T
trickster
Guest
I came across this article (a story of thoughts and feelings of an indigenous person living on the west coast of Canada - Vancouver Island)…and it really brought home to me the need for an Aboriginal Catholic theology. We need to be radical on this and go to the roots of the indigenous spirit and work from there and not from a place of Catholic comfort .
People I Don’t Know: Dysfunctional Methods of Family Dinner
Blood Related Strangers: My Indian Family and Reclaiming Our Indian Identities
We all attempt to communicate, my family and I, what do we wish to talk about, I reckon the words we wish to share most and in a truthful moment, we do share our indifferences dealt from a cruel system, but most of the time, we do this by communicating silently; if you listen closely, however, you can hear the pain being spoken and can also honour the fact when you hear my mom laugh, or when she even calls me to tell me about her day, then you can hear the plight and worry yet see the bravery when my Uncle smiles and laughs, too. The way in which he shows me his treasures and collections of random stuff, then you can move past the alcohol my cousin abuses or struggles with or is comfortable with and even spouts his own hatred…He is in fact a talented photographer, painter, musician, then you can feel the disconnection and inner workings of colonization, suppression, oppression, depression. … We Indian peoples have been forcibly removed from a world, an Indian world, a fate of alteration like a seamstress hemming a pair of jeans: forever altering our destiny to be Indian; cutting our lives shorter than warranted, shorted than needed. To work with the lands, not live in angst like our consumer driven lives compel us to do so.
We enjoy the comfortable nature of colonial hatred, of its confusion, of its frustration. “I hate people”, is a phrase I have heard quite a bit, once from my own mouth and then from time to time, from my family members as well. My Uncle has stated these (I hate people) words of expression to me and too many around him numerous times. My mom harbours confusion for his words whilst I understand her angst towards these words. Except, what I hear when he spouts these truthful words is more along the lines of, “I hate what has happened to me, I hate what my foster parents have done to me, I hate that no one loved me, I hate that they will not let me dance like a noble Indian”. The strange thing is and the one thing our family is connected too and shows our relationship as a family, is that he is not alone. I too share the same ideologies not too long ago of holding hatred up high, collected neatly, and utilized inappropriately, “I hate you, or I hate the world, or I hate everybody”. Words I have spoken and knew just once in a distant memory as a close personal ally. Keeping hatred close and letting hatred blanket my reality I built around me.
… My Uncle shared a tale, one of his foster dad whom had told my Uncle to, “Not dance the heathens dance”…what was taking place is that my Uncle danced a family dance, our family dance when he was only twelve years old…the harsh reality, “Heathens dance”, and then having a bible thrown at him. For merely dancing a sacred and noble ancestral practice of the Coastal Salish peoples: dancing with Creator, dancing with the Ancestors.
*** …There is a poem in this article that I have deleted cause of article length and unnecessary swearing, the writer then goes on…***
How do you get by with your family problems, with your family’s highs and lows, how do you let go of stubbornness that nearly debilitates one’s judgement? My stubborn, angry, **** the world attitude once helped me stay alive through my illicit street drug addictions and youth street homeless life and yet, through all this overdosing, death, and beatings, my stubborn attitude is now crippling my mind towards how my family gets along by not letting them in, into my life, into my thoughts of how I hate consumerism, how I hate oil but drive and consume gas. Not letting go, and not letting God, or Creator, whichever you choose, is backwards. In all reality, letting go is going to be the hardest thing I still struggle with to date. Why is this strange though? I mean, ever since I decided to sit in a room and said, “Hey, letting go of crystal meth, easy, admitting I’m an addict and not in control of my addictions anymore, **** you, simple, walking into rehabilitation and at an incredibly young age (19 years old), **** that, no problem, facing Wilkinson Road Jail (maximum security in a Provincial level prison) for stealing cars, stealing stuff, stealing a person’s “security”, accomplice to holding large quantities of crystal meth possession, ****, no feelings or emotions at all for breaking the law of Kanata”.
The complexities of family time somehow perplex my family driven mind. I start to question how much of a family man I truly am when my own blood family wants nothing to do with being together. I theorize about the down fall of our culture and the up rise of tyranny. The separation of the Brits denouncing the Queen as their sovereign brought the union of the United States. Then a war broke and the Brits claiming the Queen fled to the north for safety. Kanata was soon enacted as a country and colonization blanketed the lands with Indian hospitals and then Residential Schools, foster placement homes and forceful removal of Indian children continued in a terrible way, even today. Somehow these choices to expand a racist empire, to then conquer my ancestor’s conquest to be in peace with the lands and forever doomed how we sit down together, how we interact as a whole family unit is now broken into millions of fragmented Salish morals and we are in essence forgotten, casted aside peoples, then means learning how to put these pieces back together.
People I Don’t Know: Dysfunctional Methods of Family Dinner
Blood Related Strangers: My Indian Family and Reclaiming Our Indian Identities
We all attempt to communicate, my family and I, what do we wish to talk about, I reckon the words we wish to share most and in a truthful moment, we do share our indifferences dealt from a cruel system, but most of the time, we do this by communicating silently; if you listen closely, however, you can hear the pain being spoken and can also honour the fact when you hear my mom laugh, or when she even calls me to tell me about her day, then you can hear the plight and worry yet see the bravery when my Uncle smiles and laughs, too. The way in which he shows me his treasures and collections of random stuff, then you can move past the alcohol my cousin abuses or struggles with or is comfortable with and even spouts his own hatred…He is in fact a talented photographer, painter, musician, then you can feel the disconnection and inner workings of colonization, suppression, oppression, depression. … We Indian peoples have been forcibly removed from a world, an Indian world, a fate of alteration like a seamstress hemming a pair of jeans: forever altering our destiny to be Indian; cutting our lives shorter than warranted, shorted than needed. To work with the lands, not live in angst like our consumer driven lives compel us to do so.
We enjoy the comfortable nature of colonial hatred, of its confusion, of its frustration. “I hate people”, is a phrase I have heard quite a bit, once from my own mouth and then from time to time, from my family members as well. My Uncle has stated these (I hate people) words of expression to me and too many around him numerous times. My mom harbours confusion for his words whilst I understand her angst towards these words. Except, what I hear when he spouts these truthful words is more along the lines of, “I hate what has happened to me, I hate what my foster parents have done to me, I hate that no one loved me, I hate that they will not let me dance like a noble Indian”. The strange thing is and the one thing our family is connected too and shows our relationship as a family, is that he is not alone. I too share the same ideologies not too long ago of holding hatred up high, collected neatly, and utilized inappropriately, “I hate you, or I hate the world, or I hate everybody”. Words I have spoken and knew just once in a distant memory as a close personal ally. Keeping hatred close and letting hatred blanket my reality I built around me.
… My Uncle shared a tale, one of his foster dad whom had told my Uncle to, “Not dance the heathens dance”…what was taking place is that my Uncle danced a family dance, our family dance when he was only twelve years old…the harsh reality, “Heathens dance”, and then having a bible thrown at him. For merely dancing a sacred and noble ancestral practice of the Coastal Salish peoples: dancing with Creator, dancing with the Ancestors.
*** …There is a poem in this article that I have deleted cause of article length and unnecessary swearing, the writer then goes on…***
How do you get by with your family problems, with your family’s highs and lows, how do you let go of stubbornness that nearly debilitates one’s judgement? My stubborn, angry, **** the world attitude once helped me stay alive through my illicit street drug addictions and youth street homeless life and yet, through all this overdosing, death, and beatings, my stubborn attitude is now crippling my mind towards how my family gets along by not letting them in, into my life, into my thoughts of how I hate consumerism, how I hate oil but drive and consume gas. Not letting go, and not letting God, or Creator, whichever you choose, is backwards. In all reality, letting go is going to be the hardest thing I still struggle with to date. Why is this strange though? I mean, ever since I decided to sit in a room and said, “Hey, letting go of crystal meth, easy, admitting I’m an addict and not in control of my addictions anymore, **** you, simple, walking into rehabilitation and at an incredibly young age (19 years old), **** that, no problem, facing Wilkinson Road Jail (maximum security in a Provincial level prison) for stealing cars, stealing stuff, stealing a person’s “security”, accomplice to holding large quantities of crystal meth possession, ****, no feelings or emotions at all for breaking the law of Kanata”.
The complexities of family time somehow perplex my family driven mind. I start to question how much of a family man I truly am when my own blood family wants nothing to do with being together. I theorize about the down fall of our culture and the up rise of tyranny. The separation of the Brits denouncing the Queen as their sovereign brought the union of the United States. Then a war broke and the Brits claiming the Queen fled to the north for safety. Kanata was soon enacted as a country and colonization blanketed the lands with Indian hospitals and then Residential Schools, foster placement homes and forceful removal of Indian children continued in a terrible way, even today. Somehow these choices to expand a racist empire, to then conquer my ancestor’s conquest to be in peace with the lands and forever doomed how we sit down together, how we interact as a whole family unit is now broken into millions of fragmented Salish morals and we are in essence forgotten, casted aside peoples, then means learning how to put these pieces back together.
This, exactly.
.