On land
Restorative Community Project Session 3:
Is there a new materialism to how Morrison’s Charlotte dreamed to mutilate her doll, how Burnett shot that one scene, how Micky’s uncle said dont touch, and how my parent’s put four hundred dollars on display? Thinking about Kwaku’s shoreline, in the wake of another devastating hurricane and in the space left by walks with grandma or crab shacks to miss, I’m inclined to say “I dont know” — Sahfeeah.
Which reminds me it is a dumb question, like a crack in my window mistaken for a flock of birds, so I’ll ask it a different way: this is lenapehoking.
I could begin a classic Foucauldian critique of our pedagogical spaces for their instrumentalization as centers of biopolitical control, but that would seem too scientific and injurious to the subject at hand. What I can offer instead is not much better however; the Carlisle Indian School seems best syntagmized through Colonel RH Pratt’s vile remark, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” This is why I can tie a tie and my name is “Hyungtae.” We looked at that picture of what Mckayla called a family, but we knew was actually erasure and let my pupils dilate when Mohammad said “I can relate to this.” We’re Listening.
At 11:23 if you had asked us to draw a figure of the native body as it has appeared in our education thus far, we would have a vague silhouette of pipelines tagged in big block letters that read “not really.” Maybe two hours later if you asked again, it might now say something about how settler colonialism is often taken as a land-based analytic, an ahistorical politic, and made funny by Kwaku’s yawns. Smiles are the best investment you once said. Too bad “nobody knows you when you're down and out.”
Experimental physicists Monika Schleier-Smith explains quantum mechanics as the marriage between elegant theories of the world with a rigorous eye towards application. In order words: kpop. One principle to this positivist tradition is a concept known as entanglement which is the emergence of correlations and knowledge within the convergence of at least two (seemingly) random data sets. Loving you is like an axiom of quantum entanglement, chance no longer seems special or singularly my own. But it also has everything to do with the dialectics of decolonization and indigenization. For all forms of indigenization are decolonizing but not all expressions of decolonization, indigenize. All my thoughts have to do with you, but none of you has to do with my thoughts.
I remember one of the nights you came to Riepe Warwick room 302; I was sitting on the floor reading As we have always done by Leanne Simpson. At the time it was my attempt at being a radically inclusive feminist which I now realize is like trying to be a neoliberal green-party evangelist. You asked me what it was about and I said, “crying.” To which you responded, “deep” and then kissed me. Drowning in your shallow waters is now all I dream about.
Brandon read out loud for the group an excerpt from Islands of Decolonial Love, that follows the tale of a tribes woman-christ figure (i know, crazy!) who martyrs herself in exchange for the dream of life outside of colonial desolation. “There was a woman. an ogichidaakwe, but not yet. she started traveling around our territory and in the west, picking up those things that we’d forgotten.” Simpson writes. If the nishnaabewin woman picked up my memories and put them in her basket, TSA would now have two reasons to harass her. But for now, we just keep on asking, “how do I pronounce this?” — Basir