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Research day✨
Hanging out at the coffee shop again working on my research paper for my American Literature final. I’m comparing and contrasting colonial narratives against Native Americans with the narratives put forward during the Native American Boarding School Era in the United States. Being Native myself, this topic is extremely important to me, and I’m excited to dive in.
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At its surface, the shoal functions as a space of liminality, indeterminacy, and location of suture between two hermeneutical frames that have conventionally been understood as sealed off from each other. I offer the space of the shoal as simultaneously land and sea to fracture this notion that Black diaspora studies is overdetermined by rootlessness and only metaphorized by water and to disrupt the idea that Indigenous studies is solely rooted and fixed in imaginaries of land as territory. Scholars in Black diaspora studies, giving specific attention to late twentieth-century scholars, have mobilized oceanic and water metaphors to theorize Black life, aesthetics, and decolonial politics as breaks with continental European discourse. Similarly positioning itself as a challenge to Western and colonial epistemes, Native studies have centered land at the fulcrum of its analytical, theoretical, and metaphorical maneuvers that challenge coloniality. The shoal creates a rupture and at the same time opens up analytical possibilities for thinking about Blackness as exceeding the metaphors and analytics of water and for thinking of Indigeneity as exceeding the symbol and analytic of land.
Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
09.27.17 // Finished a bunch of Native Studies homework I kept putting off!
As a two spirit academic and scholar, I spend a lot of time thinking, and thinking about thinking. The amount of time I put into staring at the wall with no sound or interruption probably rivals that of anchorites, if we're being honest. Lately I've been playing with a handful of ideas that I am only just beginning to actually express, but I kinda want to put the rough thoughts down here.
Radical joy
Radical joy is the most thought through of the bunch, having actually written a paper and given a lecture on the matter. It's also to be frank the least radical sounding concept I work with. But we persist because it is a good groundwork for actually making decisions and taking action. The short of it is thus: choose every day to critique what is expected of you. There are a thousand ways to engage in radical joy, but the first and foremost is to start by asking why you are expected to do things one way, or act like this or that, or be and identify in a certain way. Ask yourself, ask others, if this really does benefit yourself, your community, your world. Question everything, change what you must, and then choose to engage consciously. This is radical joy.
Radical boredom
Radical boredom sounds funny, but it is critical, I think, to developing the skills and capacity to learn and grow and resist. Radical boredom is why I stare at the wall in silence every day. I practice being bored daily, until I can't stand it any longer, because it builds up my distress tolerance. My brain doesn't start unbearably crying out for stimulation when I'm just thinking anymore. It gives me time to think things through, be patient with myself and others, to take a full and thorough stock of myself and my world, to endure when learning plateaus and I stagnate. Radical boredom is the skill you need when you've made the choice to undertake some sisyphean or Herculean task, because you will be prepared for the boring nature of doing the work. Don't confuse this for sunk cost fallacy, though. If it sucks hit da bricks, but don't let the time pass anyways if you're working towards a worthy goal.
Shapeshifting
This is one of my most important academic concepts, and definitely my most important literary concepts. I hold that the most engaging and thorough means of learning is through becoming, metaphorically or metaphysically, the subject of the matter. You, dear reader, would benefit from shapeshifting, becoming the character, the subject, the intended audience. This is why my work is largely in second person. In my fiction it's to promote escapism and engagement, you are literally the main character, having their experiences and thoughts. In my academics it's too offer the reader a chance to see the research from the inside, to remove the barrier between reader and subject, to give humanity to the research and the researched in ways largely not allowed in academic research. It is a direct challenge to objectification.
Indigiqueering
This one is a double whammy idea of both indigenizing and queering, in the academic senses of the terms. To indigenize is to reframe an idea into an intergenerational, land based, and expansive relational ontology, based in and informed by the indigenous nations whose lands on which you live, their thoughts and traditions and histories, as well as the very lands themselves, with all the plants and animals and stones and landforms, and the community around yourself, and the generations forward your actions may impact. To think in regard to all these relations, to plan and imagine and research with an eye for the world around you and the world yet to come. Queering, on it's own, is a questioning and a critiquing of norms and expectations, engaging a subject not just on its own terms, but in a holistic and subversive manner. To queer is to call into question systems of oppression and hegemony that play out in academics and in life. Indigiqueering is thus then a combining of these two things, a reframing and a questioning, a focus on land and history and a critique of hegemony in our actions and words. To indigiqueer is to question why "this is the way it has always been done" is enough, to look for new traditions that better serve our communities in this climate crisis, in the healing of two spirit identities, in the face of the many epidemics that suffuse our families. To indigiqueer is to look for a better future for all our relations, all generations, and not allow our history of trauma and oppression become a shackle against growing and healing.
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Coming up tonight!
MA grad Jennifer Tromski edits volume on Native American Art in NYC
Jennifer Tromski (GSAS ‘16) recently edited a collection of writing about Native American art in New York City, following on her research in art history with Prof. Elizabeth Hutchinson. Here’s the publishers description:
“This publication marks the first time that a diverse group of Native painters, sculptors, photographers, installation and media artists, performing artists, filmmakers and writers has been defined as a movement or given a name.
The encounter of Native practices and in?uences with mainstream art created a community in which the relationship between art and indigenous sensibility was recognized and nurtured. These artists have shown in galleries in the heart of SoHo, written articles for publications such as Art in America, and produced work that incorporates the visual strategies of Abstract Expressionism, pop, conceptualism and various strains of postmodernism. Among the artists represented here are Leon Polk Smith, George Morrison, Jimmie Durham, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, G. Peter Jemison, Jeffrey Gibson, Brad Kahlhamer and Lloyd R. Oxendine.”
So that's my take on the residential school system. That they just did a good job at robbing us of our culture. I was fortunate that I was able to maintain my language, and I'm thankful for that, that I remember stories, I remember legends, I remember the teachings. Thank goodness for that. Because if I'd been there any longer, then things might have been different. And it was for a lot of other people my age who just totally lost the language 'cause they were not allowed to use the language. We have people in this community that have never spoke the language. So there's no justification as far as I'm concerned. No amount of money. Now the government has turned around and said, "We're going to compensate people." They say, "Oh we apologize, and we'll give you ten thousand dollars." Well, for people that are so injured and broken and that are living on the streets or they've become alcoholics or they've become so destitute. They've lost the teachings, they've lost the language, they've lost the culture. And to be handed this kind of money. It's like giving them poison.
Elsie Paul on the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, Written as I Remember It
