Preface: I really wanted to write about water and Indigeneity this week, or even what it is like to finally go off SSRIs and anti-psychotics after being medicated my whole life, but my recent trifecta of experiences with anti-Indigenous racism compounded, and in the impasse, I found myself writing this instead.
Preface part 2: These are my initial ruminations on Indigenous disposition. If someone steals my ideas on this, I will have my strong Indigenous relatives come for you. Do not steal ideas from Two-Spirit grad students. Unfortunately, this must be said in academia’s current state of intellectual sovereignty infringement.
Preface part 3: I do not intend to cause harm in writing this. I kindly ask for the respect of an email if you seriously think my free writing here could cause/is causing harm. Direct connection with the source of harm is a very Indigenous way of handling conflict. Putting people on blast on social media is a settler colonial mentality; I’ll explain that in more detail one day (or just read Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and you’ll get it).
I didn’t understand the rhetoric of Indigenous disposition v. Indigenous phenotype until last weekend when my queer identity, Indigenous identity, and Mapahood collided. A baby coyote breached the street after I was assaulted, and I knew something was awry.
Audra Simpson’s article “The State is a Man” has stayed with me for years because the concept of Indigeneity as a disposition, rather than race, is powerful. Before I go further, it is essential for me to say that one’s race is a massive impetus for settler colonial violence against Indigenous girls, women, and Two-Spirit people. I shouldn’t have to say that explicitly, but I do. When Miriam Terriak and Clayton Saunders murdered light-skin privileged Inuk woman, Loretta Saunders, many non-Indigenous and Indigenous people were irritated by the labelling of her death as an anti-Indigenous hate crime because of her blonde hair and white-passing skin. However, these two concerns, namely those of non-Indigenous Canadians and Indigenous Canadians, come from different places. White non-Indigenous Canadians showed anger because they desire the disappearance of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people, even if that desire is not explicit. However, Indigenous people’s anger toward the media’s framing of this crime is what I am more interested in because it is something we deal with in our communities regularly. As Simpson says,
“It isn’t white skin privilege that upset people, in that she is more precious than the darker ones among us – it is that her death demonstrates that no one is safe. Her violent passing is teaching us that one cannot “pass” – this structure, this assemblage, those people that articulate themselves through and for it, will find you, and subject you, it can kill you. You too can be emptied of your familial relations, your relationship to land, your signifying possibility as the ongoing project of Empire transits in Byrd’s parlance, or plows through you” (“The State is a Man” n.p.)
For the last four years, I have fixated on Simpson’s explanation here. What is this Indigeneity? And how do they know? I think back to the reality that Saunders rented her apartment, as a graduate student, to her murderers and travelled to the apartment to keke, to connect, to relate. I think about myself. I think about my daughter. I think about my mom. I think about my brother. I think about my nana. I think about loss. I think about manipulation. I think about vulnerability. I think about the reality that as “an Indigenous woman, your flesh is received differently, you have been subjected differently than others, your life choices have been circumscribed in certain ways, and the violence it seems, and will find you, and choke you, and beat you, and possibly kill you” (Simpson n.p.).
I think about loss.
I think about Saturday. I had allowed myself to forget what men could do to me. I had allowed myself to forget that non-Indigenous children could bully my daughter into believing that she, herself, is worthless. “One’s, life, one’s land, sovereignty, one’s body, emptied out, in order for other things to pass through” (Simpson n.p).
Most of my nights out are spent at queer clubs, but desperate for more dancing, I followed friends to an after-party at a club with lots of straights. Sober and walking to the bus home at 4am, a man violently grabbed me. Sexually assaulted me. Told me a cluster of acts he wanted to perform on me, and I pushed him away, timidly, desperate to relate, saying, “This is not for you.” I believe in the best of people. I trust all people to give their best. Until he shouted, “Squaw” at me, and everything fell away. An image of myself and my daughter in a landfill flashed before my eyes, and a rush of adrenaline allowed me to survive. When he followed me, I knew I had to stay aware, “and will find you, and choke you, and beat you, and possibly kill you” (Simpson, n.p.). I dropped pins to friends. I shared my location. I prayed to the Creator to keep me alive. When I was finally safe in a car, I sobbed as I texted a beautiful and caring white queer party girl I know, “I made it to my car with just a minor sexual assault, so that’s a win?” and “I just should not walk alone at night.” Self-shame. Self-blame. Two-Spirit femme walks alone at night, and they are known. Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people must not walk alone at night.
But how do they know?
I think about the precarity and anomaly of my life and the Indigenous teachings my mom taught my brothers and me that she says were passed down from her mom. My mom told us growing up that we were Chickasaw, but family lore told us we didn’t belong there– a lie passed through my family the moment the first of my lineal ancestors were shipped off to Indian Boarding Schools. No matter how strong Alice was and how firm her grip was on Chikashshanompa’, the shame of being Indian prevails in school. My mom taught us to treat everyone and every being the same; everything alive cries out for respect and care. Some may say this is a Judeo-Christian moral position: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” However, although Indigenous care and relation include the self, the self is not centered in our disposition. The us is centered. The collective is centered. We all interact constantly; this is conveyed in our language, where every noun is first a verb. This disposition is in all we do, even if we have lost our language. I attempt to write English in this way and have been coerced by colonial academia to change for publish or perish; the language never let go of me. It is in our jokes, our bantering with each other, and how we bring non-Indigenous people into our circles with desire and hope.
Part of the “passing” to leave behind “this structure, this assemblage, [and] those people that articulate themselves through and for it” requires a violent uncoupling, a loss of self, a splitting of self (Simpson n.p.). No matter how non-Indigenous people in my family may feel because of their phenotype, they are still subject to extreme violence because of their eagerness for reciprocity, relationality, connection, and otherwise in this violent society that colonizers have built on the bones from who we have sprouted (for more of otherwise, read Daniel Heath Justice).
I think about my brother, who lost his life to the sea– for trusting the ocean too eagerly, who would have known these relations better if we were on our land. I think about my brother, who, too, was taken advantage of by limits so profound that only he could tell that story. I think of myself as someone eager to relate to others who have taken advantage of me again and again, even to the point of joining a cult that unintentionally imitated a rez and nearly murdered all of who I was. But I rose again. And I think about my daughter.
The baby coyote was a sign from the Creator. Coyote is a trickster in these parts, but not as violent as the tricksters of the Southeast. I’m not from here, but from stories I have read– Coyote has the potential to cause harm, but often in ways that are ignorant to themself. When I saw a baby coyote in the middle of the city that night, I braced myself because I knew this pain involved my daughter.
Her voice shouted “boiiii” on our car trip home to Vancouver on Canada Day. She asked me what “boy” was in Chickasaw; I told her that while we have language for that, it is central to relationship and not self-identity1 as our gender is relational rather than fixated on the “self” — but in a kid friendly way, ya know? She shouted, “I don’t want to be Chickasaw.” I told her that she couldn’t change that; she could either choose to be proud of being Chickasaw or ashamed, and it would be a sad life if she chose the latter. So many of us choose the latter when we are displaced and isolated from our communities. She shouted something like, “I’m embarrassed to be Indigenous,” and I asked her, “Why? Did someone say something?” She proceeded to tell me that someone at school had been telling her that she is not actually Indigenous, that she doesn’t look Indigenous like me- her mapa, and that she can’t possibly be Chickasaw because Indigenous people are dead. I calmly explained that non-Indigenous people do not choose who is Indigenous, that nobody chooses who is Indigenous, and that only Tribal Nations and our kin choose that for us.
I felt this in my throat, as we say in Chikashshanompa, and all emotions are felt here. Throat (prefix formative): nok. To turn inside out: anokpiliffi. I pulled over and screamed: ontasahli. Ontasahlili anonka’ chokmalili loolo’. I screamed and cleared the white man from my throat. (Note: I am an early language learner, so this is probably broken Chikashshanompa’)
Lilamor ontasahli nonka’ chokmali loolo’ ayina. She asked me why I did that. Why did I pull over on the highway and scream into the ancestors that are with me, into the redwoods that house the local ancestors around me, and away from the cars built from a matrix of bad, enslaved relations. I told her, “Nobody can tell you that you are not Indigenous. Your community claims you. Your family claims you. You are Chickasaw. You are unconquered and unconquerable.” She asked if she could scream with me.
Ilontasahli tawáa.
As we rolled down the windows to air out the bad relations of the car and the bad relational memories in the car, we let in our ancestors and those ancestors on the land around us. I told her to repeat after me, “I AM PROUD TO BE INDIGENOUS” and she said, “but I’m not proud.” I told her I don’t care. She needed to repeat after me. We shouted, in call and response, “I AM PROUD TO BE INDIGENOUS” “I AM A STRONG CHICKASAW GIRL” “MY CHICKASAW FAMILY LOVES ME” “I AM HERE AND I AM INDIGENOUS” “WE ARE STRONG CHICKASAWS.”
My throat hurt but the white man was gone, if only for our hour drive home as we filled the car with Indigenous music— angry and proud and joyful. We are here. We have and will always be here. Iláyya’sha katihma.
Come out. Come home. Embrace yourself. We are here waiting. We will stay here and wait for you to come in.
Works Cited
Simpson, Audra. “The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty.” Theory & Event, vol. 19 no. 4, 2016. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/633280.
Self-identification is comical and exceptionally upsetting in academia because Indigenous is relationship. Self-identifying is kind of antithetical to Indigenous identity. However, every other option I imagine in academia is just as trite, so maybe this isn’t a place where we actually should be anyway?
Thank you for sharing this, my dear friend. I love you. I treasure you. And I treasure Lil.