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I have been thinking about Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human along with Ye-weh-node’s teachings in Language of the Stones and elsewhere.  I have been thinking about what Glen Coulthard says about the connection that the Yellowknives Dene feel with the land — that the land does not belong to them, but they belong to the land — and how this is a common belief amongst the various Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.  And I have been thinking of the words I heard from a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Elder who said, “We have different languages because we come from different lands.  It is the land that gave us our language.  We speak because the land gave us speech and different lands speak differently.”

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1.  Sorrows, Joys, and Bullshit

First of all, there are the wounds, the traumas, and the irrecoverable losses.  There are the children taken by the agents of government, the innocence taken by the hands of men, and the physical mobility taken by the front bumper and rear left tire of a careless driver.  These wounds are the great sorrows.  They are the ones that leave empty spaces on our insides and our outsides, where parts of our selves used to be but no longer are.  Or, as is so often the case with deaths and dyings (for Death is not so much The End as our constant companion on the way there), they leave spaces inside of us filled with the presence of a person who is no longer with us bodily.  Every day, you are present with me, but as an absence.  Every day, I remember what I used to be able to believe, but believe no longer. Every day.

Second, there are the great joys.  The moments of beauty that leave us breathless — waves smashing on rocks that send spray thirty feet into the air, the embrace of a lover, deer that come from the woods by the river and walk and stand and stare as though they are unafraid, and trees that remember and still sing of what there was to see before we were here.  These joys are a balm upon our wounds.  They are comfort in the midst of our sorrows.  They are moments when we can rest or revel in these bodies that we are and that are, no matter how marked, still so very much alive.

First the great sorrows, then the great joys.  Things go in that order.  When we are hurt we awaken to the world as a place into which we have been thrown — a place that is foreign and alien and Other.  Consciousness — of the kind that arrived all those years ago when a man and woman ate from a tree called the knowledge of good and evil — begins here.  But it doesn’t stop there because, when we are loved, we learn that we can also call this world good.  So first the great sorrows and then the great joys.

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The First Part: Surveillance & Audiences

I was thinking of going offline to get away from the distraction and the all-pervasive surveillance but then I got worried I would miss my f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶s̶  audience.  I mean, sure, I want to be spectacular — look at me! look at me! — but I want to be spectacular on my own terms.  I want to show you myself so that you respond by loving me, not so that unseen but always present – and we know they are always present, they are in the very coding of these pages – audience members will manipulate me or punish me or find ways to take my money.  But if I can’t have the audience I desire, I suppose I’d rather be exploited than ignored.  And I guess I’d rather have someone peeping in my windows at night than have nobody ever think of me at all.  I’ll turn on all the lights and leave the curtains open when I’m changing if that’s what it takes.

~

Once upon a time, two people “made love on the living room floor/ with the noise in the background of a televised war” but smart bombs have given way to smart phones and instead of television we have Skype or snapchat or tinder or grindr and if we can’t warm ourselves with someone else’s body, we can make love to ourselves with their image.  I’m not alone if I’m watching someone else.

Of course, we’re still bombing the life out of all kinds of other people, but it’s old news by now.  Perpetual war is kind of taken for granted.  War and loneliness are pretty much all there is anymore.  It’s so perfectly normal to be so utterly isolated.

Isn’t social media a wonderful panacea to living a life where we spend the vast majority of our time working bullshit jobs and surrounded by people we hardly know or care about?  Fuck, I’m too tired and busy and stressed and broke to ever be able to set aside time to spend with love ones… but 65 people wished me a happy birthday on Facebook! And the ads have been getting ever better at showing me things I want to buy with the money for which I have traded my life, so that’s nice.

~

I remember talking to some sex workers who started when they were very young (14 is the average age of entry into sex work in Canada).  When they first started and people told them they were being exploited (if they had anybody in their lives to say that kind of thing to them) they would laugh and point to their new fur coat or new jewelry or point out they were already making more money in a few months than most people make in five years… but two years or ten years or twenty-six years (40 is the average age of death for a sex worker in Canada) down the road, they often looked back and thought, yeah, I really was being exploited.  But, by then… well… a lot had happened by then.

Seems to me that Social Media has a similar relationship with us.  We’re so enamoured with the things it gives us, it makes it easy to forget that we’re getting fucked.

But our pages are eternal – there’s no slide from high track to low track, from private jets and Fortune 500 CEOs to five dollar blowjobs behind the Carnegie Centre, from living it up to dying – so maybe we’ll never have to know.

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We didn’t think they’d rise
And even if they did, we figured they’d understand
That we only voted strategically
—–Our hearts were elsewhere
———-I’d have voted Green if it wasn’t such a waste
—–But anyone but Harper sounded too good to pass up.
———-How can we be to blame
—————When we voted him out?
We didn’t think they’d rise
And even if they did, we figured they’d understand
After all, we drove a Prius
—–And bought organic, local-grown
———-Fruits and vegetables
—–And our hundred dollar sweaters
———-Were purchased through a fair trade arrangement
—————Between the store at the mall and a village in Thailand
We didn’t think they’d rise
And even if they did, we figured they’d understand
That although our tax dollars purchased bombs
—–We rather wished they’d didn’t
———-Plus there’s a peace sign on the bumper of our Prius
—–And although we funded the murder of entire villages in the Middle East
———-We sponsor a child in Mexico
—————Her picture is on the fridge next to the ice dispenser
We didn’t think they’d rise
And even if they did, we figured they’d understand
That although we’re middleclass settlers
—–We visited Occupy encampments
———-And dropped off socks at the shelter at Christmas
—–And we applauded idle no more
———-Even though we have no Indigneous friends
—————They just didn’t seem to be around
We didn’t think they’d rise
And even if they did, we figured they’d be merciful
Even though we were not
—–Because we wanted something different
———-And used gender neutral language
—–Because that wasn’t really us
———-We didn’t pull the triggers
—————Or fly the planes or give the orders
We didn’t think they’d rise
And even if they did, we figured they’d be merciful
Because surely there cannot be others as cruel as us
—–With no regard for the lives of children
———-Or the bodies of women and men
—–It’s not our fault they were downwind
———-Of Tar Sands or Chemical Valley
—————Or Free Trade agreements and Private Property
We didn’t think they’d rise
And even if they did, we figured they’d be merciful
Because our kids at least are innocent
—–Although theirs were too before we killed them
———-Or maimed them or took them away
—–But that’s not the point
———-We didn’t think they’d rise
—————We hardly thought of them at all

[What follows is the transcript of the material I tried to present at a conference called Streetlevel.  It’s a conference for people working in social services that are rooted in the Christian faith.  As you will see in what follows, I see this as an highly problematical endeavour.  However, given the audience and given my own background in textual criticism, especially in relation to the New Testament, I found it useful to use language, stories, and characters familiar to the audience in order to try and make some of my points.]
“How can I be healthy, when I’m already dead?”  Confronting the dominance of the medical model within social services, with an oppression-informed analysis
Opening
I will begin by recognizing that I am speaking while occupying land that Creator has gifted to the keeping of the Anishinaabe and shared with the Haudenosaunee and Lenape.  I lift my hands to these caretakers of the land and thank them for allowing people like me to live, work, play, and settle in their territories beside the Askunessippi and all across Turtle Island.  As a Settler, I benefit from the ongoing project of Settler colonialism as it plays out in the occupied territories named “Canada” on the maps we learned in school (maps that no longer show European colonies like Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo or Spanish Guinea, but which continue to show Canada).  In these territories, more than six hundred Indigenous nations have been the target of genocidal practices and policies from before independence up until the present day.  In all of this, the government of Canada, the Christian churches, the charities, and all the settlers and citizens of the nation, have been implicated.  Indeed, it is necessary to acknowledge from the beginning that as a white male settler of Christian European descent, I am a beneficiary of the genocidal process of colonization that has secured for me legal rights, access to wealth and education, and political and social status.  So, it is with a sense of my own liability and responsibility that I express my thanksgiving and lift my hands to the caretakers of the land I occupy. Chi-miigwetch.
In light of this history of genocide, so tightly woven together with the history of Christianity, it is often difficult to think or speak of God, and just as difficult to think about prayer.  However, I want to open with a prayer I learned from an elder in Vancouver’s downtown eastside.  After sharing some of his story of surviving in a Christian-run residential school, a student in a class I was helping to lead asked this elder what he now thought of God.  The student was doing what I have seen lots of Christians do – she was struggling to really hear this story of abuse, to see how it was intimately linked to Christianity, and to then respond in a manner that genuinely sought to enter into communion with the man sharing.  It seemed as though she was more upset by the idea that a person may have drifted away from the Christian God because of this experience (because she was convinced that Jesus Christ was not represented but misrepresented in residential schools and that the people who did such horrible things were not really Christians, even though they called themselves Christians). She was wanted to highlight the importance of maintaining a sense of one’s relationship with the Christian God.  She was, in other words, trying to be both sensitive and missional (these two characteristics will come up a lot in what follows).  In response to this line of questioning, the elder was very gracious.  He did not say too much but he did say that there was a prayer that he learned from one of his elders.  This was a prayer he could still pray.  It is one I can still pray, too, and I will pray it now:
Creator, may this day be good.
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This is the part about things
Looking back on myself now, I am amazed at the ease with which I spoke of some things. To speak of any thing at all (as if things are things-that-are) is increasingly an absurdity. But all this absurdity is pragmatic. Names are lies and violence and beyond any imaginable bounds of belief or justification, but we name everything (every thing, too, is a name – even if names are also not things-that-are) and so we are able to continue to maximize our efficiency in waking and sleeping and working and paying off credit card bills and taxes and fines and drug dealers (pharmacists?) and everyone else who takes the money for which we are trading our lives. Language may be ideology and fiction, but it works. And I may also be ideology and fiction but I work, too – pretty much everything is structured to ensure that I do. And if I don’t, don’t worry, there are employment resource centres and shelters and social workers to punish me (support me?) for as long as I’m unemployed and to try their damnedest to get me back to living in order to work for money as soon as possible.
Ten years from now, if this fiction that I lie about and name “my life” or “myself” is still being written (as if it is being written, as if it’s a text, as if there’s an author, as if it is, as if I am an I-that-am), I imagine I’ll look back at all of this and be amazed at the ease with which I spoke of it.
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I.
We were holding hands when we walked over the ridge of the dune and saw them. There were three of them. Bigger than newborns but still young enough to be with their mom (at first I wondered if they had been orphaned but a minute later I saw her – she was standing back amongst the trees and scrub and she had seen us long before we spotted her). There was nobody else on the beach and they were playing and jumping on each other. They were dashing towards the water and bouncing back, then dashing, then bouncing, then dashing, then bouncing – as though they had never seen water like this before and it thrilled them and filled them with wonder and joy and the kind of fear that is fun to feel – the kind that is exciting to face into, not the kind that seems bigger than we are.
We held hands and we watched. What did we witness? Three children playing and rejoicing in the world into which they had been thrown. My children were much the same when they went to the beach. Only these children were a little older and they were playing and rejoicing in their own bodies and the strength that was growing within them. And they were all playing together – playing with each other just as much as they were playing with the water and the sand.
Eventually they caught our scent and they turned and bounded over the sand to join their mother, white tails high in the air, wagging back and forth like flags. They made it look effortless.
I wanted to kiss you at that moment.
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I continue to think a lot about Haiti these days. In many ways, I think it is a microcosm of the best and worst of the world that came to be with the rise of capitalism. The history of oppression, of profits over people, of rapacious violence brought to bear upon human beings seeking little more than freedom and their own bit of land to cultivate, is absolutely appalling. The history of resistance to that oppression, the refusal to give in to Death — despite the extent and severity of the violence — the constant uprisings of Life, Life that will not be killed, Life that will not remain dead, is astounding.
Every now and then I try to talk about this with some of my sensitive bourgeois white friends, many of whom are Christians (as is Aristide, as were the French slave traders). I say things like, “The only successful slave revolt in history!” and “I wonder how all of this might provide insight into our own context!” What is the universal response I receive from these kind-hearted people? “Yeah, but what happened? Once they got free, didn’t the leaders just turn on their own people? Didn’t they just end up replicating similar power imbalances – isn’t there now a small percentage of elite, wealthy Haitians oppressing a large number of poor Haitians?  It didn’t really work, did it?”
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