https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUacU0I4yU

English 223 – Week 10

“Do you think,” she asked me halfway through our first and last session, “that maybe these ghosts you dream about aren’t really ghosts, but are your attempt to deal with death?”“No,” I said.Her wide, blue eyes fixed on me. Then you believe ghosts exist?”“Yes,” I said.It turned its bony head to study me. The room was still and warm. The air conditioning in the hospital wasn’t working very well. Sunlight glinted in Ms. Jenkins’s hair, the colour of the highlights fascinating – a tawny-gold, a light red, deep eggplant. “Are you sure?”The thing unwrapped its arms from Ms. Jenkins and drifted across the room, hovering over me. It hummed like a high-tension wire.“Yes,” my mouth moving by itself, my body not moving at all. I couldn’t take my eyes from it.“Why?”The thing bent its head, its lips near my ear. “For attention, I guess.”“Good, this is good, Lisa […] I’m sure with a little work, you’ll be back to normal in no time.”(274)

“we [Indigenous people] need not to just figure out who we are; we need to re-establish the processes by which we live who we are within the current contexts we find ourselves […] building diverse, nation-culture-based resurgences means significantly reinvesting in our own ways of being: regenerating our political and intellectual traditions; articulating and living our legal systems; language learning; ceremonial and spiritual pursuits; creating and using our artistic and performance-based traditions.

-Leanne Simpson

I suspect a lot of it’s cultural. The stories I was told growing up were full of supernatural creatures who were described the same way you’d describe your neighbours. Oh, those sasquatches. Always stealing bivalves and blondes. Well, Wee’gits playing with the tide again. Crazy raven. Gran visited from the other side to say she wants more raisin pie in the next burning. A lot of that attitude comes into play when I’m writing. I tend to view the supernatural characters like the other characters, prone to idiosyncrasies and family squabbles.

- Eden Robinson

Murdered and Missing Women: the Numbers*

• 1, 017 indigenous women and girls were murdered from 1980-2012

• In 1984, indigenous women accounted for 8% of all female homicide victims, today they account for 23%.

• Indigenous women are nearly three times more likely than non-Aboriginal women to report being a victim of a violent crime.

• The violence experienced by Indigenous women is more severe. Indigenous women are four times more likely to be murdered than non-Indigenous women.

• One indigenous girl or woman goes missing every week.

*Statistics from Amnesty International and the RCMP

I imagine the colonizers asking: How do you infuse a society with the heteropatriarchy necessary in order to carry out your capitalist dreams when Indigenous men aren’t actively engaged in upholding a system designed to exploit women? Well, the introduction of gender violence is one answer. Destroying and then reconstructing sexuality and gender identity is another. Residential schools did an excellent job on both accounts.

Because really what the colonizers have always been trying to figure out is “How do you extract natural resources from the land when the people’s whose territory you’re on believe that those plant, animal and mineral’s have both spirit and therefore agency?”

It’s a similar answer: You use gender violence to remove Indigenous peoples and their descendants from the land, you remove agency from the plant and animal worlds and you reposition aki (the land) as “natural resources” for the use and betterment of white people.

 -Leanne Simpson

“Those guys would have killed you.”“It was broad daylight,” I said. “And there were tons of witnesses. They wouldn’t have done anything.”“Honey,” she said, “if you were some little white girl, that would be true. But you’re a mouthy Indian, and everyone thinks we’re born sluts. Those guys would have said you were asking for it and got off scot-free […] You would have been hurt or dead and no one would have given a flying fuck.” (255)

“On hot days, [Uncle Mick] wore his message T-shirts: Free Leonard Peltier! Or Columbus: 500 Years of Genocide and Counting. […] For the feast, he’d changed Into his buckskin jacket with fringe, his A.I.M. Higher – Join the American Indian Movement! T-Shirt” (56)

“[My teacher] had forced us to read a book that said that the Indians on the northwest coast of British Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices. My teacher made us each read a paragraph out loud. When my turn came, I sat there shaking, absolutely furious. Since I was going to get into trouble anyway, I started singing ‘Fuck the Oppressors.’ The class cheered.”

“I don’t see why we have to file at all,” Mick said, “The whole fucking country is on Indian land. We’re not supposed to pay any taxes on or off reserve”(30)

“Find a map of British Columbia. Point to the middle of the coast. Beneath Alaska, find the Queen Charlotte Islands. Drag your finger across the map, across the Hecate Strait to the coast and you should be able to see a large island hugging the coast […] You are firmly in Haisla territory” (4)