h"ps://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 reestablish the processes by which we live
who we are within the current contexts we
find ourselves […] building diverse, nationculture-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 performancebased 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 li?le 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) “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)
“[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.”
“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)
î “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)