Category Archives: nayra

Excerpts from Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko (which I cannot recommend enough):

Perhaps the earth was spinning faster than before; rumors like this had circulated among tribal people since the First World War. Calabazas had heard the arguments the traditional believers had had among themselves- each accusing the other of being tainted by Mormonism or Methodism or the Catholic Church. But he had also heard them discuss the increased spin of the earth; others disagreed and had asserted it was instead the universe running downhill from a great peak and the increased speed was only temporary, before it reached the plain to slow gradually and regain a measure of stability.

Calabazas himself had no proof about the speed of the earth or about time. He did not think time was absolute or universal; rather each location, each place, was a living organism with time running inside it like blood, time that was unique to that place alone.



That week the Barefoot Hopi had talked about desecration. Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.

‘For me, understanding and reading 17th and 18th century colonial documents through Wabanaki political and cultural frameworks is part of a process of ôjmowôgan, the Abenaki word for history. The language tells us that “history” is a collective process of telling and re-telling, an ongoing activity in which we are all engaged.’

– Lisa Brooks, from https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/2976/page/4665/print

Silko explains that the Laguna view on the passage of time is responsible for this condition, stating, “The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away.”


Excerpts from https://publications.iai.spk-berlin.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/Document_derivate_00002030/BIA_055_067_081.pdf (this does include briefly the negative associations between q’iwa, homosexuality, and unproductivity that Elly mentions in the other thing I will link below, but think it is worth reading first if you are not familiar with the language/vocabulary for context before diving deeper):

Ethnomusicological studies in other parts of the world have noted correspondences between sound structure in music and social structure (e.g. Feld 1984). Similarly, I shall suggest that specific sounds used in musical perfor­mance, by certain peasant farmers in highland Bolivia, both appear to reflect and are perceived to manipulate social and cosmological structures. (note: see Noise by Jacques Attali for more on how musical relationships can affect new relationships in this world and beyond)



Whilst in the towns q’iwa is commonly translated as maricón or homosexual, in the countryside it is used in a less specific way to refer to a variety of aspects of gender mediation. A man with a high-pitched voice is q’iwa as is a woman who speaks in a low-pitched voice or acts like a man. Similarly the term is used to refer to men when they dress up in women’s clothes for certain rituals. But more specifically, on several occasions I have been told that q’iwa is khuskan qhari, khuskan warmi or “half-man, half-woman”. As such, q’iwa represents the conjunction of male and female, where the opposing sexes mix together equally.



Excerpts from https://www.momaps1.org/post/228-transcriptions-of-the-indigenous-and-migrant-justice-symposium:

Elly Crampton Chuquimia Quiñones-Tancara: In the 5th edition modern Aymara-Castellano dictionary, q’iwa & q’iwsa are treated as synonyms for queer people. Strategically, the new entries omit the anti-queer or bad character traits that have come to be associated with the terms (thank you Dr. Pairumani). We recall the musical or medicinal roles of these terms, which shows their unique medicinal or practical functions— for instance, the q’iwsa siku and q’iwa pinkillu. Q’iwsa also relates to the anti-spiral, unscrewing, twisting or luxation/dislocation, and q’iwa— the tears of our ancestors as qillqa, as writing, as language, joyful sadness. It is this medicine that also directs our roles as queer (q’iwa/q’iwsa) people for our communities, our relations, which is our ayni to the pachanaka, reciprocity to our people. The refusal of this medicine, brought by Christian doctrine, state law, and so forth, has caused a break in ayni that has yet to be paid back, or made just. In our commitment to our relations and the wak’as, our ancestors, we as queer people continue to give back what we owe, even when our medicine is so often mistaken for poison. We have a saying in our language, which is said many ways, but that I learned this way: qhipnayr uñtasisawa sarnaqaña. This is translated as: hay que mirar el pasado y el futuro para proyectarse en el presente—we must look at past and future in order to project ourselves in the present. Google translates it as: walking around looking backwards. Recalling the verb q’iwsuña, in the context of this phrase, we’re reminded that living in so-called reverse is also a perspective of balance. When it’s winter in our territories, it’s summer over here—to be in good relation with these lands I must live in reverse.

The phrase qhipnayara uñtasisawa sarnaqaña also implies we live with the ancestors in permanent encounter. The ancestors in our misperceived individuation, the elders of our elders, what physicists call the void, vacuum, the powerful small, where spacetime undoes—they say—somewhere around 10 minus 33 cm (a physicist told me that once). Can we understand that permanent encounter means we can give up the story of loss and recovery and remember what we already know, what cognitive neuroscience calls implicit or non-declarative memory, immemorable memory, which, as such, cannot be forgotten.



Ch’ixi indicates grayishness. Specifically, tiny spots, in contrast to the word allqa, which refers to big spots. This is important because allqa is associated with the contrasting colors that are seen as paired, and sometimes differentiated from q’iwa or queer medicine, which is frequently called lonely or single, separated from pairing (while q’iwsa also means “to remove something from its place,” we should be careful using q’iwa and q’iwsa as synonyms).

Through ch’ixi, what appears as a solid color, gray, is in fact made up of various spots. What is sometimes missed in the translation of the word ch’ixi, is that it also means a pile of small rocks, additionally, referring to the Pleiades constellation. Ch’ixi is also accumulated scree or the rocky debris that forms below mountains. Perhaps this recalls the image of our chullpas, the stone mounds that hold our eldest elders, in Paqajes. The spots & grayness of ch’ixi describe the titi felid or Andean cat, which the great Aymara scholar Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua drew as chuqui chinchay or qowa, writing this quote “very speckled animal” was “guardian of hermaphrodites, Indians of two natures.” Pachacuti also illustrates the relation, between the Pleiades, Venus, and chuqui chinchay or qowa the cat—our elders still speak these connections, as do confesionarios from the early colonial period.



It is in this context that Dr. Cusicanqui works our ancient queer medicines. Elaborating on that, we look at the suffix -naka, which is often referred to as a pluralizing suffix. Our elders tell us this suffix does not just indicate pluralization however, but variety, more precisely. So, when we say q’iwanaka and q’iwsanaka, we are referring to the manifold variations of so-called queer medicine. Re-sounding and practicing q’iwa and q’iwsa medicine is part of our ayni, our obligation of reciprocity as queer people. We say this in order to address the misunderstanding, of q’iwa, as unproductive, which comes with the historical violence of forced sterilization on queer people by the occupying states. Dormancy or repose, is not the same as unproductivity—Guamán Poma and his uncredited scribes and elders showed us this beautifully, in their planting ceremony illustrations.



This is why we listen to the tree, the bud, pankara, the butterfly, snail, ant, cricket, the trash, the river, the road that we set foot upon every day as stem, where we, as sariri, relay Tunupa, who they say changed from man to woman across the water, seemingly walking alone, only paired or connected across spacetimes. Recall the elders’ famous saying, translated as: “Do not pity q’iwa people, because they walk looking at the stars.” As mentioned, the last time we spoke, balance is a matter of perspective.



The pachanaka, or manifold spacetimes, stained us, jiwasa, before the creation of the World over our mother, the earth. Like titi, we were already stained before Europe arrived to these lands—very speckled, muy pintado, to quote elder Pachacuti again. This is the bittersweet red song, the lonely q’iwa melody, the transnocturnal huayño, the blood-red penumbra that spilled out as the chullpas mistakenly sang the first sunrise, seeing each other for the first time, individuated in sadness and joy, shared aloneness, speaking with tears, our first language: the birth of the mundo en policía, the policed world.



Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: Our languages have been colonized, our philosophers have been killed, our theorists have been killed, and we have been left with nothing but degraded words, only words reduced to their pragmatic meanings. Then it’s up to the new generations.



Because the thing about the potency of ch’ixi is that it’s indeterminate. It is neither male nor female, it is neither above nor below, but it is both at the same time.

It is both male and female, it is both above and below. So how can this be transferred to the human? One can be in two forms. Ch’i—The pronunciation is a little difficult because there is ch’ixi with aspirate [pronunciation] and there is ch’ixi with explosive [pronunciation]. Ch’ixi is soft, it is unlearned. And I’ve made it more understandable with the notion of Pa’churrima divided heart, divided soul like the “double bind” that Gayatri Spivak talks about, right? I mean, “double bind” is when you have one identity mandate and you have the opposite mandate. You have the mandate to be white, and you have the mandate to be Indigenous. And they are in a clash. But that causes schizophrenia, social schizophrenia, collective schizophrenia, and personal schizophrenia. And the ways to cure these schizophrenias are to find [how] to live with the contradiction of having this identity that has two roots. They force you to choose one to deny the other, and I refuse to ignore the fact that I am also white, that I also have European roots, and that I do not regret it because I am not to blame for having been born that way. So I want to liberate myself by recognizing the best, the most profoundly contentious of both dimensions.

https://moodle.swarthmore.edu/pluginfile.php/509827/mod_resource/content/2/Layli-Long-Soldier-Whereas.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3DrH7RFbbQekPXuE8px64gEETPlb7Qu8h8n6gqJjIkNFAT2drp_QnrNN0

38
by Layli Long Soldier

Here, the sentence will be respected.

I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate.

For example, all sentences will begin with capital letters.

Likewise, the history of the sentence will be honored by ending each one with appropriate punctuation such as a period or question mark, thus bringing the idea to (momentary) completion.

You may like to know, I do not consider this a “creative piece.”

I do not regard this as a poem of great imagination or a work of fiction.

Also, historical events will not be dramatized for an “interesting” read.

Therefore, I feel most responsible to the orderly sentence; conveyor of thought.

That said, I will begin.

You may or may not have heard about the Dakota 38.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of it, you might wonder, “What is the Dakota 38?”

The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln.

To date, this is the largest “legal” mass execution in US history.

The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas.

This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the preceding sentence, I italicize “same week” for emphasis.

There was a movie titled Lincoln about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was included in the film Lincoln; the hanging of the Dakota 38 was not.

In any case, you might be asking, “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hung?”

As a side note, the past tense of hang is hung, but when referring to the capital punishment of hanging, the correct past tense is hanged.

So it’s possible that you’re asking, “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hanged?”

They were hanged for the Sioux Uprising.

I want to tell you about the Sioux Uprising, but I don’t know where to begin.

I may jump around and details will not unfold in chronological order.

Keep in mind, I am not a historian.

So I will recount facts as best as I can, given limited resources and understanding.

Before Minnesota was a state, the Minnesota region, generally speaking, was the traditional homeland for Dakota, Anishinaabeg, and Ho-Chunk people.

During the 1800s, when the US expanded territory, they “purchased” land from the Dakota people as well as the other tribes.

But another way to understand that sort of “purchase” is: Dakota leaders ceded land to the US government in exchange for money or goods, but most importantly, the safety of their people.

Some say that Dakota leaders did not understand the terms they were entering, or they never would have agreed.

Even others call the entire negotiation “trickery.”

But to make whatever-it-was official and binding, the US government drew up an initial treaty.

This treaty was later replaced by another (more convenient) treaty, and then another.

I’ve had difficulty unraveling the terms of these treaties, given the legal speak and congressional language.

As treaties were abrogated (broken) and new treaties were drafted, one after another, the new treaties often referenced old defunct treaties, and it is a muddy, switchback trail to follow.

Although I often feel lost on this trail, I know I am not alone.

However, as best as I can put the facts together, in 1851, Dakota territory was contained to a twelve-mile by one-hundred-fifty-mile long strip along the Minnesota River.

But just seven years later, in 1858, the northern portion was ceded (taken) and the southern portion was (conveniently) allotted, which reduced Dakota land to a stark ten-mile tract.

These amended and broken treaties are often referred to as the Minnesota Treaties.

The word Minnesota comes from mni, which means water; and sota, which means turbid.

Synonyms for turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused, and smoky.

Everything is in the language we use.

For example, a treaty is, essentially, a contract between two sovereign nations.

The US treaties with the Dakota Nation were legal contracts that promised money.

It could be said, this money was payment for the land the Dakota ceded; for living within assigned boundaries (a reservation); and for relinquishing rights to their vast hunting territory which, in turn, made Dakota people dependent on other means to survive: money.

The previous sentence is circular, akin to so many aspects of history.

As you may have guessed by now, the money promised in the turbid treaties did not make it into the hands of Dakota people.

In addition, local government traders would not offer credit to “Indians” to purchase food or goods.

Without money, store credit, or rights to hunt beyond their ten-mile tract of land, Dakota people began to starve.

The Dakota people were starving.

The Dakota people starved.

In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis.

One should read “The Dakota people starved” as a straightforward and plainly stated fact.

As a result—and without other options but to continue to starve—Dakota people retaliated.

Dakota warriors organized, struck out, and killed settlers and traders.

This revolt is called the Sioux Uprising.

Eventually, the US Cavalry came to Mnisota to confront the Uprising.

More than one thousand Dakota people were sent to prison.

As already mentioned, thirty-eight Dakota men were subsequently hanged.

After the hanging, those one thousand Dakota prisoners were released.

However, as further consequence, what remained of Dakota territory in Mnisota was dissolved (stolen).

The Dakota people had no land to return to.

This means they were exiled.

Homeless, the Dakota people of Mnisota were relocated (forced) onto reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska.

Now, every year, a group called the Dakota 38 + 2 Riders conduct a memorial horse ride from Lower Brule, South Dakota, to Mankato, Mnisota.

The Memorial Riders travel 325 miles on horseback for eighteen days, sometimes through sub-zero blizzards.

They conclude their journey on December 26, the day of the hanging.

Memorials help focus our memory on particular people or events.

Often, memorials come in the forms of plaques, statues, or gravestones.

The memorial for the Dakota 38 is not an object inscribed with words, but an act.

Yet, I started this piece because I was interested in writing about grasses.

So, there is one other event to include, although it’s not in chronological order and we must backtrack a little.

When the Dakota people were starving, as you may remember, government traders would not extend store credit to “Indians.”

One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal to provide credit to Dakota people by saying, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

There are variations of Myrick’s words, but they are all something to that effect.

When settlers and traders were killed during the Sioux Uprising, one of the first to be executed by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.

When Myrick’s body was found,

                                                                               his mouth was stuffed with grass.

I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.

There’s irony in their poem.

There was no text.

“Real” poems do not “really” require words.

I have italicized the previous sentence to indicate inner dialogue, a revealing moment.

But, on second thought, the words “Let them eat grass” click the gears of the poem into place.

So, we could also say, language and word choice are crucial to the poem’s work.

Things are circling back again.

Sometimes, when in a circle, if I wish to exit, I must leap.

And let the body                                                   swing.

From the platform.

                                                                                Out

                                                                                                                        to the grasses.

“In my study, I noticed something interesting about the etymology of “genre” and “gender.” Both words come from the Latin word “genus,” translating to “race.” It was an enlightening discovery to learn that “race,” “gender,” “genre,” and even “class” all come from the same word in Latin, thereby having the same function.”

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/387112/noise-is-the-nigga-of-sound/

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/138/553676/who-haunts/

https://www.e-flux.com/notes/575616/how-to-haunt-oppenheimer-and-black-hanford?utm_campaign=later-linkinbio-e_flux&utm_content=later-39391406&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkin.bio

https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80952&page=1#.Tymk41wltKI
https://www.gallupsun.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17065:letter-to-the-editor-honoring-larry-casuse&catid=185:letters-to-the-editor&Itemid=615

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/fifty-years-later-casuse-an-ancestor-and-a-predecessor-in-indigenous-struggle/article_a0e706b8-b2ee-11ed-88c2-372450fae035.html

https://indypendent.org/2022/05/the-brief-brave-life-of-larry-casuse/

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/download/22829/19320/58582

“I am certainly aware that negative emotions such as anger and resentment have the potential to manifest themselves in disempowering and violent ways, I am not advocating for Indigenous peoples to be angry or to harbor hatred for the colonial world; rather, I am advocating that we love ourselves. At the same time, I am exploring my own resentment (or ressentiment) and attempting to apply my own understanding of Hul’qumi’num’ practice as a starting point to express emotions other than love. Finally, I remain unconvinced that ressentiment is not defensible as a potentially transformative subjectivity or affective reaction to the practices of the Canadian state in the past and present. The Western tradition is particularly obsessed with time, inventing different times (Fabian, 1983), exploitation of time, transcending time, evolution through time and so on. This is true for their conception of resentment and harm, that “ressentiment nails us to the past, blocks the exit to the future, twists or disorders the time-sense of the person trapped in it” (Brudholm, 2006, p. 21). For Hul’qumi’num’qun’ nations, we are more concerned with place, but in our big house when a harm or transgression is committed, it is addressed before the ceremony or family can move forward, and nobody in attendance is allowed to leave until there is resolution witnessed and the place where the incident occurred is cleansed by the women.

In Hul’qumi’num’, teytiyuq translates to angry, whereas qul’sthaat translates as anger that involves the entire body. The root words of qul’sthaat are qul’ and qul’aan. Qul’ is our word for eye, and qul’aan means a terrible thing that happened (in the past) that can be fixed, which suggests that some things can not be fixed. For Hul’qumi’num’qun’, anger is an embodied experience that is localized in our eyes and in our vision, how we see the world and how we are seen. For Hul’qumi’num’qun’, there are different forms of anger. Individuals must engage in certain practices to ensure protection for themselves and others from that anger, but certainly no outsider can assess the validity of another’s anger. Depending on the form, we have different practices that function to cleanse those feelings so that they do not harm that person or others in their family and community. Traditionally, and especially during ceremony today, if we are sad or angry we are instructed to not look other people in the eye for fear of hurting them, we say that our eyes are sharp. These cleansing practices, however, do not banish that anger and ask the person to forget, they are concerned with protecting the people from that anger so that it is not directed inward. Given that the violent colonial history of domination and dispossession of Indigenous peoples continues to structure our daily lives and has profound affects on our health, colonial rage overtly and covertly shapes our relations with self and Others. Indigenous women’s voices including those of love and anger must prefigure the politics of resistance and approaches to solidarity.



In the city, in the classroom, or at a protest, there is always a settler seeking my recognition. She wants me to recognize that she is distanced from the others. She is innocent. Through her look, the Other wants me to see that she is a good settler, an ally. But my only thought is: Don’t smile at me. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) demonstrates the futility of appealing to the Other for recognition and instead identifies the enemy, “since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known” (p. 92). Similarly, when Indigenous peoples deploy ‘settler’ it identifies the enemy, whereas, when deployed by settlers it is often depoliticized and neutralized rather than counter-performative in its function. When the colonized are not grateful or fail to recognize and commend the self-decolonizing of the settler, we are resented.



A settler political will should be willful, that is, willing to disobey a general will and always working toward an alternative future. Revolution is only possible when subjects violate the directives of commanding bodies, a willing willfulness to create the world anew by opposing the old orders (Foucault, 1982, p. 336). The will to change is simultaneously a negation and an affirmation. It is, as Foucault (1982) writes, “through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us” that new forms of subjectivity emerge (p. 336). The political will of decolonization refuses to reproduce the present and affirms alternative futures.”

Excerpts from “What’s on the earth is in the stars; and what’s in the stars is on the earth”: Lakota Relationships with the Stars and American Relationships with the Apocalypse
by Suzanne Kite (https://www.c21uwm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Kite_Whats-on-earth-is-in-the-stars_2021.pdf):

The same logic that allows for the consumption of Indigenous spiritual practices allows for the possession and destruction of the land and nonhumans. That same logic sees nonhuman extraterrestrials as simultaneously futuristic and evolved or reptilian and nefarious. In this many-headed imagining of the alien colonization of Earth, the Euro-American becomes “indigenous” through the act of being attacked, a distorted metaphor and a move to innocence for the invasions that are promised during American wars: the attack of the Japanese and Nazis, the attack of Communists, and the ongoing promised attacks on “freedom” by immigrants, Asian Americans, Latinx laborers, BLM activists, antifascists, Muslims, and whoever else is designated an enemy by the United States. Only through violence and war are settler futures imagined.



In examining the geography of a haunted space, one can imagine the American map like Borges’s Unconscionable Map laid over the land itself. The new map that has been laid over the continent is haunted by the land just beneath the surface. An American mythological past is created through the blending of the paranormal with the landscape, an attempt to embed a settler past to create a settler future. Revealing the bias of settler sciences requires examining settler desires and beliefs, which ultimately form new myths and new gods. Over the relatively short history of the American identity, American mythologies have been developed through song, costume, literature, policy, and media. The phenomenon of Tumblr witches or the post-1970 desire to invent American Indian ancestors speaks to the desperation of the American to create their indigeneity.



In the Euro-American context, ghosts are defined by both Christian teachings and Spiritualist understandings, even thought of as possible results of time travelers, “humanoids,” and other paranormal theories about hauntings. Looking toward cultural phenomena such as the stories of Washington Irving, the adoption of Hallowe’en, the explosion of spiritualism in 1848, and the satanic panic in the 1990s, it is clear that much of the American paranormal landscape is a direct manifestation of European conceptualizations of the afterlife and borrowed mythologies that have been laid over on top of the Americas, resulting in a pantheon of phenomena which persist today. In contemporary paranormal media, hauntings often start in the late 1800s, coinciding with the era of American Spiritualists. During the Spiritualist movement in particular, Euro-Americans living on “American” land were holding séances, while Indians living on Indian land were being starving to death and actively murdered as a part of the genocidal project. The idea of a haunting on Turtle Island, or any location, implies layers of beliefs, layers of living and the dead cohabitating: Americans, Canadians, white settlers implanting their own ghosts, layering their own stories over the top of the map, an attempt to retroactively own that location.



In a recent conversation, artist Scott Benesiinaabandan spoke about the popularity of paranormal media: “Most non-indigenous people’s interaction with the mystery is they want to provoke it. This is like talking ghost stories around a campfire, right? They want proof or they want the thrill. They want to put their finger in the dark well of the mystery, but they’re not really wanting to be in that whole lake of mystery.”



In 1998, a group of Dene elders from Northwest Canada traveled to Hiroshima to meet with survivors and descendants of survivors of the atomic bomb dropped some fifty years earlier. Some of the uranium used to kill more than 200,000 people in Japan had been mined and transported by Dene men, many of whom died years later from radiation-related disease. The six Dene elders came from where the earth had been torn up to the place where earth and sky were ripped apart like never before. They came to Hiroshima to apologize and to recognize the shared radioactive reality between people touched by the detonation of the bomb and those who unwittingly touched the materials that would make such a weapon. Nobody from the Canadian government was present, none among those who had exploited the miner’s bodies and their homelands and willingly aided the construction of the atomic bomb ever made the journey.



Stones, taken from Indigenous lands using Indigenous bodies, and transformed into radioactive materials, is the material result of the American fear of the unknown enfolded with fear of nuclear radiation and executed as warfare and violence. This will be the materials of further colonization into space.



Rieder proposes that “the way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures, but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate on another.” The colonial sense of progress is indelibly fixed to an unrelenting linear timeline towards a settler future, where Indigenous peoples are the uncivilized past, American white-superiority the present, and Mars colonization and extraterrestrials the future.

Excerpts from Postmodernism Is Not Permission by Kite (https://forgeproject.com/forging/postmodernism-is-not-permission#num-1):

Indigenous practices were acutely attacked by settler governments to specifically erode our ontological values. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim Tallbear explains how “monogamy and marriage are also part of sustaining an animacy hierarchy in which some bodies are viewed as more animate, alive, and vibrant than others.”

Intimacy is political and centuries of colonial policies in North America have sought to destroy Indigenous political power. Citing Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson writes, “the murdering, disappearing, and erasing of Indigenous women is necessary for Canada to secure and legitimize its sovereignty because they house and reproduce Indigenous political orders. This isn’t true just for Indigenous women, but it is also true for queer bodies and children because these Indigenous bodies have always housed and acted out Indigenous power, political and otherwise.”

For Indigenous people intimacy and closeness of relationships with family and the spirit world are the core of political power. Simpson continues, “All of our political structures are plugged into the essence and real power of life that exists across time and space as worlds of nonhuman beings, some of which are spiritual beings and some of which are our Ancestors.” Destruction of kinship with kin—material and immaterial—is the destruction of the whole.



Artmaking and creation with Lakȟóta epistemologies is one way I approach the reorientation of my relationship with materials. Lakȟóta intimacies with the nonhuman allow for the potential manipulation of time and space into active cosmic vortexes, beyond the settler map. These Kapemni or twisting vortexes are created through ceremony that takes place with and through the nonhuman, in the deepest intertwinement and intra-actions, intimacies where we as mere humans cannot fabricate or ignore or manipulate the nonhuman agency necessary to make immense transformations of bodies and spirits and objects. “The distinction between natural and supernatural, so basic to European thought, was meaningless in Lakȟóta culture,” writes David C. Posthumus. “Humans are not superior” in Lakȟóta ontology, they are “pitiful and helpless” younger siblings of the animal world.