched in neutrinos, which fall right through us by the trillions every second.”

The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab3

My fellow thinker about technology’s cultures, Craig Howe, told me last summer when we sat inside the Oak Lake air about a coming transfiguration. A Black Hills gold mine would become laboratory, the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab at Homestake (DUSEL). Since then, I’ve been thinking about vast lengths of cavern and ghostly particles falling through matter.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab, up the hill from my office on Berkeley’s main campus, will design DUSEL. I read its introduction to the science that will happen there: neutrinos are other than dark matter, which, along with dark energy, constitutes 75 percent of our universe. Neutrinos do not quite fill the rest. Created during the big bang, neutrinos continue to be created in the “hearts of stars” and by Earthling technologies—accelerators and nuclear reactors. LBL.gov’s poetics take me only so far. Wikipedia explains that neutrinos are elementary particles, electronically neutral, that travel close to the speed of light, almost without hitting anything.4 That is, they interact very weakly with ordinary matter. That helps, a bit. I see now why they are spirit particles. They move through us “as if we were transparent.”5 Perhaps then it is we who are ghosts. At DUSEL, scientists will study the role of these particles in the creation of matter and antimatter at the beginning of the universe: neutrino creation narratives.

Federal agencies and a rich man who gets his name on things will fund the laboratory to seek the story, a multi-layered worker hive for experiments, one mile and more inside the Black Hills. From Chicago, ten hundred miles away, a Cold War-era lab will beam neutrinos to the mine. The beam will come straight through rock under the curvature of Earth.

Homestake was mapped light as a ghost in my cultural landscape until Craig reminded me of it. I am a follower of genome science and its mining of Indigenous bodies. I’ve paid no attention to mining for minerals and lab space. The gold-rush era place sustained itself on nineteenth-century photos of dusty miners, hoary or corseted tycoons-cum-philanthropists. At the twenty-first century’s front edge, a well-coiffed physicist comes like Hearst from the Pacific to help South Dakota build yet another economy based in technology and science. Hearst built the mine in the body of the Hills. Lesko, “neutrino hunter”6 and principal investigator, will build the lab. Stark, gorgeous photos show cavernous undergrounds filled with massive technologies. I am moved by visions of ordinary matter, both that created by cosmic events and that shaped by men. I glimpse the physicist’s, the engineer’s mirage: the a-human deep past and (post)human future simultaneously. Temporal cosmopolitans, engineers, and physicists seem at one with the now and forever. While miners are caught in Old West dioramas, the Indians too perhaps, although in planning documents, the Indians are absent, even in sepia remembrances.

What we see are schemas of the mine’s hundreds of miles of shaft and tunnel.7 A New World will be built below. The Old World lies above: inartful mine company buildings, discarded machines and tools all about, the ruins of outmoded industry. Born of that history, townspeople look on as intrepid twenty-first century scientist-explorers make grand plans with maps and instruments. Lesko’s PowerPoint entrances as he de-links the lab and the world below from the past, from mining, from military, and profit: “Science sets the priorities.”8 Sigh. Do I need to say it—that profiteers, miners, common people, the land of Lakota, THE war, and the Cold War, set science? But Lesko’s vision is more easily set to music.

Berkeley, California, 9/21/10

I see stop signs around Berkeley, where I am often the one cyclist to heed them. I get a close look. They’re altered with white spray paint: STOP Driving. STOP Flying. Living en route depends on things that will not be sustained. Twenty-first century nomadism, cosmopolitanism, free as it may feel of binaries and oppressive categories, is not simply liberation. Our distances and routes were constituted along with coal and rails, war and oil, cars and jet planes. Building them took suffering. Shrinking them will as well. I imagine graffiti critics making more fundamental STOP signs. What would those be? STOP Paying for Big Science and Technology?

STOP War works. But STOP War Co-Produced with Science does not work. The technoscientific culture critic flying and cycling around the empire doesn’t have a pithy thing to say.

Updated note: I just came across this Business Insider article, dated February 28, 2024, on the renamed Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) that is one of the subjects, in a much earlier iteration, of this post.

Notes

1.  I thank Jim Clifford for his work that helps me articulate the value that I see in circulation, in “routedness” versus simple “rootedness.” See James Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): 468–490. Also see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

2.  Poem previously published in Gatherings: The En’owkin Journal of First North American Peoples, Volume XII Transformation, eds. Florene Belmore and Eric Ostrowidzki (2001).

3.  Paul Preuss, “Nature’s Unending Surprises: the Neutrino. The first of two articles on neutrino science at Berkeley Lab.”

4.  See Wikipedia’s article, “Neutrino.” Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino, last visited February 1, 2024.

5.  Preuss, “Nature’s Unending Surprises.”

6.  Ibid. See also Paul Preuss, “The Surprising Neutrino: Concluding a two-part article on neutrino science at Berkeley Lab.”

7.  See “Homestake DUSEL Conceptual Design Report,” Chapter 4: “Homestake Project Goals and Requirements,” January 9, 2007.

8.  “The Homestake Underground Laboratory,” presentation by Kevin Lesko, April 15, 2005.

This is an experiment. I am blocked in writing the next book outline my agent wants from me. I want it from me too, but peer pressure from those I respect and will submit to (i.e. a smart, strong editor) seems to push me more effectively. I once published a piece in an edited book by my Oceti Sakowin Tribal Writers Society called “Posts from en route.” When I locate a copy of that piece, I’ll put in on this Substack. I remember liking it. These new “posts from en route” will be a way to capture daily vignettes that I think will come to inform the scenes of the someday forthcoming book that looks like it’s going to be a circuitous (and not strictly chronologically linear) account of my path to and through advocating for anti-colonial Indigenous science and sexualities. The book will be a mixture of memoir, ethnography light, and academic theory. I’m reading memoirs like that now to understand what my agent is asking for. This is something new for me and so it is far more interesting than writing another academic monograph. I really want to do this, but I don’t know how to yet. I hope these posts will warm me up for this new way of writing. I will record them directly to the Substack platform instead of using my usual Camtasia film and audio editing software. I want to be regular and efficient with these posts. Thank you for coming along with me to who knows where. Like the forthcoming book, these posts will also not always be chronologically linear.

The skies over Whitehorse, Yukon are the same bright blue as my shiny, sporty six-speed Toyota hatchback. I wish I could be more artful in my description. It is truly a shocking blue. It’s too treacherous to walk around town in my Edmonton fashion art boot mukluks. It melted, an apparently very un-Whitehorse event in January, then froze again. I went a block and realized I was destined for a fall without spikes on my boots.

So I cut my walk short, and crossed the wide road to visit the territorial government liquor store. I bought two bottles of British Columbia wine, one white and one red, more expensive than down south in Edmonton. But the liquor store had not a bad selection. I penguin-walked back across the slushy, icy street to my hotel apartment that reminds me of something you’d see in the north of Sweden. Austere, functional furniture, a clean white kitchen with blonde wooden shelves: IKEA-like.

I look out the window onto the blueness over the snowy rock ledge with alpine (or are they sub-alpine?) trees atop the rocks, and expect it to be deadly cold, as it should be, but is not in this era of weak winters. We have them in Edmonton too. Half frozen rivers with intermittent deep freezes and big thaws. I wonder what the animals think who cannot easily cross the river in winter. I remember seeing their tracks on the snowy ice in years past.

When I moved to lands called Canada nine years ago, I would have been delighted with this even more northern place. This is my first time in Yukon, but there is a sense of familiarity. It is the now recognizable-to-me presence of white Canada. I flew in from Vancouver yesterday on a narrow, noisy plane squished full of white, male labourers talking about their manly work in mines and other places. They had the demeanor of regular flyers to the northern resource extraction zones. You know what I mean if you know what I mean. In 2015, I was relieved to be in Edmonton, which was as far north as I had ever been, latitude 53.5. I was relieved to be out of the much more crowded, noisier, hotter, screeching fast pace urban Texas world. In Austin or San Antonio or Dallas, the cars are always speeding around. There was so much talk of guns. The right to carry your gun around. Guns even sometimes visible on the backs of dime-a-dozen Libertarians or right-wing gun rights white men who were out and about town. Why would anyone need a gun on their back to order a weak caffe latte at Starbucks? When I sat in a Starbucks in my first couple of weeks in Edmonton, I was shocked to see a table of people, all with guns in holsters. It took me a minute to see that they were cops dressed in dark blue t-shirts and matching cargo pants. Must have been casual Fridays for cops. At least they were cops and not retired guys out for their morning coffee group. I’ll leave it at that. I’m not going to write today about the prison industrial complex and the militarization of the police force in North America.I want to write about moving north, and how it gave me space to observe all the relations in another part of the world, and myself in relation to those relations. But my family would not follow. The people who I love and who love me most, do not love Edmonton. They mostly don’t visit, or if they do, it’s not with enthusiasm. A couple of them refuse to not live in California, a place, that wore me down financially. It was also crowded and full of screechy fast deadly automobiles on densely packed highways. It never stops blooming in the Bay Area. I had permanent severe allergies and was always coughing. Berkeley made me sick, in debt, and overwhelmed. I also missed the prairies—the openness, the quieter landscape, the lack of humans filling up all the space.

I drove from there to the south prairies of Austin, Texas first. I love country music, and one goes where the job offer comes from. Then I moved to the very north prairies, even farther north than where I come from in South Dakota and Minnesota, to Edmonton. I also wanted to be one of the ordinary people again, in a town where Natives might be among the regulars at the local post office, grocery store, and walk-in clinic. I got tired of being some weird fetish in the cosmopolitan cities with their corny Indigenous-erasing ideas predominating.

Had I come to Whitehorse back then, I am sure I would have felt relief, like I did in Edmonton. Eventually though, I came to feel the distance in the northern-ness of Edmonton, its farness from my homelands and from my homehumans. You can relocate, but you can’t necessarily make your dearest ones do that with you, especially when you value their autonomy. I am here in Whitehorse this week to connect with other Indigenous people, particularly queer and two-spirit people at a two-day event, and I know I will be emotionally and intellectually moved by their world here. I will be an intrigued and grateful visitor. I will be honored and happy in conversation with them. I thought when I moved farther north than I’d ever been that I might not always feel like a visitor in this northland, but I do. Period. And I am trying to figure out what to do with that. My grad school friend Eben, now an anthropology professor at Oxford (LOL, he’s so classic) once told me I am a boundary object after that science and technology studies concept introduced by Star and Griesemer in the 1980s. I’m still thinking about that. I do know that I have figured out in the last few months that when I feel compelled by the settlers’ societal narrative to settle in one place, I become cynical about it—all the things that place is not. When I migrate on a regular path—say between Edmonton and Minneapolis or between L.A. where my sweetie lives and Santa Cruz where my other sweetie, my daughter, lives—I see the best in each place. I am, literally speaking, simply not a settle-er. Perhaps then too, my allergies will not catch up with me.

It grows dimmer as I write this at just past 5pm. The brilliant blue sky is turning a softer blue. The snow at the tops of the peaks glows very slightly golden in the late afternoon sun. Soon it will be black night and the sun won’t rise until well past 10am tomorrow. I will record in one imperfect take and upload this post after an evening house dinner I’ve been invited to. And I will be fascinated, I am sure, by the emplacement in this far north land—at latitude 60.72—of recognizable persons and things—by IKEA kitchens, wine from temperate regions, the excellent cappuccino I had at the hotel café today, two-spirit drag performers, and who knows who and what else?

Until next post.

Dear readers and listeners, I have been writing in other venues during the past few months, including adding to a set of six letters between writer and artist Simon(e) van Saarloos and myself on “living with risk during COVID-19, and non-monogamy as a form of resistance.”

This set of correspondences has been published on the artseverywhere website. artseverywhere is a venue that, in their words, is “a creative space unlike any other…that covers a breadth of artistic and creative practices as they relate to social justice and human rights.” artseverywhere wants their “artistic journalism to yield deeper connections and long-term engagement—to combine artistic freedom and innovation with rigorous storytelling.” artseverywhere’s main collections of work are “Series” “designed to cohere around a particular provocation, theme, or idea.” Check out this compelling venue at artseverywhere.ca.

Please also check out on the artseverywhere site the six-letter series written between me and Simon(e) van Saarloos. In the meantime, happy reading and or listening to my latest letter, Non-monogamy Letter #6, written to Simon(e) on October 22, 2023, and originally published online on November 2, 2023 in our Series, “The Non-Monogamy Letters.”

I reveal in this letter some profound changes in my human relational life during the pandemic, changes co-constituted, as always, with my relations with place and beyond the human. Happy reading and/or listening.

This essay was originally published in the special issue “Settler Science, Alien Contact, and Searches for Intelligence,” of American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ), Vol. 45, No. 1 (2021), 157-167. You may wish to cite that essay instead of this Substack post in your own writing.

Content warning: Profanity

Introductory Note

Much of this essay is written in the voice of IZ, a character I introduced in the book chapter, “Dear Indigenous Studies, It’s Not Me, It’s You: Why I Left and What Needs to Change.” IZ represents the evolving field that began as American Indian or Native American studies in the United States in the later twentieth century. Today, a later disciplinary iteration, Critical Indigenous studies, represents a coming together of not only United States-based, but multiple “Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty political movements” around the world, wherein “Indigenous scholars began to define the terms of their intellectual engagement within universities.” The IZ I spoke to in that first essay, and from whose collective body I write this essay, has grown into a twenty-first-century expanding discipline. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, “Indigenous centered approaches to knowledge production are thriving” globally. Our “object of study is colonizing power in its multiple forms, whether the gaze is on Indigenous issues or on Western knowledge production.” In this essay, my object of study and critical polydisciplinamorous engagement is a scientist character who searches for signs of “intelligent” life off-Earth.

IZ Speaks Back

I am called IZ. I am an intellectual movement given life in a turbulent year. Like all planetary years, 1968 was a time of death and hard, bloody births. I come from a storytelling culture, so settle in. I am known to be complicated. I have a reputation. I have disciplinary offspring and lovers, some steady and some on-again, off-again, who cannot keep their mouths shut or their keyboards quiet. They publish accounts of our relations, tumultuous attractions and repulsions in books and journals, and on social media, FFS.

One lover in particular called me out in public. She wrote about me in a book. She circled the planet, both in her flesh-and-blood body, and across that other global web of life, to gossip about me. She portrayed me as overly idealistic and given to reactionary anti-intellectualism. She accused me of privileging naïve definitions of activism and of seeing intellectualism in a binary relation with everyday work. But I like the images she used to portray me, dressed in the long sturdy coat of a postapocalyptic traveler, my braid leather-bound, arrows and warriors at my back, burning down the settler structures around us. Flames fill the frame in her rendition of me. She recognizes that I am to be reckoned with. From my own standpoint, let me fill out the story of our shared world.

With every year, I grow more desired and self-possessed. I work to woo you all to my fertile mind and my scarred, sturdy body. Stand with me. Have my back. I am unapologetic, intellectually promiscuous. Many people associate the word “promiscuous” negatively with casual and careless sexual relationships, as in “random, indiscriminate, unsystematic.” Which straight white men constructed that definition? It must have been a meeting of priests and bureaucrats, engineers in business casual, or professors in tweed or lab coats who should all retire. My promiscuity is openness to multiple, partial, pointed connections that together constitute sufficiency, sometimes even abundance. In my relational, anticolonial analytic, promiscuity is hardly indiscriminate. My couplings, throuplings, or orgiastic intellectual relations are strategic and incisive. And I desire the same precise standard in my intellectual intimates.

I tend not to be jealous of my lovers’ other dalliances, although I have discovered that I experience a particular form of resentment of certain metamours. Mononormatives may not know that a metamour is another lover of one of my lovers. I am often agnostic about my metamours. Who my lovers love is very much not my business. Yet I have found that people often gravitate repeatedly toward similar types. I have recognized bits of myself in my metamours and sometimes felt affinity with them. It is rare that I actively dislike a metamour when I come to know them.

But there is one kind of disciplinary lover who irritates me and whom my intellectual intimates sometimes take up with. If an intimate takes time away from our passionate, anticolonial relations and Indigenous intellectual world-building, and turns toward settler disciplinary companionship with say sociology, anthropology, literature, or history, I am not jealous, but insulted. I am insulted that you, my Indigenous Studies intellectual lover, would take precious time from a formidable lover such as myself, IZ, to maintain self-flagellating relationships with those boring white disciplines that spend half of their time worried about their identities and their methodological property claims. Yawn.

I do understand that you idealized their settler prestige and married them when you were too young. You thought they were the impressive ones, the best way to climb or to heal, to be “functional,” to be a good citizen. And those fields are certainly fascinated with us. I myself have appropriated some of their methods, but I no longer try to make a home with them. They want us as exotic lovers for equity, diversity, and inclusion credibility. They’ll rarely have more than one of us around in their extended polycule. They inevitably tokenize us. And they were certainly not founded to defend “Indigenous sovereignties, territories, economies and rights.” They were founded to salvage our cultural artifacts before we inevitably vanish, or they ignore us like they’re not building their wealth on stolen land. Anthropologists in their patterned scarves, lit scholars all in the same funky dime-a-dozen spectacles, sociologists in suit jackets, the historians in—oh, I can’t remember—desire us as multicultural rehabilitation of a settler world. They are not about restoring our world. You keep trying to change them while any therapist will tell you, you cannot change or fix someone. They need to change themselves. Or if you can’t pay for therapy, Paul Simon told you for free, “there must be fifty ways to leave your lover.”

Is settler prestige really worth it? You constantly complain about them. Some of you cry openly on Facebook and Twitter. Others discreetly confide your misery at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association hotel bar. You complain about the lack of passion in those settler disciplinary marriages, your nagging fear and the obvious signs that you are culturally and class incompatible. They make inappropriate comments when you do bring them home to me or to your other Indigenous family, and we all cringe. You get embarrassed. You doubt they are your true loves. Some of you are well past frustration and a commitment to rehabilitate them. You are at a point of mutual loathing after so many years of struggle. Yet you stay. Social respectability and stability matter. You may need their health insurance. You’ll certainly lose friends if you leave. They’ll think you don’t know a good thing when you have it.

I am totally down for analysis and critique, but I will never pressure you to leave your state-sanctioned disciplinary marriages meant to civilize you. I might heckle you; teasing is a sign of affection. But you have to get there on your own. It’s like Sunny Sweeney’s pop country song that goes, “You don’t leave until staying’s worse than leaving.” And then you spontaneously combust on Twitter. But this is only the background to the story I wanted to tell.

IZ Confesses

Let me begin again with a confession: I am a hypocrite. I too hook up sometimes with non-Indigenous fields, the kind that call themselves Science! I hear Thomas Dolby in my 1980s head.  My flings mostly display a science-as-whiteness phenotype even when they paint a one-dimensional rainbow across the lab. That is to say, not all of my technoscience lovers are racially white. Not all of their biosocial flesh is cultivated from lands called “Europe.” But we have all been nursed to some degree from exaggeratedly large European myths even if our physical architectures were also nourished from other lands and waters. We are all co-constituted, if you will, with nonhuman relatives. Their specificities in part produce ours as we help to (re)arrange theirs. Then humans, with water, land, moon, and stars aiding movement, transport languages to other places. Unfortunately, some humans have forced their words and their worlds onto other tongues rather than articulating languages and lifeways in conversation, and with mutual benefit. Words and concepts grown in European dirt can flow easily from some of our not-white mouths: “Science! Be rational! Not political. Be logical! You’re biased.” Such language is regularly used to avoid critiques of power and ethics, such as Indigenous critiques of extractive, non-consensual inquiry that returns no benefit to the Peoples, lands, and waters from which knowledge and wealth are taken.

I know the tendencies of Science! Like you, I hope that I can change them, rope them in with their resources to support our anticolonial cause. I keep trying because it has worked occasionally in the past. The payoff is handsome when rarely we decide to take it from a one-advisory-meeting or one-panel stand to a longer-term relationship. But be careful, I offer this wisdom: one cannot take on the entire disciplinary family of Science! Don’t bother. And whatever you do, don’t move in with them! Think about all of those movies where marginalized people get lobotomized by creepy white people. It’s psychically and physically dangerous for our anticolonial constitution. One must loosen Science from the other disciplinarians’ grip, reeducate him. I am not saying he should never again show up at the annual overpriced family disciplinary conference and nametag scope, or have beers with the other lab coats. But he should not delight any more in their haughty insider quantitative rationality vernacular. It should make him uneasy to speak that language now. Yet he will need to keep up his language skills. He cannot totally abandon his disciplinary siblings and parents. He still finds ways to love them, and turning his back on them might also be bad strategy for our cause. He might also feel a need to reeducate a few of them too. This all sounds terrible; but trust me, the right one will come to thank you.

Also remember, it is time-consuming and tedious to work through multiple flings with technoscience lovers to find the one who is totally hot to come into relation rightly—who is willing to trust the Map of IZ, willing to have their path rerouted through our geography of relations, to trust, to follow. We ask such lovers to sneak away from their disciplinary estates with their precious technologies and their discipline’s hoarded resources, including stolen Indigenous treasures. We ask them to restore Indigenous life. 

One of my long-term Science lovers was drawn into our anticolonial project initially because he desired my bones, flesh, and molecules, which he figured to be dead, ownable, patentable. I know, so morbid. Do you hear my mocking laugh? “Dead?!” This particular Mr. Science eventually learned that life is death is life. It is all connected. His desire changed when all the Indians rose from the dead before him, and asked for our bones back. We asked for our blood in deep freeze too. He witnessed with his own eyes our vibrancy and demands, and he knew to stop resisting, help us intensify our living instead of his own with stolen flesh and bones. With that experience, I tried my luck again.

Breakthrough Listen CyberHookup: Edmonton and Berkeley, May 2018

Let me tell you about a recent hookup with the “Breakthrough Listen Initiative” and their search for “intelligent” life in the expanse beyond this provincial sphere. They pursued me hard, but oxymoronically, with calculated passion like the subdued vampire that is the common figure of unredeemed Science! Ever the anthropologist of science, sex, horror, and whites, I said “yes.” I will tell you about that meeting in five 100-word vignettes.

Consent

We agree to initiate first contact. We ascertain a complementarity that could meet mutual desires if there is chemistry. The organisms collectively named Science! invite me to video chat, a virtual date with the parameters of engagement set. They are confident in their technologies. They suggest I can offer nothing to the materiality of listening to universal nature. I offer social, ethical, emotional intelligence regarding the Earthly implications of seeking alien signals in deep space. Might I offer this worldview in 500 words or less? Too much talk is unsexy. I consent. I forget to ask what they offer me.

Contact

I, IZ, on the video feed appear in the room of evenly spaced human bodies, evenly spaced windows. UC Berkeley, Ohlone territory, June 2018. My body is 1,500 miles away, no distance in a vast universe. We share a single star. It lights both our rooms. Tree beings project shadows onto walls. Humans with a spectrum of pigmentation tones, but most with penises (one presumes) wear a rainbow of button downs. The scientist organisms comport themselves into a narrow range of self-satisfied forms around a rectangular surface. They seem as I expected when they first asked me for the date.

Intelligence

My scientist seeks “intelligence,” in addition to mine, a civilization sending signals that penetrate human-generated interference, our planetary noise. His noise interferes most, his colonial signals pulsing, which he cannot comprehend. His detection apparatuses are not sufficiently refined to ascertain terrestrial signals, let alone extraterrestrial intelligence. His record of first contacts reveals his incomprehension of terrestrial beings and languages. I know his history more than he does. His memory’s erased. He probably does not recall that scientist ancestors coined “humanoid” to refer to Indigenous people as beings with human-like forms, but which were not human. The irony of our date.

Break(through)

IZ: It is not simply how you listen, but should you listen?

[Silence]

IZ: Scientist, can you hear me? Can you see me? There is no video, no audio on my side.

[Silence]

IZ: [To self ] He invited me here. Insists he values my ethical analysis of seeking extraterrestrial signals. His disciplines demonstrate his incapacity to recognize animacy in other beings. Contact becomes violence. I over-think, he says. He is only listening—there’s little chance of contact. He believes two things simultaneously, that a civilization that sends signals is advanced, yet not fully alive. ETs too are his noble savages.

Non-consent

[Audio, video resume]

Scientist: This is the frankness I want!

IZ: You could hear me?

Scientist: My feed was fine.

IZ: You were non-consensually listening? You should have turned off your feed.

Scientist: No!! Great date! Great data! For the good of all.

IZ: For ALL of us? Who funds your exploration? What is the return to you? And to me?

[White Noise]

IZ: What stories will you tell about beings you listen for when you won’t comprehend theirs? Like priests, you turn to innocence, claim passive flesh-digital ears accepting signals for a universal knower. Where have I heard this before?

IZ Sips Big Science Nectar: San Jose and Berkeley, October 2011

I am not only a lover and a storyteller. I am also an anthropologist, chiefly of the colonizer. But sometimes I bring my anthropological eyes to observe and glean insights from other Indigenous people as I seek to understand how we are making our way on this planet, and perhaps in relation to worlds beyond this one. Rewind the years to the autumn of 2011. Join me in the cavernous, marble-floored San Jose, California Convention Center for a few days when it was abuzz with 4,000 “Chicano,” “Native American,” and other “POC” scientists. In that warm October week, I attended one of the largest meetings dedicated to promoting racial diversity in science. This was a meeting designed to mentor and encourage under-represented scientists to stay in the game, and many of the scientists were young and still in school. Established Indigenous, Latino, and other POC scientists were there to mentor and encourage, and everyone was there to present their latest research. In more ways than one, this was like no other science meeting I’d ever been to.

Let me start with a key surface-level difference, the sartorial splendor on display in the sterile and gargantuan spaces of the convention center. I was hardly the only fashionista in the place. I drooled over four-inch heels and pencil skirts, crisp suits and perfectly colored ties, so much gorgeous black and brown hair perfectly coiffed, and oh my, the tight and glittering beadwork on display to top off some of those outfits. My fashion exhilaration was so far unmatched by any other “natural” science conference I’d attended. Although to be fair, I mostly frequent genomics or biological anthropology meetings, which are distinctively staid. Perhaps astronomers’ or ecologists’ meetings have more style? I giggle to think of ties with celestial bodies or lizards on them.

But it was not only the handsome look of those thousands of scientists in the San Jose Convention Center; they were thinkers of substance, in many ways their approaches compatible with the anticolonial project of IZ. I sat in one crowded conference room to see a panel on the “real life adventures” of four established scientists: two bioscientists, a chemist, and a mathematician. They gave off-the-cuff talks recounting personal, familial, and cultural challenges to doing science, as well as the systemic racism and poverty that pulled at them in the world of Science. They hinted at how their familial and community relations helped them script different STEM worlds. One speaker, a Chicana professor of mathematics, recounted growing up poor in East Los Angeles, but with a close-knit family and a charismatic and hard-driving high school math teacher, all of whom together helped her in her journey to a PhD in mathematics. There was one moment in her talk that encapsulated the energy of the meeting, the sense of collective community purpose combined with individual love of research and knowledge. East LA Math Prof stated unapologetically that while she is not at the cutting edge of new mathematical theory, she realized that she got a PhD in mathematics “to produce great mathematicians!” The room erupted into applause. Her tone was powerful, her heartfelt openness a testament to the centrality of “mentoring” in that community. I heard about making “good relations” in and through mathematics.

I was moved.

On the same panel, a Diné professor of zoology recounted growing up on the Navajo reservation and earning a PhD in zoology at a prestigious West coast university, and the culture shock he encountered there. What moved me in his talk was something he did casually. He simply spoke a bit of Diné language, and not in that way I’ve often seen at government agency meetings or social science or humanities meetings, including even our own Indigenous studies meetings (ouch), where Indigenous languages are handled carefully like sacred artifacts, not everyday things. The professor recounted his lineage and clan, then spoke in a casual and gregarious tone that indicated even to nonspeakers like me that there were enough Diné in the room who understood him. Indeed, those in the audience who understood laughed along with him. He used the language to communicate, not simply as protocol.

Prof Diné Zoologist was, of course, in a relatively privileged position among Indigenous academics. There are more Native language speakers among the Navajo than in many other Indigenous communities across lands occupied by the United States. Hanging out with (and lamentably crushing on) scientists for a quarter-century now, I have found that Diné are overrepresented among Indigenous people in science and engineering fields. At one point that week in San Jose, I encountered six Diné scientists talking animatedly in a circle before a session. They were speaking Navajo and laughing. I felt tickled. I mingled delightedly in the hallways between panel sessions and keynotes, at conference lunches and dinners served to thousands in the gigantic banquet hall. I especially took my time in the vendor area to visit and move among many tables of beadwork and quillwork, artwork, and science-related paraphernalia.

Other conference-goers shared with me their personal stories and the role of this scientific organization in their lives. Every graduate student and professor I talked to, most of whom had been a member of this association for years, spoke of the affirmation and encouragement they receive there. Some spoke of hard times in science when they considered leaving their labs or their fields, times when they felt like social or cultural curiosities. But their colleagues (or might I say “relatives”?) in this scientific organization continued to connect them to other relations in the broader community. These good relations helped them find opportunities to stay in science and to help change it in order to serve their peoples. Several scientists told me they didn’t get this encouragement from their primary advisers at their universities, but did here, where people understand where they come from. I was astounded by the power of the organization in the lives of the Indigenous and Latino scientists I met. What a different scene from the white male-dominated physical anthropology or human genetics meetings I usually frequent in my Indigenous anthropological scarves. I was enchanted.

IZ Dives Deep into Uneasy Relational Waters

On the final night of the conference, I put my arrows away and sashayed on heels into the San Jose Convention Center for the closing night’s banquet. I was high on new relationship energy (NRE). A romantic night awaited me! Waiters in black tie were gliding, bending, and twirling efficiently among the rainbow of several thousand laughing, glitzy-dressed scientists. We were about to sit down to a several-course meal paid for by sponsors including major scientific research agencies and foundations— donations in the tens-of-thousands of dollars, up to $100,000 donations by several prestigious universities. This was not a cash-bar reception with a few fruit, meat, and cheese plates like at a social science or humanities meeting. I sat down at a banquet table with seven other scholars, all young Indigenous scientists still in graduate school or in postdocs. I was the lone IZ at the table. We were all laughing and buzzed on the energy in the room, the sound of clinking glasses, and with huge expectations for the dinner talks and the show ahead.

Like the big international human genetics meetings I have infiltrated, this meeting was kitted out with lots of expensive technology. At regular panel sessions and keynotes, two gigantic overhead screens flanked the stages where speakers sat in television talk show-style chairs or spoke at podiums. Presentations were slickly programmed with all kinds of special effects that you just don’t see in the technologically staid PowerPoint presentations of most social scientists. Or think of, God forbid, the humanities scholars who simply read their papers with no visual support. Precisely programmed musical clips played as speakers ascended and departed the stage. Music also accompanied the photo ops that followed each award. Can you understand why I fell so hard so quickly? I am a sucker for a slick performance combined with slick technology.

After several days of being impressed over and over again with Indigenous and POC Science, the dinner plates were cleared at the final banquet. What happened next still makes my heart palpitate and sends a shiver up my back. The lights in the cavernous banquet hall were turned completely down and the Star Wars theme began playing. Two astronauts hovering mid-air in the International Space Station appeared on screen, so much larger than life. They had recorded a personalized welcome for all of the Chicano, Indigenous, and POC scientists. The room swelled with a towering wave of laughter and applause, mine included. I caught my breath and I caught myself. I understood like never before how intoxicating can be the nectar of Big Science and Technology. I was certainly not the only person at my banquet table to feel like I’d traveled a long journey from that reservation border town where I grew up. Sharing the moment with a promising and gregarious young Diné scientist sitting next to me, my emerging shock and growing awareness of the colonial pain it took to produce every aspect of that moment in history was mixed also with pleasure, pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure, over and over in waves.

My pleasure dissipated completely when the astronauts in the space station signed off the video feed, and we all came back down to Earth, to San Jose. The big-name speakers took the stage, two middle-aged white men from my own highly ranked West coast university, both in positions of power and with esteemed scientific careers. They gave talks meant to inspire. Perhaps many of the young scientists in the banquet hall were moved. A bit older and schooled in anthropology and histories of science, I recognized the same regretful gospel I had heard from the mouths of past scientific lovers. From those white ministers of science on stage, I heard the driest King James-like version of universal knowledge unencumbered by any reflection on research institutions’ centuries of violent explorations and “discoveries.” There was certainly no recognition of the genocidal covering over of knowledges of ancestors of the very peoples filling the banquet hall.

The first speaker, a Nobel prize winner, projected photographs of his prize-winning team, all white men except one man from China. The ongoing and well-known racial and gender exclusions of his scientific field of physics were not acknowledged. To the contrary, he spoke to the room full of brown faces and said, “You too can win this prize someday.” His old school bootstraps narrative and depoliticized history of his field was so off-rhythm in this crowd. Hadn’t we just heard from East LA Math Prof and Prof Diné Zoologist about the importance of personal and social histories shaping the questions asked, the methods and pedagogies used, the way analysis is done? Hadn’t we just applauded and cheered those visions of doing math and science? The next big man of settler science, also a university administrator, delivered the second sermon: big science and technology as salvation from our economic and political woes. He focused on the role of science and technology in US global capitalist competitiveness.

US agencies that oversee the science and technology of war were helping fund our lavish banquet, so it was fitting that science sermonizer number two spoke of the role of “diversity and inclusion,” and giving people of color access to the imperial (my word, not his) opportunity and economic largess. Holy, I came down hard from my NRE during his oration.

Having sobered up from a peak buzz of Big Science Nectar, I was profoundly weary as I drove the forty-seven miles to where I lived in the city in the hills by the bay. I drove that night to where the phallic university tower rises amidst tree-covered swells, where the big men of science perch also in their labs and houses in the hills, many with wives and ever-so-successful offspring. The gospel of inclusive excellence rings regularly throughout the city just like it did in the San Jose Convention Center that night. Meanwhile the houseless camps continued to grow around the lush university grounds and in those glittering streets that sparkle less if you bother to look down into the doorways, parks, and sides of the highways where the tents, sleeping bags, and shopping carts proliferate. More than a few of the rough sleepers have returned wounded from the empire’s wars that both seed and manifest technological fantasies of exploration, discovery, and relentless attempts at covering over the realities of peoples and nations the world over.

I point my finger, but I stumble too with settler-imperial hangovers. My fetish and desire for lab coats, engineers, and space travelers who skillfully design and operate high-tech devices. That night ten years ago in San Jose, I felt exhilarated by the video connection between an urban California convention center and a space vessel. I love the featherweight, glowing light, and rapid calculations of a state-of-the-art mobile technology, the way non-fleshly visualizing apparatuses can see down to the smallest bits of matter or out across eons. And I despise the accompanying frontier narratives, their savage/civilized hierarchies of life, their arrogance that their knowledge is the truest knowing of all, and that ancient knowledges that they and their ancestors had no part in constituting are destined to be superseded. How unfortunate.

NDNSciFi

21st-century noble savage, I escape in a pod to the sky. Launch beyond planetary myths—that we are mastodons, bones lodged in earth and museums, relics to adorn the living. Settlers war for inheritance. Glued to the video feed, I peer across centuries, and a field of orbiting debris. Their projects continue in labs, courts, bloody streets. The probes, imprisonments, eliminations do not abate. Techniques shift form. Humans versus animals parsed by priests, scientists, CIA. I tried to be their citizen, but the dead cannot inherit. The dead are inherited. I hope relatives among the stars will take me in.

Notes

Introductory note: I gave this text as a short talk on October 8, 2022 for the EarthLab’s Playing with Fire: A Hot Symposium at University of California, Santa Cruz. This text is also an excerpt from a full-length talk and chapter-in-process that will likely be in my next book.

Yesterday, October 10, a friend bought us tickets to the Indigenous Peoples’ Day sunrise ceremony at Alcatraz. While on the island, listening to the morning prayers and commentary, watching dancers, and listening to drums, I thought about the ideas presented in this piece—ideas about whose apocalypse we confront now, and whose framing within which we get told to interpret what we live through.

The annual Alcatraz gathering, occurs on what is now called “Indigenous Peoples Day” (formerly Columbus Day) and is an annual recognition of the “Indians of All Tribes” occupation of Alcatraz that occurred from November 1969 to June 1971, a protest that sought to return federally-controlled property to Native people. I am uncomfortable with large crowds, but I appreciated my friend’s gesture so I hauled myself out of bed at 3:45 am to catch a 5:15 am ferry in the dark to the San Francisco Bay little rock of an island.

I am also not a fan of state-sanctioned recognition efforts like “Indigenous Peoples Day” or “Native American Heritage Month” that blur the differences between Peoples co-constituted with very different places. Such events stretch the terms “Native American” or  “Indigenous” beyond their usefulness to us as concepts for political organizing across vast land- and waterscapes. Pan-Native terms get used by the settler state in both programmatic and rhetorical moves that seek to blur Indigenous sovereignties into a settler state rainbow of multicultural inclusion into their nation-building project, which ultimately undermines ours.

When asked to support the celebration of such days or months, my response is always, “My entire life is about supporting “Indigenous” or “Native American” people’s sovereignty. Every day is a day for Indigenous Peoples for me. What does engaging in such a celebration get us?” It’s a genuine and not a rhetorical question. I am willing to support such recognitions, if there are pragmatic (e.g. resource-related) benefits that help ease suffering.

That said, here is the talk text I presented in Santa Cruz on October 8. Happy listening and/or reading.

Art, culture, and media scholar, Heather Davis, and Métis anthropologist, Zoe Todd have written on the importance of decolonizing the Anthropocene, and the need to “open…it up beyond its current Eurocentric framing.”[1] Davis and Todd argue that rather than dating the beginning of the “Anthropocene” to the birth of agriculture, the advent of the steam engine, or to the mid 20th century, the Anthropocene should be dated to the beginning of the colonial period, approximately 1610.[2]

Davis and Todd follow geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, who proposed 1610  for two historical reasons also reflected in the geologic layer:

1)    1610 marks the massive exchange of plants and animals between the Americas and Europe that “drastically re-shaped the ecosystems of both of these landmasses;” and

2)    1610 also marks a “drop in carbon dioxide levels…that correspond[s] to the genocide of the peoples of the Americas and subsequent re-growth of forests and other plants.”[3] That is how extensively Indigenous peoples managed, and were not only managed by the land.

In their Anthropocene paper, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd “explicitly acknowledge the entangled violences of the Transatlantic slave trade and the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous peoples and territories.” So 1610 also marks an era of violent and massive transfer of human relatives and wealth from Africa to colonial overlords in the Americas and in Europe.[4] Dating the inception of the Anthropocene to this era not only attends to the geological story, but it pushes back against the assumption that humans en masse, rather than certain humans, are implicated in anthropogenic change.

We all experience the devastating effects of Indigenous genocide in the present as well. Increasingly catastrophic fires on the west coast of North America result from Anthropogenic change that includes disappearing, displacing, and disempowering Indigenous peoples, thus suppressing many centuries of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of how to live carefully with the powerful entity that is fire.

Powerful Entities

Lightening aids fire, and humans are a weak match.

I was in San Francisco for the week of the first lightning strikes in August, 2020. It was shockingly warm. About 3 a.m. the morning of August 14, as I slept soundly with all of the windows open, a sudden gust of wind slammed like a poltergeist every open door in the apartment. I jumped out of bed to witness from the large west facing window hundreds of gorgeous white hot lightning bolts striking down from the skies over the hills of San Francisco, and out over the Pacific.

I lived in Santa Cruz, Mendocino County, and Berkeley on and off from 2001 to 2012. I have never seen anything like the 44C heat we endured that week nor lightning of that intensity. From the 14th to the 16th of August over 2500 lightning strikes were recorded in Northern California. Three massive wildfires burned nearly 1.5 million acres, turned the skies dark, then orange, and rained down ash.

My daughter and I were visiting the Bay Area before we dropped her off at a hilltop farm in Sonoma County for an internship. We delayed her arrival there; with fires nearby, the farm was ready to evacuate at any minute. So Carmen and I decided to leave California and return when it was safer. We crawled on four wheels with many others on I-80 through patches of roadside flames up into so-called Tahoe National Forest, and descended into the desert of what is today called Nevada. As we left the densely built coastal cities behind, we sped toward my Dakota Oyate homelands in Minnesota to escape the ash, smoke, and fire.

Not My Apocalypse

In 2015, I had a conversation on stage at the University of Alberta entitled "Matters of Life and Death." I discussed with Sha LaBare, also a UCSC History of Consciousness graduate and a feminist science studies thinker, “The Future in Question,” and our different individual histories. In response to Sha’s deep ecological grief and sense of urgency, I expressed feelings I still work to describe with clarity.

Dakota people’s apocalyptic grieving has a longer timeline; we are at a different stage of grief. The genocide over hundreds of years of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the co-decimation of nonhuman relatives and their societies brings us and you to here. It is this world built out of our apocalypse that is now at risk. Dakota people grieve what this world still celebrates in its doctrines, anthems, explosions, and glorious accounts. Sha responded with a quote from speculative fiction writer, William Gibson: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Since at least 2015 and that conversation, I’ve been trying to figure what it means to live in the fiery end of US empire as a Dakota—as a great-great-great grandchild of a People who suffered 160 years ago their/our own apocalypse in 1862 as this empire was ascendant. Long before Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Kuwait, my people and other Indigenous peoples from lands now absurdly claimed as US “Homeland,” were casualties of US empire building.

And yet, I am now an aging intellectual with four reliable wheels, English as a first language, and a well-used US passport. I have a relatively high degree of privilege within this settler-colonial structure. I continuously confront the question, where do I individually stand? Where am I able to move? What do I have to lose in declining US empire versus what has been lost by my collective, the Dakota Oyate? And by the Indigenous Peoples co-constituted with these lands where we sit and stand today? Indigenous peoples have had US citizenship and systems forced onto us after our populational decimation. Might we therefore see the settler state project and its non-negotiable costs more clearly? 

What I struggled to communicate to Sha LaBare and to our audience at the University of Alberta in 2015, is that I think that there is not a novel sense of despair among Indigenous communities that I come from and work with. We Indigenous people in lands occupied by the US and Canada are also not disconnected from broader societies built upon our genocide, and that now mourn or disavow their own decline. We are not disconnected from settler’s present day economic struggles, industry decline, mass shootings, suicides, addictions, and climate crisis. But it is striking to observe a new psychic grappling by settlers with end times. They seem surprised by events that disrupt their mythological narratives of progress.

Consider this. What if one has not inhabited to the same degree, a settler-colonial progressive narrative? Then the material suffering of climate crisis, of the Anthropocene, of the sharp decline of US empire, is not an unknown or new order of material deprivation. Rather, it might be what Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz refers to as a “sharpening of the already present.” If one has not found shelter within a progressive colonial narrative, then one might not experience the same kind of diminished ontological faith or crisis in worldview—even while one experiences ongoing or increased material deprivation with settler state decline. Not everyone is experiencing the same negative intellectual, emotional, and moral shift in the universe as settler empire falls.

In this moment, I see an opportunity for a sharpening of moral clarity across the land. The apocalypses that Indigenous and Black peoples have suffered for half a millennium are blossoming into settler state reckonings. That the violence and unsustainability of colonialism is now confronted by an ever wider number of people feels productive and ethically clarifying. We are more able to deny the genocide deniers, those who have denied our apocalypses while building their homes and farms, factories, institutions, and wealth upon stolen lands using stolen bodies and labour.

A Call to Be Bad, not Good Citizens

I worry that many of my fellow humans cannot see a horizon beyond the US and Canadian settler states. While I sympathize with pragmatic strategies that take aim within settler state electoral politics, law, and policy to lessen oppression and resource disparities, I am dismayed when my relations—both Indigenous and not—in the streets of South Minneapolis or in Portland, Oregon couple state politics with the language of liberal patriotism or good “citizenship” in their righteous opposition to the empire’s violence.

To quote my University of Alberta colleague, Jessica Kolopenuk from Peguis First Nation, and her article “Provoking Bad Biocitizenship”:

I charge non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples alike to be bad: unpack and undermine the investments they have in propertied and rights-based individualism, state-based sovereignty and nationalism, capitalist cultures of consumption, and settler fantasies of being rightful and good.[5]

I do not subscribe to the notions, “this is not us” or “this is not normal,” ideas frequently expressed by USians since the 2016 presidential election. What I grasp in the last six years is similar to Junot Díaz’s assessment of our recent political turn. He said:

I would not say that this is a different order of madness. I think it is a sharpening of the already present madness.”[6]

I shorten this to a “sharpening of the already present”—a moment in which the violent policies and strategies of US empire first enacted upon Indigenous peoples on this continent, and African peoples, and Black people, then enacted on other peoples abroad, are now returning home to a wider array of populations within lands that the US occupies and calls its own. In this sharpening of the already present, an ever-widening circle of humans are kept beyond the border of legitimate citizen, or the human worthy of consideration by the state.

I think Jessica Kolopenuk would tell us then to embrace our badness…..and stop investing our self-worth and futures of freedom in a violent settler state, which can also be complemented by a second idea that I borrow from Junot Díaz.

Radical Hope

In 2018, I gave a keynote at a conference on disasters, displacement, and human rights. The symposium description explained that “moments of transition bring about crisis, uncertainty, and even opportunity.” Organizers posed the question, “What factors shape whether a transition is a crisis or an opportunity, and in whose eyes?”

In a 2017 podcast interview, Díaz essentially answered that question as he explained two entangled ideas: 1) misalignment with the mainstream “emotional baseline” and; 2) “radical hope.” [7] Díaz considered the state of the world. He noted that “Trump is the latest, awful. . .turn” [we can add to that starkly visible climate emergencies], but “the world has been in an awful state for a long time.” Díaz asked rhetorically, “how are you conceptualizing this challenge?. . .The ability to do what our societies seem incapable and unwilling to do is important. . . . [T]here is nothing,” he argued, “more critical than to be misaligned. . .with the emotional baseline of any mainstream society.”[8] This applies as much to climate crisis as it does our foreboding and entangled electoral politics.

In this present moment, there is a rare opportunity to build off surging momentum among those who are misaligned, to actually push that emotional baseline—to try and do what this society has seemed “incapable and unwilling to do.”

The emotional baseline with which I suggest being misaligned is the incessant dreaming, in whatever political tone, of a successful settler state. We do not only face in this moment risk from Anthropogenic change, climate crisis, and the implosion of the western colonial project. We can also constitute hope in the implosion of the progressive colonial narrative. Not Barack Obama’s vacuous notion of multicultural “hope,” but the radical hope that Junot Díaz names when he professes his  “trust in the collective genius of all the people who have survived these wicked systems.” He thinks “from the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible.” Living well together, making relations: In this moment, this hope seems less radical to me than it did several years ago.

This moment offers an opportunity to cease cultivating love for the state no matter the parties in power. This moment makes space, if we choose to move into it, to be misaligned with the emotional, intellectual, and (un)ethical baseline of those in power. Instead, we can radically hope, script a narrative that foregoes the paradoxical dream of making a colonial empire more inclusive and more relational with the earth.

Instead, we can take this opening to move into relational frameworks and care for one another as relations. We are seeing proposals for institutional, political, and material changes to enact different kinds of relations. We see them arise from “the collective genius of all of the people who have survived these wicked systems.”

Sources

[1] Heather Davis and Zoe Todd “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies Vol 16(4) (2017): 763. See https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1539.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid. 766.

[4] Ibid. 772.

[5] Jessica Kolopenuk, “Provoking Bad Biocitizenship,” Hastings Center Report  May-June 2020, S28.

[6] Krista Tippett, “Junot Díaz: Radical Hope Is Our Best Weapon,” On Being, September 14, 2017, https://onbeing.org/programs/junot-diaz-radical-hope-is-our-best-weapon-sep2017/.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

This post is based on a talk I gave for the Sexuality Education Resource Centre (SERC) Manitoba virtual Valentine’s Day Soirée, February 14, 2021. It was a ticketed event and 100% of proceeds went to benefit youth sex education and programming. It was originally posted on this Substack in text only on March 1, 2021. I re-post it today, February 14, 2022 in both text and audio. If you are normally annoyed by Valentine’s Day, this piece that knocks the fetishized (monogamous) couple, romantic, and sexual love off its pedestal—portraying it as simply one among many ways of important relating—may appeal to you.

Some names in these accounts are changed to protect the not-so-innocent. Happy reading and/or listening.

Many people associate the word “promiscuous” negatively with casual and careless sexual relationships. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:

PROMISCUOUS, ADJ. AND ADV.

Pronunciation:  Brit. /prəˈmɪskjʊəs/ , U.S. /prəˈmɪskjəwəs/

Done or applied with no regard for method, order, etc.; random, indiscriminate, unsystematic.

OED Third Edition, June 2007

Why does this society tell us that promiscuity is always so lacking in purpose? Why do we use this word to shame people for their desires and attractions? Were you taught like I was that ethical sex must be accompanied by romantic love? And that “normal” romantic love is always accompanied by sex? A dominant lesson of our society is that fidelity and commitment go hand-in-hand with scarcity—with the idea that true love is romantic love, that it is rare. And if it is true, then it lasts forever, to the exclusion of other sexual or romantic connections.

I propose that fidelity or faithfulness is not well served by a scarcity mentality, by turning too much toward one individual to meet too many needs and desires. I propose that love is more likely to endure if we allow it to transform; this includes sexual connections. Changes in hearts, minds, and bodies need not mean endings. But if you do happen upon an ending, that does not negate the truth of that love. Sexual connections, loves made and lost are not mis-steps on the way to “the right” one. They are part of the stories of our lives.

Why then lock formative memories behind a door and lose the key when you are fortunate to find new connections, new loves? Your fascinating stories belong to you. And while you don’t owe your accounts to anyone, neither must you silence them as if they never existed. Your stories are yours to share or keep quiet. Of course, be careful with your story’s characters. Remember, you are telling their story too.

In this post, I’ll share three stories and four 100-word poetic vignettes that I sometimes publish on my blog, The Critical Polyamorist, or in edited books or journals. Both the longer stories and the shorter 100s offer personal accounts of relating—stories of love and making kin promiscuously that neither obsess on romance nor diminish romantic and sexual relationships. I focus on multiple connections with many beings—our human beloveds, and our other-than-human companions, especially the relationships that sustain us. That said, not all of the relations I talk about are good relations. But relations that are not necessarily good are also the entangled relations that make and remake us into who we are.

I hope these accounts help guide you toward a generous definition of “promiscuous.” That you might consider the idea, if you haven’t already, that love and care can be enlarged, not compromised or lost, when we embrace a multiplicity of relations. 

Fidelitous

I seek multiple tongues. Desires cross time zones. Body stretches like wings over white-light nets taut between peaks and a black, deep sea—life giver. When my first LandLoveBody sleeps on the Twitter feed, intermittent with shots and false dreams, I turn to a European dalliance mouthing into morning headlines of violence in the streets of empire. AsiaPacific spins to the hard day’s end. I am already here. Together we glitter and toast the close of year. Though we remember grief no less. My fidelity is no one-relation bliss. I won’t ask everything: partial sustenance, shared pleasure, stories forged together. 

I wrote that 100 in Tokyo around New Year’s 2015. I was there that holiday season as I often am in non-Covid times with two of my dearest ones, the subjects of this first account.

1.   Platonic Polyamorous Triad

I may be more dedicated to my triadic (between three) relationship with Jun and Noriko than I have ever been dedicated to a dyadic (between two) romance. Unless a lover turns into family. For example, my daughter’s father is family, although our romance has quieted. I now have several part-time life partners, none of whom I live with: my coparent, Jun and Nori, and perhaps my most recent love of three years—we shall see what the future brings. You’ll meet him in the next account.

While there was a marriage ceremony for me and my coparent, and Nori and Jun are married to each other, there has been no ceremony to seal the triadic compact that I share with those two. I suppose I could do a formal ceremony of adoption. But the medicine man who would perform it would probably: 1) interpret our relationship as an adopted sibling one and confer the terms “brother” and “sister,” and that is not exactly how it works. We really are more like life partners, just very platonically; and 2) the medicine man would do his whole noble medicine man thing throughout the whole day of the ceremony. That level of pomp and circumstance is not really my style. Dakota ceremonies or weddings are nowhere near as expensive and over-consuming as say—a big white wedding. But they are still big to-dos.

Plus, the level of Japanese familial obligation that I am already subject to by having a part-time triad with Jun and Nori is more than enough obligation. I don’t need to add to it a medicine man having a dream about our eternal never-ending bond. It all just feels too much. I seriously doubt I’ll ever want to renegotiate out of my triadic commitments to Jun and Noriko, but you never know—they might get sick of me. At any rate, I think we have more than enough cultural pressure on our relationship.  

Ideally, I spend every December and New Year in Tokyo. The plague stopped my pilgrimage across the Pacific this year. Nori and Jun have come to live in my city twice for a year or two when they are able. Two years ago, they came to live in Edmonton for their sabbatical year away from their Tokyo universities. They rented an apartment near the legislature, walking distance from the University of Alberta where they were visiting scholars. They made more friends in Edmonton in one year than I have in five. In the US, they lived in L.A. and New York City. They were both born and raised in Tokyo, a city of over nine million and a metro area of 38 million living within a mere 2,200 square kilometres. For comparison, and this is such a cool statistic, lands now occupied by Canada contain 37.5 million people, virtually the same as the Tokyo metro area, but spread across ten million square kilometres. To Jun, Edmonton is, and I quote, “a village.”

I miss them dearly. We had dinners together a few times a week. I saw them on campus. We’d visit each other’s offices, go for post-work happy hours. We are inseparable when we are in the same city. We are all three professors and critical of US empire, although we are all three shaped profoundly by US history and culture. We met because of our mutual interests in one of the most violent aspects of the US: nuclear weapons development. I know, that’s not sexy, but bear with me. We three were in different cities in the US back in the 1990s, researching environmental impacts of nuclear development on Indigenous lands. One understands how Jun and Noriko, being from Japan, came to an interest in the horrors of US nuclear weapons. I stumbled into it because I got a job with an Indigenous environmental organization. I met Nori first and we became quick friends. She met Jun a few years later.

They got married despite Jun’s formerly womanizing ways. I don’t understand their dynamic exactly. Apparently in Japanese culture you are supposed to insult your spouse in front of others? To brag about them is to brag about yourself. Their dynamic of love and marriage is counter-intuitive to me as a US-indoctrinated person. When I am in Tokyo, I will work long days at their little dining room table while they speed all over the city on the efficient Keio train Line to teach at their respective universities. I barely leave their little house except to take the train two stops to the delectable grocery in the basement of the seven-story Parco department store. I buy things like Skippy peanut butter, apples, cheese, salmon rice balls, French wine, whisky for Jun, and Starbucks coffee. Nori rolls her eyes at my peanut butter.

One year I put Skippy on some super fancy $10 dollar very precious Japanese apple and she ABOUT DIED. They still tell people about the horrific thing I did. Mostly though I eat Nori’s amazing cooking. I turn into a Japanese Salaryman—drinking with Jun while Nori cooks dinner. He will say how awful is his wife’s cooking and she will berate him for things I cannot share with you here. While she is cooking up a gourmet feast in her Uniqlo fuzzy house clothes and her Japanese housewife apron (totally sexy), Jun and I stay the heck out of the kitchen. Until it is his turn to make the fried rice, which is a sight to behold. He’s like a steam engine using the energy of his muscles to shake the wok furiously. I keep my uncivilized, peanut-butter eating self OUT of Noriko’s kitchen. Instead, I drink old lady ume sours and I wait for my dinner of lotus root salad, sauteed greens, perfect rice, and fish. We three laugh long into the night. Mostly we talk about our respective family dramas and the politics of empire. And I gossip to them about my latest polyamorous lover. They ask to see a picture, to hear about the person’s politics, and then they pass judgement. Finally (and please don’t tell the Japanese Salarymen), Jun cleans the kitchen.

Nori and Jun advise me to spend the rest of my life here in Treaty 6 Territory. They also ask that I keep a room for them. Because Tokyo is unbearable in August. As soon as Covid-19 settles down, they plan on summering here next to the North Saskatchewan on the east end of Jasper Avenue, where we shall eat my adequate dinners, or Nori might cook in my kitchen, and I will do the dishes.

2.   Marriage Unsettled

Chichibu 

Once a decade or so outside my skull in air my own voice hangs. Two winters ago, two hours from Tokyo in a taxi we rolled round switchbacks—a paved mountain road. Village lights and the train station glittered below. From the black night, from beyond cold glass my voice spoke without ado: You may not find the one for you. You found yourself. I grieved. I knew. Later in the house nested like a warm candle in cedar-scented hills the seer completed the vision: He may not find another. When you grow old, you will care for each other.

In addition to my triad with Noriko and Jun, I live daily with two other marriages that have similar dynamics between them: mine with David, and Ted’s with Anna. Ted and I form together the hinge, where our four lives articulate although Anna and David have not met. He lives in the US and never visits Edmonton since our daughter moved back to his city. Before Covid-19, I traveled every other month to see them. David and I have been separated for ten years, but we remain coparents, professional collaborators, easy conversationalists.

We never fight over money or parenting decisions. We are both terrible at paperwork and consider lawyers a waste of money. I am now against the institution of settler-state marriage and would never again marry. So why bother with the dissolution of the state marriage contract? Perhaps David will marry again one day and we will file the papers. Although the seer doesn’t see that happening. Whatever comes to be, we are family in my worldview. We share a child. He has a better relationship with my mother than I do. We may one day share grandchildren.

As for Ted and Anna? What do I feel I can say? I am responsible to caretake their story with a gentle touch. It is part of my story too. Instead of sharing a full script, let me set the societal stage upon which we act out our collective struggles. The colonizer’s stage is not exactly arranged for the kind of imperfect, but trying-to-do-better relations that I share with you here.

Being polyamorous in Edmonton in one’s 50’s is different than being polyamorous in one’s 40’s in Austin, Texas where I began exploring non-monogamy. If you haven’t read Lizzie Derksen’s 2016 Guts Magazine article, entitled “On Being Non-Monogamous in Alberta While the Price of Oil is Going to Hell,” you might want to treat yourself. Derksen, my fellow Edmontonian, suggests that the Alberta oil economy helps produce compulsory monogamy, meaning that monogamy is considered the default, unquestioned societal standard and the obvious moral choice in any good and healthy romantic relationship. She writes:

In my own city…I see oil money being earned in order to establish discrete, traditional, single-family households, I see the loneliness and isolation that result, and I see the excessive consumerism used to combat this loneliness and all the while maintain self-sufficiency…You can’t walk for groceries if you live in Terwilligar, but you can definitely park a couple of SUVs and a boat.

Lizzie Derksen explains how the threat of cheating looms large in a culture where people live isolated in four-car garage houses on the edges of Edmonton or Calgary, counting down the weeks until partners working up north on the rigs come home to Terwilliger or Airdrie. Even close platonic friendships are curtailed due to risk of physical intimacy. Dersken writes from the perspective of a millennial about the challenges of living outside that culture.

Now imagine being in one’s 50s and attempting open non-monogamy here. In Austin, where I moved from, there were polyamorous meetups at patio restaurants and happy hours at trendy live music venues. There was Bedpost Confessions, the sexy storytelling show at an east Austin music club where non-monogamous people of all ages lined up around the block for the once-a-month show. Dressed to the nines. You could tell the ones into kink in their black leather, straps tight across all their sexy places, and their locked collars. They were there to see and be seen.

In Edmonton, we have Earls where the cocktail servers dress like backup singers in Robert Palmer’s 1988 video, “Simply Irresistible,” all of them nearly identical with hair slicked back, in short black dresses, wearing black pointy-toed pumps—an elegant look. For the 80s. I often say that Edmonton is a lot like St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1980s. Before gentrification. Before the North Stars moved to Dallas. It was hockey jerseys, leather jackets, mullets, and steel-toed boots on the working-class streets of St. Paul. I do hear from a stylist at my hair salon that there are swinger parties in Edmonton (or were before Covid) where you can go meet strangers for one-time hookups, or watch others putting their hookups on exhibition for other party-goers. But I am no swinger, I am a vanilla polyamorist who takes longevity of relationships a bit too seriously when I am given the chance.

I also found out that there are married couples in places like St. Albert who have dungeons in the back and F150s in front of the front. Of their McMansions. I found out because they sometimes look for unicorn thirds to enlist in their roleplays. I trust you know what a unicorn is? In polyamorous lingo, it’s that strange, precious, and elusive creature that everyone knows about, but no one has actually seen—typically a younger bisexual woman who will hook up with often heterosexual and monogamish—not totally monogamous—couples. Why would a suburban couple think that I, a 50-something professor, am good unicorn material? Times must be tough for unicorn-hunters in Alberta. A couple from Calgary once told me presumptuously that they were interested in having me accompany them to Victoria, British Columbia for the summer. #1: I didn’t think they were super cute. #2: I have a full-time job.

I am totally down for unsettling settler marriage, but I am not convinced that unicorning is the best strategy. Before Covid-19 hit the polyamory scene, I had my choice of newbies to non-monogamy, I won’t say they were all quite polyamorous. Polyamory is its own elaborate and nuanced system—when done well. It involves lots of sometimes tedious communication. The memes abound about how polyamory is more about talking than sex. And there are even more rules than for monogamy. Because monogamy is wired into us by The Man—in nearly every song, film, and truism we hear. Polyamory takes a lot of re-wiring. And not everyone has the financial or familial or emotional wherewithal to take it on, even if it intrigues them. I have found in Lizzie Derksen’s Alberta that couples in their 50s are well into their third or even fourth decade of marriage. Opening up the creaky, cobweb-sealed doors to their marriages after that long is heavy. Not all who pry it open are open with their couple friends at the community league. Nor with their grown children, who often live with their grandchildren in their own ranch houses on the outskirts of Edmonton. Do you know what your 50-something parents are up to?

At my age, people tend to open marriages to help the settler family structure survive. I think too many of us conflate family broadly with this narrowly-defined structure. Narrow ideas of what makes a good family and what constitutes appropriate sex have been central to colonization. The violence was done first to the colonized, but all of us have had settler norms about sex and family shoved down our throats. And because concepts of property are also central to colonization, salvaging settler marriage is about property and money. Those are chief barriers to unsettling it.

Lizzie Derksen writes about yet another aspect of property in marriage. She explains that one must be “accountable for every moment spent with people other than [a] primary partner.” I have noticed this. I find it odd, the standard of constant togetherness. Costco in Sherwood Park is filled with middle-aged couples who look annoyed with one another. I wonder why they both need to be there. They should trade off their Costco runs every other Saturday. And the other one meet with their lover for a couple of hours. But instead, there is this counting of moments spent elsewhere, even despite years of coolness that have quieted playful, teasing banter, foreclosed gentle touch or passionate probing. All this accounting: “Where were you? Why are you late? I did all of this. And you haven’t done that.” This is settler-colonial coupledom: treating partners like land, like property to be invested in and developed for a sufficient return, a nest egg for a rainy day that needs to be subjected to strict accounting procedures.

Yet because we’ve internalized and built lives around this property institution, we tend to think that salvaging marriage is necessary to salvage our families. I do not advise, of course, that you get married, but if you already are long married, I get the arguments for not leaving. Ending marriage contracts can risk our housing, our ability to feed ourselves and our children, it can tear our hearts and families apart. This is why I encourage us to resist equating an intact marriage and the couple with an intact family. We may end or not our state contracts, but regardless, can we renegotiate those partnership agreements according to more flexible rules that might help us better sustain our hearts and bodies while making our relations with one another even more mutually sustaining? I know it may seem impossible. But an idea planted now may one day find the nourishment to flower.

Let me share a quick story within a story about another mutual relationship that encountered a hiatus. It was a relationship just as profound, and sustaining, and shaping of personhood as any human marriage.

I taught an intensive course in Tokyo. One of my students wrote about the material and energetic intimacy between humans and trains. He wrote not only about the physical, but psychic devastation for the people of Sendai when the trains stopped for days after the 40-meter-high tsunami hit the east coast of Japan, March 11, 2011. The student wrote about the centrality of trains to daily life. Their passage every couple of minutes like a heartbeat until the heart stops. The trains are a rhythm of life for the people. The absence of train vitality added to the apocalyptic experience of one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded and the subsequent deadly tsunami. That also left spirits wandering streets, asking taxi drivers to take them to homes flattened under the hurling of the sea. When a driver looked in the rear view to say “but that neighbourhood is gone,” so was the passenger.

Like when the trains stopped running in Sendai, how do you stop the rolling engine of a marriage of 20 or 40 years? What is your life without its heartbeat? Even if it’s a weak or erratic heartbeat? So many marriages are insufficient in the kind of intimacy that some of us crave desperately, but others don’t much need. Some people dream constantly in waking and sleeping moments of touch and warm, wet intimacies, of the smell and feel of a lover’s body skin to skin. Other people feel absolutely smothered by the thought of a lover’s limbs or mouth wrapped around them, thrusting into them. They prefer soft fabric, the weight of a quilt, a good book, a back rub until sleep. True love can involve different kinds of intercourse, maybe none of it physical.

Early on in my polyamory experience, I had relationships with a couple of vanilla men whose wives needed BDSM. “Vanilla” is what kinksters call the rest of us. The men I dated agreed to open their marriages so the women could fulfill needs their husbands had no desire to meet. It was fascinating to watch them work with each other’s differences. I learned a lot by watching them give each other space to develop other intimacies.

I remember being at Henry and Autumn’s one night—in their home out on the Texas plains. Henry and I had just had dinner and were cuddling on the couch. Autumn called. She’d been planning to spend the night with a lover. But she started to feel ill and wanted to come home and sleep in her own house. Henry asked if I was okay with it. “Yes, it’s her house,” I replied. When she arrived home, she greeted us both with a hug. Then she went to the guest room, leaving Henry and I to our romantic evening and to the bed in their master suite. I thought “Okaaaaay.” It made an impression. Autumn with her warmth and graciousness became a role model for me.

Henry had zero appetite for the domination that Autumn sometimes craved. Sometimes our modes of connecting and our needs are simply unbridgeable. Should one partner then suffer silently? Other unbridgeable needs are also genuinely important. For example, I know that dutiful sex without desire can be soul-crushing. So can compulsory celibacy. An asexual polyamorist once blew my mind. They told me that while they never really crave sex, they will sometimes have it with one of their partners who is sexual. Because they love that partner and they want to do for them. Not everyone who doesn’t explicitly crave sex can do that. I do learn much about good relating though from asexual polyamorists. Marriages sometimes open to end one kind of suffering and to prevent another. Many polyamorists will tell you that is not a good place from which to open a marriage. Opening up a troubled marriage won’t save it. Probably true. But I do not advocate marriage salvage as much as I advocate making better relations. If open doesn’t work, then maybe transitioning out of marriage will make you better kin?

Since arriving in Alberta 5 ½ years ago, I have encountered many unsettled marriages, including Ted’s and Anna’s. I recognize their relationship patterns that I mostly am not speaking of here. By accompanying them on a bit of their journey, I have learned about my own unsettled marriage. For 13 years I squeezed myself into the box of a marriage that had similar dynamics. Trying to fit inside that relationship structure was the hardest thing I have done. And leaving was the deepest hurt in my life, and the greatest pain I have caused another person. This is why I try not to offer advice in Ted’s and Anna’s marriage matters. After a decade, I still go back and forth wondering if I made the best decision for my own marriage.

Speaking for myself, all I knew was what pop country singer, Sunny Sweeney, sang:

You don’t go until you’re praying to break even,

Until staying is worse than leaving

God knows we tried everything that we could do

You can keep your pride and blame me if you need to

It turns out we didn’t try everything. I did not know that I could or should ask for a different kind of relating, a differently shaped household. I found myself miserable in a monogamous marriage, presenting as a respectable nuclear family in a single-family home in a densely populated, overpriced city. I then made the intellectual leap to thinking perhaps he’s the wrong “one.” You know, “the ONE,” like your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? I thought that. Even though I was raised happily by grandmothers in sometimes “overcrowded” extended family conditions in the middle of a sparsely populated prairie. We were not middle-class and we had few married couples around to contaminate the matriarchal bliss.

I was also a little confused about which sets of relations were contributing most to my misery. Was it mostly the nuclear family standard? Or was my misery also sparked by being a displaced prairie person? I felt hemmed in between the mountains and sea of central coast California where we lived. Those mountains’ energy pushed, pulled, jostled me. The sea is an expanse of other Peoples’ water spirits. Could my ancestors find me there when I die? I shuddered to think of my spirit being stranded on the precipice of a deep, dark sea. With each year that passed in California, I felt more and more alienated. Yet I also felt smothered not only by mountains and hills all around but by millions of people. I longed for the tumultuous skies of the vast, empty prairie.

It took a few years for me to understand that two things were intolerable. First, my alienation from the prairies of my heart. And second, it was not my co-parent, my friend, my co-thinker who is an ill fit. He is just not my only fit. But the structure of our marriage helped alienate me from my grandmother-centered, woman-centered universe. Settler marriage with its compulsory monogamy, nuclear family and property obsessions, its couple-centricity, its respectability roleplay—is such a drag. Even if it takes a more “progressive,” non-oil economy form, colonial marriage continues to break my heart year after year as I struggle to live differently in a world conditioned by it, and as I watch people I love struggle too.

I wish I understood ten years ago, what I understand now. I might have made gentler, wiser choices. I wish I had known to ask my co-parent, my humble and kind co-thinker, to join me in exploring non-monogamy. Perhaps I could have asked him to plan with me for separate apartments, down the street or down the hall from one another if we could afford it. He was tired of my nagging about cleaning anyway. He might have tried non-monogamy. He’s sex-positive and he’s a feminist. Moving to the prairies would have been harder sell. But I did not know that I could ask for such things—that it was legitimate to want them. The consequences of unsettling marriage and the couple-headed family are painful and filled with loss, as was the colonial imposition of these cultural practices and laws that uphold them. My wish for all of us is that we can get off this damn stage, and write new scripts, new definitions.

PROMISCUOUS, ADJ. AND ADV. (NEW DEFINITION)

Pronunciation:  Brit. /prəˈmɪskjʊəs/ , U.S. /prəˈmɪskjəwəs/

Plurality. Not excess or randomness, but openness to multiple connections, sometimes partial. But when combined, cultivated, and nurtured may constitute sufficiency or abundance.

3.   Love in Bones and Flesh

I open this final story with another 100 inspired in part by the voice of a colleague, professor and artist, Natalie Loveless. The bones of this 100 came to me at her book launch in October of 2019 at Latitude 53, a gallery in downtown Edmonton. It was dark and quiet outside, but lively and well-lit inside. We crowded all together in that before-Covid time. I sat among friends and art and sipped wine. As Natalie spoke in her elegant way, I scribbled notes on a slip of paper. Thank you for being my muse, Natalie. And thank you, Ted, my love of nearly three years, for the inspiration of fine body to compare with a fine wine.

Cacao. Sea. Sweetgrass. Earth

Her 99% cacao voice melts over us, pressed together in well-hung space. At the art gallery book launch, perched on chairs too spare for ample bottoms, ­­I trace the glass’s edge with a thumb’s soft inside. Not unlike how I graze your perineum. Lids close, lips open, tongue tip probes the rim. Italian tide rolls in, stone and gold. Then pulls back—a placid goblet sea. A drop on my chin. Aftertaste of cut prairie grass in that other teasing in-between, the border zone of nose and palate. I sip liquid earth in wine. I sip the sea from you.

There was a time when I couldn’t wait to leave the lands and rivers that constitute the flesh and blood of my heart. At fourteen years old, I ran gravel roads in the summer evenings, a couple hours after my grandmother’s tasty, simple suppers. I ran out the screen door of our house, one-quarter mile down the dirt driveway to the gravel road. I’d turn right, run another one-quarter mile to the two-lane highway and sprint across Rural Route 2 although I didn’t need to. A dozen cars an hour would pass. On the other side of the road was the slow brown river where my grandmother fished on summer days, the river next to the pow-wow grounds. I remember the smell of sweet grass and a rainstorm coming. I’d turn toward home quickly, running to beat a high purple plateau of clouds. Clearly, the majestic beauty registered deep in my bones, but at the time I didn’t think anything of it. I thought all skies were like that. Later in the black starry night, I would lie next to my open window with cows mooing on the white farmer’s hill behind our house. I would put myself to sleep with dreams of taking that highway out from our country.

The title of this vignette, “Love in Bones and Flesh” is inspired by a lyric written by singer-songwriter, Lori McKenna. Her music is saturated with settler sex and marriage, but that’s true of most of the country music that I love and primarily listen to. My co-parent noticed before I knew it about myself that I love contradictions, including contradictory people. I also love guitars and fiddles. And banjos. And I love songs with stories in them, songs about place, and the troubled, wandering humans who are always loving and leaving place.

Or in the case of Lori McKenna, the humans trying to make things work. She’s from Stoughton, Massachusetts. She sells songs to famous singers in Nashville, but I prefer when she sings them. She’s less glitzy, more authentic. She and I are the same age. And I love her music, her story-songs about place and kin that are both familiar to me and that contradict my experiences of country and family. Some of her songs are noticeably Catholic to me as a Dakota raised between the ceremony of a staid little Presbyterian church on the prairie, and Dakota ceremonies. Sometimes we’d go to ceremony with Ojibway people, especially at their maple sugar camps in Ontario. My mom would drag us four kids north in spring. We’d spend long sunny days in the woods. The campfire smell was heaven. The nights were cold, but the sweat lodge was hot. We’d sit cross-legged in the dark lodge around glowing red rocks. One time, I felt I was looking back to the beginning of the universe as I stared at those rocks and their life-giving fire within.

The rest of the year, I lived with my grandmother at the edge of the small town the white people plowed and leveled, where they laid train tracks into earth. Lori McKenna’s songs are about the way whites live in provincial towns. They are the kinds of stories we are all supposed to aspire to. Songs about marrying a high school sweetheart, having children, selling your guitar when the baby comes—nuclear family story-songs laced with quiet, encouraging judgement. “Don’t steal, don’t cheat, and don’t lie.” Learn from one-night stands. They’re not real love. Relations without an engagement ring are men playing games, and you are worth more than that.

These corseted narratives, American myths in song, offer reassuring scripts. I see in my head the houses and roads in Lori McKenna’s songs. I recognize the tenderness and comfort she sings of, sleeping with her child—keeping them close and safe—instead of sleeping with her husband. I recognize the worry about half the bills getting paid. She could be singing about Stoughton, Mass. or Saskatchewan or South Dakota. I keep listening to her deft fingers on perfect strings as I watch the snow outside my window north and west from those maple sugar camps, here in Alberta on the prairie’s edge.

McKenna sings one song I listen to on repeat, “The Lot Behind St. Mary’s.” I tear up every time at a line near the end.

But now we're old enough to know…that God's love is almighty, but our love is just bones and flesh.

It’s a sad line to me and, I think, misguided. It is heaven vs. earth, spirit vs. body, holy vs. profane. It is a harsh divide that colonial Christianity brings to this land. It is not only Dakota or Ojibway or Cree who suffer for this. We all suffer from the denigration of bones and flesh. Yet our bones and our flesh emerge from the bodies of ancestors. Our ancestors emerged from water and earth. Before that, ancestors emerged from the stars. Stars continue to nourish our bodies and this planet. Whether God is involved or not, our bodies go back to the ancestral planet, like salmon bodies that die to spawn then nourish their descendants. It seems to me that bones and flesh born of the mystery and energy of the universe, give us the most profound connections we have.

On that note, I leave you with a final 100, written as instructions to one of the loves of my life, my daughter, Carmen.

River Quantum (instructions for Babygirl)

1/4 my ashes to be spread across the North Saskatchewan. When ice flows and is lit by sun at a bend in central Edmonton. 1/4 to be blown across the heavy Mississippi. Back to ancestors at Minneapolis, St. Paul. 3/8ths shall be offered up to the Big Sioux. Next to the old pow-wow grounds, make sure! That river is akin to my grandmother who fished its waters on close-to-home days when she did not venture to the Missouri. 1/8th, the remainders of me, shall be emigrated to the Corrib, my tumultuous river love near Galway’s cathedral where I cursed Columbus.

This essay was previously published in GeneWatch (Vol. 26, no. 4, August - October 2013). It is now difficult to find online. I’ve linked to the available PDF of the original publication. I first published the essay when I was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. This essay answers a misguided question that I am often asked when I speak to non-Indigenous audiences about the politics of science: “Do you believe in science or Indigenous origin stories?”

On April 13, 2005 the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism (IPCB) issued a press release opposing the Genographic Project, which aimed to sample 100,000 Indigenous and other traditional peoples to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.” IPCB critiques Genographic, and the Human Genome Diversity Project before it, as the contemporary continuation of colonial, extractive research. The analysis is also a fundamental historical examination of Western science. IPCB foregrounds the intellectual and institutional authority that science, a powerful tool of colonizing states, has to appropriate Indigenous bodies—both dead and living—material cultural artifacts, and Indigenous cultural narratives in the service of academic knowledge production.

Critics point out that such knowledge rarely serves Indigenous peoples’ interests and can actively harm them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries massacre sites and graves were plundered for body parts to be used in scientific investigations that inform today’s anthropological and biological research on Native Americans. Throughout the 20th century, Indigenous peoples around the world witnessed the too common practice of “helicopter research”—quick sampling without return of results or benefit to subjects. Indigenous DNA samples and data taken in earlier decades when ethics standards were lax continue to be used and cited in contemporary investigations, bringing those injustices into the 21st century. And new, more ethical research still takes time from other pressing projects and needs. Informed community review and collaboration with researchers will increase community benefit, but informed participation has costs. It takes resources to build capacity to sit at the table as equals instead of as vulnerable subjects—as simply the raw materials for science.

Indigenous critics also describe abstract risks that eventually contribute to legal and material harm. They worry about the objectifying nature of human genome diversity research in which Indigenous and other “isolated” peoples are used to represent ancient, less admixed populations—as therefore less evolved and not active parts of the modern world, as vanishing, as less alive. They worry that the explicit racism that plagued the physical and social sciences of earlier centuries, which assumed evolutionary hierarchy among humans, the impending death of the Indian unable to cope with modernity, and a divinely sanctioned Westward expansion, continues to insidiously inhabit modern genomics. And they should be worried. Influential Western narratives about Indigenous cultural stasis and notions of purity still plague the non-genomic sciences, including social and policy sciences and the humanities, with great impact on Indigenous lives. Physical and cultural anthropologists, legal experts, and historians are called upon by the scientific state to adjudicate Indigenous claims to rights or resources, e.g. to determine if a group constitutes an authentic tribe worthy of recognition, or whether American Indian religious freedom is actually being impeded by the actions of loggers, fishers, or rock climbers at a sacred site. In this intellectual climate, it is no wonder that genome science with its considerable cultural influence is viewed as a potential threat.

When Indigenous critics exclaim, "We will not stand by while our ancestors are desecrated in the name of scientific discovery,” or "Our creation stories and languages carry information about our genealogy and ancestors. We don't need genetic testing to tell us where we come from," they are not simply expressing “religious” or “cultural” concerns. To characterize them as simply anti-science, or as religious zealots not only misses their sophisticated historical analyses and political insights, but misunderstands Indigenous creationism as no different from the type of Christian creationism currently challenging the biological sciences and school curriculums.  

In the same way that scientific thinkers defend the veracity of the evolutionary narrative (“narrative” does not necessarily mean myth) and scientific education against the “creation science” of some Christians, Indigenous critics call out scientists and the church alike for their missionary tactics and their distortion of Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous critics note that Western cultural and historical standpoints enacted through proselytizing scientific or Christian intellectual traditions get wielded as universal swords of truth over less powerful peoples. Indigenous critics see clearly the ideological biases in both scientific and clerical traditions, which before Darwin’s Origin of Species, were intimately entangled. Today, they are not as disentangled as their respective practitioners would believe. Both science and the church claim the right to tell the only true story of human history. While the empirical data informing the two respective approaches differs, they are both laden with longstanding narratives of Indigenous isolation, unenlightened thought, and deficiency.

But it is very difficult for many non-Indigenous people to see what is so clear to many of us. On the day that IPCB issued its press release calling for a boycott of the Genographic Project, a lively genetic genealogy listerv (genealogists who use genetics to fill in the gaps in their family trees) erupted in defense of Genographic and human genome diversity research. [I write extensively about this list in my book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science.] Populated overwhelmingly by self-identified European-Americans, recent ancestry in Europe is the most popular topic of conversation on this particular list. Native American ancestry is the second most popular. (Unlike the law of hypodescent in which someone with any African Ancestry should be categorized as Black and not white, U.S. race politics have historically sanctioned the absorption of “red” into the white body.) Many of the genetic genealogists on line that day have a deep understanding of genetic science, but could not grasp the basics of IPCB’s incisive political critique. Indigenous critics do not simply object to human genome diversity and migrations research that contradicts Indigenous creation narratives, but condemn the power that science has had to define Indigenous peoples’ histories, identities, and futures. They point out that Indigenous peoples are still subject to exploitation in research. Yet one lister had this to say:

There are some indigenous people who fear anthropological DNA testing for pretty much the same reasons that some people fear genealogical DNA testing. They are comfortable with their myths & not particularly interested in investigating anything that might shake their worldview. Clinging to tradition is not something unique to indigenous people…

Another lister added:

My Mohawk ancestors believed that the world came into being on the back of a turtle. Subsequent evidence from a variety of data sources such as the Hubble Telescope have proven this particular creationist theory to be incorrect. Archaeological and DNA evidence has allowed a robust but incomplete understanding of the correct origins of my ancestors. It is futile to play osterich [sic] and ignore what is staring us in the face. When the evidence speaks loudly one must listen or forever be clinging to false assumptions. Still, that does not in any way affect my deep respect for the traditions of my ancestors, but above all else I want to know the truth…

Native American and Christian perspectives that are critical of genome knowledge are often seen to fall on the same side of a “religion versus science” divide. However, unlike Christianity, Native American origin narratives are generally missing the will to convert and so are without inherent intolerance for other narratives, be they Biblical or evolutionary understandings. In the U.S., Indigenous peoples often say they just want to be left alone to practice their ceremonies without having them outlawed or losing access to sacred sites through land and resource grabs. So why the resistance? Certainly, scientific thinkers do not have to worry about Indigenous people imposing their religions in public school classrooms to the detriment of biology education standards. Even with the balance of cultural power on their side, scientific thinkers are taught to believe that science and politics should be separated for the good of neutral science, that nature and culture are opposed. One cannot be a rigorous scientific thinker and indulge in “politics.” Of course, Indigenous critics call attention to the politics that always already inhabit science. But being allergic to the recognition of power relations in the scientific enterprise no doubt impedes one’s ability to truly grasp Indigenous analyses.

In addition to a politics allergy, scientific thinkers read Indigenous creation narratives in an overly simplistic manner when they reject for example accounts of a people emerging from a cave, or a hole in the ground. They miss central propositions in such narratives that reveal how Indigenous peoples understand the world and their place in it. For example, Indigenous creation narratives provide values for living, narrate our common history, cohere us as Peoples (and not simply “human beings”) with a common moral framework. They tie us to sacred landbases. Indigenous peoples understand ourselves to have emerged as coherent groups and cultures in intimate relationship with particular places, especially living and sacred landscapes.

Indigenous concepts of ancestry and group go far beyond genetic ancestry evidenced in “populations.” They involve biological, cultural, and political groupings constituted in dynamic long-standing relationships with living land- and/or waterscapes that define our people-specific identities. This is an important difference between the way that Indigenous peoples wield the idea of “origins” and the way that human genome diversity does. In the latter case, land- or waterscapes are places through which humans and their molecules move and settle. An environment/human divide is presumed in the genomic narrative that is absent from the Indigenous narrative. Indigenous notions of peoplehood as emerging in relation with particular lands and waters and their nonhuman actors differ from the concept of a genetic population, defined as moving upon or through landscapes. Therefore, it is true that Indigenous creation narratives challenge genomic narratives, but when read in all of their complexity one can see the veracity present in Indigenous creation narratives and the debatable conceptual and material presuppositions of genomic narratives. Indigenous groups are not anti-experimentation or technology, nor reject all new knowledge emerging from sciences, but often want to integrate that knowledge within their world views. 

Indigenous peoples do not expect scientists to adopt their stories of origin. Theirs are not generally proselytizing traditions. But they—we—want our political jurisdictions over our bodies and lands upheld and we want the power of our stories to shape our lives respected, and to not be deemed as untruths. The central paradox of 21st century human genome research is that it is presented as global and anti-racist, but has advanced historically by violating subjects’ rights to self-governance, by appropriating their biological resources, and sometimes even their cultural narratives, and by de-valuing the truths and powerful values of those it seeks to include and connect.

Note: I would change some language and terminology if I wrote this piece today. For example, the term “Native American” is now unpleasant to my ears. But the core arguments stand.

In October 2013, in my first year of polyamory practice, I began writing a blog, The Critical Polyamorist. Posts began as personal reflections of the pleasurable, challenging, and eye-opening experiences of openly practicing consensual non-monogamy (CNM). I aimed to think through the personal challenge of this new way of relating by engaging in self-reflexive analysis combined with research in polyamory, sexualities, race, and Indigenous Studies literatures. Through blogging, I pondered personal, cultural, and structural challenges that settler-colonialism presents to pursuing CNM. I lived in Austin, Texas back in 2013. I have broadened my lens to include both the US and Canada after I moved to Edmonton, Alberta in 2015.

I have also pondered the capacity, in theory, of Dakota and other Indigenous worldviews to tolerate contemporary manifestations of consensual non-monogamy. I encounter barriers to CNM within Indigenous community too, especially as presented by the imposition of settler lifeways and values related to private property and heteronormative, couple-centric, nuclear family. Nine years after beginning a polyamorous life, I continue to write autoethnographic explorations in various venues, including in academic publications and sometimes on this Substack. Portions of the earlier Critical Polyamorist blog posts have been incorporated into published essays in edited volumes and journals. And they have informed interviews I’ve done on podcasts and in print.

In naming the Critical Polyamorist blog, I took the label “critical” not to downplay the critique in which polyamorists already engage as they live against the grain of our society’s compulsory monogamy. Polyamorous people are in some ways de-facto critical thinkers and actors in that they/we think it is possible to be in loving, committed relationships with multiple people simultaneously, with the consent of all involved. Polyamory is in this sense deeply critical.

But when I take up the label “critical,” it is also not redundant. I gesture to something beyond common polyamorous critiques of compulsory monogamy, but which do not consider the role usually of racist, colonial structures in the monogamy system. I draw on a broader tradition of “critical social theory,” meaning that analysis and critique of social problems is not only for the good of knowledge, but is geared toward social change. Critical social theory also traditionally draws insights from social science and humanities disciplines. My critical polyamory work brings critical social theory including analyses of Indigeneity, colonialism, race, and sex to analyze polyamorous life and politics from my perspective as a rural-born, now urban-dwelling feminist, and anti-racist Indigenous woman.

The 100s method and multiply relating

When I began writing the Critical Polyamorist, I lived on warm southern plains of lands now occupied by Austin, where I was a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas. It was during that time that I was introduced to the idea of writing “100s” as part of an online writing group initiated by my friend and colleague, also a University of Texas anthropologist, Circe Sturm. I immediately used my emergent 100s writing practice to also think through CNM. During the 2014-15 academic year, Sturm and I wrote weekly with five other women living in different parts of the continent. We each committed to write a 100 on the same day every week, and to share it with the group by e-mail. That way, on each of seven days of the week, a different woman wrote and shared her 100 with the group.

Circe Sturm explains the 100s concept and its history in her introduction to "100-Word Collective," a collection of 100s published in 2013 in the journal Voices in Italian Americana. Sturm explains that the 100-Word Collective originated with Emily Bernard at the University of Vermont in February 2009. Sturm was a part of one of the first 100s writing groups. Bernard's idea has since resulted in the founding of dozens of writing groups, including our own in 2014-15. In Emily Bernard's approach, a writer launches their piece from an idea, phrase, single word, or anything that resonates or sparks from the previous piece. There are no limitations for form, style, or subject. Bernard explains the process of writing 100s in group as something akin to “a Quaker Meeting—if the spirit moves you, speak. Otherwise, let’s enjoy each other’s words in silence, rich and voluptuous.”

Sturm explains that "One of the reasons so many of us are drawn to this abbreviated format is that it allows us to dialogue with other writers, even when our lives are extremely busy. We also feel freer to experiment with content, form and voice, and to risk vulnerability in our writing....Some ideas catch fire and never lose their burn. This seems to be one of them."

The Critical Poly 100s posted on my blog in my earlier days of writing them (and also available in print in Elissa Washuta & Theresa Warburton’s edited volume Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers), draw on my relations with both humans and more-than-humans. For my multiple loving relations are not only about humans. My most beloved stretch of this world is the North American prairies, my water loves are its rivers, whether as far south as lands presently called Texas or as far north as lands presently named Edmonton, where I am now a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. I live at the edge of the North Saskatchewan River valley near central Edmonton where prairie meets park land, in Treaty 6 territory, a traditional gathering place for Indigenous peoples including Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota, and others.

My relationship practice that I sometimes describe as “more-than-monogamy,” loops relations with place and space into my understanding of intimate and dynamic constitutive relations. Referring to more-than-monogamy instead of non-monogamy, like referring to the more-than-human instead of the non-human, de-centers monogamy and the human respectively. Thus more-than-monogamy in my definition is not relegated to human or sexual relating. I love sex unapologetically, but I do not privilege sex among intimacies. Similarly, I do not privilege humans in my accounting of relations or relatives. I lodge without other humans most of the time. But my treasured companion most days is the North Saskatchewan River that flows just outside my south-facing windows, large as life.

My practice of relating intimately everyday with multiple knowledge forms also intersects my approaches to multiple relating with beings and spaces. It is true that I am a social scientist, humanist, and writer. But I also come from an Indigenous people who insist on relational knowledge production even under the imposition of settler hierarchies of life/not life, human/nonhuman, culture/nature, truth/myth, and material/spirit. Therefore, I do not separate and value humanistic forms of knowledge production from and over more-than-human and material observations and investigation. Though I am not a “natural” scientist, farmer, hunter, quarrier, or carver, I value the knowledge, nourishment, and forms such workers bring into being by their engagements with cells, elements, flora, fauna, and stone. And I know that Indigenous scientists, hunters, and quarriers, for example, also keep and constitute stories as they maintain relations with more-than-human relatives. This is so much more than “multidisciplinary” knowledge-making. Routing oneself respectfully between multiple bodies is another ethical roadmap—another way of inhabiting the world.

Nine 100s

Following are nine more recent 100s that focus on human and more-than-human relating in the prairie landscape where I currently live. Five of the 100s (indicated with an asterisk after the titles) were previously published in The Dalhousie Review, “Biophilia” issue, volume 100, number 3 in Autumn 2020. The title of each 100 is followed by the date on which it was written. In these vignettes, I document couplings as becoming together. Be warned, some are sexual and romantic. These ways of co-becoming (or frank talk about them) do not appeal to everyone. A couple of these 100-word vignettes document “spiritual” becomings, for lack of a better word. Mostly, these 100s document good relations. Although not-good relations and not-romantic relations—in both definitions of that word, love and idealism—are also the entangled relations that make and remake us into who we become. We do not alone become. And our becomings are not always ideal, or loving. We are also forged in part through the unromantic.

Flyer (3.24.19)*

The bright faced men who stand head-to-head with me, well pressed and with a tuque recall him. Like my "half-Asian" limo driver in chilly Durham who asked if I am too? Flyer nights over two, four times per month in my city. I bring him odd coloured wine in rolling tipped crystal when 13 hours remain before he sky climbs again. In return, I press him for 737 Max 8 knowledge. In return, he presses me, builds power, draws speed. We rise, limbs locked with the moon and descend in laughter until the melatonin grounds us into quiet night visions.

Fairy Sexy Godmother (8.21.19)*

It took months to search and decide on a river abode. So I lodged a month, then four with a spirited love. We laughed, kissed, hugged. I heated her kettle, pressed coffee in the starry purple-pink-dawned winter. I wrote for hours at an antique table. She fell from her lounge into online molecular archives, prairie histories. Epiphanies cracked open our silence. When the city spun into dark, she’d turn from her screen; gather herbs, potions, tonics, flesh. A fairy sexy godmother, she whirled ‘round the kitchen, concocting spells that mostly worked. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Dinner! Poof! I curtsied rosé into perfect-fit glasses.

Mistress of the Shears (8.29.19)

Promiscuous traveler, my hair’s been run through by fingers from Cambridge to Denver, Berkeley to Tokyo, Auckland, Jakarta. Then I found her, my colorist domme, in a #YEG salon. Like Morticia with a burgundy gloss on her own dark locks. Black clad with powerful boots and erotic accounts, lips of steel purse: “I know you’re growing it. But I’LL take an inch.” From behind, her fingers encircle my neck. I shiver. Our eyes meet in the mirror. When we rinse, her palms cradle and caress my head, her own creation of flesh and dye. Her hands drip blood wine rivulets.

Love Hotel Fieldwork (8.30.19)*

Sultry-eyed man in a suit, you and I were stuck loveless in the months I lived with fairy sexy godmother. Unless she flew off on magical business. She adores you, of course! But privacy, you know. Had our city caught on like Tokyo? I Googled “love hotel, Edmonton.” Lo and behold, the conference hotel on Gateway near Whitemud sells six hours, discounted. You were Stony Plain scandalized, but oh did you smile. In my fieldwork, front desk staff are discreet. “Welcome, Ms. TallBear. Room 204.” You tapped the door minutes later. I pulled your tie. You leaned into the work.

Clare Man (8.30.19)

He does not miss Ireland. Calgary is home. Yet pipes and fiddles sustain him. As well as my nips and kisses and hair grazing his back. He is 50, his skin 35. Impossibly vanilla, even more than I. He prefers a hard missionary session. Not every lover can thrust with such force. He closes my barre-built legs, guides them to the ceiling straight like a pole, looks up to my toes on pointe, climb gauging. Instead, he embraces knees and thighs, resumes driving. We moan until late summer sundown. He texts me at a red light: “I feel so alive.”

Communion (9.04.19)*

I inhale him, an earthy, full, round red. I know mineral whites best, but he is no airier blanc, even one run through by rock. On Sundays, he raises hands to heaven, opened by scripture. I recognize that Christian fever.  I did time in worship, exiting for good on the heels of a single line: “All Jews go to hell.” Oh hell no. This one is oddly non-evangelical: “No human is free of sin. Leave down your stones.” When he is grounded between prayers and flights, he implores me, take him hard inside. His blood, his flesh, my communion.

Cacao. Sea. Sweetgrass. Earth (10.10.19)*

Her 99% cacao voice melts over us, pressed together in well-hung space. At the art gallery book launch, perched on chairs too spare for ample bottoms, ­­I trace the glass’s edge with a thumb’s soft inside. Not unlike how I graze your perineum. Lids close, lips open, tongue tip probes the rim. Italian tide rolls in, stone and gold. Then pulls back—a placid goblet sea. A drop on my chin. Aftertaste of cut prairie grass in that other teasing in-between, the border zone of nose and palate. I sip liquid earth in wine. I sip the sea from you.

Winona Quarantine (04.14.20)

I hunt cornstarch in cupboards, but yeast is my take. What isolationist bakers covet. In a stealth drive across the sunrise city, I take this offering to a love’s snow-dusted porch, her prize to find in morning light. I binge on decades-old mournful music and sail back across the bridge, the ice river. Are these notes nostalgia for the poverty of 20? When there was less, but more to die for? The medicine man who named our girl, Sweet Song Woman, said a Winona is protected until her own first is born. I remain protected. I worry for my daughter.

River Quantum: Instructions for Babygirl (05.13.20)

1/4 my ashes to be spread across the North Saskatchewan. When ice flows and is lit by sun at a bend in central Edmonton. 1/4 to be blown across the heavy Mississippi. Back to ancestors at Minneapolis, St. Paul. 3/8ths shall be offered up to the Big Sioux. Next to the old pow-wow grounds, make sure! That river is akin to my grandmother who fished its waters on close-to-home days when she did not venture to the Missouri. 1/8th, the remainders of me, shall be emigrated to the Corrib, my tumultuous river love near Galway’s cathedral where I cursed Columbus.

Thank you as always for reading and/or listening.

Everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to disappear them from the land - this is how a society can have multiple simultaneous and conflicting messages about Indigenous peoples, such as all Indians are dead, located in faraway reservations, that contemporary Indigenous people are less indigenous than prior generations, and that all Americans are a “little bit Indian.” These desires to erase - to let time do its thing and wait for the older form of living to die out, or to even help speed things along (euthanize) because the death of pre-modern ways of life is thought to be inevitable - these are all desires for another kind of resolve to the colonial situation, resolved through the absolute and total destruction or assimilation of original inhabitants.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012: 9)

In October 2019, I gave a keynote at the Duke University annual Feminist Theory Workshop. I noticed that there was no land acknowledgement given to open the event, a by-then standard protocol across Canadian universities and many other institutions. I am not judgemental about the lack of land acknowledgements at some institutions, for the simple reason that I think they cannot be written in historically and politically robust language without lengthy consultation with Indigenous communities, and not all institutions have sufficiently extensive or good relations with Indigenous communities. It may be better not to do a land acknowledgment than to do it poorly and before one has built the necessary relationships to undertake the task. That said, there is no non-embarrassing excuse for the erasure of Indigenous-to-the-Americas history/presence in any event held on these lands. But a land acknowledgment is only one narrow strategy for making Indigenous life visible. 

Nonetheless, I am sufficiently indoctrinated into everyday and widespread Canadian academic protocols after 6.5 years living here, and I still felt a little uncomfortable without any form of land acknowledgement or Indigenous welcome on stolen land. I quickly found what seemed like a reliable online map of Indigenous peoples whose traditional territory is occupied by the area of North Carolina where we gathered. My feeling at the Duke symposium was that naming those Peoples was an important moment. Such statements may be most powerful when they are surprising.

In an interview with Rosanna Deerchild on CBC Unreserved in January 2019, Hayden King, Anishinaabe from the Beausoleil First Nation in Ontario, Ryerson University professor, and Yellowhead Institute director in Toronto, provided a short history of land acknowledgements in Canada. He noted that the circumstances in which land acknowledgements are given matters:

There is a danger of the acknowledgement just becoming the excuse, through which these institutions provide themselves permission to be on that territory…[If] maybe the acknowledgement is just evolving for the first time, then it does have the power to compel a conversation…I think in settings where it’s an unfamiliar practice or a new practice, I think beginning with that acknowledgement…that’s a good thing.

Of course, the surprise does not last long, and we are left in many cases with pro forma statements or acknowledgements that do very little to change anything. King notes that “the territorial acknowledgement is by and large for non-Native people…It effectively excuses them and offers them an alibi for doing the hard work of learning…about the treaties of the territory and learning about those nations that should have jurisdiction.”

This is effectively the perspective expressed in an opinion piece published on October 7, 2021 in The Conversation by three anthropologists, Elisa Sobo from San Diego State, Michael Lambert (Eastern Band Cherokee) from the University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill, and Valerie Lambert (Choctaw Nation) also from UNC. They lament that land acknowledgments commonly given “not only at events but in email signatures, videos, syllabuses, and so on”, can communicate erroneous historical ideas and do not demonstrably “lead to measurable, concrete change.” Rather, the authors assert, such acknowledgements place Indigenous peoples in the past, do not acknowledge the depth of colonial violence used in attempts to conquer Indigenous lands and eliminate Indigenous peoples, nor do they call for land back.

Instead, the implication of most land acknowledgements is, “What was once yours is ours now.” The authors call for acknowledgements that also advocate land back and “a sincere commitment to respecting and enhancing Indigenous sovereignty.”

Even the right-wing media outlet, The Epoch Times published an article on November 8, 2021, “Indigenous Land Acknowledgements Questioned as ‘Land Back’ Movement Grows.” Some non-Indigenous Canadians are apparently a little perturbed about all this #Landback talk. The Epoch Times article cited a CBC news story and leaked memo from mid-October, when “New Brunswick Attorney General Ted Flemming advised government staff to stop issuing land or title acknowledgements in ‘meetings and events, in documents, and in email signatures.’” The Epoch Times paints land back as unrealistic, but their coverage demonstrates the growing visibility of land acknowledgements and Indigenous movements in the US and Canada that call for return of land.

Performing Indigenous: Your Identity is Ours Now

Such worries are contrary to land acknowledgement critiques expressed in The Conversation piece by Sobo, Lambert, and Lambert, pro land back critics of pro forma land acknowledgements. They worry that land acknowledgements reinforce settler state claims to the land: “It’s ours now.” They also worry about who is sometimes called to perform them. They explain that “such rites often feature voices of people who… ‘play at being Indian—that is, those who have no legitimate claim to an Indigenous identity or sovereign nation status but represent themselves as such.”

I assume the authors, in expressing this worry, are referring to individuals thought to be Indigenous community members, who are contracted by universities to give blessings and “traditional” welcomes. My Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta has relations with local elders who we often call on to give such welcomes and blessings. But our faculty is also populated by Indigenous people from this region who have reliable networks that we can draw from. The same is not true of all universities.

As evidence for their worries, the authors cite US census data based on “American Indian and Alaska Native” self-identification, which they compare to federal data on tribal nation citizens. The authors assert that “pretendians” may outnumber actual Indigenous people in the US by 4 to 1. Of course, most of us with tribal nation status have relatives without citizenship, so numbers of people illegitimately claiming to be Native are difficult to get at. Still, the 4 to 1 disparity is high and troubling.

In Canada, we recently suffered the outing of the Scientific Director of the Institute for Indigenous Peoples’ Health at the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). Dr. Carrie Bourassa of the University of Saskatchewan claimed to be “Anishinaabe Métis” and to have Tlingit ancestry. On October 27, 2021, CBC broke a story that according to their research, there was no truth at all to Bourassa’s claims to be biologically descended from any of the aforementioned Peoples. You can watch a video of the story here.

After the story broke, Dr. Bourassa began claiming instead that she had been ceremonially adopted by a Métis elder. During the last week of October and the first couple of weeks in November after the story broke, the media was replete with images and a TEDx video of Bourassa adorned in traditional garb and holding a feather. Holding back tears, she introduces herself by a name she says she received in ceremony, “Morning Star Bear.” Bourassa is one of several high-profile cases of alleged Indigenous identity fraud broken by the CBC in the past few years. Each case has involved heavily curated performances as Indigenous by those accused of totally fabricating or greatly exaggerating their claims to Indigenous affiliation.

On November 1, two unprecedented things happened. The CIHR president announced that he and Bourassa agreed that she would “step away from all of her duties as scientific director of the Institute” and would “be on indefinite leave without pay effective immediately.” After initially defending Bourassa in an October 28th statement, the University of Saskatchewan did an about-face on November 1 and placed Bourassa on leave as well. Then on November 17, CIHR announced they are cutting ties with her. Finally, on November 18, the University of Saskatchewan announced that they appointed an independent investigator—a high profile Métis attorney—to examine Bourassa’s identity claims.

I can think of no other example in which an alleged Indigenous identity fraud has encountered such swift and definitive professional sanctions.

I grew up in a world where I was familiar with Indian play from a young age. I remain both unsurprised by how widespread it is and yet continually surprised by how brazen and extensive are the made-up stories. Often, such claims appear impervious to questions from the actual Indigenous people implicated, and the institutions that represent them. Dubious claims hang around, year after year, with perhaps only a few brave voices persistently articulating their doubts.  Sometimes, however, stories fall apart. Rarely are there significant personal or professional consequences.

In January 2019, I wrote a High Country News article about Elizabeth Warren and her claims to Cherokee identity. In that article I described a t-shirt I purchased at a pow-wow in the early 1990s when I was in my early 20s. It read “No! My great-grandmother was not a Cherokee princess!” That declaration referred to the common practice of non-Natives who have no lived Cherokee experience and no tribal nation citizenship, but who claim affiliation based on a family myth of a Cherokee great-grandmother, often with stereotypical reference to an ancestor who had “high cheek bones” or “olive skin” or long, straight, dark hair. The myth is so common that it produced the t-shirt I purchased thirty years ago.

Not only Cherokee people are burdened with this myth. There are few places I can go in the US without being subjected to this stereotypical and appropriative settler-state narrative. I also regularly receive long emails from people telling me their long-ago Cherokee or other Native ancestor family stories, and who ask for DNA testing advice. In my research and writing, I directly challenge the conflation of narrow and distant ancestry alone—actual or alleged—with substantive claims to Indigenous belonging. It thus surprises me when people who say they’ve read my work on the topic, nonetheless write me with their genetic ancestry test questions. Did they grasp a basic understanding of my words?

Not standing as, but standing with

Part of countering the stereotypical expectations of settler-colonial society is also my refusal to strike an expected pose in teaching or in public performances of scholarship and media commentary. I am mindful to avoid, especially before non-Native audiences, performances that align with their common views of Indigenous people erected around binary juxtapositions of tradition versus modernity, past versus present. I am acutely allergic to “noble savage” representations produced of those binaries, wherein the traditional Indian is supposed to be stoic and wise, both close to nature and yet other-worldly and untouched by the material concerns of the world.

We discussed in a Media Indigena “rapid round” episode on November 8, 2021 “how some people ‘Indian Up’ their appearance for non-Indigenous audiences.” We laid out the pros and cons of (performatively) wearing regalia, for example, at a United Nations meeting or at conferences and other venues where Indigenous people might be a small minority and/or susceptible to being viewed as curious relics of the past. Is one performing for a non-Indigenous gaze, or insisting on one’s community norms and pushing back against Indigenous erasure? There are, of course, ways of communicating and signaling group insiderness that do not also constitute performance for the non-Cree, non-Dakota, or otherwise non-Native gaze—strategies that are satisfyingly inaccessible to a non-Indigenous audience.    

Not that one cannot do both, but I tend to eschew more obvious representations of my individual person as Dakota, “Native,” or “Indigenous,” and instead try to ground my thinking, research, and voice in a collectivist approach I explained in a 2014 Journal of Research Practice article, “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” I had for much longer intuited the ideas described in the article, but I was able to voice or give language to them after encountering cultural studies scholar Neferti Tadiar’s explanation of the Tagalog term, “sampalataya,” which she translates as “act of faith.”[1] Tadiar uses sampalataya to describe the idea of how to speak from within rather than on behalf of a group. I describe in my article my application of her idea to my own research ethic:

Rather, one speaks as an individual “in concert with,” not silenced by one’s inability to fully represent one’s people. I read this to be a sort of co-constitution of one’s own claims and the claims and acts of the people(s) who one speaks in concert with. Sampalataya involves speaking as faith—as furthering the claims of a people while refusing to be excised from that people by some imperialistic, naïve notion of perfect representation (4).

This approach is central to my anti-hierarchical and co-constitutive (with community, but not necessarily “traditional”) knowledge production practice. But I am left to ponder now what it means for my performance for various audiences. I perform for audiences whether verbally or in writing, as an authority, with an authoritative voice. And I perform my voice and persona as a Dakota woman. In this historical moment, I am also interpreted as an “Indigenous” voice. [I bracket the contestability of the term “Indigenous” for now.] When I use the term “performance,” I do not imply something untruthful or put on, but my meaning is basic: “to carry out a task.” In my public performances of research and other thought, I stand with; my claims are co-constituted with other Dakota and perhaps broader Indigenous claims because those are the standpoints from which my specific curiosities and questions have arisen in the course of my living. I speak in order to further collective claims. In so doing, I do not attempt some “naïve notion of perfect representation.” I do not need to. I should not do such a thing. Such moves would feel paradoxically inauthentic and suggest a negative connotation of performance, something “put on,” and, crucially, to treat one’s people as artifact. I am, we are, “already caught up in the claims that others act out,” and we can therefore speak “in concert with.”[2]

I could certainly dig into performance studies for more nuanced language around “performance,” but time is short. I do welcome citational suggestions.

I circle back now to Indigenous identity fraud. Sometimes, in their attempts to achieve that “naïve notion of perfect representation,” and to do so particularly in the absence of lives co-constituted with the collective lives of a People, writers and artists, actual performers, and performers of research, blessings, and land acknowledgements put on accoutrements, both material and affectual. This is to Play Indigenous, or as Philip J. Deloria describes it in his 1998 book, “Playing Indian.” To be clear, performing Indigenous can come to stand in for standing with. Exaggerated and obvious performances of individual ancestral claims and affiliations should not substitute for acting on, with, and through lived relations with a community or People. In the academy, especially—or maybe it’s just where I see it most because it’s where I spend the most time—such performances are too common.

Performing Indigenous hinders land back

I want to make a forceful case against attention policing. Given my area of research, I’ve often heard that critiquing identity fraud, including the fetishization of long-ago genetic ancestry in support of such claims, is a distraction from more pressing problems that Indigenous peoples confront: environmental assault, health disparities, poverty, intergenerational trauma, high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people, police profiling, high rates of incarceration, and the list goes on. It both surprises me and does not that few people seem to understand that societally-entrenched Indian play, its resulting theft of economic resources, and widespread acceptance of the practice are mutually-constituted with more obvious forms of settler-state theft of everything Indigenous: land; water; natural and biological “resources,” including blood, bones, and DNA; the theft of children and other vulnerable relations; and the extinguishment of Indigenous social practices and governance authorities. This expansive list of settler-colonial approaches to extinguishing and appropriating all things Indigenous can be seen as a comprehensive, centuries-long, and ongoing approach to Indigenous elimination whether settler-state citizen perpetrators know it, or not.

State multiculturalism, including territorial acknowledgements not linked to Indigenous land and life return might seem democratic and inclusive on its face, but it is also an assertion of ownership over First Peoples and their territories. It is a denial of Indigenous governance authorities. The final stage of denial is an assertion that Indigenous Peoples and rights are not actually separate from the settler state. Self-Indigenization, “We are you,” does not require the assent of Indigenous collectives themselves, just like Indigenous peoples need not give assent to settler-state appropriation of land and resources.

Land acknowledgments and self-Indigenization as property grabs

Let’s return to the Sobo, Lambert, and Lambert critique in The Conversation. They assert that most land acknowledgements imply that “What was once yours is ours now.” This includes not only land, but moral and governance authority. Indigenous peoples get lodged in the past as an ever-vanishing race:

Take, for instance, the evocation in many acknowledgments of a time when Indigenous peoples acted as “stewards,” or “custodians” of the land now occupied. This and related references – for example, to “ancestral homelands” – relegate Indigenous peoples to a mythic past and fails to acknowledge that they owned the land. Even if unintentionally, such assertions tacitly affirm the putative right of non-Indigenous people to now claim title.

Pro forma and past-tense land acknowledgements, although they have a veneer of inclusion and respectful recognition, are not incompatible with settler-colonial denial. This is especially true if acknowledgements are not followed by commitments to social change—to the return of Indigenous land and life—meaning Indigenous cultural and governance authorities, institutional capacities, relational structures, and sustenance that are co-constituted with land and water.

Instead, what is “ours now”—that is, what is judged to belong now to the settler-colonial state and its institutions—is not only the land. In the past several years, media outlets and Indigenous organizations in the US and Canada have called on me to comment on “identity” fraud cases. I have addressed the problem assertively, and have faced tremendous resistance from both non-Indigenous and some Indigenous people too. The experience has led me to a realization: pervasive assumptions in the US and Canada that these two states have moral and legal rights to claim the land go hand-in-hand with a widespread belief in the right to claim Indigenous “identity” and with it, professional titles, opportunities, and resources. I wrote about this strong link between land theft and identity theft in a June 14 Substack post, “We are not your dead ancestors”:  

It has become clear to me that confronting this form of theft is as formidable a challenge as confronting the core theft of settler colonialism: false and illegal claims by the US and Canada to Indigenous lands and waters. The nation state’s debt for genocide committed against Indigenous peoples, and the almost total appropriation of Indigenous land and resources will never be repaid. Genocide cannot be undone. Even #LandBack, an at once inspiring and pragmatic move, cannot restore our ancestors who were stolen, starved, who died of broken hearts, massacres and sickness. Even #LandBack is still unfathomable to most non-Indigenous citizens. It is unfathomable to some Indigenous people too. Imagine how many Canadian and US citizens would balk at the idea that Canada and the US illegally occupy much of their territories, that they lack moral authority [to govern them]? That is essentially the same conceptual mountain we face in saying that well-paid and well-known people like politician Elizabeth Warren and academic Andrea Smith in the US, novelist Joseph Boyden and film director Michelle Latimer in Canada have no moral or legal rights to occupy the identities they claim and the attendant resource and psychic benefits of reverse passing.

Identity or relations?

I have taken to putting the word “Identity” in scare quotes. It is a word to which I am developing an acute allergy. I am forced to use the word because it is what settler-state culture thinks we are talking about—or maybe “identity” is its clever distraction? When non-Indigenous people claim Indigeneity, and in the process grab resources, professional authority and political power, this move commonly gets referred to as “identity” fraud or false “identity” claims. But I am not talking about identity at all. And I would like you too to stop talking about it so much. Let me explain and perhaps convince you to adjust your ideas and language when possible.

The popular concept of “identity” as it gets used in relation to Indigeneity or in relation to First Peoples, does not necessitate active relations with those collectives, nor serious engagement with their social mores and institutional authorities. “Identity” can refer to molecular patterns—biological and not necessarily social relationships—one’s “ancestry.” Such biological relationships and connections can be sparked by and/or spark lived social relations; on the other hand, they might not. “Identity,” even when viewed as a cultural rather than biological property, easily exists as an individualistic claim, as something held within one’s own body as one’s body’s property. Identity just as easily distracts us from Indigenous land and life as much or more than it supports it. “Identity” is a poor substitute for relations, including not only our familial, “tribal”, and other human kin, but it is also a poor substitute for our relations with nonhuman relatives and the places with whom First Peoples are co-constituted.

Consider this January 6, 2022 tweet by Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy who is Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk, and an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University in California.

The professor illustrates how land acknowledgements given by Indigenous people in longstanding relation with place are fundamentally different from land acknowledgements issued by non-Indigenous speakers and institutions. The latter tend to take for granted the legal and moral legitimacy of settler state occupation and authorities while ascribing a past-tense nature to Indigenous authorities. Cutcha Risling Baldy’s tweet insists on ongoing Indigenous governance and relational responsibilities. It is consistent with the idea that the settler’s individualizing, human-centric (co-constituted with white supremacy), and property-based redefinition of relations—is definitionally and pragmatically opposed in Indigenous pushback to appropriation in its many forms: theft of land and Indigenous children; the forceable replacement of Indigenous governance, ceremonies, and family forms with settler laws, religion, and family, including our most basic rights to determine who belongs to us.

Yesterday morning (of January 26, 2022), yet another Indigenous woman scholar, Celeste Pedri-Spade, an Anishinabekwe (Ojibwe) from northwestern Ontario and a band member of Lac Des Milles Lacs First Nation, published an article—also in The Conversation—addressing so-called re-indigenization in the academy that pushes back on the tiresome and distracting “identity crisis” and “identity politics” narratives. I give her the final word here. In the op-ed entitled “We are facing a settler colonial crisis, not an Indigenous identity crisis,” Pedri-Spade sums it all up:

“Mining” the archive for biological trace(s) of “nativeness” follows the same settler colonial, possessive and extractivist logic of mining Indigenous lands.

Both Indigenous lands and identities are positioned as resources that people are entitled to claim and own.

*This essay was given in an earlier iteration as an invited lecture to the North Orange Community College District for its Pluralism, Inclusion, & Equity Series, Anaheim, CA, USA, November 19, 2021.

[1] Neferti X.M. Tadiar, “The Noranian Imaginary,” In R.B. Tolentino (ed.) Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures (pp 61-76). Manila, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

[2] Ibid. Tadiar, 73. 

I woke up this morning full-on sobbing.

Bright sun fingers poking into my Edmonton bedroom with its blood red blinds and red fabric wall hangings from Indonesia, Cambodia, and a small gold silk one from China, all gathered in travel or living abroad. I was surrounded by velvet accent pillows in shades of green and red, along with a pearly white throw and a white duvet with watercolour red, green, and gold flowers to brighten it all up.

Before opening my eyes, I had been in my great-grandmother’s living room in her little house in our hometown in southeast South Dakota. I had just visited with her briefly before she went to bed in the quiet night of my dream. She was in a peach-coloured long winter nightgown and robe. I already can’t remember what we talked about, just-before-bed banter. She was in her usual good mood, smiling and tender. My nineteen-year-old daughter was with me, but she was off in another part of the house in the moment I wished Granny goodnight.

After Granny went off to bed, I turned toward the windows. I had just had installed floor to ceiling drapes with gauzy sheer white curtains beneath. The drapes were 1940s retro and very Christmas red with an ornate forest green and gold pattern all over. They weren’t quite Christmas drapes, but they were old-timey Christmas colours. Over the gauzy curtains, I had also hung in a decorative crisscross pattern, twinkling strings of white lights. Oh my, it’s only as I write this that I realize that the drapes were the same colours in which I have decorated my present-day bedroom.

As I carefully touched and adjusted the drapes and curtains, I smiled, realizing that Granny would have thought these curtains a bit “gaudy.” She was sedate in her taste. Yet she still allowed me to have the over-the-top glitzy thing I wanted in the middle of our humble existence two blocks east of the grain elevator. She always did that. My everyday shoes in first grade were black patent leather Mary Jane’s worn with lace pattern white tights and dresses in many colours and cuts, all of which she ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog.

As I stood at the windows, I saw flashing lights outside. I was curious; in our little town when I was a child, we rarely saw police or ambulance lights like in the many cities in which I’ve lived and travelled since then. The colourful drapes were already tied on either side of the windows with sashes of the same patterned fabric. I parted the gauzy under-curtains to see outside. There was a snowplow with its lights flashing as it scraped our street in the gently falling snow. I felt comforted.

Growing up in a town of 2,300, a snowstorm and snowplows hitting town and county roads late at night was a busy and important event. Things rarely felt busy and important in that little town. And nothing much good ever happened between bar close and sunrise, except a big beautiful snow and the plows that kept travel on icy country roads a little less deadly. The snowplows were caring winter visitors in a formidable prairie landscape that simultaneously forms and can kill us.

I deleted Facebook in January of this year. I have mostly not regretted it. One thing I do miss is my childhood friend Yvette’s winter storm and road condition updates in our home town. Her husband is a supervisor for the county road crew. He and his people are out there on snowy nights making country roads passable while Yvette is at home on Facebook telling everyone to stay home, stay safe, and stay out of the way while they do their work. She reminds me of the KREZ Radio Morning Traffic Report scene that opens the 1998 film Smoke Signals. You can always count on Yvette’s inside intel for up-to-the-minute news on what’s happening (or not) on local roads.

Back in the dream in Granny’s cozy living room, I suddenly realized that I haven’t seen her in at least a year. I looked down from the windows to the green carpeted floor and asked myself, “What is wrong with you? You haven’t visited your great-grandmother in a year?” Then I realized, she is dead. That’s why I hadn’t seen her in so long—not since our last night vision visit. How could I have forgotten? I turned toward the dining room that was brightly lit, the kitchen beyond it dark, and saw her bedroom doorway off to the right side of the dining area. It too was dark because she was in bed and Granny never did have a door hung in that doorframe. I wanted to go back into her room, sit on the side of her bed, talk to and see her again.

I would have embraced her in the living room if I’d remembered that our time was fleeting. I would have taken her in longer with my eyes. But now that she’d gone to her dark room, I didn’t know what I’d find in there. Dreamscapes are unpredictable, I find, especially if I attempt to impose my will on that world. I didn’t go back to her. Instead, I stood before the gaudy drapes and started crying hard because I miss her harder as the years go by. My daughter came into the room from wherever she had been, perhaps in the other bedroom, when she heard me crying. She asked me, “What’s wrong?” I don’t know when I will see Granny again, and I regret that I didn’t get to see her and my daughter meet and be together in the dream. Granny died seven years before Carmen was born. I woke myself up then with the crying.

At first after Granny’s death, she didn’t know she was dead. She visited me often in the second half of 1995 in a confused state. They were scary visits. I’ll write about those visits in another post I’m working on, tentatively called “Seven Stories of Energetic Remains,” to borrow Jessica Kolopenuk’s term for “spirits.” There are many questions I would ask my great-grandmother now at 53 that I did not know to ask her when I was 26. But in our dream visits it always feels like an ever-present, and I forget to get down to business—to ask for her wisdom and her stories. I simply enjoy our small moments in brief dreamlife minutes.

After Granny eased into death, we only visit a couple of times a year. She is almost always her very elderly self and I am always the age I am in waking life. We mostly meet in her little house. Those rooms are the genesis of my personal universe, the point from which my global dreamscape and the shape of my waking life emanate. If I find myself in dreams in Granny’s home, say instead of on Main Street or somewhere else in town, I never leave its walls. Perhaps if I did, the streets and lawns and all the wooden houses would change before my eyes into an abyss or a landscape of danger. Unlike in waking life, I always stay safe inside Granny’s house.

Thank you as always for reading and/or listening.

*All visuals courtesy of Shutterstock unless otherwise noted.