Catching dreams
Chapter 7, actually chapter 7. sorry about the confusion
Summer essays. I’m amazed that it is August already. Amazed, alarmed, and actually excited about being able to say that the book launches NEXT MONTH! Wow. What a journey. But it’s August and that means that we’re thinking about Chapter 7. Really Chapter 7, because I saw that I called the last essay Chapter 7 and it wasn’t. The stories about stones are from Chapter 6. Chapter 7 is about people.
Aanikoobijigan is the Ojibwe word for “great-grandparent” or “ancestor.” But it is also the word for “great-grandchild” or “descendant.” The word I would use to describe the person three generations before me and the person three generations after me is the same word and it connects seven generations. Aanikaw, the root word, refers to the act of binding or joining. Depending on prefix and suffix, this root can become a variety of words used to describe the sewing or tying together of the things.
So when I use aanikoobijigan to describe my great-grandparents, I am stitching, or tying, myself together with them. And when I use it to think about great-grandchildren not yet born, I am stitching myself to them too, tying us all together. When I see generations in my mind, I see threads that connect me to eight great-grandparents and then extend from me to children yet unborn. And when I look at my spouse, I see his threads connecting to eight others. My children’s threads connect to my grandparents and to his, creating these webs of relationship contained within aanikoobijigan.
My hand drum is a piece of hide stretched over a wooden hoop. The sinew lacing on the back serves to keep the skin taut and provides me with something to hold on to while I play. For this drum, the sinew is woven in the style of a dreamcatcher, with a wooden bead in the center. That is what I see when I think about aanikoobijigan: each of us a bead at the center of a web that reaches out to connect us to so many others. Each one of us is surrounded by webs of relationship and connection.
So looking at that web with the bead in the middle, looking towards the bead from the outer rim I can see the web of ancestors reaching out to me. Then looking from the bead towards the rim, I can see the descendants fanning out from me. And contained within those ancestors and descendants are not only those we might consider direct lineage, but also those who impacted us. The village that raised us, the village we raised.
The colonial world doesn’t like that village very much does it. Every system in our society is designed to disrupt it, manipulate our loyalties, snipping those strands that weave that web at the back of my drum. My drum could probaby survive a couple of snips, but too many and the drum becomes too loose to play. It falls apart. Just like our communities. Anikoobijikaan contains the idea of stiching together. But this world cuts things apart.
Austerity budgets starve communities of resources. Schools, housing, healthcare, childcare. All somehow contained under this idea that the public service is too bloated and must be trimmed. Less teachers, fewer classroom resources, no money for infrastructure, no money for doctors.
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So do corporations. I read that Starbucks will flood a community with outlets, knowing full well that half of them will fail. The more important failures are the non-chain coffee stories that just couldn’t compete with the onslaught. Then Starbucks can close down the less profitable stores content in the knoweldge that they’re the only one left.
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Grocery stores do this in different ways, agreeing to put their grocery store in a neighbourhood on condition that the city does not give permits to any other grocery story. That bylaw remains on the books long after the grocery story has shut down and left a food desert behind it.
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And into these fractured communities come police and child welfare, the only people who can help because they are the only ones who are mandated to help, who are funded at a level that they can respond. At best they offer back some scraps of those resources, bringing groceries, fixing a window. But fixing a broken window won’t fix broken windows policing and I can’t even tell you know many times I was told, as a child welfare worker, to purchase whatever the family needed as a way of getting access the family. Let me come over, I’ll bring groceries. They needed groceries, so they agreed.
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Then the police who are surveilling the community through community policing and the child welfare workers who just want to make sure everything is ok we take away community members. Take away children so they’ll be safe. Take away the adults so the kids will be safe. Keep them away just long enough that they won’t fit in when they come back, visits have turned them into tourists in their own neighbourhoods.
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If the hide isn’t damaged, you can restring the drum. You can soak it in water and stretch it over the frame again. You can reweave the connections which won’t be exactly the same as before, but they’ll hold the drum and the songs. You can put that bead back in the center where it reminds you who you are.
The next chapter is about that rebuilding. Because even if these chapters that followed the intermission we’re still talking about what went wrong, about what is still going wrong because the apocalypse isn’t cover. Colonialism is not an event, it’s a process and it’s a process that is still very much part of our present.
So next month, Book month! We turn to that final chapter and what it means to form solidarities. How will we live together in Indigenous Sovereignty.
Things you can do to help promote the book!
Please put September 27 in your datebook, even if you haven’t read the book yet you can post a review on Amazon on release day and you can base it on the excerpts you’ve read here. Even if you don’t order from Amazon, having it there matters.
You can put it in your Amazon Wishlist, that helps with the metrics too and who knows, somebody might buy it for you!
Put in on your “to be read” shelf at Goodreads. And put a review there too as soon as you can.
You’re invited! True North Aid is hosting a weekend retreat at the Queen’s Biodiversity Station outside of Kingston. There’s a $250 early registration to spend a weekend with me and Alexis Shotwell (Knowing Otherwise, Against Purity) talking about Becoming Kin, who claims you, and what do we do with unwanted kin.
https://sites.google.com/truenorthaid.ca/becomingkinretreat/home
Events!
Booking now for events in the fall/winter. So if you want me to zoom bomb your book club or come to a bookstore or any such thing now’s the time to hit me up.
See you next month!