Posts tagged "colonialism"

3 posts with this tag.

  • A hand holds a ripe red strawberry between thumb and fingers, surrounded by green strawberry leaves. Specks of soil cling to the berry and fingertips, and a few leaves nearby have yellowed and browned.

    Ode'imin: In Defence of the Berry Pickers

    · #personal essay #Indigenous #Métis #Queer #masculinity #botany #berries #linguistics #theology #gift economy #colonialism #history

    On #RezTok, a berry picker is a man who comes home without the moose. On fruity men and Canada's fruit machine, Man the Hunter and the women who hunted anyway, and pemmican, the food made of meat, fat, and berries that the Métis Nation first stood up for at Seven Oaks. On the serviceberry and its many names, saskatoon wood that became arrows, and the Michif word for a little pear. On bananas being berries and strawberries not, a Supreme Court that decided the tomato is a vegetable because of when you eat it, and a Eucharist that was already made of fruit. And on ode'imin, the heart berry: love, emotional truth, healing, forgiveness, the first medicine of spring.

  • Colourized historical photograph of an Indigenous family traveling in a birchbark canoe on a calm lake. A man in a dark hat sits in the stern smoking a pipe, while a woman paddles at the other end. Three young children sit between them near a bundle of belongings, and one child reaches a hand toward the water. A forested shoreline lies in the distance under a pale sky. Handwritten at the top of the photo: ‘Typical Natives’ and ‘Linde’.

    RIVYAYR PIMICÎWAN: We Are Always Somewhere

    · #personal essay #lyric essay #Indigenous #Métis #Two-Spirit #Queer #rights of nature #water #law #ecology #colonialism #identity #history

    On October 11, 1869, nineteen unarmed Métis stopped a Canadian survey crew by standing on its chain, refusing to let a square grid be laid over our river lots. On the Whanganui River, declared a legal person in 2017 after 140 years of Māori struggle; Te Urewera, which owns itself; the Atrato, the Magpie, the Klamath, and wild rice suing the state of Minnesota. On Two-Spirit, a word that arrived in a dream in Winnipeg in 1990, Balboa's dogs, We'wha shaking the president's hand, and a province named for the sound water makes. Liquid has no shape of its own, and bodies can refuse the container. On Shoal Lake 40, acknowledgement, and rewilding ourselves. Both us, in whole, and our land must be sovereign.

  • Two arms, one with darker skin, one with lighter skin, clasp together against a near-black background, bound by a single red thread that wraps around both. Dramatic low-key lighting isolates the hands at the centre, the red yarn the only point of vivid colour.

    What We Lose with Cultural Extinction: The Red Thread Cut

    · #personal essay #history #politics #culture #language #indigenous #colonialism #identity

    In 1995, China abducted six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima—the recognized 11th Panchen Lama—severing the chain of mutual recognition at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist succession. Meanwhile, Michif, a language born from Cree verbs and French nouns that belonged to no one but the Métis People, has nearly vanished within living memory. Both losses are the same act: colonialism's weaponization of continuity. On the extinction of languages, the cutting of red threads, and what it means to inherit a chain with links already missing.

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