Arts, Faculty of
History, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Horner, Geoffrey Allen
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This thesis is an exploration of academic methodologies including scholarly distance, the archive, and linear time, using the insights that I gained as a researcher and friend with Refugio Gregorio Bautista, a Nu Savi traditional food chef from Oaxaca; Mexico, Pedro Herminio Bautista Rojas, also Nu Savi from Oaxaca and an agricultural expert; and Jaalen Edenshaw, a Haida carver from Masset, B.C.. During my time with these three indigenous people and their communities, I learned about different aspects of their ancestral practices, and participated in different ways in their work, planting, cooking Oaxacan chocolate mole sauce, as well as sharing stories and experiences. In this dissertation, I use the insights that I have gained so far from my experience with them to explore ways in which the three central tools of the disciplines of history and anthropology are limiting due to a legacy of the trivialization of non-written ways of knowing. Though some scholars are increasingly focused on the embodied aspects of scholarly work that often go unacknowledged or unappreciated, my experience with Pedro, Doña Vicky and Jaalen has opened me to the possibility of ways of knowing that put embodiment and relationships to the land at the centre of knowing. Through a dialogue with academic sources and with the three participants, I traverse different facets of the construction of knowledge as it takes place in academic settings where people rely heavily on visual and textual systems for the production of truth and meaning.
94Chapter 2Opening and Viewing the Chapter 2 Video essayChapter 2 of my dissertation is a video essay to be watched on your computer. Made in collaboration with Doña Vicky (Refugio Gregorio Bautista), Jaalen Edenshaw, and Pedro Herminio Bautista Rojas, the video explores their ancestral practices. After reading the In-troduction and Chapter 1, please find the files for the video essay in Supplemental Materials at the following location:https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/44078Note: If you are reading this document from the supplementary URL location, you will already be looking at the file listing.95To view the video essay with the subtitles, I strongly recommend using VLC Media player, a well established, free, open source, cross-platform media viewer.To download VLC, click here: www.videolan.orgViewing Instructions1) Download all of the video files to a folder on your computer.2) I’ve split the video essay into three files. Each .AVI file has an accompanying .SRT file of the same name that contains the English subtitles for that part:Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.aviHorner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.srtHorner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p2.aviHorner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p2.srtHorner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p3.aviHorner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p3.srt3) Open the first file (Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.avi) in VLC and the subtitles should load automatically. Press the “S” key to cycle the subtitles Off if you do not require them.NOTE: If the subtitles do not load automatically, go to the Video menu: Video -> Subtitles track -> Open File... and choose the subtitles file (.SRT) that has the same name as the AVI file you are watching (e.g., “Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.srt” for “Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.avi” and so on).4) When you are finished watching the first part, open the second and third AVI files (P2 & P3) in VLC. caminando y miando: a Reflection on academic PRactice by GeoffRey allen HoRneR B.a., the University of British columbia, 1998 m.a., the University of British columbia, 2003 a tHeSiS SUBmitted in PaRtial fUlfilment of tHe ReQUiRementS foR tHe deGRee of doctoR of PHiloSoPHy in tHe facUlty of GRadUate StUdieS (History) tHe UniVeRSity of BRitiSH colUmBia (Vancouver) march 2013 © Geoffrey allen Horner, 2013 ii abstract this thesis is an exploration of academic methodologies including scholarly distance, the ar- chive, and linear time, using the insights that i gained as a researcher and friend with Refugio Gregorio Bautista, a nu Savi traditional food chef from oaxaca; mexico, Pedro Herminio Bautista Rojas, also nu Savi from oaxaca and an agricultural expert; and Jaalen edenshaw, a Haida carver from masset, B.c.. during my time with these three indigenous people and their communities, i learned about different aspects of their ancestral practices, and par- ticipated in different ways in their work, planting, cooking oaxacan chocolate mole sauce, as well as sharing stories and experiences. in this dissertation, i use the insights that i have gained so far from my experience with them to explore ways in which the three central tools of the disciplines of history and anthropology are limiting due to a legacy of the trivializa- tion of non-written ways of knowing. though some scholars are increasingly focused on the embodied aspects of scholarly work that often go unacknowledged or unappreciated, my experience with Pedro, doña Vicky and Jaalen has opened me to the possibility of ways of knowing that put embodiment and relationships to the land at the centre of knowing. through a dialogue with academic sources and with the three participants, i traverse dif- ferent facets of the construction of knowledge as it takes place in academic settings where people rely heavily on visual and textual systems for the production of truth and meaning. iii preface i have been very honoured to be able to work and share with doña Vicky (Refugio Gre- gorio Bautista), Jaalen edenshaw and Pedro Herminio Bautista Rojas, each of whom are very skilled and kind individuals. each has been a patient and generous interlocutor for me, guiding me on a path of changing awareness. the work that i present in this dissertation includes video footage of each of them in interviews, and, in chapter 2, the video essay, as they practice their craft. Beyond simply research subjects, they are crucial to the ideas i’ve developed here. it is important to state, however, that this entire work follows a journey that centres around my own experience and, as such, my statements are the result of my own thought process. Responsibility for errors or misinterpretations lie squarely with me, and as i have developed further in the thesis that follows, my representation of the three people is bound to my own experience and cannot be translated into a generalization of all Haida or all nu Savi people – nor all aboriginal people. instead, i have followed my own path that has led me to the narrative that unfolds on the pages that follow. in accordance with practice at UBc, i have pursued this project with the approval of the UBc Behavioural Research ethics Board, review number H09-00800. as i have created this project, i have worked in video and in a database that i have written in web programming languages (PHP, Javascript, Html, cSS, Python, and based on a mySQl database). as i outline in appendix 1, the core interactive functionality of the database is to link text and video, such that the audio visual footage is text searchable and relationships can be made between keywords, citations, my writing in the chapters and the video itself. i learned of this concept, and adopted some aspects of the programming model from linc Kessler, a professor at the first nations House of learning at UBc, who developed the interactive Video/transcript Viewer (http://fnsp.arts.ubc.ca/initiatives/interactive- videotranscript-viewer.html). Because of the requirement to submit an unchanging text document to the university, as well as the practical problems of compatibility and security posed by maintaining such a resource in the long term, the interactive database is not a part of my submission of the thesis, however, it has been the principal tool i have used for or- ganizing my transcription, video, references and citations, and the writing itself. in order to create a document for final submission, following the recommendations of Max Read in the faculty of Graduate Studies at UBc, i have used indesign to typeset and import video clips into an interactive Pdf. pLease NOte: tHiS diSSeRtation Pdf HaS emBedded Video. tHe Video can only Be VieWed WHen tHe Pdf iS oPened in aDObe reaDer oR aDObe acrObat. you can download adobe Reader for free at: http://get.adobe.com/reader/ iv tabLe Of cONteNts abstract ................................................................................................................................................ ii Preface ................................................................................................................................................ iii table of contents .............................................................................................................................. iv list of figures ..................................................................................................................................... v acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... vii dedication ........................................................................................................................................... ix introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1 chapter one: Positioning Sources / Working across distinct epistemologies .................... 57 chapter two: Video essay ............................................................................................................. 94 chapter three: Caminando y Miando ............................................................................................... 96 chapter four: Knowledge-in-Relation: embodied Ways of Knowing and the Strategies of Blindness .............................................................................................. 133 epilogue ............................................................................................................................................ 195 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 209 appendix 1: the database as Research tool ............................................................................. 219 vList Of figures Pedro, topic: Pedro interview - nahual....................................................................................... 1 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview traditional Knowledge............................................................ 18 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview ciPo-Rfm............................................................................... 24 doña Vicky, topic: doña Vicky comidas mixtecas.................................................................. 57 Jaalen, topic: Jaalen interview tradition..................................................................................... 72 Jaalen, topic: Jaalen interview Haida art.................................................................................... 86 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview necesidades - territory............................................................ 99 doña Vicky, topic: doña Vicky Sazon de la mano................................................................. 107 doña Vicky, topic: doña Vicky cultura de la comida.......................................................... 108 doña Vicky, topic: doña Vicky cultura de la comida.......................................................... 114 Jaalen, topic: Jaalen interview Haida art................................................................................. 115 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview traditional Knowledge........................................................... 116 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview traditional Knowledge........................................................... 118 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview traditional Knowledge........................................................... 120 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview traditional Knowledge........................................................... 130 Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Influence on Carving.............................................................. 133 Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Influence on Carving.............................................................. 145 Pedro, topic: Pedro Video essay feedback 2010.11.13......................................................... 148 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview - nahual.................................................................................... 151 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview - nahual.................................................................................... 153 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview necesidades - territory......................................................... 154 Pedro, topic: Pedro interview Semillas transgenicas............................................................. 193 vi the dashboard or openning screen of the database ............................................................ 219 Subtitle logging with topic, Reel, timecode in and out, and multilingual subtitle .............................................................................................................. 220 Browsable list of keywords with relatied subtitles and other keywords .............................. 221 a pop-up showing the relationship between a keyword ‘discipline of anthropology and a statement from Jaalen in the transcription .......................................... 222 Using the plugin to export a reference from Zotero to the database ................................. 223 an imported Zotero reference in the database ....................................................................... 223 a book reference with citations in the database ..................................................................... 223 the Stories editor showing chapter 4 and a footnote pop-up with a citation from the canadian museum of civilization website .............................................................. 224 Search result showing video clips available for viewing in a pop-up player ....................... 225 the video player cued up to play a sentence about “quelites” ............................................. 226 a transcription search result shown in context within a topic ............................................. 226 vii ackNOwLeDgemeNts i have had incredible luck to have the generosity of many people in completing this project over several years. i would like to thank doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro for their trust and confidence in me that made this thesis possible. Along with their families, they are life-long friends who have been a key part of a big change in my life and i am very grateful to them. taking dr. William e. french’s class in latin american History many years ago triggered an important life change, changing my dreams from a life in engineering to one in arts that was much more suited to my identity. Bill has been my advisor and friend for many years now and i have been fortunate to have him supervise this project and thank him for taking a risk on the very unconventional direction it has taken. in addition, my committee, Bill, coll thrush and carla nappi, have been inspiring to talk to and worked very quickly to turn around the comments of my draft. their suggestions have been critical to giving this work shape. my family has been an amazing support. my parents, Jane and Keith, have gone along with me and helped me in many important ways throughout this journey. my aunt and uncle, John and Sidney madden have been endlessly generous with their time, and with a place to stay over the years, thank you so much. i have had many discussions of my ideas with my aunt mary, uncle Roger, aunt Heather and brother alex. all of my extended family have had a dose of what i’ve been up to at different points. Gahyaah, norman Price, was an excellent friend to me in Skidegate, giving me a place to stay and sharing his language and family with me. i feel his presence even though he has passed on. i would like to give thanks to nick and etchi for introducing me to Haida Gwaii and being life time friends and giving me amazing support. Joshua Schwab has been a constant source of feedback and help throughout this whole process. our regular skype conversations keep me on track and full of ideas, thanks Josh. i would like to thank Raul Gatica and ciPo- Van and ciPo-Rfm members, for making my connection to oaxaca so strong. along with Pedro, don felis and doña maría in Plan de Zaragoza have been great hosts to me and welcomed me into their milpa and lives. ciPo continues to be an important part of my life and was an important beginning for me on this project. Jeff thomas has been very gener- ous to me with his time and thought ever since I first emailed him to talk about my work. I try to meet with him for coffee whenever i’m in ottawa and acknowledge the important role his ideas and his own work have in my intellectual genealogy. every person that i would like to thank has a story and important experience that i shared with them and often skills that i deeply value learning. i am thankful to the many people who i have had the opportunity to know and learn from during these last years: Susanne eineigel, diane Brown, Juanita Sundberg, Guujaaw, Siddartha della Santina and maria Kob- lank, Bea Harley, farah nosh and david Strongman, Heather Russell, dafne Romero (who taught me film), Alison Waldie and family, Deborah Poole, Jisgang, Nika Collison, Gwaai edenshaw, Rick ouellet, marla and Stephanie Price, mike Bruce, Susan musgrave, Sangan viii drive folks, leona clow, Jason neve and Jill Glover, tio narno, and so many other people who have contributed to my life and helped me along to way to finishing this project. ix dedicated to Rodney Pain, leslie crain, Gahyaah (norman Price), Sally Grace, trajan James, Stanley and Zeta Horner wish you were here. 1introduction Esos son las enseñanzas mas sagrado de los abuelos y nuestros padres lo venian practicando, y de esa manera lo han venido haciendo, pero al mismo tiempo, nos han ido enseñando estas practicas de esos conocimientos que du- rante muchos años, durante muchos siglos, lo fueron aprendiendo y eso lo que se hace, lo que se hace todavia en la actualidad, lo que conservamos. Those are the most sacred teachings of the elders, and our parents continued practicing them, and in this way they have kept doing them but at the same time they have kept teaching us the practices of this knowledge that over many years, over many centuries, they themselves learned, and that is what is done, what we continue to do now, what we conserve. (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Inter- view Traditional Knowledge) 2There are many important messages and meanings in the words that Pedro Herminio Bautis- ta Rojas spoke to me sitting on the top of a ridge running through his hilltop community of Plan de Zaragoza, Nuyoo, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, on a hot day back in 2007. Like a live ember from a previous fire, the knowledge of his Mixtec ancestors has been carefully kept alive from generation to generation. His words express a consciousness of the con- tinuity of his community's practices that combines a depth of time with the passing on of skills – teaching, learning and surviving. The connection between himself and his ancestors is through sharing the doing of everyday tasks related to food, planting, territory, community organization, healing and fiesta following the different cycles that shape people's lives as they are born, grow up and grow old. Just as Pedro expresses a sense of the long history of his practices, he makes them present now – lo que conservamos – telescoping time so that the con- tinuity with his ancestors is experienced as a presence in the moment. I see his as a radically different way of understanding being, what historians might theorize as a type of 'historical consciousness', one that is about proximity rather than distance. For me as a student of history, raised in a Canadian city, and of Scots, English and Irish ancestry, Pedro's statement could only resonate with this meaning after living a process of change within myself. It's an ongoing change towards a deeper respect for embodied knowl- edge, as well as the beginnings of an understanding of what it is to live in community. Since the spring of 2006 when I became a member of the Vancouver chapter of the Indigenous Popular Council of Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magón" (CIPO-RFM), I have met and become friends with different Indigenous Nu Savi (Mixtec) and Binnizá (Zapotec) people1 and their communities in Mexico and Canada as well as Haida people in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago 1 There are many different spellings for these communities in different regions. For example, for Zapotec: Be’ena’a, Za, Binizáa, Binnizá, and Mixtec: Ne’ivi davi, Ñuu Savi, Ñuu Djau, Ñuu Davi. 3on the Northwest Coast of BC. To learn from Pedro and other CIPO members like Raúl Gatica and Doña Vicky has meant beginning a process of learning about myself and the culture of my birth, my family and of the nation-state within which I grew up.It has meant being challenged to re-think my own background and assumptions and acknowledge that my truths are only one possibility among many. I have had to re-imagine the way I am in the world, and, in the process, I've become increasingly aware of how some of the Eurocentric ways of knowing that I've learned growing up have framed up and trivialized other ways of being in the world. My work over the last several years, in my life as well as in this project, has been to uncover the blindness that this framing has produced in me as I articulate myself with other possibilities of knowing the world. Jaalen Edenshaw, a Haida carver and artist from Haida Gwaii, alongside Doña Vicky (Refu- gio Gregorio Bautista), a Nu Savi (Mixtec) traditional food expert and healer, and Pedro, a Nu Savi expert in cultivation, both from the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, have all ac- companied me on a journey that I set out on, knowingly or unknowingly, when I first helped Doña Vicky make tamales in the spring of 2006. During this journey, these participants have been my teachers and guides as I have informally apprenticed with them. All three have also been very good friends to me and I feel honoured to know them. As I will dis- cuss further in Chapter one, I invited each of them to be a part of this project because they are intent on continuing the ancestral practices that are a part of their lineage as artists and practitioners. While sharing a communal identity of Haida or Nu Savi, Pedro, Doña Vicky and Jaalen are nevertheless strong individuals who have walked unique paths of knowledge and practice, and have distinct lineages for the source of their knowledge. Through sharing 4in the way they live both collectivity and individuality at once, I have learned the limitations of static ethnographic categories of culture.2 This ongoing journey has first and foremost been a life experience for me, but it has also been stimulated by my pursuit of a PhD at UBC. As a result, the insights that have come to me are often connected to my training as a historian. My goal in this dissertation is to discuss these insights while giving an account of my experience working and sharing with Jaalen, Doña Vicky, Pedro and their communities. Through a dialogue with these three participants' ideas and practices as well as with academic literature, I will explore the work that three central tools of the disciplines of history and anthropology – scholarly distance, archive, linear time – do in translating diverse people, events, cultures and things into schol- arly discourse. I will examine the role they play in the construction of accepted understand- ings of evidence and truth within academia and mainstream culture. I have come to learn that these understandings contrast with ways of knowing and being that are at the heart of the three participants' ways of being in the world – ways that centre on embodiment, living connections, and relationships of interdependence. Rather than setting out to demonstrate correlations between these ancestral ways of knowing and scientific or Western thought, I explore how my experience of Jaalen, Doña Vicky, and Pedro's ancestral practices and ways of knowing has guided me through a reflection on the blindnesses and limitations the three disciplinary tools enact in academic research and representation. Throughout my experi- ence of sharing with the three participants, I have seen, heard, and felt relationships that are critical to existence and being on the earth and with the earth that, in practice, academic ways of knowing and representing often ignore or silence. I think of the distinct ways of know- 2 Jaalen’s brother Gwaai spoke at his art opening in Vancouver about the way his work contradicts ethnograph- ic categories of culture and speaks of the importance of the individual within the collective. 5ing that Pedro, Jaalen, and Doña Vicky practice as knowledge-in-relation – knowledge that is living, that is always attached to a body, a person, an animal, or even the land, and that is manifested through mutual respect. Underlying this project is the excitement, empowerment and hope that Jaalen, Doña Vicky, Pedro and their communities have shared with me through this understanding of how continuing an ancestral epistemology of doing is involved in the contemporary strengthen- ing of Indigenous communities. These ways of knowing and practices are the foundation for future generations and provide tools for the struggle to decolonize.3 Despite theoretical discussions raging in academia about the politics of representation, Haida and Nu Savi are resilient, continuing to be themselves and to take the steps to affirm their identity and mem- ory in practice, in the dances, the art, the feasts and fiestas, the food, on Facebook, in media representations and in courts of law. I take heart that it doesn't matter whether scholars understand exactly what is going on in these communities in order to validate or critique it, they will continue to grow and strengthen regardless of whether their societies and ways of knowing are "discovered" and fully described. There are many questions that will immediately crop up for my audience as I begin an exploration that takes on such a broad range of questions and concerns. Who am I? How do I imagine my own position as researcher writer with respect to others' ancestral ways of knowing? What gives me authority to speak? Why do I consider embodiment so important in addressing scholarship that is primarily an exercise in abstraction and intellection? Ideally I 3 As I mention later, Doña Vicky participated in a protest with other women in Oaxaca City cooking mole in the centre of town against the opening of a McDonalds restaurant. In CIPO-VAN, Oaxacan cooking is critical to our methodology of struggle and awareness raising, and is a skill we all learn and participate in on an on- going basis. 6would address all these interrelated questions simultaneously in order to go straight into this exploration of ways of knowing, but that is not possible in a sequential, written document. Instead, I will set out some of these fundamental issues of framing in the following pages so that they can inform the rest of the dissertation. First, I will speak to my own positioning and how I relate to some of my own ancestors. Second, I deal with the difficulty of contex- tualizing the three participants and their practices in a way that does not depart exclusively from an academic way of knowing people and places, but that instead acknowledges the un- stable 'ground' underlying the truth claims of this dialogue in-between multiple ways of know- ing. Third, this discussion of the difficulties of setting up 'the ground' for research and rep- resentation leads into a brief exploration of how the disciplines of history and anthropology have been structured around the exclusion and trivialization of other ways of knowing like those of Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen. Fourth, I discuss how scholars have formulated the interaction between different ways of knowing in their work. I then turn to the embodied ways of knowing that I've learned about with the three participants and discuss the implica- tions of knowledge-in-relation. And finally, I set out a map of where this dissertation moves through the following chapters. My Positioning: Heritage and Liminality Ottawa, Ontario, chosen by the Queen of the British Empire in 1857 as the new capital of the Province of Canada, is the place of my birth. Growing up there until the age of 18, I had little knowledge of, or interest in the history of the place that served as the adminis- trative centre of colonial expansion into the Indigenous territories eventually surveyed to form Canada. Rather, I was focused on my neighbourhood, family, friends, mainstream pop culture and music. My education in elementary and high school involved nothing beyond a 7passing acquaintance with Indigenous peoples, just in the first pages of textbooks, as those who made way for the history of Canada to progress. Living in a middle class neighbour- hood in Ottawa, I had little awareness of indigenous people, like the Algonquin whose land the city occupies, and certainly no awareness of Indigenous people in Latin America. The only connection that I heard about in my family was my maternal great-great-grandfather who signed Treaty 7. The family stories related to me about James F. Macleod of the North West Mounted Police were about a man who counted Crowfoot of the Blackfoot First Nation among his friends, loved his wife deeply, and named Fort Calgary after a bay in Scotland close to where he was born. I also learned of him as a man who did what he thought best in a difficult time, particularly as the NWMP had to protect the southern border from the encroachment of Americans and the over-hunting of buffalo which was causing hunger and starvation among the indigenous people of the region. Thinking of Macleod as a member of my family, like the generation that I live with now, my main notion of him was as an essentially good, hard working and ethical person. Since taking courses at university in Vancouver in Indigenous history, I learned a different narrative of the NWMP and Canada and came to understand Macleod as an active, influential agent of colonization and occupation. And recently, to ad- dress this family connection for my thesis, I dug a little deeper. As part of my own personal encounter with the archive, I read letters Macleod wrote to his wife in the mid to late 1800s and found a more complicated dimension to this family history that, until now, I haven't been moved to investigate. It was when I read certain passages, try- ing to imagine listening to Macleod's voice as he talked about the indigenous people he knew, that I learned more details of Macleod's work and impact. Though he spoke of his friends 8among the Blackfoot like chief Crowfoot, I could also hear his attitude of paternalism to- wards the communities he visited in his letters, born of the concerns of a colonial adminis- trator. The following extract from a letter postmarked Fort Benton, August 15, 1879 shows the complexity of the relationship between himself, the Blackfoot chief and his people: I went to the Blackfoot Crossing with Mr. Dewdney and didn't we just delight the heart of our old friends the Blackfoot with the meat and flour tea sugar and tobacco we took them. They have suffered awfully this last Winter and it is wonderful how well they have behaved. Crowfoot appears to have kept them all in check. We went thro' their camp and I rec'd a perfect ovation. Men women and children flocked round to greet me and shake hands. The women brought their children on their backs to shake hands and held out the tiny little skeleton hands for me to shake.4 Full of colonial under-currents this joyous and light passage betrays the power differen- tial involved in 'friendship.' While he recounts that the people received him with joy, that reception is clearly shaped by his role in bringing food rations to a starving and struggling community ("the tiny little skeleton hands") reeling from the impact of settlement and over-hunting. In addition, Macleod's concerns are with "how well [the Blackfoot] behaved," illustrating the prevailing framing of Indigenous people as wards of the empire (and then the state of Canada) that, like children, need to be fed and kept in line, or even rewarded for good behaviour. In contrast to the way his letters address by name the members of white set- tler society of which he was a member – "Mr. Dewdney," "Mrs. W. [White] Fraser and Mrs. 4 Macleod, James Farquarson. “Macleod Letter 1879/09A - Transcript,” 1879. http://www.glenbow.org/collec- tions/search/findingAids/archhtm/macleod/let_1879_09A.htm, 1. 9Secord"5 – with the exception of certain chiefs, indigenous people were all "Indians," their identity expressed only through a racial category. Moreover, as I read of the other government officials with whom Macleod interacted and corresponded, like Indian Commissioner and later Lieutenant Governor Edgar Dewdney or even Sir John A. MacDonald, I came to grips with the confluence of his family interests and professional actions. Through his own work as commissioner and then magistrate and through his connection to the Drever family of his wife Mary Drever (Macleod) he shared his social milieu with some of the upper echelons of the society that, along with government and business in London, England, were the principle force behind planning and executing the settlement/occupation of indigenous territories to the West. In these moments, trans- mitted in the intimate form of letters to his wife Mary, I learned of his presence in Regina at the execution of Louis Riel in 1885 where he advised the Governor on Riel's fate. His words to Mary express his view of Riel and his rebellion clearly: "I suppose you heard very soon after the Execution took place that Riel was hanged. You see Sir John [A. Macdonald] was not so weak kneed as you thought he would be."6 Reading from an account of Mary Macleod's sister Jean A. Drever (Pinkham), I found out that as a prominent Loyalist fam- ily in the Red River settlement, the Drevers were invested in the quelling of the rebellion and Mary's brother and father had been involved in harbouring Loyalist refugees from Riel's forces. In fact, Riel had even held her father captive for a brief time.7 It is interesting to 5 Ibid, 1. 6 Macleod, James Farquarson. “Macleod Letter 1885/07A - Transcript,” 1885. http://www.glenbow.org/collec- tions/search/findingAids/archhtm/macleod/let_1885_07A.htm, 1. 7 Drever (Pinkham), J. A. (n.d.). Manitoba History: Reminiscences of an Old Timer, Part 1. Manitoba Historical Society. Retrieved February 6, 2013, from http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/20/reminiscences.shtml. 10 consider Macleod's family and professional alignments in this case in the light of the re-con- sideration of Riel as a defender of Metis rights and a Canadian and Manitoban hero. My visitation by ancestors continues with two more that appear in the archives and of whom I learned more recently. Living around the same time as James Macleod, Noah Shakespeare, another of my maternal great-great-grandfathers has many entries in the historical records of the new nation of Canada. Also an acquaintance of Sir John A. MacDonald, Shake- speare rode anti-Chinese racism into office as Mayor of Victoria, BC and then as Member of Parliament for the riding in Ottawa. Though I haven't found records of his dealings with the many indigenous groups on whose land Victoria stands, the story that distinguishes Shakespeare among his peers was his promotion of a tax on resident Chinese and limits on new immigration from China. His background being in part leading worker organizations that wished to protect their job opportunities from Chinese workers, when he became MP, Shakespeare tabled a bill in the house of commons that led to the Chinese Immigration Act putting into law a $50 head tax on new arrivals from China.8 Sir John Leman, another ancestor of mine, was an uncle of many generations ago who served as both sheriff and Lord Mayor of London, England between 1606 and 1617. Also known for buying a house from Oliver Cromwell, Leman was a merchant who was elected to his posts by his peers in the merchant guild halls. It was the merchants of London in this period that were the epicentre of funding and launching colonial adventures and charter companies like the Hudson's Bay Company that traded with indigenous peoples and then 8 See: Ward, P. (2002). White Canada Forever: Popular Attiudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia, Third Edition. Montreal, QC, CAN: McGill-Queen’s University Press, and Morton, J. (n.d.). SHAKESPEARE, NOAH. In Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. University of Toronto. Retrieved from http://www.biogra- phi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=8361 11 settled their lands in many parts of the earth. Although Leman himself appears to have focused more on domestic markets for butter and fish (he was a member of the Worship- ful Company of Fishmongers), he moved in the society of merchants who were armchair travellers of the world, risking their capital to send ships to distant lands with hopes of them returning full of furs, other goods of worth, and, in some cases, indigenous people brought either as slaves or voluntary representatives of their communities.9 As Coll Thrush draws his readers' attention to in "Meere Strangers: Indigenous and Urban Performances in Algon- quian London, 1580-1630," merchants like Leman would likely have met or at least seen indigenous people captured in the Americas shown in public as curiosities, or in the drawing rooms of socialites and other merchants as servants. For Thrush, what he calls Algonquian London was a key point in continental and cultural exchange through which the colonial project was imagined and justified by members of the merchant guilds as well as government administrators. Equally, for the few indigenous people who are recorded as having made it back to their communities, diseased, overcrowded, corrupt London often served as a dark example of what was to come in the colonies, and what needed to be resisted.10 While I present these three ancestors in this central discussion of my positioning, they are not my point of departure for this project. As you will see in the following chapters, looking at the colonization of America through the lens of my own ancestors hasn't been an aspect or even inspiration of this project. Instead, as I say above, it has been Doña Vicky, Jaalen, Pedro, their communities, territories, and ways of knowing that have guided and inspired me. 9 British Academy, and Ashton, R. (2004). Oxford DNB article: Leman, Sir John. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/ infopage.cfm?id=870, 1. 10 Thrush, Coll. “Meere Strangers: Indigenous and Urban Performances in Algonquian London, 1580-1630.” In Urban Identity and the Atlantic World, edited by Elizabeth Fay and Leonard von Morze, 195–218. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 200. 12 Yet, for better or worse, my own lineage has shaped the opportunities I've had to pursue these studies and travels, and to spend the time I've needed to make this project possible. And not acknowledging this privilege would mean silencing an underlying facet or dynamic of all of the relationships that constitute this project. The need to acknowledge family histories of colonialism is linked to Paulette Regan's discus- sion of settler history resulting from her experience working for the Truth and Reconcilia- tion Commission of Canada dealing primarily with Indian Residential Schools. Regan sug- gests that if Canadians truly want to act on reconciliation with indigenous people in Canada, settlers must begin a different kind of self-reflection: Canadians are still on a misguided, obsessive, and mythical quest to assuage colonizer guilt by solving the Indian problem. In this way, we avoid looking too closely at ourselves and the collective responsibility we bear for the colonial status quo.11 Following historian Roger Epp, she calls this the "settler problem": that is, the role that guilt and other forms of protagonism play in preventing settlers from looking more deeply at our own history – our own ancestors' stories – to understand our collective responsibility (as distinct from guilt) for the actions and violence that enabled the occupation of indigenous territories in which we continue to reside. That responsibility involves changing ourselves, changing the status quo of our government's patriarchal relations with First Nations, under- standing that we are visitors on the land we occupy, and that, far from "solving the Indian 11 Regan, P. (2010). Unsettling the settler within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. Van- couver: UBC Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.ca/books?id=ke2VXjKsFe0Candprintsec=frontcover #v=onepageandqandf=false, 11. 13 problem," we have much to learn from our hosts about ourselves and our ways of knowing and relating. In the same spirit, Victoria Freeman wrote her book Distant Relations: How my Ancestors Colo- nized North America which tells her own family history through encounters and engagements with Indigenous people. Freeman's project was sparked not only by her own experience of working in solidarity with indigenous people and her need to acknowledge her own heri- tage in relation to theirs, but also by exactly the "calamitous silence" on indigenous histories within the textbooks and histories of Canada that shaped my lack of awareness growing up. In the book she reveals the roles her ancestors played, at times much more than innocent by- standers, in creating and carrying out policies, contracts, wars, and missionization that often involved deceit and misunderstanding and led to the dispossession of indigenous territories in the Americas. Beginning with the framing of the colonial project through the eyes of her puritan ancestors in the mid-17th century as a legitimate and blessed mission from God (some even saw the Indigenous people as "one of the lost tribes of Israel" banished to the wilds and in need of civilizing), Freeman proceeds with a chronological account of several of her family lineages that featured administrators, interpreters, a missionary involved at a residential school, and other relations who show up in colonial and state records of the day. As she narrates the lives of her different ancestors, like Thomas Stanton, for example, who became a key interpreter between the new colonies of New England and the Pequots, Mohe- gans, Niantics and other tribes and as such earned the title "friend to the Indians," Freeman engages in a philosophical and ethical discussion of people's actions, attempting to identify with, or come to grips with attitudes and behaviour that seem at times so alien to her own sensibility. 14 As I reflect on my own ancestors in the light of the learning that I've done with Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro, I find extending Freeman's project into my own family history challeng- ing and engaging because it forces me to reflect on the nature of my relationship between my own ancestors and my identity. For all three participants, their ancestors – both direct relations in their lineage and, more generally, previous generations of Haida or Nu Savi – are part of their everyday link to their identities, communities and practices. As I read about my ancestors and bring them further into my awareness of myself, several questions come to mind: Am I to look to them for some essentially family characteristic that has weathered the ages? And if I can't find it, what then is the nature of my relationship to these progeni- tors of my line? What do bloodlines and family mean when changing circumstances over time and difference of personality make the task of connecting to ancestors so complex and layered as Freeman demonstrates? Another question I could ask of my own process of acknowledging my ancestors is what am I able to learn in the records left of them that would contribute to understanding differ- ent cultures? When I asked Jaalen whether he thought of particular ancestors in his own life or more generally Haida ancestors, he said that he often hears about and thinks about Susan Williams, a nuunaay (grandmother) from Skidegate who had continued to sing the Haida songs and speak the language in a time when many people were oriented away from their own culture. She passed on these songs and words to Jaalen's father's generation inspiring them to continue the struggle to regain control over Haida Gwaii. As he works in the bush on forestry or ecology projects, the Haida ancestors of generations ago come to mind as he walks past cedars that have had their bark harvested for cedar weaving. And in his carving practice he spends time looking at photos of old totem poles his ancestors carved, looking for techniques, crests, and design ideas. 15 In contrast, it seems much of my life has been committed to a critical re-evaluation of my cultural ancestors, gaining a greater awareness of their actions from within a society that places little value on elders and has a short-term memory where it concerns treaties and histories of occupation and dispossession. My journey over the last several years of work and life with Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro has been to open in myself a space in which I can feel my way beyond the apparently narrow, colonizing ways of my ancestors and connect with a part of my identity that has been unintelligible to myself and to family and friends I grew up with. Part of this journey, however, has been exactly to question the power of dichotomies like settler / indigenous that cast me as part of one category and outside of an- other. For my approach to learning from Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen to be respectful and reciprocal, I've had to learn not only about their practices, but also learn how to learn – learn how to know the world in a different more open and connected way than the lens through which western Europeans, and scholars in particular, have approached other cultures and knowledges. For example, I have had to learn how do live within and between binaries that are a foun- dational element of colonial mindsets. Because indigenous and non-indigenous people continue to articulate political and historical claims through a dichotomy of settler versus indigenous, the stakes involved in maintaining this division are tremendously high. While these binaries of West and non-West, European and Indian are constitutive of the rhetoric of settler/modernists who have championed Western civilization alongside the assimilation of indigenous peoples, without them it is difficult for people like Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro, whose communities have been deeply affected by colonization, to name the force, or the perpetrator, at work in their communities. Yet, just as this dichotomy between set- tler and indigenous can seem clear, and sometimes even stark, in my lived experience it can 16 be fluid and contingent on the situation in which I find myself.12 As the story that I relate in chapters one through three will suggest, I have spent the last decade of my life working to open myself to Indigenous ways of knowing and to understanding the effects of ethnocide wrought in Indigenous communities by colonialism. After several years of learning some of the insights that their ancestors and elders passed down to Pedro, Jaalen and Doña Vicky, it has become clear to me that I now express myself from a liminal position between worlds: I have a great respect for the ancestral practices of the three participants and have made them a part of my own life, yet I am also deeply embedded in colonial, 'Western' ways of knowing – my own ancestors, English, Scots, Irish, were colonized colonizers. Sharing with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro has meant learning about how they too inhabit liminality in their own lives. Each of them is very much versed in the practices and ways of knowing of the 'West' and is a participant, to different degrees, in consumer culture. Each of them mediate, in their own way, between the practices of their elders, distinct cultural expectations, and ways of knowing in their everyday lives. The most important thing all three have taught me is about being open to much vaster possibilities than I could have imagined – being open to living those possibilities for myself. They have grown up amidst the stories and languages of their ancestors, learning their practices and relationships in the same breath as learning at state schools, getting jobs and participating in commerce.13 It is a matter of keeping all of these connections open at once, even though they may seem contra- dictory. For me it has been a lesson in how to deal productively in ambiguity – not to resist 12 Phillip Deloria’s discussion of ‘Indians out of Place’ in American photography and popular culture is an insightful discussion of the porousness of dichotomies. Deloria, Philip Joseph. Indians in Unexpected Places. Cul- tureAmerica. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2004, 240. 13 Pedro has total fluency in Mixteco and uses it most of the time in his community, Jaalen is learning Mas- set Haida with his Ts’inii Stephen Brown, and though she can understand the language of her birth, Mixteco, Doña Vicky can only speak a few words of it. 17 it as exceptional or coincidental to human experience, but rather to recognize it as central to inhabiting worlds. Because living a dichotomy like Indigenous versus settler means at times feeling the distinction as fluid and at others having the difference crystalize and seem in- surmountable, I have come to understand ambiguity as a valuable and productive means of Indigenous ancestral ways of knowing. Understanding that I am in the midst of this ambiguity as I attempt to make sense of my experience and insights is part of a communal philosophy from Oaxaca of caminando y miando or "walking and pissing," which means thinking and doing simultaneously. Pedro expresses this simultaneity as being a part of things, a sense of being and knowing in the midst of relationships of interdependency with the land, animals, plants, water and air all in the same moment. He says: Por eso decimos que no estamos separados, no somos ajeno a todo esto, sino somos parte, somos parte. Nosotros solo lo entendemos en la practica que una persona de la ciudad, pues es bastante dificil de entenderlo. Nos podran calificar hasta de locos hasta que padecemos algunas deficiencias de facultades mentales que tambien no duda- mos que tambien hubo personas que pensaron en nuestros antepasados asi igual pero que nosotros, nosotros lo vivimos, lo practicamos, lo sentimos, lo disfrutamos diariamente. 18 So we say that we are not separate, we aren't foreign to all this, instead we are part, we are a part of it. We only understand this in the practices – that a person from the city, well, it's pretty hard to understand it. They could call us crazies, even say that we exhibit mental deficiencies and no doubt there were people who thought the same of our ancestors, but we live this understanding, we practice it, we feel it, we enjoy it every day. (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview - Nahual) His knowledge of being in the world is inseparable from practicing it – that is, the only way that it can be understood is through doing. To practice things like planting corn in the milpa, you have to touch things, you have to handle the seeds, get your hands in the dirt, feel the heat of the sun and the coolness of the water as you irrigate. To me, this contact and con- 19 nection with the earth is what is at stake in this project. In order to come to a deeper un- derstanding of Pedro, his community and his way of relating to the past, present and future in terms of continuity, I have to change my own position as I create knowledge. I have to relinquish my sense of detachment and find a way of being in the world at the same time that I'm trying to understand and write about it. The knowledge related to the practices of Haida carving and art with Jaalen, cooking and healing with Doña Vicky, and cultivation with Pedro is fundamentally connected to all as- pects of life and survival on the earth. Through allowing myself to open up to their pos- sibilities, these coherent sets of skills and philosophies have illuminated countless different elements of my life. As Pedro suggests at the beginning of this chapter, embodied practice is a means to understand his connection to the earth, ancestors, survival, and heritage all in the same moment. constructing the Ground Being attentive to the way epistemologies are embodied and performed has made me more attentive to the mundane, day-to-day practices of scholarly knowledge creation. One of these performances is constructing the 'ground' upon which communication can occur. This means, in my case, both accounting for who Pedro, Jaalen and Doña Vicky are, where they are from, and how they identify, but also connecting this background to current scholarly research and debates, for example, about indigenous identity, the politics of campesino or peasant struggle in Oaxaca, colonialism, and a myriad of other themes that might seem relevant to this discussion. For example, I might place Doña Vicky within a national nar- rative about indigenous people in Mexico, or a narrative about the intersection of ethnicity 20 and gender. But these categories and narratives are impositions and framings on my part as a scholar, and may cater more to the debates and interests of the discipline rather than listening and being attentive to Doña Vicky and how she chooses to place herself. Just as Johannes Fabian identified anthropology's "major task" in his time as the quest "to reveal the unconscious forces by cutting through the layers of deceptive conscious behavior" of the people being represented in research, framing Doña Vicky in a particular context guided by the concerns of the discipline of history can be equally trivializing and disempowering. Context is a convention used to locate objects of study and engage the audience, giving them a degree of comfort and orientation within a region of the world, or a methodologi- cal debate with which they may not be familiar. I think of this question in terms of the concept of synecdoche, the part representing the whole.14 In this case, placing Doña Vicky within national and thematic histories, attending first to scholarly discussions and debates in the framing of my narrative about her not only makes her voice secondary, but it makes her story another example, a part that represents the whole of an academic postulation. By ex- tension, this gesture links Doña Vicky through a scholarly system of cross-referencing texts and ideas that tacitly contributes to reifying a singular, universalizing and totalizing picture of the world as ultimately knowable through scholarly strategies of representation. Who owns materiality? Who has a monopoly on constructing the ground? What if Doña Vicky, along with Jaalen and Pedro, are parts that do not fit in this global, universalized whole? As Jisgang, 14 Blogger and humanities researcher Stephanie Trigg points out that the Oxford English Dictionary’s examples of synecdoche are both connected to the triumph of English colonialism: “the example for naming the part but understanding the whole is 50 sail for 50 ships, while the example given for naming the whole but un- derstanding the part is England beat Australia at cricket.” Trigg, Stephanie. “Humanities Researcher: Synec- doche, Cricket and Colonialism.” Humanities Researcher, September 29, 2009. http://stephanietrigg.blogspot. ca/2009/06/synecdoche-cricket-and-colonialism.html. 21 Nika Collison from Skidegate tells it, Haida history, told by Haidas, goes back to when they were first created in Haida Gwaii: . . . This is how we know of the time before land and before life as we know it, when there were only the Supernatural Beings. The world was covered in salt water and it was both light and dark, they say. This is how we know that we come from the ocean, some as human beings, others descending from Su- pernatural Beings who over generations, became human. Our stories recount the creation of Haida Gwaii and North America, and the many geographic and supernatural events that followed: heat waves, floods and tsunamis, the last ice age, rising and lowering sea levels, the first tree on Haida Gwaii.15 It is a distinct story or ontology that is irreducible, and cannot simply be ingested into an- other, academic origins story. In her exploration in Land, Spirit, Power, Charlotte Townsend- Gault points to the autonomy of ways of knowing in a formulation of the world from Ojibwe artist Carl Beam: "The Indian viewpoint is that it was made for its own sake."16 People, objects, and experiences don't all necessarily require another meta-narrative to give them meaning. Townsend-Gault sets out this incommensurability: In the end, cultural difference is expressed not by attempting to find common ground, common words, common symbols across cultures. It is finally digni- fied by protecting all sides from zealous over-simplification, by acknowledging 15 Steedman, Scott, and Jisgang, Nika Collison, eds. That Which Makes Us Haida - The Haida Language. Skidegate, Haida Gwaii: Haida Gwaii Museum Press, 2011, 17. 16 Nemiroff, Diana, and National Gallery of Canada. Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa: The Gallery, 1992, 83. 22 a final untranslatability of certain concepts and subtleties from one culture to another.17 Placing people in context, then, has serious implications when working across different ways of knowing. Something so apparently 'solid' and 'concrete' as the ground upon which my statements and claims can be made suddenly becomes shaky and unstable as I learn how situated I am within certain practices of meaning-making and particular forms of rationality. My own desire in this project would be to 'ground' the three participants in terms of their own ontologies and epistemologies, to write entirely from the position of a Haida or Nu Savi way of knowing the world that, like the Oaxacan expression caminando y miando expresses, places doing and creating at the heart of the process of knowing. This is an idealistic position- ing, however, that is attenuated both by the problematics of essentialized Haida or Nu Savi identities, and by the fact that I am an academic researcher myself, and that a dissertation is the definition of an academic locus of enunciation. That said, I have made an effort to be true to the insights that I have gained from the three participants, allowing them to guide, as much as possible, my struggle to construct the 'ground' of my writing. When I began to read and write again after two years focused on being in Haida Gwaii and Oaxaca and participating and learning with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro, I found that my day-to-day experience of the dynamism and positivity of life in their communities was not reflected in much of the literature, or was weighted down by the framing of struggle and injustice that was of most interest to scholars. Scholarly writing often employs narratives of victimhood and struggle to define people like the Haida and Nu Savi as 'marginalized' rather 17 Ibid, 100. 23 than central to visions of the future. That's certainly not to say that these communities do not have struggle in their lives and are not working through the legacy of colonialism, as well as confronting the challenges of the renewed, expansive push by multinational corporations for resources in their own territories. But I am striving to get away from this hierarchy of emplotment, searching instead for ways to orient this account from the outset around these three people, their communities and ways of knowing. As I have come into relation with Haida and Nu Savi people through friendship and participation in their lives, they have be- come part of my community. Giving context of each of the participants, then, becomes an account that originates from the relationships that we've created together, and the exchanges and experiences we've shared. While remaining cognizant of the challenges in their lives, I want to emphasize through my narrative the deep sense of hope and joy that is a part of be- ing in the community, living continuity and resilience. Pedro expresses eloquently his exhila- ration of being on the land, walking the mountain trails of his territory: Para mi, de ser indigena mixteco, y de vivir en mi territorio propio, de disfrutar todo lo que hay dentro de mi pues es lo mas bonito. Para mi es lo, es incompa- rable esto porque de alli disfruto, de alli me divierto haciendo lo que me gusta hacer, lo que me enseñaron mis antepasados, pero al mismo tiempo este, me da, me da descanso, me da felicidad de, de mi propio trabajo de, de la cosecha que yo cosecho eso es lo que me da, me lleno de felicidad. 24 For me, to be indigenous Mixteco, and to live in my own territory, to enjoy all that there is inside of me is the most beautiful. For me it's, it's incomparable because from there I enjoy, from there I have fun doing what I like to do, what my ancestors taught me, but at the same time, it gives me, it gives me calm, it gives me happiness, from my own work, from the harvest that I collect, that is what gives me, that fills me with happiness.(Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview CIPO-RFM) origin Stories of the disciplines The constitution of history as a discipline in the nineteenth century occurred through the trivialization by historians of non-written forms of knowledge, including Indigenous ways of knowing that were primarily communicated orally in face-to-face interactions. As Daniel Lord Smail suggests in his work Deep History and the Brain, text and the document became 25 paradigmatic to the discipline of history by the mid-nineteenth century, leading practitioners to disqualify entire societies, and thus other truths and ways of knowing the world, from their purview because they did not have writing. Historical consciousness, in their eyes, was impossible without a society's feats and developments recorded in text. Smail quotes an adage from French Historian Françoic Guizot written in 1869: "the keeping of written memorials of deeds and destinies is the beginning of history, since they reveal 'sentiments which testify to the superiority of man over all other creatures.'"18 Through the agency of text, historians and intellectuals of the nineteenth century imagined a space of the civilized man that was self-referential and, from within it, insisted on their own position above all creation. Smail goes on to quote Nietzsche's reflections on a cow in 1874: "The beast lives unhistorically."19 Later, in 1885, historian George Fisher linked this space explicitly to nations "in their internal progress and in their mutual relations," rather than other formations that were understood as 'prior': "Of mere clans, or loosely organized tribes, [history] can have little to say."20 While the details of face-to-face encounters recorded in the archive were central to the historian's project, attention to the historian's own embodied practices and experiences were incidental and external to composing narrative histories which were, in the formulation of nineteenth century historian Leopold Ranke, entirely on paper. In his article "Leopold Ranke's Archival Turn: Location And Evidence In Modern Historiography," Kasper Risb- jerg Eskildsen traces Ranke's growing fetishization of the archives in Austria and the Italian peninsula during the first half of nineteenth century, revealing that, for Ranke, the most 18 Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2008, 50. 19 Interestingly, Smail says Nietzsche “observed,” as though he could understand the thoughts and memories of animals, in this case, cows. Ibid, 51. 20 Ibid, 66. 26 important aspect of historical work was not the story resulting from the research, but the regimented methods of interacting with the textual documents in the archive, particularly reading documents against each other and sleuthing out new documentary evidence, that were used in conducting the research itself. Despite the rich oral traditions of the Europe of Ranke's time, Eskildsen states: "In the archives [Ranke] learned to view human history as a history of documents."21 By developing a rigorous calculus for dealing with statements recorded in the archives, Ranke made the claim to objectivity, to a scientific history. It is Ranke's privileging of the archive in historical practice that led him to make the following judgment: "I think that [periods without documentary traces] should be excluded from his- tory. For good reasons, as they contradict the principle of documentary research."22 Scholars' emphasis on text and writing as the only path to modern truth making was a critical political statement in the turn of the century world dominated by European empires that needed to bolster their expansive claims. The important distinction made by historians such as Ranke and Guizot between cultures with writing and cultures without it was fruitful in the creation of disenfranchised Others of distinct origins. As history was formalized into an academic discipline in the nineteenth century centered on dominant political figures and intellectuals, anthropology came to focus on these cultural others, or "strange societies" in the words of anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker.23 Ac- cording to Franz Boas' 1908 history of the discipline of anthropology: 21 Eskildsen, K. R. “LEOPOLD RANKE’S ARCHIVAL TURN: LOCATION AND EVIDENCE IN MOD- ERN HISTORIOGRAPHY.” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 03 (2008): 425-453, 435. 22 Ibid, 437. 23 The fact that in the mid-sixties Powdermaker, as a conscientious scholar, still used this stereotypical lan- guage of Othering is an indication of the strength of the legacies of turn of the century salvage ethnography. Robben, Antonius C. G. M, and Jeffrey A Sluka. Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2007, 1. 27 The special task that is actually assigned at the present time to the anthropolo- gist is the investigation of the primitive tribes of the world that have no written history, that of pre-historic remains and of the types of man inhabiting the world at present and in past times. It will be recognized that this limitation of the field of work of the anthropologist is more or less accidental, and originat- ed because other sciences occupied part of the ground before the development of modern anthropology.24 Referring to George W. Stocking's formulation, Richard Handler puts the purview of the anthropologist in more stark terms: "Anthropology’s peripheral peoples had 'dropped through the boundary spaces between the gradually separating disciplines' of the human sciences during the nineteenth century."25 In the new discipline, anthropologists set out to develop methods for fieldwork and interaction with "tribes" judged to be non-civilized. Since the goal of anthropology was to represent these groups – like the Haida or the Iro- quois – in monographs and articles, methodologies for translating living people into written text such as rigourous field notes and complex classificatory systems became the meat of the new enterprise.26 Just as explorers saw the continents of the "new world" as terra incognita ripe for discovery, so anthropologists took the apparent lack of textual systems among these lands' inhabitants for silence and empty space that could now be filled. In order to impose a knowable order onto their chosen subject matter, anthropologists set out to make legible the peoples of this world, ordered in sequence from left to right as though in a book. 24 Handler, Richard. History of Anthropology, Volume 11: Central Sites, Peripheral Visions: Cultural and Institutional Crossings in the History of Anthropology. Madison, WI, USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, 3. 25 Ibid, 4. 26 Such methodologies were at the root of the debate between Franz Boas and Otis Mason. See Boas, Franz, and George W Stocking. A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1989, 5. 28 Physical anthropologists like Frederick Starr in the late nineteenth century and early twenti- eth centuries set their task to map out the different races of man according to physiognomy understood through measurements and description in order to invent the races of the earth as a coherent collection, an archive of flesh. One reviewer described Starr's heroic project of description and classification that would lead to his 1908 volume In Indian Mexico: In each village he aimed to measure 100 men and 25 women; in all, he mea- sured more than 1150 men and 300 women. He made 700 negatives of types, life, groups, houses, villages, and scenery, and made 50 casts in plaster from living subjects. Most of this work was done in mountainous districts remote from railroads, mostly with suspicious and superstitious natives. On his last trip alone he rode 1000 miles on horseback, while his plaster, plates, etc., had to be carried principally on human backs.27 Such endeavours constituted the "magnificence" of the American Bureau of Ethnology's reports that "will be more appreciated the more the Indian passes away."28 Underlying Starr's dispassionate project to contribute to the collection of the races of man was his fascination with this Indian Other and the radical difference physical appearance revealed. Upon en- countering the Mixe people in Oaxaca, Starr was smitten: "Wrapping themselves in their tattered and dirty blankets, they laid themselves down on the stone floor, so close together that they reminded me of sardines 27 Starr, Frederick. “Survivals of Paganism in Mexico. With Reproductions of Photographs from the Life of the Mexican Aborigines, and a Note on the Recent Advances in Ethnology.” The Open Court 1899, no. 7 (July 1, 1899). http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/ocj/vol1899/iss7/1, 398. 28 Ibid, 392. 29 in a box ... Their broad dark faces, wide flat noses, thick lips and projecting jaws, their coarse clothing, their filthiness, their harsh and guttural speech, profoundly impressed me and I resolved to penetrate into their country and see them in their homes, at the first opportunity."29 It was Starr's wish to "penetrate" Mixe culture in order to discover the essence of their group through a reading of their physical appearance. He established an ordered mapping of each tribe or grouping based on physical traits, especially the measurement of limbs, plas- ter casts of facial features and cranial measurements, arraying them like different fonts for a new human typography. Starr's order of types of "Indians" found in Mexico was strikingly close to a naturalist's display case of dead butterflies and beetles pinned in rows. This was a world in which anthropological knowledge was created through the 'objective' observa- tion of an array of differences that could be categorized and classified by organs, segments, stamens, language, fishing practices, and crafts. Practitioners of the nascent discipline of anthropology also constituted this human collec- tion through oral narratives using the framework of the ethnography. Since their sources were oral and not written, and were related to the lives of non-European Others, these ethnographic studies were not understood by scholars as human histories on par with the central national narratives of modern European history – the process or "force" that gave rise to the civilized races – but rather as a means to understand prior stages of the evolution of human societies through the lens of natural history. Recorded as ethnographies rather than histories, these stories were cast in a temporal dimension prior to that of the civilized European, disciplined and ordered on the basis of perceived levels of technology and social 29 Starr, Frederick. In Indian Mexico (1908). Project Gutenberg, n.d, 15. 30 development in order to prove the evolution of Modern Man through hunter/gatherer, sedentary agriculturalist and onwards and upwards.30 Ideas of the progress of man held by salvage ethnographers like Starr were set in place much earlier in treatises like that of Joseph Marie Degérando at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He articulated his sense of the immense temporal distance between Europeans and "savages" in his treatise to departing maritime explorers: The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travel- ling in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age. Those unknown islands that he reaches are for him the cradle of human society. Those peoples whom our ignorant vanity scorns are displayed to him as ancient and majestic monuments of the origin of ages...31 Though "Indian" cultures of the Americas were contemporaneous with their European colonizers, participating as vital links in trade networks and creating military alliances with colonizing forces, they were narrated by practitioners of late nineteenth century salvage an- thropology like Franz Boas and Edward S. Curtis as already in the distant past, and, if still in existence, soon to disappear. Salvage anthropology, as I’m defining it, was predicated on the urgency of collecting oral narratives and artifacts from Indigenous peoples by anthropolo- gists in order to save the last markers of these cultures that they believed would inevitably vanish. Ironically, as vibrant Indigenous communities throughout the Americas attest today, 30 Starr, Frederick. Strange Peoples. Ethno-geographic Readers ;no. 1. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1901. http://catalog. hathitrust.org/Record/007674049, 3. 31 Robben, Ethnographic Fieldwork, 34. 31 it was the anthropologists who were stuck in the static, "authentic" pasts they created for the peoples they studied.32 This thumbnail origins story is not an attempt to survey the movements of both disciplines up to this writing, but instead to set out the ontological importance of textual systems for knowing the world from a disciplinary perspective. These textual systems took both the form of monographs and articles in which knowledge was represented and authorized, but also the form of a metaphor, making the world legible as arrays of words across a page, ordered according to a syntax and grammar that could be fully known and mastered.33 Like stacks of documents and books in the archive, the lives of earlier generations stood musty and dead, disconnected from people's embodied experience of the present.34 The sidelin- ing of non-textual ways of knowing and the peoples who live with them and understand the world through them is a weighty legacy within which anthropologists and historians continue to work and which materially shapes their practices of knowledge-making day-to- day. Changes to those disciplines have been wrought as the effects of this legacy have been recognized, and attitudes towards other peoples changed, yet the very strict persistence of 32 For example, Paige Raibmon writes: “Motivated to preserve what they believed were remnants of dying In- dian cultures, salvage anthropologists attempted to document old ways uncontaminated by White influence. In so doing, they erased the historical specificity of their own day and of their informants’ lives. They transformed the most traumatic and turbulent period in the history of western North American Aboriginal people into the benchmark of timeless Aboriginal culture.” Raibmon, Paige Sylvia. Authentic Indians : Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2005, 5. 33 Smail says: “Harold Peake and Herbert Fleure, in their natural history of humankind of 1927, described the geological record in vivid terms as a number of volumes organized into two series, the first of which, the Azoic, survives only as “a few pages, badly crumpled, scorched, and burnt,” all that is left of the last two vol- umes of the series.” Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 47. 34 One of the key aspects of the Idle No More campaign in Canada has been the call to recognize the continu- ing legal status of treaties that many Canadians see as part of a distant past (over 100 years ago) that no longer has any relevance today. 32 text-based representation within the disciplines, even over numerous other technological op- tions like video and hyperlinking on the web, demonstrate its continuing power.35 Working Between ontologies-Worlds: Struggling with the Legacy of the disciplines As historians and anthropologists construct 'the ground' on which to represent their objects of study in context, they still live with (and often struggle against) the legacy of these nine- teenth and early twentieth century protagonists of the disciplines. As my anecdotal history helps establish, it is not as though current Indigenous oral or embodied ways of knowing and academic scholarship are simply neighbouring forms that exist pleasantly side by side – 'you do your thing over there and I'll do my academic thing over here.'36 Rather, embedded in the very language and concepts of western academic thought is a systematic, strategic and political trivialization and even direct attack on other forms of knowing, especially those belonging to the cultural others that colonial powers encountered and tried to dominate, as- similate, and disappear. These ways of knowing have historically presented, and, as Adele Perry points out, still pres- ent a threat to western states and claims to nationhood in the Americas.37 In her discussion of Justice Allan McEachern's rejection of oral history in his 1991 judgment on Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, Perry shows how ultimately the trial: 35 That said, there are several interesting multimedia oral history projects scholars are pursuing. See, for example: University of Houston: The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling: http://digitalstorytelling.coe. uh.edu/, Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia: http://storytelling.concordia.ca/, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) - The Capture Wales Project: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/your- video/queries/capturewales.shtml, Digital Storytelling Toronto: http://storycentre.wordpress.com/ 36 Working with people in aboriginal communities as a researcher means to know how deeply historical prac- tices (and certainly some contemporary practices) of research have affected community members. 37 Lukacs, Martin, and Tim Groves. “Mounties Spied on Native Protest Groups”, n.d. http://www.thestar.com/ news/canada/politics/article/1096919--mounties-spied-on-native-protest-groups, 1. 33 reinforced his conviction that textuality was a crucial signpost of civilization. ‘‘The evidence suggests that the Indians of the territory were, by historical standards, a primitive people without any form of writing, horses, or wheeled wagons,’’ concluded the Justice.38 Like Starr eighty-three years earlier, McEachern – a British Columbia Supreme Court Jus- tice – constituted a collection of "modern" traits, what he called "historical standards" of civilization, to trivialize and reject the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en and their claim to fifty-seven thousand square kilometers of their homeland.39 In the face of the years of reflection on the colonial experience in academia and the post-colonial projects to valorize oral histories, Perry contends: We may wish that a positivist discipline rooted in an almost mystical reverence for the ‘‘primary document,’’ assumed to be written and unpublished, was a thing of the past, but it remains very much with us, and a rigorous critique must acknowledge that as well as argue against it.40 The perceived divide between oral and written/textual ways of knowing is a site of strug- gle that is continually rehearsed in contemporary academic work. But in some ways it is doomed never to find a resolution, considering the antagonistic colonial roots of the disci- plines. Even in the very writing of the Delgamuukw chapter of Antoinette Burton's Archive Stories volume, Perry notes: 38 Adele Perry in Burton, Antoinette M. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2005, 335. 39 For another discussion of Delgamuukw see Daly, Richard. Our Box Was Full : An Ethnography for the Del- gamuukw Plaintiffs. Vancouver, BC, CAN: UBC Press, 2004. 40 Burton, Archive Stories, 343. 34 This work, including my own, tends to pepper analysis rooted in the written archive with brief nods to oral sources. This scholarly approach, not unlike the legal one adopted by McEachern, is one that simultaneously acknowledges and submerges the critique of Indigenous [oral] history and archives.41 In a very pragmatic sense, then, the different worlds that oral tradition speaks to are difficult to represent, particularly within the discipline of history, without embedding them deeply within a document-based, archival analysis. In anthropological treatises too, the voices of Indigenous people and the deep ethnographic descriptions of their practices must be made to say things of relevance to the discipline – in the past, this perhaps meant proving a uni- versal theory of the evolution of culture while, more recently, it leads to attempts to prove the importance of particularized, local meanings and distinct ontologies. But just as in this dissertation, the central interlocutor of the writing, those prepared to evaluate its worth as a 'contribution to knowledge,' remain scholars and, more generally, the academy, rather than the community represented in the writing. Despite the historic circumstances that have led to the apparent imperviousness of academia to other ways of knowing and communicating, many scholars have worked to broaden the scope of academic practice in order to create openings and perforations through which other ways of knowing can flow in. These are approaches like Indigenous Methodologies, third wave post-colonial thought and Posthumanism that challenge scholars to develop ways of research and representation that incorporate, at a fundamental level, non-western ontolo- gies and epistemologies. They are dynamic in the sense that to follow the critiques and strat- 41 In this quote Perry uses the work ‘archive’ more broadly to refer to oral and written memory rather than just the physical archive. Ibid, 337. 35 egies that they originate means to struggle to connect writing and research to the scholar's embodied experience of being in the world – an act that is in turns complicated, problem- atic, rewarding, and fundamentally personal. I would like to acknowledge just some of the people who are working in parallel with my own project, at times informing it, but at others confirming insights that I have received from Pedro, Doña Vicky and Jaalen. These scholars continue to contribute to the broadening of academic discourse in order to make other ways of knowing increasingly articulable. One of the starting points for Indigenous Methodologies, for example, is the need to de- colonize. Linda Tuhiwai Smith sets the scene for her survey of strategies for decolonization with an articulation of the effects of continuing colonization on the voices and lives of In- digenous people. As an indigenous scholar she feels the heavy legacy of the Euro-centrism that is a foundation of the colonial project: When I read texts, for example, I frequently have to orientate myself to a text world in which the centre of academic knowledge is either in Britain, the United States or Westem Europe; in which words such as ‘we', ‘us', ‘our', ‘I' actually exclude me.42 The dangers of writing within a colonially formed enterprise are subtle but potentially self- defeating: 42 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London ; New York : Dunedin, N.Z. : New York: Zed Books ; University of Otago Press ; Distributed in the USA exclusively by St. Martin’s Press, 1999, 35. 36 We begin to write about ourselves as indigenous peoples as if we really were ‘out there', the ‘Other', with all the baggage that this entails. [ . . . ] Writing can be dangerous because, by building on previous texts written about indige- nous peoples, we continue to legitimate views about ourselves which are hostile to us. This is particularly true of academic writing, although journalistic and imaginative writing reinforce these ‘myths'.43 As a result, Tuhiwai Smith brings together a guide to twenty-five ways to decolonize, ways that are oriented towards self-determination and autonomy, "healing, restoration and social justice."44 Among the goals/strategies that are key elements of scholarly and non-academic approaches, she lists sharing, creating, claiming, story-telling, restoring, returning, and gen- dering. Indigenous Methodologies have much to do with recognizing who is speaking and what their story is. In my search for a voice through which to articulate the narrative that follows in this dissertation, I was inspired by Jeff Thomas, an Iroquois photographer, artist and writer whose work in different media has reframed photography in the archive and provided new ways to approach turn of the nineteenth century ethnographic portraiture through personal dialogue. Thomas begins much of his writing by telling a story from his childhood and from conversations with his elders that relate his own personal connection to photographs of In- digenous people. As I will describe further in the epilogue, from the centre of the National Archives in Ottawa, Thomas deconstructed the ethnographic categories that were used to label photographs of Indigenous people in the collection by naming the people they repre- 43 Ibid, 36. 44 Ibid, 142. 37 sented and inviting family members to come into the exhibit he mounted in order to connect with their own family relations in the pictures. Voice is also critical to Margaret Kovach as she opens her discussion and interviews with scholars on Indigenous methodologies in her book Indigenous methodologies: characteristics, conver- sations and contexts. She begins with an evocation of the difference between talking in person and meeting someone through their writing: I am introducing myself purposefully in this prologue for it is relational work. In community, I would share this through talk, I would give enough informa- tion about my lineage and those who raised me for people to 'ssess me out.' People would nod; I would know if they understand. It is different in writing.45 Kovach's narrative throughout the book is very personal, a tone still relatively rare in aca- demia outside discussions that focus on issues of reflexivity. As Kovach reflects in her own narrative, The act of sharing through personal narrative, teaching story, and general conversation is a method by which each generation is accountable to the next in transmitting knowledge. As contemporary Indigenous thinker Pyre jean Graveline asserts, we learn in relationship to others, knowing is a process of 'self-in-relation' (1998: 52).46 45 Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: characteristics, conversations and contexts. Toronto: University of To- ronto Press, 3. 46 Ibid, 14. 38 As an Indigenous person who re-connected with the community of her ancestors later in life, Kovach is very cautious in positioning the knowledge that she presents and her relation- ship to it. In this way, Kovach recognizes all the while her position as an insider-outsider – a person whose relationship to her ancestral community is complicated by a childhood in a non-indigenous home. Devon Mihesuah's question about voice is exactly why it is that so many histories of Ameri- can Indians are still being told without the voices of the communities whose own histories are being told. According to Mihesuah: Many historians and anthropologists also argue that Indians cannot accurately recount their past using oral traditions. They refuse to use informants, believ- ing modern Indians' versions of their tribes' histories are "fantasies."47 Not only does this attitude sideline Indigenous people's voices on their own community identity, but it also reifies a colonial, Euro-centric perspective on the creation of objective knowledge in an academic or 'Western' mode. As a response she questions: [ . . . ] are not some written records fantasy? Are not some writings of some army officers, missionaries, explorers, and pioneers who encountered Indians exaggerated and biased? Are not some uses of statistics illusory?48 47 Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians. Lincoln: Univer- sity of Nebraska Press, 1998, 2. 48 Ibid, 2. 39 Mihesuah's work suggests the continuing obstacles Indigenous communities face when the academic representation of their past made – enabled by assumptions about the linearity of time (rather than continuity and repetition) – silence their connection to their ancestors. Angela Cavender Wilson, writing in Mihesuah's volume Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, insists on the connection between the stories of her maternal lineage that her grandmother told her and her own identity as a Dakota woman. As such, not simply history, a story to be consumed as part of a professional interest or hobby, stories tell of her own existence in a line of women: It is through the stories of my grandmother, my grandmother's grandmother, and my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother and their lives that I learned what it means to be a Dakota woman, and the responsibility, pain, and pride associated with such a role.49 The disconnection of histories from the responsibility and respect that structures the life of Indigenous communities steals them from their position within a web of meaning that spans generations past and still to come. There are many other scholars and thinkers working on these themes of Indigenous meth- odologies, among them Donald Fixico, Eva Marie Garroutte, Bonita Lawrence, and Julie Cruikshank.50 Critical to understanding the significance of this work, as Kū Kahakalau points out, is that the insights Indigenous ways of knowing offer are applicable in any field: 49 “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family.” In Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, 27–36. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, 27. 50 See Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005., Fixico, Donald Lee. The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and 40 [ . . . ] indigenous researchers must be able to utilize indigenous methodolo- gies, not just at institutions controlled by indigenous peoples, or in disciplines oriented toward native studies, but even at the most conservative and presti- gious Western universities, and in fields seemingly unrelated to native life and native ways.51 A second discussion that connects to my work as well as to Indigenous methodologies is the Third Wave Feminism of bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Ella Shohat, Chandra Mohanty, and Rey Chow.52 Finding your own voice within the structures of academic rigour and institution can be very difficult where authority has historically been recognized as originating in white males. bell hooks, for example, talks about the opening that Paulo Freire made for her to articulate her own struggle despite feminism's origins in the concerns of middle class white women: [ . . . ] early on the feminist movement was not a location that welcomed the radical struggle of black women to theorize our subjectivity. Freire's work (and that of many other teachers) affirmed my right as a subject in resistance to define my reality.53 Traditional Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2003., Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. Ewing, NJ, USA: University of California Press, 2003., and Lawrence, Bonita. ”Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004. 51 Kahakalau, Kū. “Indigenous Heuristic Action Research: Bridging Western and Indigenous Research Method- ologies.” Hulili : multidisciplinary research on Hawaiian well-being. 1, no. 1 (2004): 19–34, 20. 52 Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994., Anzaldúa, Gloria E. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2009., Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994., Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders : Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2003., and Chow, Rey. Age of the World Target : Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2006. 53 Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994, 53. 41 hooks' own sense of 'defining reality' as a means of self-definition and terrain of struggle reminds me of one of the sayings I refer to again later from the campesino communities of the CIPO-RFM that talks about creating the world we want to live in. For hooks, creativity is a key right to claim in finding your own voice. Gloria Anzaldúa writes of the creativity of experience that engenders identification and sub- jectivity as a occurring on the border, a space in-between of contradictions and possibilities. For a characterization of the creative spaces of chican@ artists, she refers to the concept of Nepantla: Nepantla is the Náhuatl word for an in-between state, that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or sexual position to another, when traveling from the present identity into a new identity.54 Moreover, she states that: To be disoriented in space is to be en nepantla. To be disoriented in space is to experience bouts of dissociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups. The border is in a constant nepantla state and it is an analog of the planet.55 As such, in Anzaldúa's sense, liminality is not only a productive positioning from which to articulate ideas and for creative resistance, but it is also a space that all people inhabit as we constantly cross borders, appropriate, and re-appropriate expressions. 54 Anzaldúa, Gloria E. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2009, 180. 55 Ibid, 180. 42 Borders between humans and non-humans that are a feature of the liberal humanist subject are the point of departure for many discussions of Posthumanism attempting to address du- alistic constructions of nature and culture that abound in scholarship and Western societies in general. Governing conceptions of the human subject in academia tend to set off human beings as separate and superior to their environments and the non-human beings that inhabit it. While many discussions of Posthumanism come out of the blurring of lines between human and non-human prosthetheses or microorganisms as discussed in connection with technology and medicine, Juanita Sundberg alongside Annette Watson and Orville H. Hun- tington argues that these approaches to Posthumanism continue to exclude unauthorized voices "whose interest in posthumanism might lie elsewhere, and at other scales."56 Address- ing dualisms of nature and culture in Western discourse, according to Sundberg also means addressing continuing Euro-centrism in academic epistemologies and ontologies even within Posthumanist debates. At stake in Sundberg's approach to her own scholarship in geogra- phy is the need to create, following the incitement of the Zapatistas, "a world in which many worlds fit."57 In order to involve Indigenous ways of knowing in an equal partnership in the production of knowledge, Watson and Huntington set out in their article "They're here - I can feel them: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges" to produce a multi-vocal, multi-ontological account of a moose hunt in Alaska. Combining their different voices, both in their dissonance and convergence, Watson, a scholar in geography, and Huntington, a Huslia Tribal Member, produce a 56 Watson, A., and Huntington, O. (2008). They’re here - I can feel them: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges. Social and Cultural Geography, 9(3), 257–281. doi:10.1080/14649360801990488, 258. 57 Sundberg, Juanita. “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies.” Article. Vancouver, 2011, 3. 43 paper [that] narrates a single moose hunting event as another human – nonhu- man (posthumanist) assemblage: the acceptance of a moose's body and its spirit by the hunter. Not just about the practice of hunting moose, but about the spaces that inform such practice, the epistemic spaces that constitute con- temporary IK [Indigenous Knowledge].58 In addition to speaking to the concerns of Posthumanism, Sundberg, Huntington and Watson directly address Eva Marie Garroutte's call to de-center the authority of academic discourses. In her book Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America, she outlines a research positioning called Radical Indigenism that requires the researcher to "abandon any notion that mainstream academic philosophies, interpretations, and approaches based upon them are, in principle, superior."59 Mario Blaser, informed by Bruno Latour, has also set out to address this latent understand- ing of scholarly ways of knowing as practically superior by destabilizing their foundational conventions and certainties. In the context of government relationships with the Yshiro people in Northern Paraguay, Mario Blaser brings forward a formulation of the "fact" that points to its connection to ontology, practice and performance. Blaser employs Bruno La- tour's expression "factish" which "seeks to bypass the sterile modernist discussion on wheth- er the "things" we see in the world are "facts" (purely external and autonomous objects) or "fetishes" (reifications of our subjectivity)." As such, ""what exists" is always the ongoing effect of practices or performances," and therefore: 58 Watson, “They’re here - I can feel them”, 259. 59 Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. Ewing, NJ, USA: University of California Press, 2003, 107. 44 what we call "fact" (or reality) is better conceived of as a "factish" in which ob- jectivity and subjectivity (and, therefore, nature, culture, morality, and politics) are entangled with each other in an indissoluble knot because "facts" are both real and done—or, better, they are real because they are being done.60 Echoing Pedro's earlier statement about learning through doing, this understanding of the 'factish' serves Blaser as a means to open the door to a more level dialogue between what he calls ontologies-worlds. The ontologies-worlds people inhabit are the product of historically situated practices, that is, of the distinct imaginaries we produce. Blaser frames his explora- tion of a land co-management program being collaborated on by the Yshiro people and state officials in Paraguay as an attempt at "integrating Indigenous and modern scientific knowl- edge" that is prone to "misunderstandings" between the groups involved because of their distinct ontologies-worlds. According to Blaser, these "misunderstandings:" might turn out to be instances of what Viveiros de Castro calls uncontrolled equivocation, "a type of communicative disjuncture where the interlocutors are not talking about the same thing, and do not know this."61 As such, the difficulty in communicating across these disjunctures is doubly difficult because people are not even aware of the very different grounds upon which they base their judg- ments. For scholars wishing to break down this barrier and sustain a productive tension between academic ways of knowing and Indigenous ways of knowing, they must acknowl- 60 Blaser, Mario. “The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting Program.” Ameri- can Anthropologist 111, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 10-20, 11. 61 Ibid, 11. 45 edge and locate these performances of scholarly ontology-worlds as Sundberg and others suggest.62 Scholarly works that engage non-academic members of Indigenous communities as co- authors must live with what can sometimes be deep tensions between academic rationali- ties and ontologies and those of the co-researchers. Take for example the anthology Haida Gwaii Human History and Environment from the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People, edited by Daryl W. Fedje and Rolf W. Mathewes with contribution from members of the Haida community. As a counter to the prevailing notion that everything that happened before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas is "prehistory," the volume uses the term "history" strategically to describe its project whose time scale would normally preclude it from the discipline in large part because there are no written records pertaining to that period in the archive. Moreover, it is a "history" written by archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, and Haida rather than historians. Their book sets the task to their readers, and the Haida contributors in particular, of bringing science and oral tradition into the same frame in order to create a new history for the islands. In Kii7iljuus Barbara Wilson's and her co-author Heather Harris' words, "We believe that the conjunction of data provided by the k'aaygang. nga and archaeological/geological evidence can produce synergies in which the two kinds of knowledge combine to create something greater than the two separately."63 The book inter- weaves Haida and scientific accounts of Haida Gwaii through collecting both types of ac- counts in the same place, as well as through methodological essays like the one by Kii7iljuus and Heather Harris, making an important statement about the confluence of evidence about 62 See also Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sundberg, “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies”, 5. 63 Kii7iljuus Barbara Wilson and Heather Harris in Fedje, Daryl W, and Rolf W Mathewes, eds. Haida Gwaii Hu- man History and Environment from the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005, 122. 46 Haida Gwaii. In his foreword, Guujaaw, the president of the Haida Nation, relates scientific and Haida ways of knowing: Science is coming of age, and while there is a convergence and a reconciling of science with our histories, scientists may have to take our word on certain facts. It was because Raven fooled around with his uncle's wife that Gahllns Kun (his uncle) spun his hat and caused the water to rise, accounting for one of the floods. Scientists are still trying to figure out how the sun and the moon got up there, and while they have theories, give them time and they will come back to us. And we can tell them, because it was told ...64 In Guujaaw's vision, the two ways of knowing the world are, at the end of the day, striving for the same knowledge or "facts." As he puts it, science is playing catch-up, only now find- ing out what speakers in the Haida oral tradition have said all the time. The Haida Gwaii Human History volume is a sign of mutual commitment between members of the Haida community and members of the government and academic communities to think through and continue a dialogue about different epistemologies and ontologies. But its publication also speaks to the challenges that it raises. Specifically, how are readers to understand "synergy" when considering fundamentally different ways of knowing truth? The geological evidence of the appearance of the first trees on the islands of Haida Gwaii many thousands of years ago is one of the points of connection Kii7iljuus and Harris signal 64 Ibid, xxiiii. 47 that links the geological and archaeological records to the accounts of the first tree in Haida stories recorded by John Swanton. The synergy the authors suggest in the volume is lost on some readers. One academic reviewer, for example, praised the book for its approach, but said ultimately she understood it as a case of science validating oral history (and not the other way around as Guujaaw would have it). In another review, the reader simply failed to comment on the book's project of a multivocal account of human experience on Haida Gwaii, passing over the Haida stories and analysis, perhaps as an idiosyncrasy in an otherwise coherent compilation of concrete scientific studies.65 In both cases, the scholars appeared to be unable to think through the project without scientific and western ways of knowing being the centre to the periphery of Haida ways of knowing. In her article on Posthumanism, Sundberg refers to case studies wherein scholars (including herself) limit themselves to a "contained and self-referential circle of Anglo-Eurocentered thinkers"66 in order to articulate their projects. Through these "Performances" that Sun- dberg explores, she shows how a lack of situating the "loci of enunciation" of scholarly discourses – tacitly positing them as universal – is a part of the everyday practice of scholar- ship. Alongside scholars like Blaser, she suggests that ontologies are performed and inhabit- ed, producing, in Blaser's words, "multiple ontologies-worlds" through practices and interac- tions.67 Thinkers like Pedro, Doña Vicky and Jaalen acknowledge the simultaneous existence of different ontologies-worlds constantly in their respect for other creation stories that account for the beginnings of the people and worlds in different communities. Making this 65 Robert Losey, “Haida Gwaii: Human History and Environment from the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People,” The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 2, no. 2 (July 1, 2007): 281-283; Deborah McGregor, “Haida Gwaii: Human History and Environment from the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People.,” Letters in Canada 78, no. 1 (Winter2009 2009): 214-216. 66 Sundberg, “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies”, 6. 67 Blaser, “The Threat of the Yrmo”, 11. 48 acknowledgement, within largely text-based self-referential academic discourse, is difficult because it means finding a way through the walls that have defended against 'non-rational' others and 'superstitions' for several centuries now. In my experience, it is only through the use of evocative language and situated, personal narratives that reaching over these walls is possible, or even thinkable. In this thesis, I have attempted as much as possible to allow my methodology to research and writing arise from my experiences sharing with Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro. Though I have training in academia that no doubt informs my project, instead of relying on the literature to structure my approach to relating and sharing with the three participants, as I composed this thesis in video and writing, and continued my dialogue with them throughout, I made listening to my experience and to their voices central to the unfolding of my narra- tive. This meant a struggle to find my own voice amid the myriad of academic sources and writing conventions, an endeavour that was not easy. How to pull off an exploration of Indigenous ways of knowing that doesn't just seek to 'validate' them in the eyes of academ- ics, but that instead truly creates knowledge through dialogue, respect and an attention to embodied practice? As I invited Doña Vicky, Jaalen, and Pedro to participate in this project with me, I took on a commitment to find a way to incorporate their voices into my text that respects the value of their knowledge. For me, that meant giving their voices at least equal weight and author- ity in this dialogue as I give to those of academics. I needed to find a way to ensure that the three participants did not end up becoming simply objects of study, their lives turned into data and categorized in such a way that a boundary would be drawn between their voices and the methodological discussions in the text that form the foundation for my interpretations 49 and analysis. In order to imagine and create a space free from those boundaries so that their voices come through with their own authority, I have dedicated three chapters to their ideas and my experience of sharing with them, including a one-hour video essay. In addition, the analysis of archive, linear time and scholarly distance in chapter 4 also draws upon their insights.68 Despite this effort, I still recognize that I have an over-determining role in every representa- tion of each of the participants whether in text, or in the video I shot and edited. Work- ing between ways of knowing, not just between different opinions, ideas, or perceptions, but ways of inhabiting the world day to day, through seemingly mundane practices as well as statements and claims, has been very difficult for me. Being constantly attentive to the subtleties and understanding all the while that there are things that I will never understand, has been challenging, but also freeing. Participating in an embodied practice as a form of research constantly puts in question my own subjectivity as I relate to others. Working in the milpa (corn field) in Pedro's commu- nity, stirring the big cazuela of mole at Doña Vicky's house, and hanging out as Jaalen carves cedar also allows me to recognize in my own position as we bring a shared world into being. Instead of insulating myself from these experiences by holding on to the concept of the 'field' as though my time with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro was divided off into a separate, objective, space, I am always conscious of them as close friends who are a part of my life, whether or not I am wearing my 'researcher' hat.69 68 Julie Cruikshank takes up the challenge of positioning the women she worked with on oral history by bringing them into the company of Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin, scholars who were also working to understand their world at the turn of the century. Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. Print, 60. 69 For a discussion of “the field,” see also: Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 126. 50 Knowledge-making and Embodiment The central insight that I learned from Pedro, Jaalen, and Doña Vicky is that everything I do is living, embodied, and in relation. Whether I'm cooking or researching and writing, there is an aspect of feeling, intuition, touch, gestures and movements involved. As I've learned to paint Haida formline design on totem poles, cook Mole Amarillo with Doña Vicky, or help Pedro plant crops, I have come to understand the centrality of my whole body and its rela- tionships to the things that I eat, touch, and work with. In academic practice, these aspects of my connection to the embodiment of everyday life are generally left out of the narrative. Antoinette Burton and the contributors to Archive Stories explore experiences of the vis- cerality of research, re-inserting the bodies of the researchers in the archives, bringing back the archivists and the institutions where archives are held into the scholar's narrative. Their book sets out with a goal of "enumerating the ways in which archival work is an embodied experience, one shaped as much by national identity, gender, race, and class as by profession- al training or credentials," and to indicate "historians’ comparative silence about the personal, structural, and political pressures which the archive places on the histories they end up writ- ing— as well as those they do not."70 Burton and her contributors examine the lived, bodily relationship to the archive through, for example, its "architectural dimension" which "impos- es its own meanings on the evidence contained therein."71 Like pent-up confessions, Archive Stories reveals the way historians all have their own stories of being in the archive, surviving its deprivations and mold in order to live the triumphal moment of discovery. These are stories that are not typically a part of the resulting published work, or if so, are found only in foot- 70 Burton, Archive Stories, 9. 71 Ibid, 8. 51 notes or as asides rather than considered to be germane to the central historical narrative and the creation of knowledge. As a result, the chapters in Archive Stories take on the "backstage of archives— how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated"72 in order to bring out the embodied experience of archival research that often goes unacknowledged except in personal conversations and anecdotes told at conferences. Horatio N. Roque Ramírez, for example, explores a live human "talking archive" in the testimonio of Teresita la Campesina, a transgendered latina living in San Fransisco, to look at how she actively shaped the way she wished her archive to be constituted and performed.73 Instead of attempting to contain Teresita within the bounds of a research framework he controls, Ramirez highlights the agency she has in dictating the terms of her representation. Teresita does not hesitate to make clear to her audience (that includes Ramirez) the significance of her role in the queer community, and thus how she should be narrated: ""You’re talking to me," Teresita said forcefully, "a pioneer . . . so please wake up and smell the coffee!" [followed by thunderous laughter]"74 The "comparative silence" on embodiment that Burton seeks to address signals an important distinction that I've experienced between the epistemologies of the disciplines of history and anthropology and the ancestral ways of knowing of the three participants. The difference is that in the case of Jaalen, Doña Vicky, and Pedro's ancestral ways of knowing, embodiment and presence are very much a part of thinking and being aware, whereas in scholarship the emphasis is primarily on visual, textual systems of knowing. This is to say that unless em- bodiment, in and of itself, is the theme of the discussion, it generally goes unacknowledged. 72 Ibid, 7. 73 Ibid, 130. 74 Ibid, 112. 52 It is a distinction that is, as I discussed above, difficult to express in writing, particularly in the context of a history dissertation. Learning the central role embodied relationships play in creating knowledge that may seem abstract or purely 'academic' has meant encountering the limits of language to express mean- ing. I have struggled to find a better word for 'participant,' for example, which is a short- hand for "Doña Vicky, Jaalen, and Pedro" that I use to avoid repetition. 'Participant' in no way conveys the role that each of these three people play in this project and feels counter- productive to my message that they are central to the knowledge that I present here. I've wondered if 'co-researcher' would be better, or does that expression risk becoming another euphemism for people without academic credentials participating in studies and research? I discussed this recently with Doña Vicky's brother Raul and he reminded me of a conversa- tion that he'd had with Doña Vicky after the trip she and I took to Haida Gwaii. We'd had a rough flight out of Masset and she was talking about how she had prayed for our survival (I imagined myself a leaf floating in the wind to calm myself), and she told Raul that she had reminded herself at the time that the work she was doing with me was important, and that her commitment was unwavering. On her trip to Canada and Haida Gwaii, she brought with her all her skills in healing, protocol, cooking and food preparation, all of which defined our interactions with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people we met. "Participant" does not come close to characterizing her contributions nor the honour for me in working with her. Nor does the term characterize the key role being with Doña Vicky played in the form and value of this project.75 75 I would also consider “Partner” for this project, in order to respect the knowledge and contributions Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro made, however that term could imply their responsibility for mistakes or misconcep- tions that I present as author and editor. It is important to re-state that the responsibility for these errors of interpretation lie with me only. 53 As I entered the writing and reading process, I've been interested to find many of the les- sons that I learned from the three participants echoed in the literature. When I read Bruno Latour's article "How to Talk About the Body? the Normative Dimension of Science Stud- ies," for example, I came across his discussion of "Learning to be affected," an embodied way of learning through which a person opens themselves up to differences as a form of learning about the world, rather than "the discounting of all remaining differences [that don't fit a given theory] as irrelevant" in order to produce a generality.76 As I said above, the first lesson I learned with Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen was to be open to differences and understand how that openness can change the way I am in the world. I decided to narrate my experience and insights through the story of meeting the three participants as a means to emphasize the connection of my knowledge to them, something that I feel would become less focused, valued, or even lost if I had mixed the discussion with a survey of the literature on embodiment. Spending time learning and sharing with Pedro, Jaalen and Doña Vicky has impressed upon me the intrinsic relationship between my body and the knowledge I hold – knowledge-in- relation. Learning from practice has taught me to put my body at the centre of knowing, to open myself to an awareness of intuition and embodied experience in my understanding of being in the world. Simply put, I can't know, I can't learn, without my body. My openness to my body, my intuitions, emotions and sensory experience are all my principal methodologies. For my audience to understand the foundations of my exploration and analysis in this dis- sertation, I need to share the meaning of caminando y miando as I have experienced it, in first 76 Latour, Bruno. “How to Talk About the Body? the Normative Dimension of Science Studies.” Body and Soci- ety 10, no. 2-3 (June 1, 2004): 205 -229, 220. 54 person.77 I need to share the notion of practice – continuing to do things, to live – as a way of knowing. It is through actively living and embracing ambiguity that Jaalen, Pedro, and Doña Vicky can enact their worlds through western eyes at the same time as through their own ways of knowing. Said in another way, knowing is synonymous with inhabiting, an action of creating and performing my world. reading/Viewing/Listening Whether it is my understanding of Haida carving or the importance of the sazon de la mano in cooking, I have built this narrative through myself, through my experience with the three participants, and my own understanding of academic methodologies. Like the writers of the Archive Stories volume I am trying to positively manifest the centrality of my own relation- ships to my "objects of study" and to the sources that I interact with in creating this narra- tive. It is a story about me and my own process as much as it is about Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro, and the how their ways of knowing can transform assumptions about historical practice. As a result, the meaning that I create over the course of the following chapters, originating from my own embodied experience, comes from the ground level, not an ab- stract position of omniscience. In order to locate myself on the ground floor, in the midst of relationships of mutual inter- dependence, I begin with an account of my relationship to Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro in Chapter 1 that brings out what it has meant to me to get to know them, my political com- mitments with them and thus the origins of the insights from my experience with them. 77 Grimaldo Rengifo Vásquez brings forward a similar saying from indigenous communities: “To know, you have to live.” Rengifo Vásquez quoted in Meyer, Lois, and Benjamín Maldonado Alvarado, eds. New World of Indigenous Resistance: Noam Chomsky and Voices from North, South, and Central America. Open Media Series. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010, 8. 55 Through this positioning of my process of learning from the participants and the explora- tion that I offer of the historian's tools, I take up the notion of knowledge as fundamentally connected to the body and identity of the knower and their experience of teaching and learning that allows it to spread to other people/bodies. Chapter 2 that follows is a video essay that I've composed from interviews with, and foot- age of, the practices of Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro. Beyond soundbites that inform the written narrative, the video essay is a space for my reader/viewer/auditor to become familiar with some aspects of the worlds in which the three participants live. For Doña Vicky, this was an opportunity to film her process of making the savoury chocolate sauce, mole negro, that is an ancient communal dish for the Nu Savi used at fiestas and celebrations. We also went to Tlaxiaco, her home town, and rancheria La Purisima, where she used to visit her paternal grandfather, so that she could tell some of the story of where she grew up. When I worked with Pedro, he framed the video footage as a history of the practices and knowledge of his community that would serve both for people elsewhere to know about, but also as a record for the younger generation of his pueblo. And with Jaalen, the interview centered on questions stemming from my own interests in Haida art and his relationship to the past, to research and institutions like the museum.78 Chapter 3 brings out my own sense of my experience with the three participants, fleshing out some of the insights that I gained from being with them. Continuing the story from Chapter 1, I explore my entanglement with the lives, activities and stories of Pedro, Jaalen and Doña Vicky in order to challenge the distance between the researcher and their object 78 The footage that I was able to capture with him working on totem poles has served in video clips that I’ve made for his website at Jaalen.net that showcases his art in carving, painting, copper shields, canoes, and anima- tion projects. 56 of study that typically undergirds the production of knowledge in the discipline of history. In addition, the story of the chapter reveals how valuable a resource my dialogue with the three participants has been for me in imagining a different way of relating to my world and to knowledge. The chapter guides you through my process of learning with the three par- ticipants in order to present some of the insights that I've gained from the experience and how they provide a point of departure for my re-evaluation of the tools of the discipline of history. Chapter 4 is structured around the three central tools of scholarly distance, archive, and lin- ear time. Beginning in the museum with a reflection from Jaalen on his relationship to Haida artifacts, I discuss the role that our everyday, embodied intimacy with the material world plays in the construction of knowledge through these three tools. Through this reflection I suggest the ways these largely unacknowledged intimate relationships come through in our imaginary of archive, time, place and solidity. I've opted to write an epilogue rather than a conclusion because instead of a closing, an epilogue represents a continuation. My goal with the epilogue is not to close off possibilities or to provide a sense of the completion of my process of learning. Instead, the epilogue will serve to relate the insights I've learned with the three participants to work by Indig- enous people that is informed by embodiment and ancestral ways of knowing. Artists like Jeff Thomas, and scholars like Andrea Walsh are finding ways to create space in academia through practice, re-appropriation and re-contextualization for the ways of knowing of their communities. Their work speaks to the resiliency and continued relevance of the knowledge they and their communities have to share despite the structural barriers and narratives that have been deployed to trivialize and exclude it. 57 Chapter 1 positioning Sources / Working across Distinct epistemologies Bueno, la comida mixteca de mi pueblo tiene varias comidas tradicionales, no? mmm, una de las principales es las comidas para las fiestas, es que es el mole, tamales, pozole, picadillo, que le dicen allá, es para los grandes eventos, de fiestas, de bautizos, de confirmaciones, de casamientos, y de fiesta del pueblo es esa comida. Well, Mixtec food from my pueblo (village) has several traditional dishes, no? mmm, one of the major ones is the food for holiday meals, like the mole, tamales, pozole, picadillo, they call it here, is for large events, parties, baptisms, confirmations, marriage, and town fiesta is what the food is for. (Doña Vicky, Topic: Doña Vicky Comidas Mixtecas) 58 Sometimes as I would watch Doña Vicky cooking or talking about traditional Oaxacan dishes, from the perspective of a viewer watching a video clip on a computer screen, I would wonder, with some degree of worry, what this has to do with History. What was I thinking taking all this video with Pedro, Jaalen and Doña Vicky talking and doing things now to use in a dissertation about History? But as I am drawn in to her words and presence and pay less attention to my disciplinary angst, I pick up again on how naming off the Mixtec dishes and remembering the process that she went through to learn them, especially the Mole, is a means for Doña Vicky to remember her own heritage and to speak it out for others to know it. My time with Doña Vicky has taught me why it is that she struggles to carry forward this important thread in her life that links her with generations of food preparers and a long history of these specific foods before the word ‘traditional' ever came in to use to describe them. In this chapter I will trace for you the way I have gotten to know Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen. How I know these participants and the relationship that I have with them is intrinsic to my project. As I explore below, I have learned with them that knowledge is fundamentally connected to people and things in a way that I couldn't have imagined before. The reflec- tions that I present in these chapters are alive in my relationships and my experience of shar- ing with Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen – knowledge-in-relation is critical to understanding the status of the claims that I make here. This knowledge originates in the process that I've been a part of for the last four or more years, a time of coming into relation with the ways of knowing of Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen's communities. In order to make this brief account of how I have come into relation with the lives of the three participants, I will begin by talking about my process of finding my own voice in rela- 59 tion to Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro, their ancestral knowledges and academia. I will then trace my own path of coming to know each of the three participants, a process that has required significant change in myself, and then I have a section on each of the participants and their communities and worlds. Finally, I introduce chapter two which is the video essay that I created with them. Finding Voice Doña Vicky once told me that the people (el pueblo – indigenous, non-indigenous, rural and urban "poor"1), the ones in la lucha (the struggle) with her in Oaxaca are tajantes, meaning that they speak out loudly and insist on being heard even though the mainstream population and government don't want to listen and might not understand what they're saying. Like Pedro says, they may sound like crazies out there on the street demanding respect for the traditional ways of cooking, dancing, growing food, and above all for their own land. Tajante (pronounced Tahantey) could be roughly translated as emphatic. As she explained to me, it is a mode of speech, insistent and defiant, but sometimes difficult for authorities to under- stand because of its situatedness in local understandings of the world. Doña Vicky would recognize the reaction to being Tajante in an passage I read in Paul Nadasdy's book Hunters and Bureaucrats. He relates an anecdote from the Yukon where government bureaucrats and scientists in a wildlife co-management workshop lay down their pens and wait through the stories Kluane people tell about their land and the animals – sometimes subjecting them to "gestures of impatience and disrespect, such as eye-rolling, audible sighs, and/or under-the- 1 I struggle with the word “poor” as a category that I find disrespectful, and rooted in colonial/modernist notions of the world always understood through a progression towards the apex of European civilization. Although I have often heard people in Oaxaca, including Doña Vicky, refer to themselves as “nosotros los pobres,” I find the expression myopic in its positioning of “poor people” as in need of help from the Global North, rather than in possession of wisdom, skills and resilience. 60 breath comments – and then once again take up their pens afterward and urge the meeting to get back 'on topic.'2 Trying to find my own voice in this writing, one that also addresses the concerns of my aca- demic audience, has been a struggle since the way I want to communicate is to some degree tajante. I know, for example, that describing knowledge as "connected" may very well sound like new age credulity rather than hard-hitting academic analysis. One of my supervisors warned that this type of exercise could be seen in a similar vein as the bourgeois life journey depicted in books and movies like Eat, Pray, Love where a middle class white woman from the US sets off to find herself through eating Italian and appropriating spiritual practices from India, all the while maintaining her own lifestyle of privilege while these cultures and communities provide her an exotic background for transformation. Doubtless there is an element of that in my story, and much academic work done across cultures. Certainly, the privilege of travel common to academics and a dose of projecting ideals and preconceptions on others is inevitable in this type of dialogue. Each reader/viewer/auditor will make their own judgment of the status of this account, its authenticity. If I have succeeded in com- municating my experience of entering into relation with the participants, their communities, their places and knowledges, then people who have experience in Indigenous communities – either being from those communities themselves, being settlers, or doing solidarity work – may recognize some of the anecdotes, practices or ways of knowing that I bring up here. If I have been successful in this narration, my audience will have felt invited in to a different experience of knowledge and history. 2 Nadasdy, Paul. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Van- couver: UBC Press, 2003, 131. 61 As I have mentioned, my intention in this project is to work with the voices of practitio- ners of ancestral practices without trivializing them into categories of "folklore" or myths/ legends in the process, but rather learning from them as I would from the words of au- thoritative scholarly writings. This means disregarding the customary hierarchy that Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to that runs from European sources at the top, down to Other ways of knowing often voiced outside of academia. Chakrabarty asserts that, through the method- ologies of a Europe-centered academia, other non-European scholarly traditions such as Sanskrit become "now only matters of historical research" for the people who would have been the holders of this "unbroken and alive" intellectual tradition.3 Instead of following this hierarchy wherein nineteenth century ideologies of the progress of civilization re- invent other cultural traditions as artifacts of a previous age, my task here is to orient myself towards Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro's ancestral knowledges as the centre from which I engage in my writing and exploration. Instead of characterizing all Haida or all Nu Savi as one coherent ethnographic category, the knowledge and representations I offer here come primarily from the three participants, their own experiences, and their teachers. Alongside recognizing their collective identities as Haida or Nu Savi, to understand Pedro, Jaalen and Doña Vicky's knowledge is to understand specific lineages and people rather than simply as members of an ethnographic category of culture. Each person speaks about the parents, elders, aunts, uncles, ts'ini's, nonii's, or abue- los (all words for grandparents) who taught them what they know. When I was talking about this with a First Nations Hip Hop artist in Vancouver, he said that it is like a form of cita- tion – he said that aboriginal people often cite the land and their elders to give the origins of 3 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Ewing, NJ, USA: Princ- eton University Press, 2000, 5. 62 a skill, a name, or a story. It is a citation in a different modality than an academic citation. In part, no doubt, it is a means to establish authority about who passed on the knowledge, but it is also about respect for different people's knowledge: it isn't to say that my source trumps yours, but rather to locate where the knowledge came from and recognize its lineage and connection to that place. These ways of knowing are about relationships between beings and bodies, recognizing a connection to an elder or a place rather than conceiving of knowl- edge as simply out there, accumulating endlessly in the ether, the libraries or the internet. It is about truly listening and being open on a deep level to other people's ideas. With this sense of knowledge as situated in place, in respect and in and through relationships, I have confined myself for much of what I write here to the dialogues and experience that I've had with Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro. In referencing other people's voices like Iroquois photographer Jeff Thomas, or a scholar like Diana Taylor, my goal is not to perform a sense of mastery of the literature, but rather to articulate them with this dialogue and find a way to bring them into relation with the other voices. When I bring in an academic monograph or article, such as Taylor's piece on the on- line archive in chapter 4, for example, I do so because it has become a part of this dialogue and not because I wish to use it as a means to validate or authorize my claims. In addition, I recognize that the network of scholars discussing the themes on which my dissertation touches is vast, much larger than the literature with which I choose to dialogue, making a complete evaluation of all the different fields an endless task. Instead, as I have said in the introduction, my primary orientation that guides the paths I choose to follow is towards the voices and ways of knowing of the three participants and their communities. Not a master, I am just at the beginning of learning a different way of being in the world. I don't have all the answers, and what answers I do are suggestions, or meditations. 63 The way that I've described my exploratory dialogue as made up of nodes that connect through me is likely a similar experience to how some other scholars would describe their own work and way of doing and thinking. Rather than beginning with a particular end in mind, a field for example, I've followed the direction that my face-to-face relationships have taken me. This is part of an attempt to relinquish the view from above that is based upon the assumption that a complete or "total" picture and accounting of research subjects is pos- sible. The ideal position that I'm striving for is one on the ground level, incomplete as seen through empirical eyes, based at times on intuition, since embodied knowledge is funda- mentally bound to the experience of a particular body and its makeup. To do so, I believe, means to put in play my relationship to my sources, because I can only make this move as a deliberate, political act, itself tajante, by attempting to re-imagine that relationship for my reader. My Own path Talking about my relationship to Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro is to reflect on the way that my own relationship to knowledge has changed over the course of the last decade or more. Both through my educational path at UBC and through my friendships with members of the CIPO-RFM in Oaxaca and Haida people in Haida Gwaii, particularly Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro, I have ended up in a different place than where I began. Having envisioned a career as an engineer when I first entered university, I soon changed my focus as a result of my exposure to different geographies and histories through a course in Latin American His- tory. As a Canadian with a largely Northern, snowbound orientation, the realization of my ignorance of most of the culture and history of Latin America was quite an awakening, and in particular, my total lack of awareness of aboriginal cultures South of the U.S. - Mexico 64 border was stark. As I shifted into that field my mind was opened to very different ways of knowing the world through classroom sessions, stories represented in books, and through my travel to Mexico. Some of the solid assumptions I had about my world started to de- velop holes and ruptures. Knowingly or unknowingly I set out on a journey into those gaps, striving to reduce the distance between myself and the people, culture and experience that upon first encounter were so interesting to me, and, I admit, so foreign. It was in this initial phase of my journey, when my contact with Mexico was through aca- demic programs and remained largely in the realm of abstract ideas gleaned from books I'd read rather than embodied relationships, that I experienced that moment of epiphany at a history seminar in Oaxaca in 2002. It was in a group discussion amongst graduate students and professors from across North America and the U.K. of anthropologist Patricia Pes- sar's work in the Sertão in Brazil that she had just finished presenting to us. During the discussion amongst colleagues, Dr. Pessar revealed that the campesinos in the community in which she was working, following the prophesy of a local elder, believed that she was a god- dess come to visit them. This revelation, a part of the genre of "off-the-record" fieldwork anecdotes, led to peals of laughter throughout the room of academics. The moment, when a room full of graduate students and professors shared a joke about the quaint and peculiar beliefs of campesinos in the Sertão in Brazil, would have gone unnoticed for me earlier in my life. Indeed, in my younger days, the notion that Dr. Pessar, as the researcher in a rural community, was thought to be a goddess by the community would have seemed far out to me, even ridiculous. Perhaps I would have drawn on the extensive vocabulary in the Eng- lish language for describing the campesin@s' belief while simultaneously trivializing it and distancing myself from it: superstition, myth, magic, sorcery, backward, etc – straight out of the times of Frederick Starr. But this time around the seminar's reaction to campesino 65 belief stuck out for me like a sore thumb. The warm feeling of a shared joke amongst col- leagues felt foreign to me and I identified the power that was embodied in this group of historians, of which I was a member. It seemed to me like a form of hypocrisy – at issue, in my mind, was a basic disrespect for the people who were so earnestly represented in Dr. Pessar's work. My reaction speaks as much to my own ego and self-righteousness as to the issues of posi- tioning and respect involved. In the midst of the laughter filling the room I was indignant on behalf of the campesinos who had shared their belief with Dr. Pessar. I was sure that if they had been in the room, none of us would have been laughing, self-assured in our knowl- edge that their belief was ridiculous. I posed the question to Dr. Pessar "How do you know you aren't a goddess?" My earnest attitude was lost in more peals of laughter, as was any rev- elation I had intended to make about the position of the researcher vis-a-vis her objects of research. I don't see this off-the-record joke as a momentary lapse of judgment, but rather a sign of something more systemic. In fact, Dr. Pessar is a well-intentioned, accomplished academic whose book demonstrates nothing but respect for her interlocutors in the Sertão. For me it made evident the safe distance that is always presumed to exist between the re- searcher's analysis, publications, colleagues, home life, and the subjects about which they write. It pointed to the cultural consensus among many scholars of history and anthropol- ogy: that the material they write about, though it be other people's lives and identities, can be legitimately treated as raw material rather than a community of living, breathing human beings demanding respect and dignity.4 4 Of course, as I will discuss more later, the dead deserve the same respect and dignity as the living. We will all be someone’s ancestor one day. 66 These years of connection and crossover have opened me to many different ways of see- ing the world to which I couldn't relate before. Perhaps I could read a book and imagine a distinct life way, one based on survival in remote areas, or life in a small community guided by elders, but it would only be based on the distanced type of relationship available in a book where my imagination fills in the blanks and much of people's actual experience of living it is left out. Sharing with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro and spending time in their com- munities has given me a glimpse into this experience, and most of all what it means to live a life connected to place, to the land. Through their practices, all three put a high value on lived experience and on the connection between the physicality of experience – doing things with your hands and your body – and the ways that they know the world. Their ontology is rooted in place and in experience. Part of the process of de-centering that I am in the midst of is finding the familiar spaces like the seminar room to be suddenly foreign, almost as improbable and unlikely as the belief in goddesses was to me before. As I learn more of the ways of knowing of Pedro, Doña Vicky, and Jaalen, the ways their elders and ancestors have passed on, I have understood their value in immediate practical ways. The idea of a space in which to sit and partake in a specialized discussion of campesinos' lives centered on the opinions and perspectives of other academic commentators (rather than centered on the truths of the campesinos them- selves) can seem ridiculous if you think about it that way. My academic relationship to the stories, cultures, and peoples of Latin America changed into something more lived and experienced when I began to connect my life to some Oaxacan members of the social movement that led to the barricading of Oaxaca City in 2006. As pressures for resources and land grow in Mexico, the indigenous peoples whose homeland 67 it is have continued a strong movement of resistance that is now the foundation of a broad- based popular social movement. In 2006, this social movement was focused on the ouster of a corrupt governor who used a very heavy hand to deal with dissent, using thousands of police and street tanks with chili pepper laced water canons. When I arrived in Oaxaca in 2002 for the Mexican history seminar, I wasn't aware of the long history of resistance in the region, going back well before the arrival of the Spanish. We did cover some aspects of Oaxacan resistance in the seminar and had academics working in the area speak to us about it, but still, for me it was not part of my life, but rather a topic of study. While we were in Oaxaca City during that summer, walking the streets, looking for a patio to sit down at and enjoy a beer, I would witness protests in the centre of the city by campesinos. As they marched down the street with their machetes, or I walked by their sit-in in the central plaza observing them as a tourist, I felt their presence as completely alien: they held signs bearing slogans and denunciations in a language that I was just learning and had only the slightest context to understand, and they slept only with blankets on the dirt or pave stones of the plaza. This sense of campesinos being somehow alien to me began to change, not in Oaxaca but back in Vancouver, when I started to participate in the Vancouver branch of the Consejo In- digena Popular de Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magón" (Indigenous Popular Council of Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magón" or CIPO-RFM). I started participating when the group was orga- nizing for the arrival of Doña Vicky, Panda, Eleuterio, and Chayo, members of the CIPO from Oaxaca, and the Ex-Bishop of Chiapas, the late Don Samuel Ruiz García and his as- sistant Martín Hernandez, for the 2006 World Peace Forum. For two weeks over the Forum, we worked together to put on a series of events, make tamales, attend seminars and sessions, 68 deal with political strife and a number of other activities with which I had little experience. The first lesson that I learned working with CIPO (largely in my weak Spanish) was to work together as a community. I remember hearing from my friend who was there at the beginning in 2005 that CIPO- VAN started when Raul Gatica, a founding member of the CIPO-RFM and refugee in Vancouver, began to use the word "we" for the group of friends who had coalesced around him. Through this gesture of collectivity he constituted the CIPO-VAN. When I talk to Pedro and Doña Vicky, they usually talk using "nosotros," meaning "we," when speaking about growing up in their community or their practice, because theirs is not an experience that stands alone, but rather it is a shared experience of living in community: speaking as a person with roots in Tlaxiaco or Plan de Zaragoza, speaking as an Indigenous person or as a Oaxacan campesino, or speaking as a woman, in Doña Vicky's case (Nosotros las mujeres...). Working and hanging out with CIPO-VAN meant learning this "we" for myself, taking on a collective identity for good times and bad. In practice, the "we" came to be for me through doing things together: the cooking that we do for events, the papier maché, designing and writing literature about the movement in Oaxaca, and working to achieve consensus in meet- ings. As I learned more about the indigenous communities in Oaxaca like Doña Vicky and Raul's, Pedro's, Chayo's and Eleuterio's, I came to understand how deeply rooted and im- portant this collective identity is for them. Learning through doing, embodying collectivity through my participation in everyday activities with CIPO-VAN, allowed me to understand for myself how communality could be a basic aspect of life every day, particularly through some of the ancient practices like making mole that reaffirm collective work in Oaxacan In- digenous communities. 69 For me, taking on a communal identity has been a healthy step towards decolonizing. It teaches me about connection to other people in a way that I never would have imagined otherwise. It's not easy because, as someone who has lived an individualistic subjectivity all of my life, it means re-imagining my own behaviour and expectations. There is the pleasure of doing things together, being able to rely on others for help and support. But there is also the strain of personalities, especially in a group like CIPO-VAN, where many of us are new to communal thought. The luxury of an urban life connected to society through monetary exchanges is that you can walk away from a difficult friendship or acquaintance. But to live in community, especially a small community like Pedro's or Jaalen's, means always having patience to live and work alongside others even when the going is tough. Binnizá/Zapotec anthropologist Jaime Martínez Luna has described what in Oaxaca is called Comunalidad as an epistemology of the communities based on collectivity, "a cosmovision originating from the “us,” from the self-determining and action-oriented collective..."5 Ac- cording to Martínez Luna, Comunalidad "is an historical experience and a vibrant, present day set of behaviors, which is constantly renovated in the face of the social and economic contradictions generated by capitalist individualism."6 Although as a group in CIPO-VAN we have the lifetimes of experience from the members of CIPO-RFM to draw upon as a resource for this way of knowing and being in the world, we also live it ourselves, and it has meanings within our cross-cultural group (a German, Canadians, Mexicans, Oaxacans) that are internal to us. 5 Martínez Luna in Martínez Luna, Jaime. “The Fourth Principle: Comunalidad.” In New World of Indigenous Resistance: Noam Chomsky and Voices from North, South, and Central America, 85-100. Open Media Series. San Fran- cisco: City Lights Books, 2010. http://kairos-chairo.blogspot.com/2011/01/comunalidad.html, 88. 6 Ibid, 88. 70 Being a member of CIPO-VAN has continued to open a window for me into the lives of the campesinos marching in the plaza. I have worked as something of an apprentice to Doña Vicky during her two subsequent trips up to Vancouver to work with a Geography class, and then at her house in Oaxaca, learning how to cook traditional dishes, learning some of her healing practices as her translator, helper, and patient, and simply spending time chatting with her and sharing our experiences. Pedro also came to Vancouver one year and traveled with Doña Vicky and me to Haida Gwaii. And I went to his village of Plan de Zaragoza two times to visit with him there, during which time we talked extensively about life and the CIPO-RFM and his agricultural practice (he can talk about moon cycles for hours). Through the lens of personal experience, I have a taste of what their lives, cultures and traditions are, and what they mean to them. I have not myself become aboriginal in the process, because, even if it were possible, this is not a process of assimilation. Rather, I have shared in the lives of the Oaxacan members of CIPO-RFM in Vancouver, as well as at their homes in Oaxaca, just as they have shared some of the experience of my life, meeting my friends and family and learning about my background. I first visited Haida Gwaii, Jaalen's homeland, in 1997 shortly after my friend Nick from Ottawa moved there. Haida Gwaii is an archipelago of islands about halfway up the coast of British Columbia. My early brief visits to these remote islands were spent staying with friends on Tow Hill Road among non-Haida residents who were creating new lives for them- selves and their new families along the beach. It was in 2007, when I met up with Dafne, a filmmaker and friend, in Queen Charlotte City to start a new project that I began to meet and make friends with Haida people. During my time living on the South end of Graham Island, she introduced me to Norman Price, a Haida elder and master carver who carved one of the poles at the Haida Heritage Centre at Kaay Llnagaay in Skidegate. I ended up staying 71 as a house guest with Norman on and off for two years. It was during that time when I also met Jaalen during the time he was working with his father Guujaaw on a Haida Canoe (Tluu) at the Haida Heritage Centre. Initially Dafne and I worked on a project filming canoe carv- ing and steaming, but I then changed course to focus my own camera on Jaalen's totem pole carving up in Masset. In the last three years, between Skidegate and Masset, I have met and made friends with many Haida people.7 While living with Norman (Gaahyaah) I had the opportunity of being a night student in Haida classes at the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program. I met several elders through SHIP and learned for myself why they are referred to as precious elders. Along with other younger Haida, Jaalen is very committed to his language, art and culture, and we often talk about the knowledge his elders have to pass on about food, fishing, and all kinds of things to the younger Haida generation. Along with Doña Vicky and Pedro, I've shared with Jaalen what I know from my experience working with the CIPO-RFM and being in the communities in Oaxaca. My friendships and participation with the CIPO and my rela- tionships with Haida people have inspired me and given me hope. Partly to raise awareness about the communities in Oaxaca, partly because I wanted the participants in the video essay to know each other, and also out of my own excitement to make links between important people in my life, I arranged for two tours of Haida Gwaii, in 2009 with both Doña Vicky and Pedro, and then in 2010 with Doña Vicky, during which time they met Jaalen and his family.8 7 As I mention in the beginning, being friends and understanding the importance of our friendship is part of this process without which I can not continue to learn the insights I present here. 8 The three of us worked very hard to raise funds through awareness events we put on together in Haida Gwaii. We had so much support from islanders and the Skidegate Health Centre in particular, that we were able to pull it off even though we had little planning ahead of time. 72 Like people in Oaxaca, the Haida have had their own struggles, including devastating epi- demics of smallpox, the Indian Act of 1876, the potlatch bans of 1884, residential schools, and multinational corporations coming to log their forests.9 It's hard to come to grips with the extent of the impact of colonization and occupation, let alone write about it, particularly as someone who isn't Haida. The Potlatch ban, for instance, was a law that forbid the pot- latch ceremony through which the laws and protocols of Haida communities were spoken, danced, sung, and witnessed. Jaalen talks about the days when Haida were not allowed to dance in public: I hear stories of when the potlatch ban was on, the elders would put curtains 9 There are many resources to recommend for more on the history of Haida Gwaii, like the Haida Laas News- letter (especially the Journal issues) that is published by the Haida Nation, the book That Which Makes Us Haida on Language that I mention in the introduction, and specifically on the Land Use Plan: http://archive.ilmb.gov. bc.ca/slrp/lrmp/nanaimo/haidagwaii/agendas.htm 73 or blankets over the windows and sing songs and have the little kids dancing around, and that was, you know, my father's generation that would be the little kids dancing, and there wasn't really [dancing] out in public much, but there was that thread that was able to a bring it forward for when, when I was grow- ing up we were dancing and singing in public and, for my children that's, just a big part of what they know in daily life. . . (Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Tradition) The Haida have responded to the challenges colonialism posed with tremendous strength and growing pride, all, as many will say, guided by their ancestors. The recent book, That Which Makes Us Haida - the Haida Language, is a testament to the resilience of the Haida people, and its pages give several accounts of Haida history in the voices of elders and the younger generation of Haida. The blockade against logging trucks at Athlii Gwaii (Lyle Is- land) in 1985 was a key moment for the Haida that led to the creation of the Council of the Haida Nation representing all Haidas and giving them a stronger negotiating position in rela- tion to the government. A unique development that says volumes about Haida Gwaii is that since 2000, all communities, both Haida and Non-Haida have signed a Protocol Agreement that essentially declares that islanders recognize the Council of the Haida Nation for protect- ing their interests over the provincial and federal governments who had been preoccupied with ensuring the rights of the off-island forestry companies. The agreement led to the development of the Haida Gwaii Strategic Land Use Agreement that creates protected areas and oversees the reversal of disastrous forestry practices by companies like Weyerhauser and Western Forest Products and the development of an Ecosystem Based Management model led by the Haida but done in collaboration with governments and stake holders. In addi- tion, Haida Gwaii now has a Marine Use Plan that resulted from an agreement between the 74 Haida Nation and other stake holders. This strategy has been successful in bringing people on the islands together and fostering understanding, but there are still major challenges of governments attempting to impose their will, like Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's forceful endorsement of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline which threat- ens salmon stocks and Haida lifeways. My time with Jaalen has usually been connected to his ongoing artistic and cultural work. I've spent quite a bit of time as an onlooker or groupie of his carving projects. Jaalen de- scribed what I did, along with his friend Shaun, as supporting the pole project, just by being around, accompanying them in the process (though, unlike me, Shaun milled the sapwood off the pole and planned and helped execute the raising of the pole in Jasper). And then, along with others, I helped by painting the eyes, wings, hoofs, and eyebrows of the pole in black and red. I've also supported his work as an artist in other ways, like designing his web- site and working with him on Adobe Illustrator to transfer designs for printing. In the following sections, I'll share my own experience of being with Jaalen, Pedro and Doña Vicky in order to convey a sense of who they are to me. As I mentioned in the introduction, I am not setting out to signify them within a 'larger' or 'meta' grid of scholarly meaning that may not be congruent with the way they would narrate their own lives. Instead, by attempt- ing to keep as close to my experience as possible, I present a partial picture of who they are through my relationship to them, a picture that is particular rather then generalized. I do so in order to respect that each of them are able to articulate their own identities in their own voices and their own ways. 75 Doña Vicky That time in 2006 when I made my first tamale at Emilie's house in East Vancouver with Doña Vicky and other members of CIPO-RFM from Oaxaca, it was the start of breaking down some important barriers for me. Not familiar with membership in this type of group, I tended towards a position of observer, as though I was a guest rather than a participant. I was still trying to figure the situation out, a task all the more difficult with weak Spanish. It was Doña Vicky who snapped me out of that position and set me to work. She got me to put aside my qualms about participation and dig in, preparing the banana leaves for the tamales (who knows how they'd appeared in East Van) amid new smells and tastes of the Oaxacan dishes like frijoles con hoja de aguacate (beans flavoured with avocado leaves). As we were doing this work at the dinning room table, Doña Vicky came back from the kitchen to offer us beer to drink. I demurred and said something about trying to cut down on my beer intake. Doña Vicky wouldn't hear of it and laid down the law: she told me that I had to drink the beer because it was needed for the tamales to turn out well. If I didn't drink it, she said, it would not bode well for the flavour and people wouldn't like them. In- stead, we had to have a drink together and focus our positive thoughts on the food (When you're making 1000 tamales for a party, there's a lot riding on the flavour...). Now, I've had friends and family come up with stuff before like "hold your breath when you drive past a cemetery," or "stop thinking so much about your exam or you'll jinx it" but I don't think they really knew what they were talking about beyond just repeating things they'd learned as "superstitions" when they were little. In fact, I'm sure I've said things like that before too. But with Doña Vicky, this was no joke or throw away comment. As I would learn later, it was based on a deeper understanding of how her intentions, her positive thinking and her 76 prayers affect her surroundings and especially the food she cooks. So, as I was sitting there at the table watching and helping with the tamales, I wasn't simply watching as an outsider, but instead, alongside everyone else with us that night I was a presence or energy in the room that could influence the outcome of the cooking. I was connected to the food and my behaviour and the intentions that I focused on the food would affect it. After eating Doña Vicky's food, I believe her. Doña Vicky has taught me, and many others around her, the key role of food in our lives, our health and in the struggle for autonomy. For me now, the kitchen is not a 'domestic space' but a dynamic, political one, the most im- portant room in the house. A few years later, when Doña Vicky was back in Vancouver working with Geography 495, a course in transnational solidarity at UBC, she and I went on a short trip to Nanaimo on Van- couver Island to visit with my aunt Mary. We used Doña Vicky's mole negro sauce to make a big meal for my aunt's friends and had a nice visit during which I served as Doña Vicky's as- sistant and translator. The night before we made the mole, I woke up at 2 am and proceeded to be very ill, vomiting outside. I had a pain in my gut that was unlike anything I'd experi- enced before so I went and knocked on Doña Vicky's door to ask her for help. I knew she was a healer at that point, and had come to trust her skills. She told me that I looked green in the face and took me up to the kitchen to prepare a remedy. I was expecting some kind of a calming tea that would bring me back to normal, but I started to suspect something was amiss when she mixed together lime, salt, and baking powder. I drank the mixture down and she watched me expectantly. I felt the tension in my system rise, but no calming. She gave me another dose to drink down. And then, all of a sudden, everything in me had to come out in short order! I ran down to the washroom and my digestive system was evacuated. 77 When I got over the shock, I realized I felt much better and the pain in my gut had subsided. This was a first personal lesson for me about Doña Vicky's way of healing. Rather than working with pharmaceuticals that minimize symptoms, she physically rids people of the problems causing illness, even if it means having to undergo some discomfort, or even pain to heal. Sometimes is it quite a direct way of healing, like the sobada where she massages your abdomen to displace food blockages that have clogged your system. The massage is quite rigourous, and if you do have an empacho (the blockage) it can be surprisingly painful, but definitely a relief, and sometimes quite emotional since, as she says, the stomach is the centre of our body and is connected to our psychological well-being. Doña Vicky has struggled to maintain this ancient knowledge, keeping it alive, like healing empacho that she learned from her grandmother, or making the mole that she learned from her aunts. Her struggle to protect her community's Usos y Costumbres (Customs and Uses/Tradi- tions) is a struggle that has been part of her survival, providing a means to feed herself and her family, an economic base, and an anchoring in the culture of her ancestors. It is part of a struggle within her family to continue with these practices as her daughters and sons have moved, with her help, into professions and, as a result, become part of the more urban, na- tional Mexican culture of Oaxaca City where she's lived for thirty years. It is a struggle that first brought her to Vancouver in 2006 to speak out about the people and values that were being threatened and systematically oppressed by the then governor of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Doña Vicky is a perfect example of how ancestral practices can be at the heart of resistance and raising awareness. My work with CIPO-VAN has always been connected to making 78 food: for events, to showcase the products of our cooperative, and as a means to integrate new members (like myself in 2006) through sharing the process of making the food. The scene of making a Oaxacan dish with Doña Vicky is always accompanied by stories about living in Tlaxiaco and continuing the practices and communal philosophies that have been with her people for hundreds, even thousands of years. As you participate in the cooking, you understand how the feeling of working together on an ancient recipe with basic ingredi- ents, doing it yourself, is transformative and empowering. Doña Vicky's constant awareness of the need to struggle for change was made clear to me during the World Peace Forum in 2006 when, even though she was travelling in a foreign country, she still had the guts as a woman in her late fifties to run and duck through the legs of a guarding RCMP officer at the Mexican Consulate in Vancouver. With this act she began an occupation of the consular offices for the afternoon to demand that Ulises Ruiz be kicked out of office. I'm not sure the officer had every seen anything like it before. For me, knowing Doña Vicky has been a privilege in many ways, but perhaps most importantly because of this link to a different way of knowing the world than I had been exposed to in my life. As you'll see in the video, Doña Vicky has some fond memories of life in Tlaxiaco earlier in her life. When we were planning what we should cover in the video, she said that she wanted to take me to her grandfather's rancho in La Purisima, over the hill from her house and near a church that had been constructed by the community several hundred years before. She's talked to me about those days walking over the hills to the rancho in La Purisima and trav- elling by donkey at the age of 5 with her father the long distances between communities when he was a travelling salesman, offering products like soap and pots to his customers. 79 Her father died when she was young and she had to take over much of the childcare for her brothers and sisters, helping to pay their way through their school years. She was married at 15 and had her first child shortly afterwards. When I think of her, I think of someone who has lived a hard life, and whose work ethic speaks of the struggle to survive. But she has much to show for it. She supported her brothers and children through school so that they now have office and professional jobs, something she is very proud of. She has learned many of the recipes like mole negro that are a part of her Nu Savi background. She's been president of the elementary school in Pueblo Nuevo where her grandchildren are attending. Doña Vicky is an important member of all of her communities: the Pueblo Nuevo neigh- bourhood in Oaxaca City, the San Miguelito neighbourhood in Tlaxiaco where she grew up, and rancheria La Purisima, even CIPO-Vancouver. She has led campaigns in her neighbour- hood to demand that local governments give access to water, pave the roads, and support education. She even cooked mole in the centre square of Oaxaca to protest the impending development of a McDonald's restaurant (McDonalds gave up and changed their location). pedro Pedro is from Plan de Zaragoza, Nuyoo, Oaxaca, an isolated mountainside community of 250 people. Like many people from the rural communities in Oaxaca, Pedro is very humble and I didn't learn the extent of his character until I visited him at home in Oaxaca. The trip into Pedro's community emphasizes the remoteness of it for an outsider like me. I took a van from Oaxaca City for four hours into Tlaxiaco (Doña Vicky's town), and then a smaller van along a highway and then progressively smaller roads until we were on a small, rough dirt road winding through the mountains. Plan de Zaragoza is at the end of that little road, a road the communities built with resources the government conceded to them after much 80 struggle during the height of their participation with the CIPO-RFM. There are two little stores in Pedro's village, and one has the satellite phone that is the only phone in the com- munity. There are periodic announcements over a loudspeaker when a call comes in for someone, just like in countless other small villages around Oaxaca. What I came to realize during my visit with Pedro was that there was very little beyond my own labour that I could offer in return for my stay. When I stay in Plan, I room with Pe- dro's friends Don Felis and Doña Maria who are also in the CIPO-RFM. Although there are two small stores and the vendors and students who go to the village of Nuyoo or Tlaxiaco most days connect Plan to the cash economy, the food that I ate was all grown and prepared by Pedro, Doña Maria and Don Felis. One night, for instance, we had a chicken cooked in Doña Vicky's mole sauce that I had gifted them. It was one of the six or seven chickens that they had raised themselves. The food is part of the cycle of production, planting corn for the tortillas, beans, onions, garlic, that they have continued all of their lives. Bringing in a 20-pack of chicken thighs from Sam's Club (the Mexican Walmart) seemed grotesque. So it was really just through becoming part of that cycle of labour, for the period of my stay, that I could feel like I was contributing to my meals. Each day I would hike somewhere to little clearings somewhere in the middle of the forest where Pedro and Don Felis would have a crop of onions or something growing and we would water them, or plant new seedlings. One day I picked coffee with Don Felis, but generally coffee is for selling at the market and after about seven hours of hiking and picking I would have made about five pesos (45 cents) for my share of the coffee berry harvest. While I was on my latest visit to Plan, Pedro was on the guardia (community watch) and was out most days working on communal projects and surveying their territory to keep an eye 81 out for signs of incursion by other communities or resource companies. Pedro told me that walking in the bush is the thing that he loves most about his life in Plan, being out some- times for two weeks at a time in a remote corner of their land, sleeping on the ground with no roof overhead. It's a very different feeling of fulfillment from having money in the bank: everything that he has, he's participated with other community members to grow, harvest and defend. But he's also done it in accordance with the knowledge of his ancestors and in balance with the land and the spirits to whom he's given thanks through offerings of food and drink. As Pedro discusses in our interview, there are many threats to the continuation of his ances- tral knowledge of how to survive on the land. Genetically modified seeds are encroaching into the territories of indigenous Oaxacans through government seed programs, and their spores are being carried by the wind far beyond the fields where they have been planted. These plants threaten the cycle of collecting seeds for future seasons because as they infect native crops of corn; they don't produce viable seeds. He's also told me that communities are reporting mangled and mutated crops that are inedible. Considering that the seeds Pedro plants have been in his community for generations and generations, their contamination would be a tragedy and would threaten their way of life. The encroachment of resource extraction companies is another major threat. Out at the end of the road, there are only the people of the small communities to resist the government and paramilitaries that want access to more and more land so that the mostly foreign (some- times Canadian) mining and forestry companies whose interests they promote, like Fortuna Silver and Goldcorp, can profit. I've had the feeling of vulnerability that Pedro expressed to me when I was there, realizing that during my visit, there was no police to call, no one to 82 come in and save the day. In fact, while foreign observers have often been used as shields against human rights abuses, during the uprising in 2006 in Oaxaca the governing PRI politi- cal party published a list of foreigners who would be arrested and deported for being pres- ent in the state. The list was widely understood in the solidarity community as a death threat against observers. So this vulnerability, which is the other side of autonomy, is a part of Pedro and his community's life. Survival is not just about making enough food to feed the family, but it is also about protecting each other from forces that would take their land away. The last challenge that I'll mention (in an incomplete list) is winning the hearts and minds of the younger generation who are increasingly becoming oriented towards urban culture, speaking the Spanish they learn in the state-sponsored schools, and in some cases losing their own language. Keeping alive the importance of self-reliance and survival as a commu- nity, like the practices of the cycle of food production, as well as their ancestors' language, is critically important to Pedro. Since many of the benefits of the elders' knowledge about living on the land are intangible and learned through experience, it's hard to compete with the immediate comforts and conveniences of global market goods as they penetrate more and more into his community. But the most important thing that I learned from Pedro was that these ways of knowing were not things he clings to from a previous time, but active and alive ways of being in the world such that the words "modern" and "traditional" become irrelevant. For Pedro, taking care of the land and being part of a continuity of living in that place defines his people. It is the land where his grandparents and ancestors are buried. Jaalen Jaalen is Haida. Something that always strikes me in talking to him is his sense of connec- 83 tion to his home, Haida Gwaii, and his community. For me, Jaalen defines himself through his commitments to Haida language and art and the health of his community. In a very ex- plicit way, like many other Haidas, everything he does relates back to his community, whether it be multimedia projects like stop-motion animation to promote Haida language, or working with an all-islands group to oppose the Northern Gateway Pipeline and make sure a massive oil spill doesn't destroy the salmon. There is an urgency to this work because, like in Pedro's community, it is a struggle to resist the encroachment of multinational corporations like En- bridge that threaten the Haida livelihood. In the case of language and traditional knowledge projects, there is the rush to work with elders still living who have important skills and sto- ries to pass down. All of these pressures are connected to having a strong sense of identity, culture and place for generations to come. The colossal impact of smallpox on the Haida comes up frequently in conversations with Haida people. The loss of ancestral knowledge about living in Haida Gwaii, the language, and their own history, passed on orally, face-to-face, crops up when we talk about stories, certain crests, or the villages that ceased to exist when the populations that had survived the ravages of smallpox were forced to move to Masset or Skidegate. Many things about be- ing Haida now, a century after over 90% their population died from disease, are connected to this period of devastation. Some of the stories that were recorded by anthropologists or that certain elders still hold intact tell of times when the islands were connected to the mainland, literally thousands of years ago. Losing many of those connections to lives of their predecessors plays a role in all projects to re-articulate Haida-ness through storytelling, art, language, repatriation of remains, and reconstitution of the Haida land base to safeguard traditional food sources and village sites. 84 In the spring of 2008, Beau Dick, a Kwak’waka’wakw Chief from Vancouver Island put on a potlatch to honour and mourn the Haidas who had been quarantined in the late 1800s by their people at Bones Bay on an island remote from the community that is now Alert Bay. The Council of the Haida Nation has an issue of the Haida Laas Journal in 2009 that speaks to the potlatch and the disease and loss of life that it commemorated. Of the small pox epidemic, Kii'iljuus, Barbara Wilson says: Smallpox running through our people can be likened to a fire burning a li- brary of 30,000 books. Our elders are our books of knowledge and the young people are the first drafts [...] When you think of the knowledge that was con- tained in 30,000 people and then we were decimated to less than 600, the fact that we can function as a people is truly amazing.10 Each person represents a resource for learning the ways of the Haida people, and each loss is felt. Several articles in the journal point to evidence that the epidemic was a form of biological warfare waged by government officials by passing on disease-ridden blankets to First Nations in Victoria (Mak'toli) and sending hundreds of people back up the coast to die and spread the illness to other coastal communities rather than inoculate them to prevent the spread of the illness. The experience of colonization for the Haida included the banning of the potlatch, the residential schools (one of which is located in Old Masset), the appropriation of land and resources, and systematic discrimination such that, according to my friend Norman, an elder, 10 Wilson, Kii’iljuus, Barb. “SOMETIMES, IT’S ALL RIGHT THERE.” Haida Laas: Journal of the Haida Nation, no. March (March 2009): 8, 8. 85 even as recently as the 40s Haida were not allowed in certain stores and establishments in Queen Charlotte City, for example. But as Barbara Wilson's quote suggests, the Haida have survived and are now actively working to heal their community and ensure their children have more and better opportunities to live well as Haidas with a strong culture to back them up. Like Pedro and Doña Vicky, for me to know Jaalen is an honour because of the strength and vision that he has to continue to learn from his elders and to translate their knowledge and language into as many forms as possible that speak to the young people in his community. Although there is still much residual pain and regret for the losses that the Haida have sus- tained, my time in Haida Gwaii has shown me the strong will that Haida people like Jaalen have to heal and reconstitute their people. And it is clear to me that, as many Haida will say publicly, they are accompanied by their ancestors as they take these steps forward. Hanging out with him at the pole, in Jasper, or when he was on a visit to Vancouver, I recognize that Jaalen's relationship to knowing and to the world originates in and is constantly connected to Haida Gwaii. Probably one of the most important insights that I've had about Jaalen and Haida culture has to do with the rules. It took me a long time to figure out this lesson that stemmed from our discussions of Haida art, but, as with many of the things that I've learned through this process, when I was ready for it, truly open to listening and had let enough of my own bag- gage fall by the wayside, the penny finally dropped. Thinking of Haida art as simply art, I understood it as an aesthetic expression that could be manipulated and re-interpreted simply following the artist's whim. So when I asked Jaalen about what I'd heard from some people, elders in particular, about "mistakes" in the art, I thought he would just answer that some 86 people still clung to a traditional model. I imagined that like other art I'd been exposed to, particularly in these retro times, young Haidas would tend to re-work the old designs to make them entirely new. Instead, he said that yes, there actually are lines that are incorrect, there's a real specific law to Haida art that when you, when you start to deviate from that, there's a lot of freedom to move within it but once you've deviated from that it becomes mistakes in the art... (Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Haida Art) I couldn't figure out this answer for some time; it didn't fit with my own understanding of things. The lesson I eventually learned was as much about my own perspective and assump- tions as it was about the younger generations of Haida artists. After being around longer, talking about formlines with Jaalen and his brother Gwaai, my understanding has shifted. The rules aren't about being stuck in the past or about holding on to "tradition" and resisting 87 the encroachment of the "modern"; rather, the lines in Haida form line art follow essential flows, flows that might also be seen in water, air, and, I guess even in rock formations if you're willing to wait around for long enough.11 So for Jaalen, his goal isn't necessarily to buck tradition, nor is it to promote a nostalgic sense that Haida art is only true if it stays the same (as it seemed at first to me), but instead his practice of the art transcends these under- lying assumptions about cultural development and time. I think that to call Haida formline designs "art" is to impose a label that is too limiting to fully understand the lessons that it offers and the role it can play in our daily lives. This insight about Jaalen was important for me because, although I had learned much about being self-reflexive in academic writing and thinking, learning about the rules meant a more profound and fundamental adjustment of my thinking. I had to take yet another step back to reflect on how my own assumptions were shaping not only my understanding of Haida Art, but also my expectations about Jaalen and his identity as part of the younger genera- tion. I had to understand the extent to which these assumptions had been lodged in my consciousness at a deeper level that I wasn't aware of. For instance, it called into question my perception of old things as part of a past and therefore obsolete, a perception that is reinforced in a very practical way every day as I use computers and the web and explore new technologies. I see Haida like Jaalen holding on to the lessons that they can learn from their ancestors that are helpful, and creating and adopting new skills and techniques as it is useful to them, rather than buying into a vision of the future like the Jetsons or Star Trek where 11 When I was painting some of the eyebrows and shapes on the Jasper Pole, Gwaai told me that the curve I paint follows a flow that begins before the brush touches the wood and finishes after the end of the arc. A good painter captures the energy and tension of a flow in their art that is flowing through our existence in wa- ter, wind, even fire. According to Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulaanas it like the tension of the tide flowing between two rocks on the shore, or an inherited wisdom that a line would “spring apart if you touched it with a knife.” Yahgulaanas’ discussion is in Vancouver Art Gallery. Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art. Van- couver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006, 156. 88 everything is always new and shiny and the old is cast off. It is this concern for living in their place that made it possible for the islands-wide protocol agreement that I mention above, begun in 1997, and now signed by all communities in Haida Gwaii. This agreement recognizes the Haida Nation's "hereditary responsibilities and the relationship of the Haida people to Haida Gwaii" and affirms that "the harmonization of Haida and Crown titles need not be divisive or exclusive and can be taken as an opportunity to make things better." A unique statement, the communities protocol agreement came out of the recognition across the different Haida and non-Haida villages in Haida Gwaii that it was time to stop the control of multinational corporations and off-island interests of the is- land's resources and society. People recognized that the Haida have the right to govern their own territory and have the interests of all islanders in mind as they continue to make deci- sions about the future of Haida Gwaii. The agreement has been foundational in enabling several accords with the provincial and federal governments around land and marine use and conservation. . . . Having Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro as teachers has required much more of me than any graduate program could demand. This project has been a witnessing of ways of knowing: it implies a responsibility to remember and always take into account what I've learned, and pass it on in a respectful way. Unlike a lecture that I have paid for and that I engage with primar- ily as a consumer, the lessons that I continue to learn with the three participants always imply a re-imagining of myself and involve putting myself into situations that are unfamiliar and sometimes involve personal risk. I have to re-evaluate my own assumptions and ways of 89 being that I wasn't conscious of, but that shape the way I inhabit and perform my world. It's meant learning some hard lessons about my dependence on commodities and global regimes of power that support my standard of living and that shape my own subjectivity at a deep level. It makes me reflect on my lack of autonomy in day-to-day life and my desire for ano- nymity that comes from growing up in an urban setting that is much less face to face than smaller rural communities. At the same time, it has given me strength to make choices and create the world that I want to live in every day. One choice that I've made is to recognize that there is no separation between my "study" and the resulting dissertation, on the one hand, and the life lessons that I've come upon with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro, on the other hand. Rather than see my work with Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen as something that is limited in scope to "the field," the relations I have created with each of them are for me like family. My parents and two aunts came to visit me in Haida Gwaii and were able to meet Jaalen and his family, and Doña Vicky has met my mother and my brother and his family.12 When I go to Oaxaca, I stay with Doña Vicky's family, with her husband, Don Lupe, and her daughters and sons and grandchildren. These are life-time relationships that I value deeply and personally and that form the bedrock of my day-to-day life now.13 I recognize that working in the kitchen to make tamales, mole amarillo, or pollo en barbacoa is just as much a part of my intellectual process of writing this dissertation as reading Derri- da on the archive. In fact, as I've tried to do in this chapter, like cooking with Doña Vicky or 12 Doña Vicky often asks me for the latest on the person she nicknamed “El Changuito Maldito” or “The Bad Monkey,” my nephew Jasper (who when she met him was five years old and climbing up the walls). 13 Many scholars have opened themselves to a different type of relationship with the people they work with, acknowledged, for example, in the term ‘co-researcher.’ 90 planting onions with Pedro, this writing for me is a means to manifest the relationships that have made possible the knowledge that I present here. Where originally my academic prac- tice centered around writing about other people as objects of description and deconstruc- tion from a distanced, seemingly omniscient perspective – how did they understand their own identities, and how did they position themselves with respect to their own cultures and societies and in regards to notions such as nation and authenticity – now I find myself as a node in a network striving to understand the creation of knowledge as an embodied process enabled by my relation to my research subjects, now guides and teachers. Rather than simply studying and reporting back on them, my task has become learning about myself and the legacy of an academic culture that authorized the re-framing of people, animals, plants and land as research objects, modular elements of a particular, Euro-centric world view. Where does my need to know about aboriginal people, for example, come from? Where does the right to research people come from? Those are questions that underlie any scholarly endeav- our. I would like to introduce you now, through video, to Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen, the three members of this network of relations with whom I have worked most closely. Having this video essay about the three as a chapter rather than an accompanying document means that the voices, sounds, gestures, and practices of Pedro, Doña Vicky and Jaalen are central to the ideas that I present in this dissertation and their presence constitutes a critical step in its narrative progression. If I am attempting to speak of the importance of embodied experi- ence – mine in this case – as a means to knowing things, and to communicate them, then my reader/viewer needs to become acquainted with that experience in as direct a way as possi- ble. My goal for the video essay is to create a sense of proximity for the viewer, introducing them "in person" to the participants in the video and giving them senses – aural and visual 91 – of the experience through which I learned some of what they chose to relate. This prox- imity is only partial as the senses that video can convey do not include smell or taste for Doña Vicky's cooking, nor feel for the shapes carved in cedar by Jaalen or the soil of Plan de Zara- goza in which Pedro plants his seeds. Nor does it allow you to enter into relation, knowing and at the same time being known by the three participants. But it nevertheless provides an opening to hear, see and learn from each of the participants about their practice and the role that it plays, not only in their way of life, but their struggle to protect and foster it. As a document that is partly the product of a scholarly process, the video is difficult to evaluate within a dissertation. From where does the authority of its voice come? Is it me speaking as the camera person/editor, carefully curating my experience with Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro? Or, as we listen to them speak, are we hearing directly from them? Though I use the word dialogue because it is more faithful to the relationships that I've developed with the three practitioners, I find Aaron Glass' use of "encounter" a useful intervention in considering the authority of this video essay as a tool for representation. In presenting the 2008 screening of Edward S. Curtis' 1914 film In The Land of the Headhunters, Glass frames Curtis' work with the Kwakwaka'wakw people as an "encounter." Glass and his team, work- ing in collaboration with Kwakwaka'wakw people, presented the film they had restored with additional footage found at UCLA. Moving away from the attempts by Bill Holms' group in the 60s to sanitize the film through political correctness (for example, changing the title to In the Land of the War Canoes), Glass and his team talk about it as an artifact left over from Curtis' trip to the Kwakwaka'wakw territory: Rather than documenting Native life in 1914, Head Hunters documents a mo- ment of cultural encounter between Curtis and the Kwakwaka’wakw actors 92 and consultants who were performing Curtis’s scripted version of their own past for the camera.14 In this rubric, the film is not to be viewed as an accurate ethno-historical document whose claims to ethnological veracity must be preserved and updated to suit today's tastes. Instead of being perceived as a production of authoritative anthropological knowledge, the audi- ence's focus is turned onto the relationship between Curtis and the Kwakwaka’wakw that is manifested in the production of the film. As director, producer, and salvage ethnographer, Curtis becomes a character who is just as much a part of the film as the Kwakwaka'wakw actors are, even though he doesn't appear in it. Moreover, thought of as an encoun- ter, the balance of power shifts, implying that the film is a co-production between the Kwakwaka'wakw and Curtis. As historians of the film have pointed out, its production gave the Kwakwaka'wakw people a pretext to craft major ceremonial pieces, masks and to per- form ceremonies that the younger generation had not had a chance to participate in because of the Potlatch Ban and discrimination. The goal of this next video chapter, my fantasy like Curtis', is to have the voices of Doña Vicky, Jaalen, and Pedro come through for my reader/viewer/auditor as autonomous, di- rectly expressing their thoughts on an embodied practice and the way that it connects them to their heritage, their culture, and the land in the way that they have shared with me. As I will explore later, however, like Head Hunters, the discussion in the video is partly guided by me, by what I would like to hear about – that is to say, none of the participants called me up to request that I just show up at their doorstep and document their practice. In that sense 14 Glass, Aaron. “Edward Curtis Meets The Kwakwaka’wakw :: IN THE LAND OF THE HEAD HUNTERS - Home”, n.d. http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_frontpageandItemid=1. 93 it is a co-production, begun at my behest, where each of us shaped the content in different ways but in the end, I sat at the editing workstation and, in consultation, constructed the nar- rative of images. 94 Chapter 2 Opening and Viewing the Chapter 2 Video essay Chapter 2 of my dissertation is a video essay to be watched on your computer. Made in collaboration with Doña Vicky (Refugio Gregorio Bautista), Jaalen Edenshaw, and Pedro Herminio Bautista Rojas, the video explores their ancestral practices. After reading the In- troduction and Chapter 1, please find the files for the video essay in Supplemental Materials at the following location: https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/44078 Note: If you are reading this document from the supplementary URL location, you will already be looking at the file listing. 95 To view the video essay with the subtitles, I strongly recommend using VLC Media player, a well established, free, open source, cross-platform media viewer. To download VLC, click here: www.videolan.org Viewing Instructions 1) Download all of the video files to a folder on your computer. 2) I’ve split the video essay into three files. Each .AVI file has an accompanying .SRT file of the same name that contains the English subtitles for that part: Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.avi Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.srt Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p2.avi Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p2.srt Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p3.avi Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p3.srt 3) Open the first file (Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_p1.avi) in VLC and the subtitles should load automatically. Press the “S” key to cycle the subtitles Off if you do not require them. NOTE: If the subtitles do not load automatically, go to the Video menu: Video -> Subtitles track -> Open File... and choose the subtitles file (.SRT) that has the same name as the AVI file you are watching (e.g., “Horner_G_ Caminando_video_essay_p1.srt” for “Horner_G_Caminando_video_essay_ p1.avi” and so on). 4) When you are finished watching the first part, open the second and third AVI files (P2 & P3) in VLC. 96 chapter 3 caminando y miando Now that you have met Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro through stories and video, my goal for this chapter is to talk about what it means to learn from them. The questions I attempt to answer are about the nature of the insights I've gained from the participants and how they have shaped my understanding of historical practice. I've already revealed a bit of my learning process in the sections about the three participants in chapter 1, for example, when I wrote about learning the nature of Haida formlines and the way they reflect fundamental flows in the world around us that transcend the categories of "art" and "modernity." As you will see, however, regardless of the profound meaning of these lessons for me, they are learned in a very everyday context, as I help out at the pole by painting an eyebrow on a crest figure, as I make Pollo a la Naranja for the fifth time, or as I return to a familiar conversa- tion with Pedro. Suddenly a light goes on, something fits together a bit more, or seems even more connected. In this dissertation I ask a lot of my reader/viewer/auditor for exactly this reason – that without following a process of gradual experiential learning, it is very difficult to be able to take in what the words and actions that Pedro, Doña Vicky and Jaalen have to offer. As I have argued, the insights I've gained are difficult or impossible to write about because reading about something is so different from experiencing it. Take for example the vulner- ability that someone living in a remote community feels. Until you've been to visit them and have felt, even for a fleeting moment, what it would be like to be in their position, it's hard to understand what it means. Or at least that's the feeling I had. When I went to Yaviche 97 for a visit, I arrived at a small village at the end of a road we had driven on for seven hours. Shortly after we arrived, I discovered that the next town over of Tanetze was attempting to extend their administrative control over five different pueblos, including Yaviche, and I was expected to serve as a human rights observer. In 2003, paramilitaries from the PRI (Partido Revolutionario Institutional) came to Yaviche and shot several people killing one and wound- ing seven.1 Although for community members who live with the need to provide their own defense, even against the armed aggression of their own government, the stress and fear caused by the situation would be something they had dealt with before, for me it was quite a challenge and when I decided to stay and meet with the comunal authority to show my sup- port, mine was a decision made in disorientation and fear. For many people around the world, these uncertain circumstances are an every-day reality, and for me, coming from a safe, secure and economically privileged background, the vis- ceral experience of danger was like a lightning bolt. Nothing happened in the end, despite rumours circulating that people from Tanetze had snuck a ballot box into someone's house to capture votes from Yaviche. I'm sure my furtive conversations with Miguel, Eleuterio (whom I'd first met in Vancouver with Doña Vicky), Lola and Simón reafirmed for them my status as just another gringo. Nevertheless, for me it was a realization, not only in my 'mind,' but throughout my whole body, of the stress and vulnerability that I imagine is a constant el- ement of life for Eleuterio and Simón in Yaviche, and Pedro in Plan. Knowing that you only have the community around you for support and defense against scarcity as well as against government oppression, gangs, and other potentially violent incursions, plays a major role in all of your decisions and your reality from day to day. 1 For more information, see: http://www.nodo50.org/cipo/documentos/carav1.htm. 98 So I do ask for a lot here, knowing that words, at least my words, can never fully represent the viscerality of lived experience. At best I can hope that people who have shared experi- ences in communities like Plan de Zaragoza or Masset, perhaps much more extensive ex- periences than mine, can relate to this dialogue. I can only hope that you will suspend your doubts and judgments just as I have had to do in order to seek genuine openness and will- ingness to be affected. This is the basic requirement – that anyone can strive for – in order to learn beyond the blinders of their own ontology-world. As you will have gathered by now, the learning that I am talking about is not an event or "outcome" – there is no curriculum or exam that tests the knowledge resulting from hours spent hanging out with Jaalen as he carves his pole, or an afternoon of planting onion sprouts in one of Pedro's fields, or batiendo la masa (preparing the dough) for tamales for the third time with Doña Vicky. Neither is there a simple report or essay, such as this one, that can authentically represent the experience. Instead, I see experiential learning as an ongoing embodied process that has no end. As I have lived it, it is a process of increas- ing awareness, openness, grace, agility and efficiency of movement, patience, sensitivity and appreciation for the practices of everyday life. As Pedro says of the connection between himself and the land: alli donde practicamos nuestra fiesta donde practicamos nuestra cosmovision, nuestra lengua tambien, porque aparte de que, nuestra lengua es muy util para comunicarnos, pero tambien nuestra propia lengua la utilizamos para comuni- carnos y relacionarnos con la tierra directamente en nuestro propio territorio, en nuestro territorio practicamos la danza, practicamos, el baile mismo que hacemos. 99 O sea es decir que sin, sin el territorio no podriamos practicar todo esto que conforma nuestra autonomia. there where we practice our fiesta, where we practice our cosmovision our lan- guage as well, because, apart from the fact that our language is very useful for communicating amongst ourselves, we use our language to communicate and relate to the land directly in our own territory, in our own territory we practice the dance, we practice the very dance itself that we do. That is, without our territory we couldn't practice all this that constitutes our autonomy. (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Necesidades - Territory) Being connected to the land isn't just an idea, belief or bit of rhetoric, it is a feeling that Pedro lives every day through planting, harvesting, weeding, feeding animals, drinking water, 100 walking, and countless other activities in his community. My sense of that doesn't just come from the quote in the interview, it comes from visiting with him in Plan and digging in the dirt, learning to water plants properly with his friend Don Felis and eating corn and beans, prepared over a cooking fire, that he planted, cared for and harvested. I had the privilege of eating corn and beans grown from the seeds that are the direct descendants of the seeds of his ancestors, renewed year after year through replanting and collecting to set aside for the following year. They were seeds that have been protected and kept in the community for centuries. Knowing that the day's meal is made up of organisms that have lived in the com- munity for generations alongside the people gave me the feeling of what living this connec- tion that Pedro talks about means. It is exactly because they are especially conscious of these connections understood through practice that Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro make good teachers. Each has not only learned their practice from their elders in the way that generations have before them, but they have reflected upon the importance of those ancient practices for themselves and their commu- nities to learn from and to maintain their identity. In a world that media outlets, scientists, academics and politicians continually tell us is "modern," figuring out how these ancient, embodied practices fit in the midst of Facebook, hedge funds, and flash mobs is part of the struggle – the carving, cooking, planting and harvesting help keep each of them cen- tered in their own cultures. In a much more conscious way than I have, Pedro, Jaalen, and Doña Vicky have been reflecting upon and acting upon the connection of radically different epistemologies and ontologies in their own lives. They have negotiated productively be- tween different creation stories: for example, Jaalen is from the Eagle clan that comes from Djila'qons, a woman of the forest, and Haida Ravens come from Skuulajaad (foam woman), yet elders in Skidegate and Old Masset who are holders of Haida language and stories, also 101 attend the United Church on the reserve regularly which teaches the bible story that all peo- ple come from Adam and Eve. And they have had to confront various different challenges to their local knowledge, like people claiming that there is one world and one, scientific, account of that world that any rational modern subject must believe (to believe otherwise is either a sign of irrational behaviour, false consciousness, or a political ruse). Having to ne- gotiate these different versions from birth, understanding the relationship between the truths of their families and communities and those of the colonizers and settlers has been neces- sary for Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen to navigate governments, education, national politics, struggles for cultural rights and so on. Their practices of cultivation, carving and cooking are important resources to draw upon in order to remain centered in their own cultures, histories, identities and homelands: as tools to counter assimilation, as tools for survival and livelihood, as strategies and visions for the future, and as means to keep their stories and ancestors alive in their communities for their children. For me, to learn the subtle, but profound lessons from people who truly know from experience, whose embodiment is central to knowing and who understand that all knowledge is in rela- tion (to people, being, places, etc.), means putting myself in play, accepting my own vulner- ability and the provisional nature of my own truths in order to become part of their knowl- edge and worlds. It has meant opening myself to listening and learning in a new way. This opening isn't just an intellectual gesture, considering new ideas in the abstract, on paper, but actually living these different possibilities through engaging in the practices. I had to learn why their worlds seemed unimaginable to me before: how had I learned to see them as alien to me, and why has my own vision of existence been so limited? It made me wonder, how would I work to change that so that I could learn without being inhibited by my own judg- ments? For example, I learned from working with Doña Vicky that she focuses her energy 102 on the dishes that she cooks, saying prayers and making small gestures that impart energy and flavour to the food. Whether or not I have reason to believe that there is scientific back- ing for these transfers of energy is not important to the way that I'm choosing to relate to Doña Vicky. Instead of scribbling something about it in my field notes or rationalizing the experience to fit into my preconceived ideas, (as much as possible) I have followed her lead and have adopted it for my own cooking, trying to feel and embody the practice as she does. As I said, the tasters of my food will be the judges of whether it improves with intention, but I think it does. The point is that, without simply ceasing to exist as my own person or to have my own ideas, my relationship to Doña Vicky involves being very open to her view of her practices and allowing that view to affect me. For, what meaning can pass between us if I am constantly judging the elements of her practice to have no basis in scientific or aca- demic thought, or if my reaction is to look for some "unconscious," "rational" explanation that underlies her actions? Exploring and being affected by each of the participants' practice means dislodging myself from a position of expert academic or omniscient observer and, as a gesture of respect and dignity towards Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro, to move into new terrain that is unfamiliar to me without needing to classify and order it in order to render it intelligible to myself. It's good to leave your comfort zone from time to time, epistemologi- cal unease is a good thing. This type of learning means taking things as true that I don't fully understand, relying on a feeling and on trust. The pleasure from this experience comes when things fall into place – then you realize that you were ready and prepared to learn a particular insight that you weren't able to pick up on before. As I say in the introduction, learning in relation – through the face-to-face relationships that I have with the participants – is an important part of the methodological statement that I have to make here. After I showed him my draft of the video essay in Plan, Pedro told me 103 that the work of the historian, part of my work, was to be more close to the actors ("estar mas de cerca"), to get to know them more deeply, to create a relationship based on trust through participating, becoming part of their process.2 He distinguished this way of working from how he understood other projects in history and anthropology as creating suppositions – "I suppose that's how it was in the lives of those people 500 years ago." Instead, for Pedro, to be able to narrate the history and origins of a people meant to know them and to partici- pate with those who hold the memory of the ancestors that has been passed on. It means to become part of the relationship between the earth, the moon, the seed, and the human being – to experience is to know ("experimentar es conocer"). For Pedro, then, history is not in the archive, but it is with the people who live with the memory of the ancestors, who under- stand the connections between things like the earth, the moon, and the seed and continue their practices. In order to tell Pedro's history, I have to experience it, that is, I had to get my hands in the dirt to plant, I had to work in the milpa (corn field), hike up and down the hills the village is perched upon, and just spend time with him and his community. This means paying atten- tion to subtle, everyday things, like the way he moves as he works, the efficient gestures he has learned for chopping vegetables or kneading dough (la masa). For instance, both Pe- dro and Doña Vicky take every opportunity to handle food with their hands, letting water pass through their fingers, or taking a vegetable or fruit in their hand to slice it up instead of using a board like I do (in fact, their knives are shaped more like little machetes than a french chef's knife or the Japanese Santoku I use). When Doña Vicky and I were prepping chicken for a stock one time she emphasized to me that it's good to handle meat in order 2 Pedro, Topic: Video Essay Response. 104 to transfer to it the energy of your body and the sazón de la mano, the flavour of the hand that gives your food its goodness. These are things that you might not notice unless you take the time to work with them, movements and habits that tell a story of the way their people have interacted with their environment, planted, harvested, and prepared food for centuries. To understand the significance of these insights for me has meant not only participating and "experimentando" as Pedro says, but to be open to adopting them as part of my ongo- ing awareness of the world in my own life. Because coming into relation with this type of knowledge, these histories, means that they are a part of my life beyond this project – the value of the knowledge that I present in this dissertation derives from the fact that this is not a passing research focus, but a new direction in life. Raul often says that we build the world that we want to live in. That idea comes from a say- ing that he credits to the community of Cacalotepec where a CIPO-RFM member Crisologo lives. The saying goes: El futuro no existe, lo estamos construyendo ahora, porque es ahora que esta- mos contruyendo el mundo que queremos vivir. The future doesn't exist, we are building it now, because right now we are building the world we want to live.3 Like caminando y miando, this saying means that instead of sitting down at a table to plan out the way the world should be, we creatively imagine and enact the world we want as we live our lives every day. For me, it is a reflection on the direction my life is taking, the central 3 Raul Gatica, personal communication, 24 September, 2012, my translation. 105 philosophy that has guided my work in this project and that I have attempted to incorporate into the writing of this dissertation. It is a central methodology of the CIPO-RFM that is rooted in the ways of the indigenous communities of Oaxaca. It reflects the ancient ways of knowing through practice, learning, teaching and knowing as you plant, harvest, and con- tinue the cycle of survival and community relations. Caminando y miando. The other night in Vancouver when I decided to make one of Doña Vicky's dishes, Pollo a la Naranja (Orange Chicken), for my friend Sid, I reflected on how continuing the practice of Doña Vicky's cooking allows me to reflect in a different light on the themes that I'm talking about in this project and connect again with my experience of working with her. The dish, a mole based on Guajillo peppers, tomatoes, charred onions and garlic, and the juice of two oranges, has a flavour that marries superbly with the chicken after being thoroughly liqui- fied in the blender and seasoned in the hot oil of the pot. I realized as I was going through all the steps to prepare the meal that doing one of Doña Vicky's dishes was different from other cooking I do. It is always related to my memory of cooking with her, learning all the techniques, remembering the places and times that we made different dishes, and the move- ments that are a part of it. Also, there's a heightened care and intention that goes into it as I think about the sazon, or flavour that passes from my hands into the food as I touch it, and the energies that are needed to make the dish turn out. The dinner allowed me to remember – with my whole body, not just my mind – memories that are below the surface and felt, the experiences again of learning from Doña Vicky and the integration of her teachings into my own life and practice. For her, this experience of cooking is related to the memory of the aunts who taught her mole, and her ancestors who came up with these recipes and ways of cooking. 106 The sazón de la mano, as Doña Vicky talks about it, is just this connection between the body of the person doing the cooking and the food they are preparing to eat: Pero si hago una salsa, unos quelites como decimos en mi pueblo, y unas tortillas calientes la gente se ve encantada porque hay sazón en la mano porque simplemente los quelites nada mas llevan su cebollita, su ajito, y una salsita y sabe riquisimo, porque? Porque tenemos sazon en la mano. Y hay unos que aunque hagan grandes guisos no sabe sabrosa la comida, sale desabrida, sin sabor, y no sabe lo mismo eso es la sazón de la mano. 107 But if I make a salsa, some forest greens (quelites) as we say in my town, and some hot tortillas, the people go enchanted because there is flavour in my hand (sazon en la mano), because the quelites simply go with its onion, its garlic, and a little salsa and tastes so good! Why? Because we have the sazón en la mano. And there are some who, although they make grand dishes, the food doesn't taste as good, it comes out [desabrida], without flavour, and it doesn't taste the same, that is the sazón de la mano. (Doña Vicky, Topic: Doña Vicky Sazon de la Mano) Even in the simplest dish – a snack of tortillas and salsa because sometimes that's all there is – the sazón is there. This is a connection that is impossible with an industrial process. As she says: porque la maquina industrial no tiene sabor de mano, esa tendra sabor de 108 fierro, pero no de la mano entonces, eso es muy importante y si en cambio nosotros, haciendolo con nuestras propias manos, alli viene el sabor sabroso, rico, y tradicional. because the industrial machine doesn't have the flavour of the hand, it might have the flavour of steel, but not of the hand, so that is very important, and if on the other hand we, making it with our own hands – that's where the fla- vour comes, rich, traditional. (Doña Vicky, Topic: Doña Vicky Cultura de la comida) It is the transfer of energy from live beings that occurs face-to-face, or through touch. I also saw the lived connection between the body and the air, water, and earth visiting with Pedro. When you do dishes or cook with water in his community, you usually have a big barrel of water to work from that you fill up from time to time like a little reservoir. Instead of a tap, 109 you have a jicara, or gourd (often now a plastic bowl), that you use to scoop up the water and pour it into pots and dishes. Whenever he would pour water, Pedro would always hold the jicara in a way to let it run through his hands and fingers, seemingly mixing himself in it as it runs into a bowl, or in rinsing a dish. He had a care for the water, both in using the jicara to conserve it, but also, in touching it you could see his respect for and connection to it. These are ways of being that reaffirm the connections with the world and its energies in everyday life and are linked to knowledge that is passed down through the generations, not necessarily by teaching, but by enacting and experiencing. Pedro once told me that when he was young, he would play act planting and harvesting, watching his parents and grandparents at work, that's how he learned to cultivate. Openness and awareness have been key to learning with Jaalen as well. In this case it's being open to the subtleties and layers of meaning that Haida carvers are attuned to in the process of carving a totem pole – taking a huge 500 year old tree and making it into incredible forms that tell a story of territory, history and rights. Recently, I arrived at the airport in Masset for another visit in Haida Gwaii and I ended up spending the afternoon at the shed where Jaalen and Gwaai are carving the Jasper pole. I was checking out how much further the carving had gotten, and chatting with Jaalen. Even as it lies horizontally – a massive cedar tree taking the shape of a dragonfly, bear, goat, raven, two human brothers and their daughter/niece – the pole is a bit of a meeting place, people coming and going from around the islands, and that day even a man from Jasper. People from the community are really proud of the pole, as they are of the one that was just raised in Skidegate for Sidney Crosby, a Hereditary Chief. Some of the visitors to the pole are tourists who've been given directions to the shed, and others are community members, fam- 110 ily, relations, friends who've come to see the pole, but also discuss sports, politics, projects, or whatever comes up. There are a lot of connections that happen at the pole. When I'm at the pole I wander around it taking in all the lines and forms – eyes, mouths, hoofs (in the case of the goat), tongues, wings. I also try to take it in with my hands, feel- ing the surface of the shaped red cedar and following the grain. Not that there's a particular technique to being a pole carving groupie, but when I'm there I'm trying to focus on my other senses apart from my eyes to get to know the cedar and the shapes they have carved on it. I also think about the discussions that I've had with Jaalen about his practice, and the links it has to his ancestors. There is an everyday-ness to the scene, a regular daily round of waking up, getting coffee at Masset Grocery, rolling down the road to the shed in New Town in Gwaai's 80s Land Cruiser and getting down to work. But there's also a legendary-ness to the scene, carving animal crests that are from the carvers' family and clan and that also relate to ancient stories told by elders. It is continuing an ancestral practice – making sure all lines are correct, following the flow of the forms – and visioning the 80 to 100 years of the future life of the pole, designing the surfaces to avoid rot and water damage so that it will still be standing for their great-great-grandchildren. Like some kind of dimensional portal, as it's carved the pole is a point of connection in people's lives, in stories of the ancestors and in the stories of the lives of the artists themselves, connecting territory, family, and survival. In the case of this pole destined for Jasper Park, BC, the crests tell a Haida story passed on by elder Hazel Stevens from Skidegate about connections to the mainland. You can watch and listen to Jaalen telling the story of the Jasper pole here.4 Jaalen first heard it from Diane 4 You can view the video clip I made with Jaalen of him telling the story of the Jasper Pole on his Vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/23287121 111 Brown of Skidegate when he was describing the idea he and Gwaai had for the figures on the pole which needed to represent a connection between the Haida and Jasper. The central arc of the narrative is about two brothers who go to the mainland, cross over the Coastal Range and travel into the interior. One of the brothers ends up staying inland and starting a family, and the other brother returns to Haida Gwaii. Not only does the story link Haida to the interior through family connections, but it also has echoes in the lives of the carvers. Both Jaalen and Gwaai have left Haida Gwaii to go to school, Jaalen to Victoria and Gwaai to Vancouver. Gwaai, the older brother, has stayed connected to the mainland, spending most of his time in Vancouver, carving jewelry and cedar. Jaalen returned to Masset where he's started a family and continues to carve. When the story of a Haida connection to the interior came to Jaalen from Diane, both he and Gwaai could feel the reverberations in their own lives. As people come and see the pole from different walks of life, more connections occur and the stories continue to accrue meanings in people's lives. Hang around long enough and something will come up. I found myself connected to the pole through a friend at UBC. Jaalen had told me of the negotiations that had been going on with the aboriginal groups in whose territory the pole will be raised. Apparently some of the groups were originally questioning Parks Canada about raising a Haida pole on their territory – why wouldn't a local artist from their community be commissioned to create a piece representing their own terri- tory? There was an article about it in the newspaper too. And then back in Vancouver I met up again with my friend Rick with whmo I'd had a graduate class in 2005 at UBC. It turned out that he was the guy who'd been asked by his family in Jasper to open a dialogue about the pole project with Guujaaw, Jaalen and Gwaai's father and the president of the Council of the Haida Nation. As Rick and I made the connection, sitting there in the First Nations 112 House of Learning at UBC where he was working, I realized that another link had been cre- ated, now in my life, between the pole in Masset and the interior and the community in Jas- per. I showed Rick some of the video footage that I had of the carving and he asked me to put it together in a DVD that he could gift people in his community. For me, in my life, this seemingly random connection emphasized the way that the legendary story represented by a series of crest animals in the pole works through the lives of those around it. It reminds me of the way that the world is made up of these connections, like that between the water, the earth, the air, and the animals that Pedro talked to me about. The pole has provided an important lesson to me about remembering the past in the con- nections and stories that collect around it. These articulations are with people long, long ago like the two brothers and daughter whose experiences are recorded in k'aaygang.nga (Skide- gate dialect: long, long ago Haida ancient stories), and they're with Jaalen and Gwaai, the head carvers of the pole, with the Haida people, with ancestors and future generations, as well as the future and past of their relations with inland people. Then there's me, I have my own connection with Rick and my trip to Jasper to be at the pole raising. And there's all the people who come to see the pole and find their own links to it. It speaks to the multiplicity of possibilities in relating past, present and future through specific people, bodies, objects, stories and spirits. These articulations around the pole speak to me of a different sense of time experienced not in a strictly linear way, but rather as a sense of simultaneity as though all these people, stories, ancestors and supernaturals were present in the same moment as a density around the pole. I think and feel it as a sense of being and connectedness that is not measured in segments like years and decades. Rather, the practice of remembering is literally 113 alive in people who learn their stories and speak them to their children.5 It doesn't mean being unaware of a sense of the passage of time, or a time long, long ago. Rather, it is the difference between, on the one hand, a nostalgic sense of the past as being forever lost down an untraversable linear axis of time – a sense of time I believe to be very much at the root of the experience of modernity6 – and, on the other hand, an experience of the past as continuous in the present, as ever-present. This sense of time is present in Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen's relationship to the knowl- edge they sustain through their practices. The practices are not simply a form of commem- oration, but are rather based on a recognition of the continued relevance of the knowledge and methods of the ancestors. For example, Doña Vicky talks about how the recipes her ancestors invented had simple, natural ingredients, lots of fruit, nuts, chiles, that were not only local, but healthy for the body and that came from a understanding that the stomach is the centre of the person's body and health. As Doña Vicky proudly says, continuing these ancestral recipes and the herbal remedies ensures the health of her family and community into the future: yo creo que en todo eso pensaron nuestros antepasados para hacer ese tipo de comida para que no nos dañara nuestro estomago, nuestro organismo porque antes no habia medicos, solamente con tecitos nos curabamos, con tecitos de yerbitas y ellos sabian con que curar por si nos enfermabamos, por eso previni- 5 Elder James Young speaks of the training that his father had as a child in the strict storytelling traditions of the Haida in Fedje, Daryl W, and Rolf W Mathewes, eds. Haida Gwaii Human History and Environment from the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005, 141. 6 James Clifford deals with this theme in his discussion of Time/Space. See Clifford, James. “The Others: Beyond the ‘salvage’ Paradigm.” Third Text 3, no. 6 (March 1989): 73-78, 73. 114 eron en hacer ese mole con pura fruta, no? I think our ancestors were thinking about all that to make that kind of food so we would not hurt our stomach, our body because there were no doctors, only with teas did we cure ourselves, with teas of herbs and they knew how to heal us if we got sick, as such they prevented problems by making the mole with pure fruit, no? (Doña Vicky, Topic: Doña Vicky Cultura de la comida) Jaalen signals the continuing relevance of his ancestors when he talks about taking medicine in order to see his pole as an ancestor would, in order to catch the mistakes and the breaks in flow: 115 if you're taking, taking medicine ..., you can see how, ... ancestors ... would have seen ... our art and how it related to this place, and it doesn't matter that it's centuries later but it's still, we're still the same, I guess the same the same feelings coming from the art and same feeling of responsibility and respect for the land shows through it, shows through the art. (Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Inter- view Haida Art) When I talked to Pedro about planting, he explained the rhythm in terms of cyclical lunar time, a sense of time he shared with his ancestors. When he was young, he tested it. He said, porque yo decia, pues yo, la tierra, todo lo que se siembra en ella germina porque germina y cómo que hay que uno que respetar este, el ciclo lunar asi 116 decia yo cuando era yo joven... because I said, well I, the earth, all that we plant in it germinates because it germinates, and how is it that you have to respect the lunar cycle? this is what I said when I was young... (Pedro, Topic, Pedro Interview Traditional Knowl- edge) When he was young he didn't understand the importance of the elders' teachings, he thought they were irrelevant now and didn't see the connections: Cuando yo tenga tiempo, voy a sembrar, cuando yo tenga tiempo, voy a co- sechar. ¿Que tiene que ver el ciclo lunar con la tierra y el ser humano? ¿o con la semilla misma? 117 When I have time, I'll plant, when I have time, I'll harvest. What does the lu- nar cycle have to do with the earth and human beings? or, with the seed itself? (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Traditional Knowledge) But as he tells it, he soon found out that his yields were less than anticipated. Instead of the earth being a tool that he could simply exploit to produce food at his leisure, as he tested the knowledge of the elders and ancestors, Pedro came to understand the relationship between the cycle of the moon and the earth and himself. When the moon is in the first quarter or is full, it has the most positive energy that it passes on to the cultivator and the earth. That's when the earth is prepared, turned and fertilized with compost and that positive energy is in- terchanged between the cultivator and the earth. Planting and cultivation also happen during this time of high positive energy transfer from the moon. The lunar rhythm was a critical point of connection for him: si no respetamos todas esas reglas de oro como decimos pues automatica nos estamos alejandonos de la realidad con la naturaleza nos estamos auto-excluy- endonos de la naturaleza. 118 If we don't respect all these golden rules, as we say, well automatically we are distancing ourselves from reality with nature, we are auto-excluding ourselves from nature. (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Traditional Knowledge) As such, today Pedro still finds himself very much a part of this cycle whose workings his ancestors learned, practiced, and taught younger generations. Far from being obsolete and inaccessible, the past of his ancestors is still with him every day. Like the essential flows of Haida formline design that have come down through the genera- tions to Jaalen, understanding the lunar cycle for Pedro is an essential element of existence that transcends categories of modern and traditional, old fashioned and cutting edge. The knowledge of their practices, handed down from the ancestors like the moon and the seed, and the flows of Haida form lines, are elements of continuity that create a distinct non- 119 linear sense of time. Being part of a cycle that connects each of the practitioners to their culture, territory and ancestors creates a sense of simultaneity rather than measured distance into the "past." Rather than being part of an incessant growth or accumulation, in Pedro's conception, knowledge itself, like planting and harvesting according to the cycles of the moon, is a con- tinual process of renewal. Traditional knowledge survives because of the living bodies that constantly renew it through experiential learning: nuestros antepasados nos enseñaron ... nos educaron verbalmente con un objectivo de que todo ... lo que hay en la tierra, ... el agua, todo lo que hay, los recursos naturales, ellos ... no lo veian como riqueza, sino que, todo lo que hay en la tierra desde aquel entonces lo veian, lo veian como elementos principales para resolver sus necesidades de sobrevivencia, ya asi lo vemos todavia hasta la fecha, hasta la fecha que estamos en el siglo veinte y uno asi lo vemos no lo vemos de ninguna manera como riquezas, o convertirlos en riquezas, este, economicas ... por eso este, ha sido verbal todo, y ha sido en la practica tam- bien los conocimientos porque en la practica de todos los conocimientos de nuestros antepasados en la practica fuimos aprendiendo, en la practica fuimos relacionandonos con la naturaleza misma con todo 120 our ancestors taught us ... they educated us orally with the notion that all ... there is on the earth, ... the water, all that there is, the natural resources, they ... didn't see it as riches or wealth, but rather, all that there is on the earth ever since that time they saw as principal elements for resolving their necessities for survival, and that's how we still see things now, now that we are in the 21th century. This is the way we see it, in no way as riches, or to convert them into economic wealth ... for this reason everything has been verbal, and in the prac- tice, the knowledge, because through the practices of our ancestors we contin- ued to learn, in the practice we went relating ourselves with the natural world, with all things. (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Traditional Knowledge) For Pedro and his community, knowledge from the elders is about a person's relationship to the land, the elements and survival, and it is alive, embodied in the people who teach and 121 learn it orally and through practice and experience. Instead of being a fixed quantity con- tained in a book on the shelf, knowledge is alive in the connection between people and their world. In contrast to the model of externalized knowledge held in books and archives, the process of cultural conservation that Pedro speaks of, "lo que se hace todavia en la actualidad, lo que conservamos" "what we do now, what we conserve"7 is something that happens in practice. Conservando, or conserving does not mean fixing or pickling things in a jar, instead, it is an active, embodied process of continuing the planting, harvest, food preparation, defense of territory and care for the land in which his people live. Instead of a sense of the past as sealed in time, something only accessed through archives and analysis of "dead" material, it is a sense of presence – the presence of the ancestors, the earth, animals, people, supernatu- rals (in the case of the Haida). As such, it isn't as though any of these elements of life cease to exist, become obsolete or irrelevant. Instead, they are taken up in Doña Vicky's practice of cooking and healing following ancestral ways, Jaalen's carving along the rules of Haida art set out by the supernaturals, the Master Carpenter,8 or the continuation of planting and harvesting crops by the cycle of the moon. Each of these practices involves remembering – people, objects, stories, crests, lineages – as a tool for experiencing the world and for produc- ing food and art, for surviving. The traditions, the lessons present in the practice, lineages, and in the stories, are for survival and root people's actions not only on the land but also in navigating colonial governments, mass culture, or using mobile communications technology to maintain contact throughout diasporic communities like the Haida in Vancouver, Alaska, Prince Rupert, Seattle and Haida Gwaii, or Nu Savi people working as migrants in the U.S. 7 Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Traditional Knowledge. 8 Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Haida Art. 122 and Canada. So this sense of simultaneity, of living with the presence of ancestors and spirits, I see as a relationship to existence and memory that is distinct from a historical consciousness framed by linear time. Conceptions of linear time, time that seemingly cannot be turned back on itself, suggest a disconnect with the traces left on the landscape by earlier generations of people and animals. In contrast, however, instead of the past as a foreign place, an Other world, I have come to see the traces people have left behind as signs of their continuing presence in people's lives. In Mexico there is a spiritual landscape throughout the country, and certainly in Oaxaca where Doña Vicky lives. There are places like Juquila or the basilica in Mexico City where virgins like la Juquilita and the virgin of Guadalupe are worshiped. There are pyramid complexes like Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza where the ancestors held their spiritual practices and their descendants have a thriving market of arts and crafts, and there are little shrines and votive candles in many places, like street intersections where driv- ers cross themselves and pray. Doña Vicky has an altar in her home where candles remain lit day and night and she goes on an annual pilgrimage to visit the virgin of Juquila to ask for help. She maintains her connection to the town of her birth, Tlaxiaco, keeping up on her duties in the community and to the virgin of La Purisima where her grandfather's rancho is located. These are places that connect her to a spiritual world, but also to the past, to her ancestors, and her family. Visiting them, and interacting with them, or going to the cemetery to arrange flowers, share food and drink on the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and organize the family grave site are processes of remembering them and recognizing their presence in her life rather than their absence. These traces on the landscape aren't just physical reminders, however, like a mnemonic 123 device utilized simply to bring something back to mind. They are a part of an understanding of the land and the earth as alive and dynamic, full of spirits and forces that shape our lives, whether we are open to it or not. As I've mentioned, in my time cooking with Doña Vicky and helping her with healing ceremonies like a purification with smoke in Skidegate, she's talked to me about the spirits that remain in houses that have to be communicated with or in some cases, given offerings of food and drink or holy water. She and Pedro have also talked to me about susto and espanto, conditions that arise from an accident or shock (choque) where part of the affected person's spirit is left behind at the place where it occurred. The ceremo- ny to bring that spirit back to the body involves drinking and eating with the spirit, pouring offerings on the ground in the place where the choque happened and calling the spirit back. For Doña Vicky and Pedro, then, the connection to the land, and a particular territory, has to do also with the spirits of their ancestors, themselves and their families present through traces in the material world around them. In the midst of Doña Vicky's life, in the country or the city, surrounded by fields of corn and beans or concrete and traffic congestion, this connection is taken up day to day in the energies that are transfered between her body and the things around her, like the food she prepares and eats. Connection to past relatives and elders is also a part of day-to-day life in Haida Gwaii through reincarnation. One night I asked Jaalen and Gwaai to tell me a bit about reincarna- tion. They said you often hear of a person being the return of an ancestor, a Tsinii or Naa- nii, grandfather or grandmother, because of the way they act or the way they know things. Jaalen's sister (many years younger than him) is said to be the reincarnation of a woman from another Skidegate family. That family has always recognized her has the reincarnation of their mother/grandmother. The thing that proved this relationship to Xiila's mother Marcie is the story of the nickname Xiila gave her doll. Xiila has a doll she used to take with 124 herself everywhere that she called 'Lid.' Her parents thought 'Lid' was a strange name for a child to call a doll. One time Xila went to a potlatch and took the doll for whom she had even made a ceremonial button blanket. Her Dad said to these Skidegate ladies from the other family 'what a strange name for a kid to give a doll: 'Lid,'' and they replied, 'of course, Lydia was her sister in the previous life. Lid was the name she called her sister.'9 Some elders will tell their family that they will come back again. Like a man who hid his tools in the woods, and when he came back in the form of a new baby, this boy, later in life, set out into the woods and found his tools to bring back to the village because he remembered where he'd hid them in his past life. Another time when Jaalen was carving out the back side of a totem pole, his young daughter Haana (2 or 3 years old at the time) was playing around at the end of it, putting wood chips on the centre of the wood and was pouring water along the edge. Jaalen asked her 'Haana, what are you doing?' and she said 'Helping you Dad, I'm helping you hollow it'. He looked at her puzzled. 'All we need is some fire' she said. 'I'm going to go look for some fire' she said as she wandered away. And Jaalen realized that she was trying to hollow out the pole how they used to do it over a hundred years ago, lighting a fire on the part to hollow out, and wetting the part they don't want to catch fire so that it remains untouched. As Jaalen said, Haana had never had any interest in fire, never played with it, and would never have known how poles used to be hollowed out, but she suddenly was able to show her Dad. Her great-grandmother used to call Haana by the name of her great-great-grandmother because she recognized that ancestor in her. In this way, not only are Haida people living in the presence of their ancestors' spirits and the traces they left behind in the art – poles, canoes, masks, weavings, hats – but in some cases they are the reincarnations of their ancestors. For this reason it's always important to respect children as 9 These are not the exact quotes, but my recollection of a re-telling of the story by Jaalen and Gwaai. 125 you respect your elders. I refer to this way of living in one undivided presence, with ancestors, spirits, supernaturals, land and animals as a sense of simultaneity or non-linear time – in contrasts to the linear time of the state, bureaucracies, institutions, hard science and the experience of modernity driven by ideologies of progress and order – because it is the best way I can think of to relate my own experience of being with Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen. Like I said earlier, I'm not trying to establish a model or system to describe the singular way that all Indigenous people use to interact with the past. Even Haida oral tradition records events going back thousands of years to floods and tsunamis, as well as the first tree on Haida Gwaii. Each of the three, as you can see and hear in the video essay are also well versed in the notions of linear time of the state and institutions and sometimes take it up to narrate their own lives. Like me, each of them has learned to employ it pragmatically to interact with the colonized settings within which they live (particularly when it comes to "tramites" or bureaucratic pro- cesses with the government). Nevertheless, the sense of simultaneity, an openness to life experienced without being connected to a particular, universal, time-scale, is an important part, I believe, of the way we are in the world. Photographs provide a liminal space where different conceptions of time can meet in pro- ductive and illustrative ways. At one point, I asked Jaalen to talk about a photograph that stands out for him from the record left behind by ethnographers and travelers of the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. He said it brought to mind the photo of Dr. Kude, the last shaman of Masset: "that picture symbolizes the last time, or the last era that we had our spirituality, and what we believed in as far as the supernaturals and healing..."10 It was the 10 Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Old Photos. 126 last time at least, he said, that shamans were formally trained in healing, though people still live with the presence of the supernatural and reincarnated ancestors. He went on to say: "things are coming back, in strange ways, there's people in our community that are learning things and, things come to them and you know I don't think it's necessarily gone forever but it was definitely gone for a time." The photograph of Dr. Kude was taken by Edward Dos- setter, a photographer working for the Canadian government, contracted to document the tour of the Indian Commissioner Dr. I.W. Powell in 1881. While Dossetter took the photo as a kind of inventory for the purpose of reporting back on wards of the Dominion, the photo spurs a string of meanings for Jaalen that relate to the possibilities in his community. This way of relating to photographs beyond their framing as ethnographic objects makes me think of Jeff Thomas' work as a photographer of Indigeneity. I've had the opportunity to meet and talk with Jeff Thomas in Ottawa several times now, and his ideas and work are an important guide to my thinking in this project. Some of his works engage the juxtaposi- tion of contemporary images of indigeneity with the photographs of Edward S. Curtis. Thomas' interest in Curtis' turn of the century images of Indigenous people from across the Americas is rooted in the silences that are present in period photographs and the archive of the time. As he says, "the Curtis photographs hint at conversation, and made me long to hear their voices. The images made me lonely for my elders and reminded me of the power- ful influence they had on me."11 His exploration of these photographs of Indigenous wom- en and men, many in regalia, is part of a project of "building a new paradigm that unites past and present."12 11 Thomas, Jeff. “At the Kitchen Table with Edward S. Curtis.” Unpublished (2010), 3. 12 Ibid, 2. 127 In both Jaalen's and Jeff Thomas' interaction with turn of the century photographs of ancestors, I see a desire for and gesture towards renewal: a renewal of connections to the ancestors portrayed in the photographs, and a renewal of the threads that those ancestors fought to carry on to the next generations. Looking at the photo of Dr. Kude leads Jaalen into a consideration of the moment of Kude's conversion to Christianity and the forc- ing of Haida beliefs underground, but also in the same instant, a projection of the future of those beliefs "coming back in strange ways." Seen through a linear conception of time, the photograph is like a time machine, taking us up and down the axis of time, history, and "events" with Jaalen, going backwards through dramatic cultural change into that distant past one hundred years ago, and then forward again to the future of the Haida people. But as I sat listening to Jaalen, I sensed the connection he had to the photo through a sense of presence – a lack of axis or measure – experiencing the live connection between Dr. Kude's practice of Haida medicine and this generation's healing and growth in the same moment. As Thomas says of Curtis' turn of the century photographs, they "can be used, on our own terms, in our efforts to heal. They are a gateway for Indigenous people to revisit their own histories and to remember and recall stories that their elders may have passed on to them."13 Haida people are courageously finding ways to make their culture strong again through learn- ing the language from elders, learning the art, dance and stories. The old photographs are a means to show lineage, mounted on the walls in peoples' homes. I expect there's a tinge of nostalgia for the past that anyone, Haida or not, would experi- ence looking at hundred year old photographs. I often find myself feeling almost a vertigo as I'm drawn into old images of the Haida, imagining what that time must have been like. 13 Ibid, 16. 128 What I'm trying to think through with respect to Jaalen and Jeff Thomas is a relationship of proximity – "estar mas de cerca" "being closer" in Pedro's words – through which the viewer could occupy the same space as the ancestors. Since the beginning Haida have lived with the supernaturals in Haida Gwaii, and Haida say that each generation's spirits are still here. I believe the position Jaalen occupies in relation to these photos is the "active" position Jeff Thomas seeks to replace the passivity of the "armchair tourist" consumer of archival pho- tos taken by Europeans.14 Thomas' own viewing position is one committed to "challenging the silences of the archive." In Jaalen's case, as he speaks of the photo of Dr. Kude, he is not lost in a moment, struck by wistfulness and regret of the passage of time, but rather his position is one of active connection to the very same place his ancestors lived day-to-day, the Haida homeland. It is an understanding that Dr. Kude's spirit is still here, accompanying his generation as they continue to make important decisions for past and future generations. Experiencing the presence of ancestors, drawing on the photographs of ancestors as a gate- way (in Thomas' words), is an innocent gesture, like Robert Davidson raising his totem pole in 1969, the first pole raising in Masset in 100 years. Published in 2009, Four Decades: An In- nocent Gesture is Davidson's photo essay made up of a compilation of participants' photos. In contrast to the genre of the turn of the century ethnographic photos I've talked about, used by anthropologists, collectors and government agents as tools to order cultures into generic types, they are photos taken by the press and by Haida people of themselves: families, clans, elders and children, in a moment of celebration, transformation and healing embodied in the raising of the pole, the donning of regalia, and learning the dances. Together, the photos collected in the book offer a vision for Haida people showing a moment of the renewal of 14 Ibid, 1. 129 the connection to the ancestors enacted by Davidson and his community courageously tak- ing up the thread for their future survival. Though a photograph is an explicitly visual representation of the world, invented at the height of 'modern' European Imperial culture in the early nineteenth century, I think of all the unseen meanings photos contain for different people. For example, the difference be- tween sharing space with the presence of an ancestor like Dr. Kude to connect the moment of the photo with the recovery of the Haida people, versus I.W. Powell commissioning the photograph as an inventory of subjects of state power ("Our Indians" in the words of the Queen in her treaties). The former is a less tangible, less overt meaning that I think is only truly perceptible to someone with a greater degree of openness to experience and connec- tion. It brings me back to Pedro's lesson about planting in time with the moon. At first he wants to manage planting and harvesting to suit himself and isn't open to the intangible lessons of his elders and to the energies that flow between the moon, the earth and himself – he doesn't want to understand the elders' message about why his corn isn't sprouting: Cómo se va a esconder el maiz o la mazorca debajo de la tierra cuando es im- posible? decia yo que no, que a pleno luz del dia, pues yo decia: es que ustedes viejos ya no ven bien. Yo si veo bien porque estoy joven, asi pensaba, asi decia, y llevaba este, la practica de, de piscar de cosechar mazorca en luna cuarto menguante o, o sobre todo ... cuando no hay luna y avanzaba yo mucho, o sea, era mas grande la extension que yo este, levantaba la cosecha pero mas embar- go la cosecha no era la esperada, era inferior. Pero eso quiere decir que yo no vea, eso quiere decir que alguien haya pasado y 130 se robo la cosecha – no, entonces al paso de los años fui ... llevando la practica a los consejos de los abuelos y ... empecé a darme cuenta a experimentar de, el resultado de cada uno de mis actos y alli fue donde ví que los, todos los conse- jos de los abuelos esta, esta comprobado How could the corn or the whole cob hide itself under the dirt when it's im- possible? I would say no, that in the plain light of day – well I said: it's that you old people can't see well anymore. I see well because I'm young – this is what I thought, this is what I said, and I continued the practice of collecting, harvest- ing the corn in the quarter moon or, above all when there was no moon, and I advanced well, the extent of the land that I harvested was larger but all the same the quantity of the harvest was not what I'd hoped, it was inferior. But this would mean that I don't see, this would mean that someone might 131 have come by and robbed the harvest – no – so with the passing of the years I started following the practices and councils of the grandparents and I began to notice and experience the result of each of my acts, and that was when I saw that all the advice of the grandparents was proven. (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Traditional Knowledge) Pedro says he started out with a superficial understanding of planting seeds, believing as many young people do that he knew best – the problem was simply that the elders could not "see well." It was only as he had more experience and opened himself up to other "unseen" possibilities that he came to understand his place within a network of relationships to the world around him. In my own life, even as I write this dissertation, I try to keep up on my cooking and keep a focus on my relationship to the ingredients that I use. I think of how I handle food respect- fully and with positive thoughts and positive energy to impart good flavour and health to the food. I'm baking my own bread from scratch these days, and sometimes as I knead it I think of what it would be like to grow my own wheat, getting my hands in the very soil it grows in, so that I could harvest it, mill it into flour, bake it into bread and then eat it. Although bak- ing bread and preparing and cooking is an every day thing, it gives me pleasure use my own hands and energy to make my food, and allows me to connect to Pedro's feeling of being a part of a cycle of sustenance that provides him with an embodied, spiritual connection to the material world around him. The more I repeat these actions and play a role in producing my own food rather than going to a restaurant or heating up a microwave dinner, the more I can see the possibilities for being a part of millennial cycles of survival as part of the earth, water, air, and moon. 132 Understanding the way your intention affects the things you do, the food you prepare; feel- ing the sense of connection to a story, allowing it to meander through your life; allowing a linear sense of time to fall away in order to live side-by-side with the spirits of the ances- tors; being open to learning through experience, knowledge and insights that are intangible and intuitive: these are things that I have learned, experienced and felt that for me defy the epistemologies of the disciplines that I grew up with. It seems more and more that what I don't see is what I get, that true knowledge is being open to the way I am connected to the world. Being seduced by the explanatory power of visual representation – diagrams, models, tabulated values, printed text, video – and letting my body and other senses wither and decay through disuse means that I don't know how much I need to rely upon my connection to the earth, water, air, and other beings on earth for my survival. Instead, I need to learn about those connections by doing – caminando y miando. 133 chapter 4 Knowledge-In-relation: embodied Ways of Knowing and the Strategies of Blindness Let's begin at the museum Through his work with the Haida Repatriation Committee, Jaalen has travelled to different museums worldwide to look at their Haida collections as part of a project to negotiate the return of these pieces to Haida Gwaii. Recently, in 2009, he went to the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford to view things like masks, bent wood boxes and rattles that his ancestors had made as long as 300 years ago. Though he recognizes the work that museums are doing to make the objects available to the communities, the museum context makes it very difficult to truly know the pieces: 134 ... now we're looking at some of these pieces without the context in the mu- seums and, you know you, you can't know quite what it was for, or you don't know how it moved in the firelight or there's those little nuances that you miss ... (Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Influence on Carving) Extensive collections of Haida tools, boxes and ceremonial pieces are stored away through- out European and North American institutions, a situation that Jaalen deeply regrets. He says that had they not been removed through selling and stealing they would still have rel- evance to the community – "we'd be handling them and using them and even if something were to happen to a piece, because it had a use in our society, another carver would make something of similar design in order to use it." The staff made an exception for the Haida, allowing them to handle and touch the ancient pieces that the staff, administrators and museum professionals understand as 'artifacts.' In general, though, these pieces would either be behind glass to be viewed from a distance, or even just stored away in a drawer with only a photographic reproduction available for view- ing in a textbook. The notion itself of the 'artifact' speaks of the re-casting in the museum context of an everyday useful tool or mask as a mystic trace of something now long gone. For Jaalen, it is a testament to the role the museum has historically played in colonial narra- tives of disappearance of aboriginal people: 135 I think before, [the pieces] were, almost in a way kept away from the original communities because saying that the people still existed and still used those types of objects almost devalued them for the museum, I think, cause they'd rather have an extinct people and have the last remnants – but I think every- one's sort of realizing that we're not gone yet. (Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Influence on Carving) . . . Jaalen's account of handling the mask at the Pitt Rivers Museum reveals the importance of embodiment for his way of knowing. Whether or not he is able to see how a carved piece comes alive in the firelight – as it was purposely carved to do – is a question that is fundamental to his relationship to materiality and its role in the construction of knowledge. 136 Movement in the firelight signals that the piece, a mask for example, is meant to be engaged with as part of a ceremony or dance that involves a whole body connection to it. I've seen people put on raven masks and dance them, becoming ravens: moving around, cocking their heads inquisitively, even snapping the purpose-built beak open and closed. Jaalen points out a critical epistemological point stemming from the objects in the museum: What is the nature of the knowledge we have of them when we don't engage with and relate to them by touching, moving and giving them life amongst ourselves? What ontology-world is conjured around carvings when they are contemplated behind glass, or when they are periodically removed from storage drawers for researchers to catalogue and describe? Such questions of embodiment and knowledge-in-relation are at the root of this chapter. Through a discussion of the archive, linear time and scholarly distance – three interwoven strategies at the root of the disciplines of history and anthropology – I will explore this idea of how we perform and produce worlds as we create knowledge. In particular, this chapter will address the blindness that I believe results from the centrality of these three strate- gies as governing metaphors in these disciplines, and scholars' dependence on them for the creation of expert knowledge. My goal is to take up the lessons and insights that I continue to pick up with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro in order to understand with greater nuance what is missing from pictures of the world and the past created using these abstract, textual and schematic modes of intellection that prioritize the visual and impoverish our embodied relationship to the material world around us. Exploring archive, linear time, and scholarly distance, three disciplinary strategies essential to and constitutive of ‘Western’ ontologies-worlds, means examining the (dis)embodied relationship to materiality and life energies they foment and how that relationship prefigures 137 our scholarly practices of research and writing. In turn, it means attempting to relate these strategies to my experience with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro: literally figuring out how to bring scholarly knowing into relation with the land, water, place, people, animals, plants, energies and survival – even if this is only possible through a critique. I believe notions of truth, evidence and history flow from people's intimacy with objects and the living, material world around them. The embodied ways of knowing that the three participants carry with them takes this relationship to materiality as a constituting epistemological position defying Descartes' famous mind/body dichotomy. Instead, as I will discuss at greater depth later in the chapter, these ancestral ways of knowing hold the body, undivided, at the centre of intel- lection, the act or process of understanding. My goal here is to suggest that, far from being central, scholars' relationship to materiality and embodiment in their academic practices of evaluating and analyzing evidence goes unacknowledged or even systematically denied. Scholarly Distance: Disappearance in the Museum The museum is one of the first sites in children's lives where they are taught to forge a dis- tanced 'objective' relationship to objects. Many scholars have discussed the mechanisms of the museum display complex1 and the ways that curation shapes the audience's reception of the objects exhibited. As children go through the halls of display cases protecting artifacts like bones, vases, little critters, paintings and dioramas, the admonition not to touch, not to get too close, and to keep your voices down is a constant message conveyed by parents, staff, signs and velvet covered cordons. New areas set up in museums for kids to play and inter- act with objects like the Canadian Children's Museum with its "Home On the Go" exhibit 1 For example, Tony Bennet in Karp, Ivan, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds. Museum Frictions : Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2006, 48. 138 which invites kids to "Relax in our Bedouin tent as you sip coffee, play backgammon, and experience the life of a Bedouin family"2 only sharpen the distinction between play spaces and display spaces where solemn contemplation is the expected behaviour. Instead of the embodied, tactile experience of the Children's Museum, the conservative space of the ex- hibit hall – conservative both in the sense of a space where objects are carefully conserved under glass and behind cordons, as well as a space where staff, experts, and parents inculcate conservative, restrained, institutional behaviours – enforces a disembodied experience of ob- jects, people, and culture that teaches children and other viewers about distance, "evidence," and "objectivity." Particularly in the genre of museology represented by the Pitt-Rivers institution, museums combine the public-ness of the government institution – holding documents and objects in the public trust, at times on display – with the secrecy of documents hidden away in restrict- ed storage. As Derrida suggests of the physical location of archive, the dwelling, the place that "marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the non-secret" – holding objects in the public trust does not mean the public has unlimited access to them.3 Storage vaults that keep artifacts in the trust of their authorized keepers and prohibitions surrounding the viewing of those artifacts made visible to the public emphasize secrecy and the privilege granted to the expert staff and the researchers who have the backing of recognized institutions. Even when artifacts are in plain view, they are conspicuously inaccessible to anything other than sight under the glass, with only staff and specialists having the requisite authorization to be permitted to touch 2 Canadian Museum of Civilization. “Home on the Go | Canadian Museum of Civilization”, n.d. http:// www.civilization.ca/childrens-museum/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/home-on-the-go. 3 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2. 139 them. Through technologies of security and display, the museum inculcates a reverence for appropriated objects produced by aboriginal ancestors. This reverence is produced by fitting them into particular visual narratives of order of time, space, and human relationships that have been established by anthropologists and curators. As the object is transformed from a tool used in the community to an artifact to contemplate, it becomes a marker of a re-in- vented authenticity and a re-imagined origin in the mists of time that, according to Western narratives, precedes the modern time of the historical present to which the museum and oth- er modern institutions belong. The chasm between viewer and revered object is produced through temporal and cultural distance conjured between the 'modern' subject viewing the artifact and the almost unimaginable world of the aboriginal creator/user of the object. In his assertion that "we're not gone yet," Jaalen points to a key element of the museum's system of ordering and elucidating material culture. The museum's appropriation of Haida objects, re-framing them as 'artifacts' in a narrative of the Haida, or the 'Northwest Col- lection', re-invents them as the "last remnants" of an "extinct people" despite the fact their creators may still have been alive at the time, or that their descendents might still be alive and well a century later. At the Pitt Rivers, Jaalen came face-to-face with the power of the nar- rative of disappearance forged by the ancestors of museologists' discipline – salvage anthro- pologists and ethnographers like George Dorsey, Charles F. Newcombe, Marius Barbeau and Franz Boas who went collecting in Coastal communities. This disappearance as Jaalen experiences it is, I believe, two-fold: first, the contemporary continuity of the Haida com- munity and their claims to their territory are not present in typical ethnographic exhibits, particularly those rooted in nineteenth and early twentieth century conventions; and second, as Jaalen's comment about losing the nuances of an object suggests, the disappearance is enacted by the severing of embodied connections between the object and the community 140 in which it originated. These relationships may be perceptible, for instance, in a design on a bent-wood box that embeds a story about the creation of Haida Gwaii, or they may be imperceptible, unknowable to people who aren't from the community. As Jaalen suggests, it is through the displacement of the object from a community where it has meaning into the museum that disappears the object's connection to life, territory, practical uses, ceremony and the networks of meaning the object inhabited. The only way I can think of to represent the imperceptible relationships that I'm talking about is with examples. Doña Vicky's relationship to the virgin of Juquila, for instance, embodied in the shrine in her house, and taken up in the journeys that she makes to Juquila to ask the virgin for help and protection, is one of mutual aid and faith whose profound nature is not accessible on a museum plaque. Pedro's relationship to the land and the moon through transfers of positive and negative energies is another example, requiring sharing time with Pedro and working in the fields to even begin to understand. In the museum context, the seemingly intangible relationships that are severed are perhaps more apparent when the 'artifacts' are ancestors' bones. Nika Collison, a Haida woman who is a member of the Skidegate Repatriation Committee, recently gave a talk about a letter between nineteenth century collectors Newcombe and Dorsey at UBC's Global Encounters Symposium. She said that the letter's content "relates directly to being Haida and to our history and to today." The 1897 letter from Dorsey to Newcombe talks about Newcombe's boasting of his ability to obtain "100 ds of skeletons" of Haida ancestors from "ruined vil- lages on the West Coast." Dorsey's chilling final comment before his salutation, "Have you any skulls or skeletons that you will sell or exchange?" indicates the collectors' limited un- derstanding of the bones as "specimens" which might have "duplicates" available for sale or 141 exchange.4 Dorsey and Newcombe clearly related to the ancestors' remains as they would to any other phenomena forming part of a museum collection – as material evidence to be cat- egorized, classified, and even as commodities. The living connection that the remains have in their community of origin was not on their radar. Many museums that have vast collections of objects taken from indigenous communities, like the Pitt Rivers and the Museum of Natural History in New York, are now working with some of those communities to repatriate their objects. The Pitt Rivers project, for example, undertook to bring Haida people like Jaalen to the museum in Oxford in order to view (and touch) the collections in person and begin negotiations on which objects might be returned.5 Repatriation is exactly about renewing embodied relationships with the things taken from aboriginal communities, insisting on bringing them back as a part of a healing process. For many Haida people, the remains of ancestors must be respected because of the spirits that are connected to them. The Skidegate Repatriation committee's website describes the pro- cess and meanings of bringing home the ancestors: The most wonderful outcomes of repatriation work are right here at home. Bringing our ancestors home is a large and long process, requiring the support and efforts of all Haida communities. School children and volunteers make button blankets and weave cedar bark mats to wrap our ancestors in. Artists teach apprentices how to make tradi- tional bentwood burial boxes and paint Haida designs on them. 4 Global Indigeneities Views from Near and Far, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6HIDqczQYUandfeat ure=youtube_gdata_player. 5 “International Research Network - Pitt Rivers Museum”, n.d. http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/haida.html. 142 The Haida language has to be learned by more and more people so that the ancestors can be spoken to and prayed for. Elders and cultural historians teach traditional songs, dances and rituals. Many more people have begun to look towards and embrace traditions that until Repatriation began, only a handful of people participated in. And perhaps most important, after each ceremony, one can feel that the air has been cleared, that spirits are resting, that our ancestors are at peace, and one can see that healing is visible on the faces of the Haida community.6 The "specimens" from Dorsey's letter are transformed back into "ancestors" in the words of the committee, as they are carefully wrapped, buried and prayed for. The repatriation website suggests the renewal that bringing back the ancestors entails, the production of boxes and weaving, and learning the Haida language in order to repair relationships and heal accompanied by the ancestors. As Jaalen says, during his visit to the Pitt Rivers museum, he had the feeling that their pres- ence as Haida people handling Haida "artifacts" created a troublesome rupture in the nar- rative of disappearance that was forged by salvage ethnographers – the ancestors of muse- ologists' discipline. The continued survival and growing presence of his community, the continuation of Haida art with a new generation, and their desire to remove their objects from the museum's system of colonial ordering destabilizes its power and legitimacy. In evoking the golden ages or 'classic period' of aboriginal groups like the Maya, Aztec, and 6 Skidegate Repatriation & Cultural Committee. “Respecting Our Ancestors”, n.d. http://www.repatriation. ca/Pages/Respecting%20Our%20Ancestors.html. 143 Haida, along with the concomitant 'post-classic' downfall, ethnographers of the late nine- teenth and early twentieth century convinced their readers that they were witnessing the end of the communities that had accepted their presence in their territories and answered their questions.7 What nineteenth century ethnographer or collector would have imagined that Haida descendants would show up a century later at the museum to reclaim their objects? Posing this last question in the context of the ethnographic narratives of the museum is critical to understanding the role scholarly distance plays in our performances of ontologies- worlds. The narrative of disappearance, founded upon assumptions that aboriginal cultures could not survive the thrust of colonial expansion and the putative arrival of 'modern soci- ety' – that is to say, disease, missionization, assimilation and ever accelerating change – has been so powerful exactly because it has been deeply embedded in our mundane, day-to-day performances of academic and western worlds. The anthropological knowledge of aborigi- nal peoples collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was akin to a process of death and mummification – the passing of indigenous cultures into a static, fixed form – like a preserved corpse – a counterpoint or foil to 'modern' culture, positioned not only as the present of those carrying out the collecting, but also as the future of all. Scholarly Distance: (Dis)embodied history Although my discussion so far focuses on the representation of aboriginal people in the museum, I believe that the distance between knower and object, resulting from the object's passage into a static space of death or pastness, is particularly fundamental to imaginings of 7 Even renowned Haida Artist Bill Reid once said after curating an exhibit in 1967 of early Haida artists: “Well, I guess we might as well wrap it all up,” meaning that clearly the greatness of the tradition was a thing of the past. Shadbolt, Doris. Bill Reid. Rev. ed. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1998, 6. 144 modern Western ontology-worlds in the primarily textual discourses of history and anthro- pology. In his discussion of the creation of anthropological knowledge in monographs and articles, Johannes Fabian states that: "The object's present is founded in the writer's past."8 Beyond simply a grammatical construction, Fabian's claim suggests that objects of ethnographic description, like cultures and people, are denied presence through their rep- resentation in text. Disconnecting and secluding objects, beings and relationships from day-to-day life and their subsequent reinvention through description and categorization in abstract spaces of knowledge means that the phenomena are not remembered in life. While this sense of pastness and non-presence might frame academic work, Fabian goes on to point out that the connection between knower and object is in fact much closer than most scholars acknowledge: "In that sense, facticity itself, that cornerstone of scientific thought, is autobiographic."9 That is to say that knowledge about the object does not exist apart from the experience of the knowing author who describes and categorizes it for others. I believe this distanced type of knowledge-making and world-making is rooted in the power- ful notion of the 'clean slate' that scholars discuss as one of the governing metaphors for Western thinkers since the renaissance and the enlightenment.10 The clean slate thinker be- gins with the invocation that all prior ways of knowing the world are rent by irrationality, su- perstition, bias, and corruption, and are simply not 'new'. It is a teleological model founded upon the notion of linear time that organizes experience, and, importantly, knowledges into past, present, and future such that certain types of knowledge or ideas are old and there- 8 Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, 89. 9 Ibid, 89. 10 James C. Scott’s work on high modernist cities like Chandrigar and Brazilia is a good example of the clean slate. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, 1998, 94. 145 fore potentially invalid because they are 'out of date.' In the academic model of continually expanding knowledge through the production of monographs and articles, novelty – 'What's new about your work?' – is a central criteria for determining value and, by contrast, repeti- tion of ideas is either unrecognized, carefully regulated by systems of citation, or regarded as derivative or simply plagiarism. The knowing subject is also raced, classed, gendered, and presumed to be human in this process such that the seat of knowledge, and therefore power, resides in particular places.11 All other ways of knowing consequently appear to be encompassed within the knower's view, subordinated within collections of subcategories and observed phenomena for the knower to describe. Since aboriginal peoples and cultures were supposedly set to disappear at the turn of the twentieth century, modernizers and nation builders promoted concepts such as assimilation to prevent these remnants of the past from interfering with the growth of 'civilization.'12 Among Western post-enlightenment thinkers, instead of an awareness of embodied relation- ships and connectedness contributing to knowing, embodied practices are generally collected together under labels such as 'spirituality' or 'backwardness' and thereby held apart from the objective, scientific work of creating knowledge. Evidence, for example, cannot be based on things like one's own intuition or gut feelings, things that in life may in fact do much to direct a person's actions. Neither can a relationship to the land, or a knowledge of intangible ener- gies like Doña Vicky has as the basis for her healing practices stand as sufficiently concrete 11 Paul Nadasdy discussed learning from animals with an interviewee: “I asked him how he had learned to hunt like that. Without hesitating, he said that he had learned it from moose. Then he thought a bit and said that his father and others had taught him some things, but mostly he had learned by hunting and by being open to what the animals had to teach him.” Nadasdy, Paul. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Rela- tions in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003, 108. 12 According to Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush, “Native hauntings disrupt dominant and official historical narratives as expressions of liminality that transcend fixed boundaries of time and space.” Boyd, Colleen E, and Coll-Peter Thrush, eds. Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011, xxii. 146 to found an academic narrative. Instead, in most academic practice these embodied insights that are not the product of a position of omniscient objectivity are perceived to obscure the vision of the thinker. The act of creating scholarly knowledge tends to begin with analysis, the practice of taking things apart into their essential elements as interpreted by the thinker, and then reassembling their parts free of their entanglements in the living world according to function, collection, similarity and difference. This reassembly means discovering/creat- ing an origin in a grid-like, abstract ontology-world governed by linear time and measured space.13 Among historians, for example, failing to place an event, person, thing, or relation- ship on a timeline – in history – can result in a historian being accused of 'de-historicizing' a subject, leaving them 'out of time.' When I set out with Pedro to do video interviews and get footage of his agricultural prac- tice, the account we were to make did not rest on this invented point of origin. Instead, Pe- dro immediately understood the history we would record as consisting not just of the stories from his elders, but the ways, the practices, and even the golden rules of his community, and their ways of knowing and doing. There is no history of his community that stands apart from the story of his own generation, and generations before and after him: the history he would tell was about how his community has always continued the practices of their ances- tors, how they will continue to walk through their world.14 As I accompanied Pedro, Don Felis and Doña Maria planting onions, going down the valley to water gardens in the forest, pick coffee, work the milpa and take the corn kernels off the cob, I shared in their history, 13 Fabian uses the expression “taxonomic space.” Fabian, Time and the Other, 54. 14 Juanita Sundberg brings forward walking as an epistemology in the Zapatista philosophy: “Marcos is sug- gesting that the Zapatista movement is enacted through walking; the journey is the destination, and the world is brought into being through everyday praxis.” Sundberg, Juanita. “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies.” Article. Vancouver, 2011, 13. 147 or rather their continuity, by doing with them. It is a story of their connections to their land, animals, water, the moon, and the air, a story of participation in cycles of existence, like the lunar cycles of energy exchange that tell them when to plant and when to harvest their food. It is also a story of how they sustain their community in the face of government projects to assimilate them and harness their labour.15 Instead of stripping away the entanglements of lived experience that complicate a narrative, we went about our process of knowing by being a part of those entanglements. This way of being a part of, continuing, is distinct from knowledge conceived of as 'information' or 'data' to be stored, disconnected from bodies and personal experience (a process reflected in this written work). It entails a distinct rela- tionship between knowledge and materiality that casts objectivity in a different way, that is, by acknowledging that our affective relationship to material objects plays a role in the truths that we believe and the worlds we construct for ourselves to inhabit. As I grasped more about the ways of knowing that Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro were sharing with me, like Doña Vicky's way of cooking where she is always attentive to her own embodied relationship to the ingredients and the process, I understood more precisely the consequences of a form of knowledge based on distancing through fixing things in abstract space, in models, timelines and hierarchies, in order to know them. Sequestering masks, bent wood boxes, language, stories, and practices in the time-space of Western knowledge – mod- ular objects of display or textual analysis to be used interchangeably as evidence in debates 15 In Plan de Zaragoza, Pedro’s friend Doña Maria’s days are full of hard physical work, hiking up and down mountains to get to tend her cow, working in the milpa, and cooking. One day she wasn’t around and I asked Pedro where she was. Pedro revealed that there is a government program Doña Maria is a part of that provides financial support for her daughter to attend school two communities over. One of the conditions of receiv- ing the money is that Doña Maria, in the midst of all her work with Don Felis to feed herself and her family, is forced to attend an aerobics class. If she does not attend the class, the other members of the community attending it are encouraged to tattle on her resulting in her daughter losing access to basic education. Pedro laughed at the cynicism of yet another government “support” that is in fact a tactic to divide the community and undermine their autonomy. 148 and teleological theories of the progress of civilization – not only cuts them off from the people and communities who produced them, but also severs relationships of mutuality and respect. It seems to me that initiatives like those of the Skidegate repatriation committee are a direct response to this form of distancing. Not only does insisting on taking objects and ancestors back from the museums confront ethnographic narratives of disappearance, it is also an epistemological positioning that puts our whole bodies at the centre of our relation- ship to the living world, maintaining embodied connections to the materiality of our lives like the bones of the ancestors. And, critically, it is not just any body at the centre – not the divided body of Descartes, not the schematized medical 'body' that appears flayed or in skel- etal form on charts and diagrams, nor the cumulative, statistical human – but specific beings understood as wholes, like Pedro, myself, or you. How, for example, is the being/person doing the research and representation in books and theses – myself, un-fragmentable – in- volved and connected to the knowledge they produce? Is it possible to conceive of knowl- edge as separable from the being who produces it? Going back to Pedro's characterization of my project of doing history: lo mas bonito es que cuando el historiador se integra ... a esos actores y esta mas de cerca para conocer y experimentar sobre todo la historia, creo que es lo que mas nutre en ambas partes porque eso le ayude tanto al historiador como este, el que narra... the best thing is when the historian integrates him/herself, participates with those actors and is close enough to know and experience the history above all – I think that it is what most nourishes 149 both people, because this equally helps the historian and the person telling the story... (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Video Essay Feedback 2010.11.13) For Pedro, the relationship between researcher and subject, then, involves embodied expe- riences of sharing space, teaching gestures and ways of doing things that are part of the practice. It is a process without end point through which both people are nourished from this sharing and learn in relation to each other as living beings. In this model, the physical body as part of a whole being – its presence in the doing – is central to the history, the move- ments, of Pedro's community. This history is a story of survival and resilience that speaks not only to the experience of his ancestors, but also his own generation and following gen- erations as they continue a relationship to the land that has endured for generations perhaps even millennia. As I understand the ways of knowing that Pedro has shared with me about his community, his knowledge is not simply 'out there' as information or data to be freely manipulated and placed arbitrarily into schemata and hierarchies. This knowledge is connected to beings through relationships of mutuality and interdependence that revolve around respect and responsibility. When Doña Vicky talks about cooking and the transfers of positive energy between the food and the people who eat it, she is referring to this mutuality – food and people are in relation, dependent on each other and sharing the same field of energy. Talk- ing with Doña Vicky about the need to touch food with your hands and connect your own sazon de la mano with it, or talking with Pedro about nahuales, the beings, like a rabbit or a jaguar, that are your dual in life makes me think of how their understanding of these con- nections in their relationship to their material surroundings goes much deeper than my own. As Pedro describes it, alongside possessing special skills and capacities, each person embod- 150 ies a duality as expressed in the nahual: ... en la actualidad usamos esa palabra nahual, pero es más, es decir yo, yo estoy aqui como ser humano, pero hay otro, hay otro animal, o inclusiva la lluvia misma que es parte de mi vida aunque yo no lo sepa, aunque yo no los vea. Si es un animal, y que anda en el campo, en el monte, y que por un descuido de esa animal llega alguna otra persona, lo yere o lo mata, inmediatamente yo me enfermo o si lo yere y se logra escapar y salvarse de la muerte, pues yo me voy a enfermar pero puedo salvar, salvarme de la muerte. Pero si la, el animal se muere, pues tambien yo me muero. Es increible, es increible, este, explicarlo, y que otras personas lo puedan en- tender. Nosotros lo entendemos bien porque eso tambien no es algo nuevo de apenas ayer o hace unos cuantos años para nosotros, sino que tambien ya de, de cien- tos de años, de muchos cientos de años. Por eso, este, lo entendemos porque tambien nuestros abuelos, nuestros padres lo han venido viviendo, lo han venido sufriendo 151 ... in the present we use this word nahual, but it's more, that is to say I, I am here as a human being, but there is another, another animal, or even the rain itself that is a part of my life although I don't know it, although I don't see it. If it's an animal, and it lives in the country, on the hills, and by its carelessness a person finds them, and injures them or kills them, immediately I fall sick or if it is injured and manages to escape and save itself from death, I will become sick, but I can save myself, save myself from death. But if the animal dies, I die too. Its incredible, incredible, trying to explaining it so that other people might be able to understand it. 152 We understand it well because it isn't something new from yesterday or only a few years for us, rather now, for hundreds of years, for many hundreds of years. This is why we understand because our grandparents, our parents have lived it, have suffered it along the way. (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview - Na- hual) Pedro's articulation of his connection in life and death to an animal, or in his case as he explains later, the rain, speaks to how this fundamental interdependence is understood in the community as a result of hundreds of years of experience living it. As he says, it is a part of his life that he can't "see", but that he can understand through his own experience. When it rains, or there is a thunderstorm, yo no me asusto cuando llueve cuando llueve yo siento esa sensación de, este, de energías positivas. Cuando relampague o truena, este, cerca, no me asusto cuando otras personas se asustan 153 I'm not afraid when it rains, when it rains I feel that sensation of positive ener- gies when there's lightning or thunder nearby, I don't get scared when other people do (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview - Nahual) As Pedro suggests, though knowledge about nahuales may provide some means to heal or feel happiness, in certain cases it also implies suffering as part of this interdependence. In- terdependence and mutuality are key to Pedro's way of knowing, particularly in his connec- tion to his land and territory: automaticamente seriamos un pueblo sin identidad propia si no tendriamos el territorio y no podriamos practicar la autonomia misma, por eso, un pueblo tiene una vida, puede practicar todo lo que, lo que por muchos años ha practi- cado. Lo hace cuando tiene su territorio y el dia que ya no tengamos territorio pues automaticamente vamos a dejar de existir como pueblos originarios 154 automatically we would be a people without our own identity if we didn't have the territory and we couldn't practice autonomy. So, a pueblo has a life, they can practice all that they have practiced for many years they do it because they have a territory, and the day that we don't have a territory, well, automatically we will cease to exist as original peoples (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Nece- sidades - Territory) Jaalen also speaks to this notion of respect and dependence on the land when he says that Haida art and culture "comes from the land and the sea."16 Interdependence means a distinct positioning towards the world and towards knowledge. It means not having dominion over "facts" and objects as raw materials, or treating them as interchangeable units, but instead understanding that they are connected to you, as all things are connected, and must be re- 16 Jaalen, Topic: Jaalen Interview Haida Art. 155 spected. Doña Vicky's prayers and gestures when she is making food express her respect for the process and ingredients that were passed down to her from her ancestors and her knowl- edge of their connection to her through energies that pass back and forth between herself and the food. These are ways of knowing that hold the body and personal experience as central to inhab- iting a person's world, and they speak against the universals, categories and hierarchies of abstract Western worlds. They suggest the complexity and subtlety of knowing in contrast to the primarily visual, textual, evidential paradigm typical of the disciplines of history and anthropology.17 In her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informat- ics, N. Katherine Hayles discusses this very question in the context of the Posthuman,18 cybernetics philosophy which is increasingly consumed as a tacit, yet fundamental aspect of academic practice as scholars come to depend on digital prosthetics like smartphones, tablet computers, and internet databases (with their concomitant logic and ordering) in their day-to-day lives. In her exploration, Hayles shows how these philosophers celebrate the reduction of life and experience to data and information. Hans Moravec, for example, writes that "it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer."19 As Hayles points out, posthuman, cybernetic thought devalues embodiment: "the posthu- 17 Avery Gordon says: “Stories of ghosts provide resistance to the “hypervisibility” that is characteristic of this era in which “we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for consumption.” in Boyd, Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, 191. 18 Hayles is part of a discussion about the transformation of the liberal human subject through technology that is part of cybernetic theory. Though there are connections, it is not to be confused with the Posthumanism discussed above by Sundberg and others relating to creating a space in academia for non-dualistic epistemolo- gies like those of many Indigenous groups. 19 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chi- cago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 1. 156 man view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life."20 For Hayles, the reimagination of the liberal human subject in this era saturated with techno- logical and scientific developments occurs at the cost of the body: "Embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman..."21 Thus, in this increasingly digitized world where trips to the library are more likely taken via internet, using eBooks, online journals and archives, the creation of knowledge is, more than ever, an out-of-body experience. Bodies become statistical abstractions – data – that do not warrant a degree of respect when speaking of them. In this ideal, there is no body attached to scholarly work, no infirmities. The reader of a monograph should be able to consider the author's concise argument without experiencing the intestinal discomfort the author had as a result of eating tacos from a street vendor during the study. None of the arguments with the kids, or stress from committee work and travel, appear in the final document.22 Instead, monographs read as one long, cogent statement rather than a years-long process of writing that was interwoven with life's ups and downs. We do not live our lives with objectivity or detachment, but rather through visceral passions, emotions, and connections. While scholars in different fields are working hard to find different ways to break out of the academic mold of detached neutrality, the legacy of this ethic of distance and depersonalization in academic 20 According to Hayles, the body becomes a “supplemental” to human existence conceived of as data in cyber- netic theory. (see p. 12) Ibid, 2. 21 Ibid, 4. 22 Ruth Behar has attempted to break down this boundary by writing herself and her triumph of receiving a MacArthur fellowship into her account of a market woman’s biography from San Luis Potosi. Though she does an effective job of addressing this lacuna in scholarship, she has been critiqued for it from various quarters, for example, Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The Academic and the Witch.” New York Times Book Review (September 5, 1993): 722, 1. 157 narratives is still powerful and many works across the discipline still read as though they were written by an emotion-less automaton. Historical accounts of human experience related in historical monographs and articles are often less storytelling than interpreting and martialing those experiences, effectively as raw data, into sequence to prove theories and arguments, perhaps of social organization, origins, or even to address methods of writing of historical narrative. But the author's living body can never disappear – this neutrality is a contrived atmosphere/world that is conjured in writing, masking the presence of author's body and emotions. Neutrality is an effect that academics, business people and politicians generally cast as professional, but for many people it makes the narrative seem to lack compassion, respect, or even the author's own personal attachment to the things, people, animals and the land where it occurs. In Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Cul- ture and History, a recent anthology, Victoria Freeman brings out an aboriginal Torontonian's reaction to this way of knowing and representing: Woodworth spoke of how horrifying it was to hear his ancestor's painful expe- rience objectified by an academic historian. He spoke of how Native people were inside the history and the feeling of the history—they did not just think about this history in their heads but experienced it bodily in the DNA their an- cestors had passed on to them – a view shared by a number of interviewees.23 Thus for the people with whom Freeman spoke, knowledge making is a corporal, emotional activity embodied in respect and relationships. 23 Freeman in Boyd, Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, 230. 158 Scholarly Distance: embodiment and Viscerality in the Digital World As the scholars of the Archive Stories anthology argue, it is important to remember, however, that there is no simple dichotomy between embodiment, on the one hand, and the distanced detachment of scholarship, on the other.24 The intimacy of embodied experience in the world and our visceral attachments to objects are still very much a part of scholarly creation of knowledge and valuation of evidence, whether or not this intimacy is acknowledged. As I will explore further, not acknowledging the centrality of our bodies and the material worlds we inhabit in our practice results in knowledge that is weakened because it masks way these live relationships are constitutive of knowledge. Scholarship is an everyday practice. Many scholars enjoy the smell of a new book, for ex- ample, and the sensation of breaking in its spine in preparation for a read.25 Scholars experi- ence the effects of different fonts, spacing, leading, tracking, and kerning whenever they pick up a book. Typographers labour to "make language visible," fine tuning serifs and spacing to relax the eye and create an ambience suited to the subject matter.26 I've picked Garamond for this paper because of its visceral appeal for me, and the relaxed feeling I get in reading it. Although it is a restful font because it isn't very condensed and it has more of a flow to it, it also has a classic formality to it that is appropriate for academic work – I would never pick the font "Marker Felt" for this purpose. The sight of well spaced lines of text on the page (not too crowded together) with sufficient padding on the edges of the page give it a dy- 24 See also Bruno Latour: Latour, Bruno. “How to Talk About the Body? the Normative Dimension of Science Studies.” Body & Society 10, no. 2-3 (June 1, 2004): 205 -229. 25 William Matthews, for example, says books need “gentle treatment” when opened for the first time: Andery, Gabriel. “How to Open a New Book.” Boing Boing, n.d. http://boingboing.net/2010/09/06/how-to-open-a- new-bo.html. 26 Normally I wouldn’t cite an encyclopedia, but it had the best wording. Wikipedia. “Typography - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia”, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography. 159 namic open feel. These intimate details of the embodied experience of highly visual, textual knowledge – the sensual aesthetics of knowledge creation – are constitutive of the status of a given article or monograph just as ideas of race, class, gender and objectivity might shape the analysis. While watching and listening to Diana Taylor's lecture "SAVE AS... Memory and the Ar- chive in the Age of Digital Technologies" on Youtube, I learned from her of the concept and metaphor of the skeuomorph that is helpful here. Originally used as a strategy for archae- ologists to trace evolutionary changes in material culture, the skeuomorph is an ideal concept for examining the way people creatively imagine the relationship between their embodied experience of materiality and abstraction in their day-to-day lives. Referred to as "material metaphors,"27 the skeuomorph is defined as "a design function that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time."28 N. Kath- erine Hayles gives the example of the vinyl molded stitching on her Toyota dashboard: "The simulated stitching alludes back to a fabric that was in fact stitched, although the vinyl "stitching" is formed by an injection mold."29 Despite the fact that the simulated stitches have a physical presence – you can actually feel the texture of each stitch – they mark the abstraction of stitching with thread into a concept or performance, visually and materi- ally rendered. Digital skeuomorphs like the envelope email icon or the trashcan icon on a computer, however, take this discussion of the interface between materiality and abstraction a step further. In addition to being design references to prior functions, digital skeuomorphs are 'objects' in the virtual world of computing, transient configurations of pixels on a screen, 27 Gessler, Nicholas. “Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms”, n.d. http://www.skeuomorph.com/. 28 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 17. 29 Ibid, 17. 160 that refer back to materiality itself. Digital devices like laptops and tablets, now the standard platforms upon which academic production occurs, are abstraction machines that translate paper, pencils, books, and a myriad of other previously material, physical tools and tasks into data represented onscreen. Computer operating systems and software programs use text-based, highly visual, interfaces most of whose functions require an advanced degree of visual and textual literacy to engage with. Yet, by way of the digital skeuomorph, they are replete with references back to schol- ars' material circumstances that "provide us with "a path" instead of "no path" at all."30 Not just accents and flourishes, digital skeuomorphs are constitutive of the experience of work- ing at a computer. According to Hayles, the skeuomorph has facilitated changing paradigms and technologies: "In the history of cybernetics, skeuomorphs acted as threshold devices, smoothing the transition between one conceptual constellation and another."31 But, decades after these icons first appeared in graphic computer environments, instead of being left behind as simply transitional elements, electronic device interfaces are increasingly laden with skeuomorphic elements of the physical, material world we inhabit, like the bookshelf in the new iPad eBook app. As our day-to-day research and writing practices move more deeply into the virtual world of digitized information, academics like myself working in the domain of public truth-making rely on the skeuomorph as a prosthetic to provide continuity in our worlds. Though our goal might be simply to access an article remotely using an electronic device like a laptop, desktop, iPhone or iPad, tech companies are throwing massive resources at making that 30 Gessler, “Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms”. 31 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 17. 161 experience more 'real', like an interaction in the physical world. Developers are increasingly building dimension and depth into the visual interface of devices through drop-shadows, higher resolution graphics and trashcan, mail, and document icons that almost pop out of the screen for a more realistic look, gyroscopes to respond to movements, flipping of virtual pages in eBooks on the iPad, increasingly complex hand gestures, and even full body ges- tures in the case of new gaming consoles. Some linux graphical interface developers have even worked three dimensions into their operating system so that windows are actually four sided cubes.32 Through the tablet and smartphone inventions, the keyboard itself (except on devices like the Blackberry) has become a graphic skeuomorph, representing the once physical keys, only to disappear when not needed. The emphasis on incorporating people's experience of their day-to-day material world is not a happenstance, but part of a specific strategy to make computing devices more attractive and broadly usable and understandable for a larger market. Beginning in earnest with the insight by companies like Apple that originated these skeuo- morphic graphical environments in the 1980s, digital devices have become almost exclusively geared towards our experience of walking through physical worlds. This change should not be seen as simply an 'upgrade' to address the usability of the original UNIX command line interfaces where a $ prompt waited patiently to receive textual commands from the user like 'ls' or 'cat'. Rather, this was a move away from the computer as a machine built only to perform complex calculations and programs and towards computing as a visceral experience of virtual worlds to inhabit. In computing, massive financial and labour resources are being thrown into recreating lived, material environments in virtual form, like the use of shading in 32 Mills, Ashton. “Xgl -- Linux Gets a 3D Desktop - Operating Systems - Build - Features - Atomic MPC”, n.d. http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/Feature/35615,xgl----linux-gets-a-3d-desktop.aspx. 162 operating systems that adds dimension, perspective and even texture to the 'desktop'. In- deed, all of these features emulating embodied experience come at great expense to system resources, demanding faster chips, more memory, and larger, faster hard drives. The drive to recreate material objects and worlds in digital virtuality is resulting in companies and tech- nologies like Facebook and Instagram, social media networks and applications that convert embodied experiences of social situations into online data management environments which are worth billions of dollars. Technologies like Wii and Microsoft's Kinect33 translate the user's body and motions into data used by their games and exercise programs on screen. When I see someone walking down the street staring into their smartphone and tapping away at it, it makes me think that we are so oriented towards these screens that we tend to forget there is a life outside of them. While Hayles defines the skeuomorph as a "threshold device," I believe it is important to consider the flip side of the skeuomorph's function, which is to mystify the actual complex- ity of the processes it masks with an element that is familiar to us from our prior experience. In many contexts, like the digital skeuomorph used in computing, this mystification occurs through appealing to our visceral response to things in our lived environments. In 2000, when Apple released Mac OS X with its "Aqua" graphical interface, Steve Jobs announced the new dimensional, textured environment by saying: "One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it."34 What could possibly make someone want to lick a com- puter screen? And why would it be desirable to arouse that response? New York Times col- umnist David Pogue described the scrollbars on Aqua windows as "lickable globs of Crest 33 Microsoft Connect: http://www.xbox.com/en-CA/Kinect, Nintendo Wii: http://wii.com/. 34 Mac OS X Top Secret - Aqua, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mra5g_tBnhYandfeature=youtube_ gdata_player. 163 Berrylicious Toothpaste Gel."35 Through deft use of skeuomorphs, Apple, a company that has always been education and university-oriented, transformed computing into the sensa- tion of eating candy. Sales of iPhones, iPads, and Macbook Airs point to the success of this approach. What I think could aptly called 'visceral' design has now become a pillar of Apple's design strategy for software. The impulse to lick data represented in pixels on a screen suggests the power of design to capture our senses and to persuade us through deploying the familiarity of the material environments we inhabit. The skeuomorph instantly condenses memory, physical response, and even a sense of touch in relation to textures and icons onscreen. The experience is in the genre of the trompe-l'oeuil, that baroque fascination that Foucault describes in The Order of Things. Foucault states that artists and architects of the seventeenth century used trompe- l'oeuil as a rejection of, and commentary on, prior forms of knowing in Europe that were based on similitude: in the trompe-l'oeuil's visual deception (for example, a window looking out to a pastoral scene painted realistically on an cement wall) belied the simplistic correla- tions of logic proceeding from superficial signs of similarity. The era of this new epistemo- logical stage, for Foucault, was "the age in which the poetic dimension of language is defined by metaphor, simile, and allegory."36 Like the trompe-l'oeuil, the skeuomorph translates a visual element – a surface available only to the eyes – into a multi-sensory effect for our bodies. But in the context of the digital skeuomorph, what was once a novelty or game of thought has become a fundamental tool in our everyday lives. Our computers and devices, placeless places in the words of Diana Taylor, are virtual working environments where everything is a 35 Pogue, David. Macs for Dummies. Indianapolis, In, U.s.a.: For Dummies, 2000, 340. 36 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. First ed. New York: Vintage, 1994, 51. 164 metaphorical reference to our previous experience. But while this material metaphor en- ables our engagement in abstract concepts and worlds, it masks a complex binary, electronic process. Moreover, it is a layer of mundane deception that has agency in constituting the constructed worlds we perform and inhabit. Not simply a transitional mechanism, the skeuomorph saturates our technologically assisted existence because, just as we increasingly live and work in abstract worlds, our attachments to embodied, visceral experience of the material world do not simply dissolve into thin air. Instead they stay with us, complicating the notion of the detached, thinking brain, even as we attempt to create historical narratives that are objective and neutral. To me, the saturation of skeuomorphs, particularly in technological devices, signals in turn three important aspects of the relationship between people's embodied experience and abstract thought in the Western/scholarly mode: first, the saturation of the skeuomorph suggests the persistence of people's day-to-day, material world in abstract thought and virtual, digital worlds, providing their structure and legibility; second, it suggests people's continued dependence on their embodied, sensory experience of the material world for objective thought, judgments and analysis; and third, it suggests the resulting weakness of abstract thought, particularly in the academic mode, in guiding our being, our survival, and our relationship with the earth. That is, rather than valuing our experience of the earth and our physical practices themselves as a source for embodied intellection, we have come to trust and rely upon our own contrived, increasingly complex and detached representations of the world and life. 165 the archive and embodiment The archive provides another gateway into this entanglement of embodiment and material- ity in abstract thought that, as the scholars of Archive Stories point out, goes largely unac- knowledged in much scholarship. On the one hand, there is the very concreteness of the structures that house the archive: institutions that store documents and artifacts. And on the other hand, there is the archive as figuration, a metaphor for Western epistemologies based on knowledge creation through ordering and storage in hierarchical systems of cat- egories. Reading with my experience of embodiment with Doña Vicky, Pedro and Jaalen in mind, I found Jacques Derrida's exploration Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression to be a place of connection with the archive. Derrida's prose alerts me to the viscerality of the archive and as such its status as a key site where the rhetoric of solidity resides. Through its constant reminders of the embodiment of the archive, Derrida's narrative shows how the authority of the physical archive translates into a constituting element of the discourse shaping the validity of evidence and the production of truth. "Encrusting" his narrative with visceral imagery, Derrida addresses N. Katherine Hayles' call to keep the body present in knowledge-making. In his poetic discourse, he invokes the archive through the imprint of a spiritual covenant on the very skin of Sigmund Freud's body. The circumcision of Freud marked the covenant between himself and his God on his body "in the seventh in the days of the years of your life."37 In Derrida's narrative, Freud's penis becomes the figurative substrate upon which the archival impression is registered.38 The mark, or covenant, is repeated ("as a memorial and a reminder" in the words of Freud's 37 Derrida, Archive Fever, 22. 38 Ibid, 22. 166 father Jakob) in an inscription at the beginning of a Phillipsohn Bible Jakob gave to Freud in his childhood, but which is then re-gifted to him with inscription, and now "sou peau neuve, under new skin," bound in a new leather cover:39 In a reiterated manner, it leaves the trace of an incision right on the skin: more than one skin, at more than one age. To the letter or by figure. The foliaceous stratification, the pellicular superimposition of these cutaneous marks seems to defy analysis. It accumulates so many sedimented archives, some of which are written right on the epidermis of a body proper, others on the substrate of an "exterior" body. Each layer here seems to gape slightly, as the lips of a wound, permitting glimpses of the abyssal possibility of another depth destined for archaeological excavation.40 Derrida's evocations demand that the archive not be simply be thought of as an abstract tool or a generic category of knowledge, but instead, like the experience of learning through an- cestral practices, be connected to particular bodies, particular objects, desires and sensations. In the Greek creation story of the archive he begins with, Derrida draws his reader's atten- tion to the weighty-ness of the archive through his discussions of the archons – the early archive's Greek guardians whose house stores its documents: Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law. To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this speaking the law, they needed at once a guardian and a localization. Even 39 Ibid, 21. 40 Ibid, 20. 167 in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could do nei- ther without substrate nor without residence. It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place.41 This description of the archive alerts us to its solidity, its incarnation in bricks and mortar in the house of a particular person (the archon). These laws are not blowing in the wind: they are imprinted on a physical substrate kept in the house or arkheion. In the inscription written to his son, Freud's father Jakob refers to his own safe keeping of Freud's Phillipsohn Bible as "stored like the fragments of the tablets in an ark with me."42 The images Jakob calls forth in this meaningful inscription are of the material weight of the substrate in which text is inscribed, as well as the physical container in which the substrate is stored. Derrida emphasizes Jakob's allusion to the tablets: Arch-archive, the book was "stored" with the arch-patriarch of psychoanaly- sis. It was stored there in the Ark of the Covenant [Deut. 10:1 - 5]. Arca, this time in Latin, is the chest, the "ark of acacia wood," which contains the stone Tablets; but arca is also the cupboard, the coffin, the prison cell, or the cistern, the reservoir.43 These are the material, weighty circumstances of the Freudian family archive of spiritual un- derstanding, knowledge and wisdom that contribute to Freud's Bible's truth and authority. It 41 Ibid, 2. 42 Emphasis in original, Ibid, 23. 43 Ibid, 23. 168 is a particular kind of call to authority from father to son, one that is familial and affection- ate, but still an instruction or entreaty. Derrida's evocation of the body allows his readers to feel the inscription on our own skin, feel the pain of the wound through layers of our epidermis. We feel the weight and perceive the dimensions of the arkheion, the house where the Greek archons protected the laws that gave them power, we can almost smell the rooms, feel the texture and weight of stone. And yet, like the action of the digital skeuomorph that enchants us with the ambience of mate- riality and dimension on screen, Derrida deploys these figurative references to skin, tablets and Ark in order to make his argument about the archive more compelling and forceful. For me, his argument is forceful not just through its use of logic, but through its visceral dimen- sion, its appeal to our emotions and senses. As we follow his argument, we travel through the familiar, day-to-day world we inhabit by way of objects, places, bodies and actions, like excavation. Derrida's efforts to render the archive tangible through his often poetic essay plays with this connection between our embodied experience of the world, on the one hand, and our 'detached' evaluation of evidence, on the other. Though detachment requires scholars to lay aside their emotional attachments and passions and construct analyses and arguments with 'just the facts,' Derrida's overt appeal to the visceral, sensual affect of his readers forefronts the function of solidity in scholarly discourse. Though generally operating on a much more subtle level, notions of materiality deployed in narrative refer back to our sense of physical solidity. Solidity, both in the sense of the substrate of the archive (stone tablets, paper docu- ments and photographs), as well as rhetorical allusions to 'facts' as concrete (the solid step- ping stones of a true statement or convincing argument), brings out our continuing depen- 169 dence on our day-to-day, visceral, full body experience of materiality, of objects, place, food, weight, depth, and texture. As we experience the world through touch, smell, and taste, as well as through sight and hearing, we experience a visceral connection to the world, the weight of objects and their hardness, for example, that provides an unacknowledged means to judge concepts in the abstract. The prominence of abstract, rhetorical notions of solidity is particularly clear in the choice of what to collect in forming an archive. Amid his poetic evocation of the archive, Derrida points his readers to its central function: that of collection. Archives are rooms filled with drawers or shelves of (sometimes moldy) documents, photos, and other objects organized into a system imposed by the archivist. It is the organizing principles of the archive, the gathering together of a corpus, that perform its truth making function: The archontic power, which also gathers the functions of unification, of iden- tification, of classification, must he paired with what we will call the power of consignation. By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into re- serve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. It is not only the traditional consignatio, that is, the written proof but what all consignatio begins by presupposing. Con- signation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation that is, of gathering 170 together.44 Following Derrida, then, Truth in the archive is constituted through creating a collection that can be shown to be united in meaning. In order to create this unity, the question is: upon what basis are objects and signs gathered together? The notion of "counter-archive" addresses this question by challenging established criteria of solidity for the archive. Counter-archives are collections of unconventional things, often considered intangibles or ephemera, that demand new understandings of what can stand as evidence and what is 'solid.' Scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Antoinette Burton, and Diana Taylor work at the outer limits of the archive – where solidity and ephemera meet. Each of these scholars insists on the central mediation of our embodied experience of materiality in the discourse surrounding the archive and performances of truth and evidence. Their work shows that the tangibility of the archive's documents and objects is not simply a given, but is constructed and contingent, and, ultimately, connected to the way our feel- ings, intuitions, and visceral attachments to our material world travel into abstract narratives, theories, principles and ideals. For these scholars, to make their collections into a (counter-) archive, the official archive and its mechanisms must be re-imagined and their work, in the words of Muñoz, is to "disrupt the very notion of officially subsidized and substantiated institutions."45 For Muñoz, the notion of ephemerality is central to understanding queer history, or "queer- ness." Because of the experience of vulnerability to attack, the queer archive is "covert": 44 Ibid, 3. 45 Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women and Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory 8 (January 1996): 5-16, 6. 171 "Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead ex- isted as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evapo- rating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility."46 Muñoz' title, "Ephemera as Evidence," points to this question in its juxtaposition of two words: "ephemera," something that, by definition, doesn't "count" (or, we could say, is weightless); and "evidence," things that do count, that have weight in an argument. The records that make up the collection of Muñoz' queer archive, are imperceptible to those who don't have the experience of queer acts like clandestine sex in a public washroom. Muñoz writes about Tony Just's work, for example, that makes present and "archives" queer en- counters by scrubbing and sanitizing a public washroom "laboring to make it look pristinely, shimmeringly clean," and then documenting the space in an "ethereal" photograph. The photographs of shimmering urinals, sinks, and tile walls are "ghosts of public sex" that need to be recognized and decoded. In the operation of the queer archive, a record like a sexual encounter in public is recorded through its "negation" and "erasure" not only because of the secrecy of these acts, intelligible only to those in the know, but also as a way of "mark[ing] the systematic erasure of minoritarian histories."47 For Muñoz, then, what can stand as evi- dence for the archive are not necessarily things that we can touch, but rather things, ghosts even, that can touch us, that affect us. In Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India, An- toinette Burton uses notions of house and home to question the notions of solidity that 46 Ibid, 6. 47 Ibid, 6. 172 determine what the archive can gather together, but also to question the site and form of the actual archive itself. Burton's examination of three Indian women's narratives employs conceptions of home as both material places – houses filled with objects – but also home as an emotional attachment to an idea of place, like "England, India, or, more subversively, the "black Atlantic.""48 She looks at how the three women used their homes as archives containing material family histories, private memories, "domestic interiors"49 and "interior decoration[s]"50 in order to narrate a different, yet critical history of India. Playing on in- tersecting, gendered notions of the home, Antoinette Burton folds Derrida's Greek origin story of the archive (the laws residing in the house of the male archon (home as arkheion)) into a domestic, female, conception of home as the material archive of family history that is nevertheless charged with political meanings. Though the organization of the women's nar- ratives around the material culture of their past homes could not be more oriented towards solid objects, it is the female-ness of the spaces that, Burton argues, produces these archives of the home as ephemeral and untrustworthy in the eyes of historians: Hence, what women wrote was conventionally designated "Literature" (the do- main of memory, sentiment, and fiction) while men claimed the more "objec- tive" task of writing truth-telling "History."51 What these counter-archives of the home allow Burton to show, however, is the way the solidity of archives, their consignment in a concrete, material substrate, is always produced 48 Burton, Antoinette M. Dwelling in the Archive : Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. USA: Oxford University Press, 2003, 32. 49 Ibid, 4. 50 Ibid, 48. 51 Ibid, 20. 173 in the same moment they stand as evidence. That is, like the habitually feminized spaces of the houses that root the narratives in Dwelling in the Archive, the institutional archive is both primary and secondary source at once: in the same moment historians employ evidence as originary fact, they also produce the very masculine materiality that ensures its pure, truth- bearing status as a 'concrete' document stored in a privileged, institutional rather than do- mestic site. Derrida also refers to this simultaneous function of the archive: A science of the archive must include the theory of this institutionalization, that is to say, the theory both of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it.52 The archive must serve as the material substrate, the origins and evidence from which stories are told, but it must also tell its own story of its legitimacy and claim to truth. This simul- taneous making of the artifact, and the artifact's significance leads Burton to suggest the archive's contingent nature: . . . we must concede the fundamental liminality of the archive: its porous- ness, its permeability, and the messiness of all history that is made by and from it. We might even think of it as a kind of "third space": neither primary or secondary because it participates in, and helps to create, several levels of inter- pretive possibility at once.53 It is exactly its incarnation in bricks and mortar, like the national archives of Canada and Mexico, complete with street addresses, that masks the archive's "porousness" and "perme- 52 Derrida, Archive Fever, 4. 53 Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 26. 174 ability." But, according to Diana Taylor, when archives move online to become "digital col- lections," the apparent solidity of the institution starts to dissolve. In her exploration of the archive once it goes 'online,' Diana Taylor reveals the way its per- formances of solidity and enduring-ness disguise its fleeting qualities and the existence of its documents only as copies. In "SAVE AS... Memory and the Archive in the Age of Digital Technologies," Taylor suggests that online archives are not, in fact, archives, though they have features that emulate the traditional archive such as selection and exclusion. She makes sense of the online archive as a digital skeuomorph. Like the examples from my discussion above of envelope and trashcan icons, the digital archive (often labelled "media archive") car- ries with it the trappings of the physical archive even though many of its assumed properties do not necessarily apply in the online context. The notion of documents "contained" in the archive, for example, is quite different online when the 'substrate' is weightless electrons in constant motion through networks. According to Taylor, online "archives" seemingly do not have a place of consignment, one of Derrida's defining elements of the archive, but rather a "paradoxical ubiquity and seeming no-where-ness."54 When users of online archives view a document or video, they in fact are viewing a copy – bites downloaded to their browser cache or filesystem that no longer reside in the servers of the archive itself. Thus, the docu- ments said to be contained in the arkheion, this "privileged topology," "this uncommon place," of the archive are in fact endless duplicates, their underlying data spread out over servers and terminals the world over.55 Taylor also calls into question the enduring-ness of archival documents online. Whether 54 Taylor, Diana. Diana Taylor: SAVE AS... Memory and the Archive in the Age of Digital Technologies, 2010. http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGurF1Rfj0Uandfeature=youtube_gdata_player. 55 Derrida, Archive Fever, 3. 175 or not a given record continues to exist – an uploaded video on Youtube, for instance – is a question of "commitment:" "the owners may or may not commit to preserving these ma- terials long term."56 Simply the fact that bibliographic references to resources on the web must have an "accessed date" suggests their mutability or possible disappearance at any time. Taylor says that web pages often have a short lifespan or change like the "Person Of the Year" (You, as in Youtube) issue of Time magazine online that she finds later to have miss- ing images, an altered layout and different message: When I looked again after six months, some of the images from the gallery were online, but as loose images, not as part of the magazine's layout or orga- nizing concept. However, other images, not included in the original publica- tion, had also been added as if they were part of the original while others had been re-inscribed with logos of other web sites. What kind of archive is this that erases rather than preserves the traces of its former incarnation?57 What Taylor's essay suggests is that online archives are by nature ephemeral: "temporary, im- permanent, transient, fleeting."58 Instead of archival documents being indivisible origins, the unique traces of the idealized model of the archive, the objects of the online archive cannot be seen or utilized except as a temporary duplicate. The contents of an online "document" – itself a skeuomorph, its icon often a graphical mimic of physical paper that masks the underlying binary code – can change, become corrupted or hacked, or simply disappear just as documents go missing from national archives. And finally, as with any online resource, 56 Taylor, Diana Taylor. 57 Ibid. 58 Abate, Frank R., and Elizabeth Jewell, eds. The New Oxford American Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 176 media archives depend on a constant flow of electricity from hydro dams and diesel or coal fired generators running throughout the network from servers, through internet providers, trunk lines, and of course the battery in your laptop. These analyses of the discourse of materiality surrounding the archive, that give structure to its claims to truth and origins, indicate to me that archive is a key site that serves scholars and others as a portal or boundary between tangible materiality, on one hand, and intangible, abstract, immateriality, on the other. As these four scholars' narratives demonstrate, to speak of the archive means to slip constantly between archive as physical incarnation – as inscrip- tions on the flesh, on tablets, and collections of objects guarded in edifices of bricks and mortar – and archive as conceptual model or metaphor. Like the material metaphor of the skeuomorph, it means to pass between the tangible and the intangible in the same instance. This boundary between the material and immaterial, imagined in and through the archive as concept and institution, is constantly being crossed over in everyday expressions like "hard evidence," or a "solid foundation for an argument," or conversely, "flimsy evidence," or "shaky grounds." We could say that language – and communication in general – are freighted with viscerality and embodiment, and yet this baggage is generally tacit and goes unacknowledged even as it structures writing and discourse. Like a lawyer turning up in court with an expensive suit, the impact of the visceral, material underpinnings of discourse may seem passive aspects in the background, but they are never- theless a crucial and effective element of persuasion subtending at all times scholarly episte- mologies in a myriad of different ways. For instance, embedding the rhetoric of materiality into a narrative, as Derrida does so well in Archive Fever, allows scholars to reach their reader on different levels. Yet this techne is understood as simply an accoutrement to the prose, or 177 even a trick like a trompe l'oeuil, that makes writing engaging and effective. Because they are discussing the archive, an imagined interface between materiality and abstraction, Muñoz, Burton, Taylor and Derrida are very aware of their deployment of textual skeuomorphs or metaphors that rely on materiality. But even then, in their work and mine in this disserta- tion, these discussions remain textual representations of materiality, and are therefore highly mediated relationships rather than truly embodied relationships. Circling back to the ancestral ways of knowing that I've discussed throughout this thesis and particularly in the previous section on Distance, over the time that I've known and shared with Doña Vicky, Jaalen, Pedro, and their communities I have come to understand more about their relationships of mutuality that maintain the body and sentient, lived experience at the centre of knowing. The repatriation of ancestors and art that the Haida have worked so hard on, for example, suggests their relationship with those 'things' as live connections that are presences in their own lives and deserve respect. The way Doña Vicky interacts with food to transfer flavour, energies, and even healing has taught me to respect food as more than just a raw material for life. Their connections to materiality and embodied experience are not just convincing turns of phrase or 2D digital graphics that excite thoughts of licking "Berrylicious Toothpaste Gel" while masking the complex operations of software coding and hardware, they are part of an understanding of the vital connections and interdepen- dence among beings and energies on this planet that can only be known through practice, through doing. A living connection to things means knowing through dynamic change, but also actively negotiating ambiguity as a constituting aspect of knowledge. I don't perceive ambiguity as a limitation of, or obstacle to knowledge, but rather a multiplicity at its core. Many scholars, 178 particularly in anthropology, have critiqued the way that cultures have been (and continue to be) represented as frozen in time, closed off as though in a vacuum where their traits can be catalogued and their essences determined. In the introduction, for instance, I cited Johannes Fabian's formulation of structuralist anthropology that calls for aboriginal societies to "hold still like a tableau vivant."59 A tableaux vivant suggests a type of knowledge that is possible on the condition of both a visual and temporal stasis, rather that knowing through change and ambiguity. As site of the mediation between solidity and ephemera in discourse, the archive is one of the origins of this way of thinking. The archive's objects that signify through their solidity through their approximation of heavy, immovable stone, must not move, must not trans- form into something else in order to sustain their role as anchor for objective arguments and narratives. Just as the solidity of archival material is produced in this site, so are the events, people, and places of which it is a trace. Without a live connection of respect and mutuality, the archive cannot remember the origi- nary moment of the things it claims to document. That is to say that, without understand- ing the presence and continuity of life on the land that we inhabit on this earth, materials re-invented as solid, fixed quantities for scholarly inspection do not sustain the spirit and essence of the imagined originary moment that is so arduously sought. To turn again to Archive Fever, Derrida insists that the archive in fact plays a function of forgetting origins, or arkhē: 59 See also Raibmon, Paige Sylvia. Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2005.; Fabian, Time and the Other, 67. 179 The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhē. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it. [ . . . ] One has trouble, and for essential reasons, establishing it and interpreting it in the document it delivers to us, here in the word which names it, that is the "archive."60 This is the limitation of the archive, that even as it stores or "shelters" the original traces of things, it can only remember them in suspended animation or death. To salvage ethnogra- phers, the bones of the ancestors were merely "specimens" that can have no agency: their lives were lived in the land of the Past and their remains are simply traces to be taken up as stable signifiers of ethnicity, culture, or human evolution. By contrast, as I discuss above, for Pedro, doing history means me doing, continuing, participating in the practices of the com- munity in order to, in a sense, remember through my own experience, and understand it as a continuity. Learning from Pedro, Doña Vicky and Jaalen, has meant opening myself up to a way of remembering along new pathways and relationships that stems from embodied practices. Linear time: Nostalgia and Disappearance In chapter 3 I talked about a different sense of time, a simultaneity or presence around the Two Brothers pole for Jasper Park that Jaalen was carving. The pole teaches me how the story of the brothers becomes active in people's lives, including mine. Like ripples across the water that reverberate back and forth, the story of three Haida ancestors (two brothers and a daughter) represented in the pole is reflected in the lives of Jaalen and his 60 Derrida, Archive Fever, 2. 180 brother Gwaai, but also in the lives of all those who witnessed the pole's carving and rais- ing. Through the density of lives connected in some way to the story of the pole and its carving, it becomes a node of presence and continuity of experience, from the ancestors to Jaalen's generation, that, for me, made the divisions and measures that constitute linear time fall away. It made me think: What if I were to suspend my notions of time as a strict linear progression through segments of eras, epochs, days and minutes? What if the expression 'anachronistic,' used to indicate things not following the proper order of historical time, was itself out of place? As references to time machines in literature and pop culture like H.G. Wells Time Machine and the movie "Back to the Future" signal, linear conceptions of time ordered along an axis suggests movement, vectors through human experience that we can travel up and down. In these types of popular representations of time travel, the war of 1812 or the Mexican Revo- lution stand as events along the axis, just waiting, like a film set or a pioneer village complete with all the characters, ready to enact their stories for us. Even in the disciplines of anthro- pology and history, an understanding of time as spatial movement is prevalent, though in subtly different ways. The roundly critiqued anthropology of the mid-twentieth century and before, for instance, positioned aboriginal peoples as 'primitives' whose cultural practices existed (and were relevant) only in an ancient time before contact with Europe. To do an ethnography of a 'primitive people' was to travel through time like Degérando's "philosophi- cal traveller" who sails "to the ends of the earth" encountering "others [who] recreate for us the state of our own ancestors, and the earliest history of the world."61 In his discussion of twentieth century anthropology, James Clifford cites the work of Margaret Mead whose 61 Degérando in Robben, Antonius C. G. M, and Jeffrey A Sluka. Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2007, 34. 181 writing was used in the 1980s for the American Museum of Natural History's "Hall of Pa- cific Peoples." Her text presents Pacific Islanders as existing only in "a world that once was and now is no more."62 He points out the temporal division Mead and the curators of the exhibit maintain between herself as researcher and her Pacific Island interviewees – despite the fact they shared time and space during her visit – through the organization of objects in the exhibit: . . . artifacts suggesting change and syncretism are set apart in a small display entitled "Culture Contact." It is noted that Western influence and indigenous response have been active in the Pacific since the eighteenth century. Yet few signs of this involvement appear anywhere else in the large hall, despite the fact that many of the objects were made in the past 150 years in situations of con- tact, and despite the fact that the museum's ethnographic explanations reflect quite recent research on the cultures of the Pacific.63 As Fabian suggests in his phrase the "denial of coevalness,"64 even as they shared each other's presence at the time of Mead's fieldwork, for her, the practices of the Pacific Island- ers – and the islanders themselves – were 'anachronistic,' or 'out of time.' Mead's positioning of islander culture suggests several themes that I believe are still pres- ent in historical and anthropological work, subtly enabled by the powerful notions of linear time that serve as a common measure among the disciplines. The apparent movement up 62 Mead in Clifford, James. “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988, 201. 63 Ibid, 201. 64 Fabian, Time and the Other, 31. 182 and down the axis of linear time, through the 'long nineteenth century' or the 'middle ages,' is accompanied by a sense of the present as a knife-edge – a fleeting moment of experience which disappears never to be lived again, its representation stored in the archive in docu- ments and other traces to be used in reconstruction and reenactment. This apparent 'loss' of time or nostalgia makes up part of what motivates anthropologists, historians, and antiquarians living in this unstable present. Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as "a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy."65 This definition draws our attention to several aspects of linear time discussed above: the loss of the knife-edge of experience forever to time, a sense of periods of time as spatially or geographically distributed (dis-place-ment), and finally, the fantasy of reconstruction that allows time to be travelled back and forth in our imaginations and through representations in books, photos and film. For Mead and other anthropologists, for example, contemporary practitioners of ancestral practices were often judged to be 'inauthentic' exactly as a result of the researcher's own sense of loss – presumably we already know that the true ancient practice that research subjects purport to continue has already been irretrievably lost to time. Though this attitude is less prevalent in the scholarship of the last twenty years, much of the framing of indigenous people in the tourist trade and depictions in film and popular culture continues to be on these terms. In addition, following Pedro, I would say that to understand that practice as a continuity, a person has to experience it, and in some way become a part of it.66 65 Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2002, xxiiii. 66 Doubtless this is not a straight-forward notion to write in an academic setting, and likely brings to mind thoughts of appropriation, ‘going native,’ as well as the danger of a person or researcher essentializing a cultur- al practice while attempting know it in a lived way. But, I think these are the risks each person has to negotiate respectfully through being aware and listening and they are always implicated when a person relinquishes their detached position and allows themselves to be open to other ways of knowing. 183 Time travel has its attraction and power as a concept because of nostalgia – because of the possibility it promises of witnessing originary moments. As it is imagined in popular cul- ture, time travel allows the voyeur to see 'what really happened.' For Derrida, the desire for ultimate origins is the fantasy that is the fever of the archives. The title of Derrida's book, Archive Fever, or mal d'archive, means to: have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepress- ible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.67 It is the ironic result of an evanescent conception of time – time itself, even 'the present', as fleeting and ephemeral – that the West is consumed with this desire to return to an imagined stable, solid and static truth of the ages. Even as they crumble, ruins present the possibility of this solid, enduring truth of long ago. In Derrida's narrative, ruins become the ultimate fantasy of origins: the stones that have stood for so long against the elements now speak for themselves. It is Freud's fantasy, an example Derrida quotes him using to illustrate "live memory" in contrast to hypomnesic, archival memory. For Freud, the counterpoint of instantaneous "live memory" is archival memory – the result of decyphering information held as a supplements outside of the body, inscribed on the substrate in archives rather than in the mind. According to Derrida, this view of technical prostheses of memory, the "auxiliary representation" of memory on paper (or on hard drives for that matter), puts the archive in tension with archaeology: 67 Derrida, Archive Fever, 91. 184 They will be always close the one to the other, resembling each other, hardly discernible in their co-implication, and yet radically incompatible, heterogeneous, that is to say, different with regard to the origin, in divorce with regard to the arkhē.68 For Freud, archaeology presents the possibility of unmediated origins – in the moment of discovery, there is no need for interpretation, constituting and then decoding collections: "It is the nearly ecstatic instant Freud dreams of, when the very success of the dig must sign the effacement of the archivist." Of the archaeologist and his dig, Freud says: "If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple..." and ultimately, "Saxa loquuntur!" – "the stones speak!"69 A further discussion of Freud on archaeology and memory sharpens what is at stake in this quest for origins. Derrida draws his reader's attention to Freud's exploration of an archae- ologist's obsession with the footsteps of a woman in 79 A.D. in Wilhelm Jensen's novel Gradiva. The novel tells of an archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, who becomes obsessed with Gradiva, a woman represented on a bas-relief in a museum whom he comes to believe died in the volcanic eruption in Pompeii. Having worked his life interpreting artifacts, Hanold sets out on a search for a fundamental truth beyond that which results from his decoding of traces: a search for the actual moment of the woman's footstep itself. No interpreta- tion or decyphering would be involved: in Derrida's words, "An archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible from the impression of its imprint, Gradiva's footstep speaks 68 Ibid, 92. 69 Ibid, 92. 185 by itself!"70 It is when the artifact or trace is confused with a live moment and vice-versa, "an archive which would in sum confuse itself with the arkhe, with the origin."71 Hanold is struck by a density of affect, involving a desire or dream of "reliving the other:" He dreams rather of reliving. But of reliving the other. Of reliving the singu- lar pressure or impression which Gradiva's step [pas], the step itself, the step of Gradiva herself, that very day, at that time, on that date, in what was inimitable about it, must have left in the ashes.72 In this formulation, the fantasy of re-visiting origins through time travel becomes one of appropriation. It is critical that in Boym's definition of nostalgia, loss and displacement are paired with fantasy. "Reliving the other" is a means of assuaging the feeling of constant loss and dearth of meaning that results from a sense of the present as fleeting. For, how can en- during meaning be forged in a moment that has already escaped? In the case of documents and objects sequestered in archives and museums, ownership of these artifacts, traces that might reveal the "ecstatic instant" of origins, are a means to make up for this seeming lack of presence. Scholarly discourse extends its ownership over artifacts through placing them in time, histo- ricizing. As I mentioned above, a common accusation leveled at historians and anthropolo- gists is that the subjects they portray are 'de-historicized' in their narrative. But this strategy of meaning making, attaching lives and experience to a 'universal' timeline in order to render them facts results in an understanding of them freighted with the baggage of progress and 70 Ibid, 97. 71 Ibid, 97. 72 Ibid, 98. 186 modernization. It is no secret that this timeline, including the 'middle ages,' the 'renaissance' and the 'pre-modern period' all come to their zenith in the urbanized 'future' of the pres- ent exemplified in the city. Events on the timeline become meaningful as they are framed as steps, advances towards the modern, towards civilization. The problem or opportunity encountered by anthropologists of the early twentieth century like Boas, Barbeau, Malinows- ki and later Mead, was that the 'primitive cultures' that were the subject of their research were apparently hold-overs of a different age. While indigenous people's existence appeared to allow anthropologists to learn of the practices and lives of their own distant European ancestors ('how they would have lived'), the trend they regretted was that the milieu of their work, the 'field locations' like the islands of the South Pacific or the Northwest Coast, were transforming into 'modern' places too quickly. With the aid of linear conceptions of time, change over time undergirds a geographical dis- placement through which the 'Past' is represented as an Other place, like a different country. And so it was, over the years, that 'remote' Indigenous villages were transformed into cities and traveled forward along the road to modernization. In the Boyd and Thrush anthology Phantom Past, Victoria Freeman's discussion of stories of Indigenous haunting in the city of Toronto reveals an important tension regarding this reconstruction of place on the modern timeline. When Freeman spoke to her interviewees about how they related to stories of Indigenous haunting in the city, they revealed quite different understandings: for most of the non-Indigenous people I interviewed, stories of haunting expressed what was once and is no longer, hence a kind of absence, whereas for Indigenous interviewees and some of their allies, ghost and spirit stories articulated what had been and is still present, if invisible, in the city, and what 187 could become more visibly manifest in the future.73 In the first view, the city has entirely pre-empted prior claims and histories. As Freeman points out, Toronto is a city of the new where recent immigrants and established settler fam- ilies celebrate innovation and change with little interest in what came before in that place. As Coll Thrush points out, Indigenous people in the city have been represented as the "citizens of yesterday."74 In the second sense, Freeman's aboriginal interviewees negate this notion of linear time as also implying the remaking of place. Toronto is still the same place, the home- land of aboriginal ancestors of the Wendat, the Seneca, the Anishinaabe and other groups. Rather than disappearing, the ancestors' bones reveal themselves to road construction work- ers in order to insist on their territorial claim in solidarity with their descendents now living in the 'city.'75 Many aboriginal groups, including the Haida, are mapping their territories with the original names as a means of re-stating their claim to land. These efforts and other re- namings like the Salish Sea not only put these claims on paper, but insist on the continuity of their places in the face of settler strategies of appropriating through the teleological narrative of 'progress' and modernity. José Esteban Muñoz asserts that the queer archive's constituent performances are knowable to "those within its epistemological sphere" yet they "evaporat[e] at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility."76 In the context of the devices of linear time, I would put this in the form of a question: Who is able to see things disappear? Like the ephemeral per- formances Muñoz points to as only perceptible to those open to their possibility, the conti- 73 Freeman in Boyd, Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, 215. 74 Thrush in Ibid, 69. 75 According to Freeman, “Interviewees told me that “bones come up for a reason.”” Freeman in Ibid, 223. 76 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence”, 6. 188 nuity of aboriginal presence often evaporates at the touch of those whose ways of knowing blind them to it. Though Mead and her colleagues in anthropology worked face to face with their aboriginal interlocutors, their interaction was shaped by the heavy frame of time under- stood as a one-way progression to modernity. To their view, with the modern world 'upon us,' the culture and practices of aboriginal people could only be a window into a past time in that great universal trajectory of civilization since assimilation was already complete. People who can see things disappear, who are embedded in the compelling and inevitable logic of linear time bound to notions of 'civilized' progress end up in a narrow reality where haunting and spirits represent a hold-over, mere superstition rather than meaning, connec- tion and relationships. It is a view that understands 'ghosts' and 'haunting' as the frightening afterimage of a disappeared past. As the editors of the Phantom Past anthology point out, many scholars have understood haunting as out of time: anachronism might well be the defining feature of ghosts, now and in the past, because haunting, by its very structure, implies a deformation of linear tempo- rality: there may be no proper time for ghosts.77 The editors point out that scholars often address indigenous presence (and other forms of haunting) as a literary convention or psychoanalytic tool. But this perspective is sustained by those whose own notions of rigour, evidence and solidity limit their view of the real possibilities offered by non-Western epistemological spheres. Instead, it is a presence of spirits that endure in particular places. In Masset, for example, few visitors can stay very long without feeling a presence, an energy that sustains and inspires the Haida in their struggle to 77 Buse and Stott in Boyd, Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, xxvviiii. 189 regain control over the management of their lands and waters.78 Are settlers mixed up – in the wrong place? In an interview, Ojibwe artist Carl Beam once said of European colonizers that "they behave here just as they would have in Europe five hundred years ago."79 He contended that "landscape is internal," and his quote suggests that Europeans never truly arrived in Turtle Island but rather brought Europe with them. The colonization of this place people call Canada is the continuation of a story that was born in Europe and doesn't have any roots in the 'new world.' Instead of learning the ways of their hosts and the ways of their land, settlers have imposed, and continue to impose, their ver- sion of things in their own time, out of place. Being a settler myself, this has been a hard lesson to learn. Knowledge in relation I opened this chapter with Jaalen's comments about handling Haida pieces in the museum in order to point out a distinct relationship to objects. What Jaalen told me about handling the objects outside of the context of their use suggests to me the importance of relating to them as live, as an animate part of a lived process. My experience of sharing with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro has opened me to the different possibilities of this relationship that makes things, considered to have an unshifting, unitary meaning in Western ways of know- ing, take on a multiplicity of meanings, becoming alive through my relationship to them. Objects have their own live presence that is connected to me through interdependence. 78 Through the Watchmen program, the land use plan and marine use plan, the Haida have been able to regain some of the control and autonomy over their islands. 79 Beam interview on Trent U. Radio, 1989. 190 I understand this presence as itself a form of knowledge in relation. It can only be truly known through the continuation of practice and doing in order to maintain those relation- ships and learn from them. Cooking Doña Vicky's recipes, for example, is a means for me to continue that process, to continually call to mind the ways she's taught me, and strengthen my own intentions in my relationship to food. Presence cannot be historicized – it cannot be placed in the linear time scale of modern history before or after the renaissance, 'pre- contact' or 'post-contact.' It is circular, repetitive, continuous, presence. It does not disap- pear with the passage of time or become calcified in stone. It is being, embodiment and life, undivided and uncategorized. In various ways I've attempted to address some of the narrowness and fragility that accom- pany the three governing methodology/metaphors of scholarly distance, the archive and lin- ear time I explore above. While I have discussed their limitations, I have done so in the same language and academic framing that I believe is incapable of capturing the sense of embod- ied connections fundamental to knowledge-in-relation. Even the shorthand 'knowledge-in- relation' cannot begin to do what is necessary to convey a way of knowing – a goal that is my supposed purpose here. Nevertheless, there are a few aspects of this dissertation that have enabled my exploration of the themes of embodiment and relationships above. For one, I decided to put my own ex- perience with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro explicitly into the narrative of the dissertation, using my own feelings and intuitions both as guide and as material examples to discuss. The process that I've been through, that in retrospect I now perceive as an epistemological shift, is the result of allowing my own methodologies and framing to be affected fundamentally by the participants in this project whose role in other research endeavours would typically 191 be limited to 'informants' whose ideas and knowledge would be present only in description as a subcategory of the researcher's pre-existing framework. This shift is a de-centering, or rather, re-centering: moving my position into a space in between Haida and Nu Savi ways of knowing and academic ways of knowing. As Muñoz asks, "Who owns rigor?"80 My goal has been to question the ways truths and facts are produced through the methodologies of the discipline. In addition to these positionings, I have created an online database in which to write and gather together the sources with which I dialogue. The database, which I describe in greater depth in Appendix 1, has become a means for me to disturb the conventions of the dis- sertation and challenge the apparatus the university's employs for authorizing knowledge. Firstly, the expectation of a dissertation, as any thesis writer knows, is that it be entirely in writing, formatted specifically according to guidelines for footnotes, spacing, etc. In contrast to a continuing process, the dissertation document must represent a terminus of research, or at least a conclusive, self-contained snapshot of the results so far. For very understand- able, pragmatic reasons, my meetings with Graduate Studies and the UBC Library to explore the idea of submitting the database as my thesis ended without a solution. The constantly changing world of technology means that the software I've developed for the database will eventually fall victim to bugs as code standards change over time. Though it is built in the text of programming languages, the database is prone to decay over time. In addition, as an interactive web database, it represents the possibility of continual editing and change, possi- bilities that the keepers of theses must guard against in order to maintain the integrity of the institution and the knowledge it stores. As a result, I've had to find another way to make my 80 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence”, 7. 192 submission more like the static document the university expects. The design of the database represents an open process by its nature. Not only have I con- tinued to fill it with video and textual materials, but, beginning with a very simple three table design intended solely for keeping track of my video transcription, I gradually expanded it to satisfy different needs, like a keyword interface for brainstorming on the interviews and foot- age, an interface for references in the literature, and an editor in which to write this disserta- tion. When you design your own database from the ground up, there are endless possibilities for relationships. My priority was to ensure all entries of any kind in the database could be connected to each other in relationships the nature of which I could describe as I go. The result, not entirely complete, is the formation of multiple pathways through the video and textual materials that allow for the user's own process of knowing.81 Instead of a closure, the database has been a process of relationships that has become a practice for me as I finish this dissertation. Like cooking, it has offered me a means to focus my intention on my process of knowing and being in relation. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, for Pedro the notion of "conservando," or conserving, means keeping relationships alive, passing on and maintaining knowledge orally from person to person so that they live it through their practice. If all "objects" are to be seen only as dead, fixed in time and place for our close inspection and interpretation as in the model of the museum or the archive, the knowledge and perspective that comes out of such an encounter says little about the live, visceral connections between the researcher and their world, nor does it have much to say about the people being represented in the archival documents or 81 Please see Appendix 1 for screenshots and a more extensive outline of the database functionality. 193 museum artifacts. Pedro's conservando speaks specifically to the continuity of practices of cultural survival like planting, harvesting, ...la lengua, la gastronomia, la medicina tradicional, la cosmovision que es la otra parte fundamental, la danza, tambien este, conservar los conocimientos de curanderos tradicionales y sobre todo la otra parte muy fundamental es conser- var las semillas originales o semillas criollas... ...language, cuisine, traditional medicine, cosmology which is the other key part, dance, also, maintaining knowledge of traditional healers and above all the other very fundamental part is to preserve the original seeds or native seeds... (Pedro, Topic: Pedro Interview Semillas Transgenicas) Conservando implies continuing activities that must be done not simply talked about. Being 194 there, in his territory, doing the planting, the fiesta, the healing, and taking care and protect- ing the land. These practices are at once a part of Pedro's way of knowing, his epistemology and ontology, and the way of conserving that way of knowing, caminando y miando. Conser- vando is a duality or a multiplicity that can't be captured in a representation in the archive, yet it has endured for thousands of years, from one body to the next, in Nu Savi communities like Pedro's and Doña Vicky's and Haida communities like Jaalen's. 195 EpiloguE pollo a la Naranja by Doña Vicky As you make this dish, focus on your relationship to the food. Effort has gone into growing and harvesting the ingredients, and they will nourish your body. Make sure you are in a good mood and think of the good energies that you are passing into the peppers, tomatoes and chicken as you handle and prepare the ingredients. Don't multitask with the TV or internet as you cook, give the food your respect and undivided attention. Once the ingredients are all cooking together, have a copita of mezcal to toast the food and your health. As Doña Vicky says, it helps with digestion. Serves: 10 people Ingredients: 1 + 1/2 onions, roughly chopped 1 + 1/2 heads garlic, roughly sliced 15 dried guajillo peppers, seeds and veins removed 2 cups water 7 roma tomatoes 2 pinches of dried oregano 3 cloves 3 peppercorns pinch of cumin seeds 2 large oranges 6 tablespoons of vegetable oil 10 pieces of chicken thighs salt 1. Dry fry onion over high heat, stirring frequently until burnt. Set aside in medium bowl. 2. Dry fry garlic in the same pan on low heat until dried out and charred but not 196 totally black. Add garlic to the onions along with the oregano, cloves, peppercorn and cumin seeds. 3. Place the peppers (seeds and veins removed) and tomatoes in a pot and add just enough water to cover the ingredients. Bring to a boil and cook vigorously, without stir- ring, until peppers are soft and the skins of the tomatoes have started to peal off. 4. In a blender, puree the onion, garlic and spice mixture with the pepper-tomato mix- ture until very fine. 5. Heat the oil over high heat in a pot large enough for all the ingredients in the dish. 6. Test the oil to make sure it is very hot before pouring in the sauce. A drop of sauce placed in the oil should sizzle vigorously. 7. Pour the blended sauce quickly into the pot while being careful not to get splashed by the hot oil (apron recommended). This step of shocking the sauce gives it the sazón, or flavour. Stir frequently for 10 minutes. 8. Wash the chicken and add it to the pot. Carefully move the chicken around from time to time to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom, but be careful not to work the chicken too much or it will start to come apart the more it cooks. 9. Add the juice of 2 oranges and about a 1 1/2 tsp of salt. 10. Continue cooking chicken on low heat, moving it from time to time. As the chicken is getting close to being ready, check the flavour and add salt to taste. 11. When the chicken is cooked through, the dish is ready. Serve with hot tortillas. For left-overs, store chicken pieces separately from the sauce to maintain the integrity of the chicken. . . . A story that Doña Vicky often tells of herself when meeting new people is how she got the name "Doña Vicky." Her "real" name, Refugio Gregorio Bautista, was registered in the years after her birth, entered in the state records by government officials as an invention at a time when her parents couldn't read or write. Growing up she was known as Virginia, or Viki for short, and it was only several years later on some errand at a government agency that they 197 discovered that she was registered as Refugio. As she says, "Doña Vicky" has become her "nombre de lucha" (fighting name, or name in the struggle): "I prefer that they say Doña Vicky, because it's only on the paper that they know me by my true name."1 Her satisfaction in telling this story comes in the subsequent part where she relates a time when the police were looking for her in 2006. It was when Doña Vicky was participating in marches and at barricades during the occupation of Oaxaca City by a broad-based protest movement intent on ousting the Governor. When they came searching, the police only had her nickname to identify her, and her family members were able to say that the woman of the house was Refugio Gregorio Bautista, and that they hadn't heard of this "Doña Vicky." In the meantime, Doña Vicky was able to make her escape out through the back of the com- plex of concrete walled properties in which she and her neighbours live. The story is the source of great humour for her and as she says, it shows the great luck she's had in staying out of jail that she attributes to her faith. The traces of Doña Vicky that exist in the official archives, like her own name, or photos taken of her by undercover police to identify her at protest marches, can be misleading or have little relation to who she is in life. Whether or not she desires to go on record, or be archived, the data on Doña Vicky's life continue to expand in the state archive. In Shawn Michelle Smith's words: If one cannot or does not produce an archive, others will dictate the terms by which one will be represented and remembered; one will exist, for the future, 1 Doña Vicky, Topic: Doña Vicky Empacho. 198 in someone else’s archive.2 What has inspired me to engage in a dialogue between myself and my Nu Savi and Haida friends as well as to take on this dialogue between ways of knowing, is the translation that occurs when a person's life and practices are described and narrated in scholarly work. Take Pollo a la Naranja, for instance: anyone can read the recipe above and cook up the dish (I en- courage you to try it out, it's delicious). But tasting Doña Vicky's Pollo a la Naranja, with the sazón of her hand, is something else altogether. It means to know Doña Vicky and perhaps to help her put the dish together, watching her work with the ingredients – never measuring, but eyeing up quantities by memory – and understanding the focus and energy she puts into her cooking. Just writing about it in this thesis can never do it justice. I got into this project because my interests took me in the direction of 'aboriginal history' and, in particular, the mechanics of scholarly representation of aboriginal cultures. Through my experience working with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro, however, witnessing and tak- ing part in their practices, I've become convinced that this isn't simply about the category 'aboriginal history.' Instead, the ancestral ways of knowing that the three participants con- tinue practicing and protecting suggest to me the way what I’ve been calling Western ways of knowing rely on contrived boundaries, and close off possibilities and relationships of respect and interdependence that are, to me, intrinsic to life on earth. What I realized is that the category of 'aboriginal history' is part of my own baggage that I showed up with when I undertook this project. 2 Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the Color Line : W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2004, 9. 199 By coming into relation with Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro, I have become aware of differ- ent subtle and empowering possibilities for knowing that can serve to broaden my intellectu- al process in a way I have never imagined before. I have learned to respect and pay attention to my intuition and embodiment – that is, a sense of knowing through personal experience, though doing. Conservando: continuity and repetition, resilience and resistance When I was in Oaxaca visiting with Doña Vicky and Pedro, I had the opportunity to go to my friend Josh's maternal community of Ranchú Gubiña (Union Hidalgo) in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to meet his uncle, Tio Narno. As I did when I stayed with Pedro's friend Doña María, I had the opportunity to help Tio Narno and Josh take the dried maize kernels off the cobs (desgranar el maiz) so they can be used in tortillas, atole and all kinds of other food. Tio Narno continues his work in the milpa, the fields where he grows and harvests corn for selling and trading in the community. Back in Vancouver, Josh told me that Tio Narno had once passed on to him the multiple meanings of the Zapotec word for ancestor, binnigula'sa'. Along with 'ancestor,' binnigula'sa' signifies 'giants who founded our towns,' and also refers to clay figurines that continue to be found in the milpa. On another level, binnigula'sa' means "flexible, resistant sapling," or "rubber" – that is, something that bends but does not break. For Josh's community, this word signifies the resilience that is a part of their identity, and part of what guides their lives. Binnigula'sa' means to be flexible, but also to resist and main- tain that identity. It's a form of strength that is rooted, like the sapling, in their relationship to the land and to the members of their community who are living, have lived, or are still to come. 200 Like Pedro's word conservando, binnigula'sa' is a community methodology – not new but rather ancient – that is embodied in generation after generation and is a principal element of cul- tural survival. It emphasizes resilience and the work communities engage in continually to defend their territory and way of life. It is how things are done, and how Tio Narno, Pedro and Doña Vicky and their communities will continue doing. Robert Davidson expresses a similar concept in his book Four Decades: An Innocent Gesture: Haida histories are carved in totem poles and other objects, expressed in danc- es and songs, reaffirmed in speeches and sustained through repetition. They are all part of the ceremony that connects us.3 In my experience, these communities are not asking a 'we' in the centres of academia to judge the worthiness of such methodologies, nor to debate how best to incorporate them into the archive, historicize them, or debate their points of origin along a linear axis of time. In the course of my time knowing people in these communities, as well as Zapotec, Mixe, Iroquois people, I have had the honour to witness this continuation of culture and memory in the face of systematic colonial oppression. While academics search for new ways to write about what happened, Haida and Nu Savi people will continue to do their history. Some- times with, sometimes without the blessing of institutions, governments and scholars, these communities are continuing to live, grow, and recover things hidden as a result of colonial- ism. I'm inspired to hear Pedro talk about his connection to land, the air, the sun, water, earth, energy, seeds, ancestors, all things that I have taken for granted in my day-to-day life. How 3 Davidson, Robert. Four Decades: An Innocent Gesture. British Columbia: R. Davidson, 2009, 73. 201 much is the life of a typical scholar actually related to these things? How much of my life is dedicated to an awareness of the relationships of interdependence that provide for my survival on this earth? Creando espacios Doña Vicky's brother Raul, one of the founding members of the CIPO-RFM, often de- scribes our work in Canada with CIPO-VAN as creando espacios: creating spaces within which to imagine the world that we want to live in. Although as a group we look for ways to sup- port the struggle for human rights in Oaxaca, as CIPO-vaner@s our process is just as much about finding our own path to autonomy in Vancouver, both in our group activities (food cooperative, cooking, fiestas, marches), but also in our own everyday lives. Through cre- ative engagement with 'reality' we go about finding ways to imagine other worlds and other relationships that take their inspiration from the CIPO-RFM communities in Oaxaca. For me, creando espacios has been a means to experience, both in Vancouver and Oaxaca, this sense of continuity and resilience, because it is about finding your own strength and sense of self within a community. My work with Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro is part of this gesture of creando espacios through which I can imagine different possibilities. While it is exciting to create these openings in my life, it is sometimes a struggle to have the confidence and self-assurance to uphold them. For exactly the reasons that I traced out in relation to the three tools of scholarly produc- tion and truth-making – scholarly distance, the archive, and linear time – it hasn't been an easy process for me to incorporate other ways of knowing into my practice as an academic. While academic institutions set out to create a context within which scholars can undertake 202 new and different research, I've found that the prized skepticism that often defines academic strategy can heavily shape the act of listening such that certain voices and ideas cannot be clearly heard.4 How often, for example, does a discussion about relationship to the land get consigned to categories like 'traditional beliefs' or 'aboriginal spirituality' such that its signifi- cance remains subordinate to the scholar's framework of analysis? Over the course of this project I have met artists and academics who are working to create spaces within academic and public discourse in order to engage with other ways of knowing that allow their audiences to question academic practice. As a means to signal pathways for the continuation of creando espacios, I would like to highlight the work of two people who are inspirations for my own process. To begin with, I return to a discussion of Jeff Thomas, the Iroquois photographer whose work in conversation with Edward S. Curtis I mentioned in the introduction and chapter 3, and then Andrea Walsh, an anthropologist at the University of Victoria who works with children's artwork from residential schools and day schools. Jeff Thomas Jeff Thomas' photographs operate on a visceral level through juxtaposition. Many of his most well known pieces are composed with two side-by-side images, one being a photo tak- en by Edward Curtis, like the photos of Sioux warriors "many of whom actually fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn,"5 and the other being a contemporary photo of an aboriginal 4 Again, Paul Nadasdy’s discussion of Athapaskan people’s meetings with academics and government officials are relevant here. He says: “When they feel the need to disregard these seemingly arbitrary limitations on the subject matter and choose to talk more broadly about matters they feel are important and relevant, they are allowed to speak (though they are sometimes subjected to gestures of impatience and disrespect, such as eye- rolling, audible sighs, and/or under-the-breath comments), but the conversation is invariably brought back “on topic” (often after a brief but awkward silence) by a scientist or resource manager.” Nadasdy, Paul. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003, 131. 5 Ace, Barry. “Essay”, 2000. http://artengine.ca/ghost_dancing/frames/essay.html. 203 person in pow wow regalia. Thomas' project is to find the continuity of family history and heritage bound up in these images, the perception of which is weighed down by stereotypes. Taken at a time when representations of aboriginal people were used as a means to organize hierarchies of racial types as part of a racialized visual discourse, turn of the century pho- tos like Curtis' still shape the way aboriginal and non-aboriginal people view aborigineity. Through strategies like juxtaposition, Thomas seeks to disrupt this visual discourse and seek out a different viewing position, one that can see through these framings of racial type that obscure the unique identity and subjectivity of the person sitting for the portrait. Through his work in the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa, Jeff Thomas' goal has been to re-connect photographs in the collection to their families and communities by invit- ing aboriginal viewers to identify their ancestors who sat for portraits with ethnographers from the Geological Survey of Canada. In fact, as he told me recently, part of re-framing the photographs was exactly to call them "portraits" instead of photographic records as a means to recognize the relationship between photographer and sitter as in other family portraits at the time. By re-establishing the photographs' places in family lineages, Thomas and his viewers re-appropriate the photos and re-signify them as a family heritage rather than a generic type like a "squaw."6 Instead of yielding to the archive's authority over iden- tity, Thomas says that his dream is "to make the archive an active site of engagement," a site where documents and photos can be re-appropriated, new meanings can be imagined, and new connections to people's lives established. According to Thomas: Aboriginal artists are now a part of the awaking process. As our conversation 6 Kazimi, Ali, and V Tape (Firm). Shooting Indians a Journey with Jeffrey Thomas. Videorecording. Vtape Distribu- tion, 1997. 204 has developed, the feeling of sharing a mutual interest in photography and its ethnographic format, has indeed opened a dialogue between cultures.7 As I alluded to in the introduction, another important element of Jeff Thomas' approach that serves to rupture authoritative academic discourses and create space for other ways of engaging within academia is his use of his own voice and his own life story in his discussions of representation. As he begins any given paper or talk, Thomas will tell a story relating back to his childhood in Buffalo and on the Six Nations reserve to frame his ideas and pho- tographic practice. In addition, he makes clear that his intellectual positioning and lineage come from the elders on the reserve during the days when was finding his own interests. In one talk at a Curators-in-Context presentation in Banff in 2005, as part of his story about how he came to be interested in photography, he said: I know there's been a lot of quotes in the papers as to thinkers who have laid the groundwork for a lot of the issues that are being talked about today and the first slide here shows the person who had the greatest influence on my life, and who really set me off in terms of the pursuit of understanding in terms of artwork, historical photographs, museum collections, anthropology: her name is Emily General. She's the sister of my grandmother's partner, Burt General. They had a farm on the Six Nations reserve.8 This is a key positioning that uses an unexpected comparison between scholars and phi- 7 Payne, Carol, and Jeffrey Thomas. “Aboriginal Interventions into the Photographic Archives: A Dialogue Between Carol Payne and Jeffrey Thomas.” Visual Resources 18 (January 2002): 109-125, 124. 8 Thomas, Jeff, and Anna Hudson. “Curators in Context - Bridging Art and Audience: Storytelling in the Pres- ence of Historical Canadian Art”, n.d. http://curatorsincontext.ca/en/talk.php?id=16. 205 losophers with his elder, Emily General, in order both to situate himself, and demonstrate a different pathway for knowing that is related to community and life on the reserve. I see Thomas' practice as an artist as a strategy for re-animating the objects and records of the archives, objects that have been stuck for a time in undiscovered storage areas, and in the musty colonial knowledge systems that framed them as markers of inferiority. Brought back into the light of day, and once again into relation with the sitters' descendants, the photo- graphs take on new life and provide a foundation for action to future generations of indig- enous people. Andrea Walsh I was lucky to attend a workshop at UBC entitled "Living Through Violence: Indigenous Ceremony, Story and Art" that featured Dr. Andrea Walsh with elders Sulsa'meeth (Deb George) and Tousilum (Ron George) as presenters. Andrea Walsh is a visual anthropologist at the University of Victoria with "Canadian, Irish, Scottish, and Nlakap’amux ancestry," and has worked with Jeff Thomas on various writing projects.9 Her research project struck me because of her approach, not only to the children's drawings from residential schools that are objects of her study, but also her positioning as a researcher. Walsh's presentation at the Liu Centre was different from the others in the workshop in that she was accompanied by Sulsa'meeth and Tousilum, two elders from Vancouver Island; together they opened the session by singing a prayer song. As audience members, we were brought into her presentation through the prayer and from the beginning we knew this 9 For example, Thomas, Jeff. Drive by: A Road Trip with Jeff Thomas. Toronto: University of Toronto, Art Centre, 2008. 206 would not be a typical academic discourse. Her own talk was framed at the beginning and end by the elders' own words. In particular, I was struck by Tousilum's closing narrative of being taken away to school on an island as a small boy and the overpowering sadness and anger that he felt. It was only in later years with the guidance of an elder that he was able to let go of his anger and aggression in order to begin healing himself, and become a support for others to do the same. With the weight of previous generations' trauma at residential school as one of the founda- tions for her work, Walsh told us about the children's artwork from residential schools that are the pieces around which her research is centered. These artworks were collected by teachers and others who didn't want them destroyed.10 In order to begin her research pro- cess, she was advised by a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to enter into relation with the children's artwork through ceremony. As she related, she began a year- long process of preparation for the ceremony that included cleansing herself by dunking in a river and learning the steps for the ceremony, as well as gathering together the food and materials that would be needed to put on the significant event. Walsh's approach to the work itself is carried out with the support of the Elder's Voices group at UVic that is available to guide people working on the campus in Indigenous ways of knowing.11 Engaging with the artwork of children whose lives were disrupted by the trauma of being 10 Walsh’s work includes editing a book on the Inkameep Day School about the artwork students did in the 1930s and 40s with teacher Anthony Walsh (no relation). The teacher who took over at the school when Walsh Walsh’s work includes editing a book on the Inkameep Day School about the artwork students did in the 1930s and 40s with teacher Anthony Walsh (no relation). The teacher who took over at the school when Walsh left burned much of the artwork that had become famous around the world. See: Osoyoos and District Museum and Archives. “Osoyoos and District Museum and Archives - About the Inkameep Collection”, n.d. http://os- oyoosmuseum.ca/index.php/exhibits/collections/inkameep-day-school/about-the-inkameep-collection.html. 11 MacLaurin, Anne. “Children’s Residential School Art Portrays a Truth | The Ring.” The Ring, University of Victoria, n.d. http://ring.uvic.ca/news/children’s-residential-school-art-portrays-truth. 207 stolen from their communities means leaving behind scholarly notions of 'neutrality' and instead seeking out a respectful relationship with the pieces as more than lifeless, inanimate objects. Walsh told us that in approaching her work on the pieces, she would sit in a room with them, allowing herself to be affected by their presence and the stories each one com- municates. At a recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) regional event at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, elders took over planning for the handling of the artwork as it was brought into a room for exhibition: “The paintings can’t be stacked; every child must be carried,” instructed Cheryl Johnson, one of the women who organized the dancers for the pre-TRC instal- lation of the artwork at the Victoria Conference Centre. The pre-TRC event to hang the paintings with the participation of survivors, family members of the child artists and their communities took the form of a memorable ceremony. Over 40 Nuu-chaha-nulth women dancers each carried a single piece of art into the space. They were led into the room by men sing- ers, who filled the hotel with their voices and drums.12 Walsh and the elders' approach to the artwork indicates to me a different relation to the past, a responsibility to the lives and spirits of the children that is about healing them and also healing the community. Like Pedro working in the milpa, Walsh, as a researcher, finds herself within a network of important relationships with past and future generations that are experi- enced simultaneously. I see her work as a way to make a space within her academic context (and her discipline) for embodied ways of knowing trauma and healing that have not been a 12 Ibid. 208 part of typical academic projects. . . . For me, coming to an understanding of how the ways of knowing that I've been exposed to through the last several years goes beyond the completion of this dissertation. As I continue the practice of creando espacios and learn to live and know in-relation, I don't know where my journey will lead. The only thing for it is to continue doing, to learn another dish with Doña Vicky, plant some onions with Pedro, or pass the time with Jaalen while he works on his next pole carving project for Gwaii Haanas. . . 209 Abate, Frank R., and Elizabeth Jewell, eds. The New Oxford American Dictionary. 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Trigg, Stephanie. “Humanities Researcher: Synecdoche, Cricket and Colonialism.” Humanities Researcher, September 29, 2009. http://stephanietrigg.blogspot.ca/2009/06/synecdoche- cricket-and-colonialism.html. Tubutis, Todd J. "Filming a Makah Village for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man". Electronic The- sis or Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1998. https://circle.ubc.ca/han- dle/2429/8289. Versluis, Arthur. "Antimodernism." Telos 2006, no. 137 (December 21, 2006): 96-130. Ward, P. (2002). White Canada Forever: Popular Attiudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia, Third Edition. Montreal, QC, CAN: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action?docID=10132308 Watson, A., & Huntington, O. (2008). They’re here - I can feel them: the epistemic spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges. Social & Cultural Geography, 9(3), 257–281. doi:10.1080/14649360801990488 Weir, Candace. "For Those of Us at Bones Bay: Candace Weir." Haida Laas: Journal of the Haida Nation, no. March (March 2009): 23-27. Wikipedia. “Typography - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia”, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Typography. Wilson, Angela Cavender, and Devon A Mihesuah. Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Schol- arship and Empowering Communities. Contemporary Indigenous Issues. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Wilson, Angela Cavender. “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family.” In Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, 27–36. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Wilson, Kii'iljuus, Barb. "SOMETIMES, IT'S ALL RIGHT THERE." Haida Laas: Journal of the Haida Nation, no. March (March 2009): 8. Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Yates, Timothy. "Derrida: 'There Is Nothing Outside of the Text'." In Reading Material Cul- ture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Post-Structuralism, edited by Christopher Y Tilley, 206- 280. Social Archaeology. Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, MA, USA: B. Blackwell, 1990. Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-theory. BFI Publishing, 2001. 219 Appendix 1 The database as Research Tool Throughout my dissertation project, I have been focussed on linking my reflection on the ancestral practices of Doña Vicky, Jaalen and Pedro to my own practices as an academic, attempting to relate the insights I received to my day-to-day thought processes, brainstorming and writing. Faced with the task of transcribing several hours of video, I decided to use my experience working with databases and PHP/ HTML web languages to log the interviews with the participants. What began as simply a convenient, searchable format within which to store and organize the video transcription be- came a much more complex tool that would serve an important role for my emploration of academic ways of knowing. As the database expanded to include much more than just lines of transcription, it came to capture much of my thought process and writing process. It first occurred to me to use the MySQL database when I was faced with 20 hours of foot- age to transcribe: how could I record it in a flexible format that would leave all my options open down the line? A relational database has this flexibility at its core. Because I was using Final Cut Pro to edit the video essay, I logged the timecodes in the format ‘hh:mm:ss:fps’ as in most professional editing software (including the Frames Per Second, or fps) so that Fig.1 The Dashboard or openning screen of the Database. 220 the database would serve as a reference tool for editing together the video essay for chapter 2 back in Final Cut. Using the database, I could quickly browse the topics or search for a specific phrase and immediately have the reel and timecode allowing me to quickly locate the clip in Final Cut Pro. Figure 2 shows the subtitle input form that allows for quick data entry. The reel and topic menus maintain their selections so that logging in a topic on a given video reel only involves setting those fields once and thereafter only entering the timecodes and subtitle phrase. Needless to say, this form of transcript logging proved very helpful in the video editing stage of my project. As I started my writing process, delving into my own experience of being with Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro, I needed to find a way of representing the feelings and insights I gained on paper and connect them to the interviews and footage that I had recorded. Since my most important insight from that experience was that all knowledge and experience is intimately connected and in-relation, I soon set about establishing a set of concepts or keywords that served as conceptual nodes to which I could relate the subtitles in the transcription. In es- sence, I put the elementary function of the database - relating records in different tables, to work as a metaphor (albeit simplistic) for knowing in-relation. Take the notion of Obsoles- cence for example. I entered the concept as a keyword in the database and defined it as a Fig. 2 Subtitle logging with Topic, Reel, Timecode In and Out, and multilin- gual subtitle. 221 fundamental part of modernist ideologies that suggests that anything ‘old’ is also irrelevant and to be cast away. I then was able to pick out a subtitle from the interview with Jaalen where he talks about his conception of tradition as something constantly renewed in the community, that stood for me as a counter-point to this modernist notion of obsolescence. Using the functionality that I built into the online interface of the database, I registered a re- lationship between Jaalen’s subtitle and the keyword ‘Obsolescence’. Following the strictures I’d set out for myself in designing the interface, as with each relationship between records, I had to write a paragraph that explains exactly how Jaalen’s statement relates to the keyword Obsolescence. The description of this relationship, then, helps me to remember the move- ment of continuity and renewal in the Haida community that resists the disappearance fore- told by modernizers and salvage anthropologists of the turn of the twentieth century. As my list of keywords and relationships grew, I brought this developing web together in a brows- able list available on every page as I continue to brainstorm. Figure 3 shows the accordian menu of keywords that expands to show the keyword defini- tion and the related keywords and subtitles. As you hover over a given relation (Figure 4), the text explaining the relationship pops up in a box. This web of keywords and subtitles not only helped me in my writing process, but, in paying close attention to these relationships, I saw important connections emerge that taught me more about how I could relate my experience of ancestral practice to my Fig. 3 Browsable list of keywords with relatied subtitles and other keywords 222 academic practice. After a joking conversation with my supervisor about submitting the thesis as a database, I started to ruminate further on that idea and saw the possibilities of host- ing all my writing process in the same database space alongside the video transcription. Knowing how much I dislike writing in Microsoft Word, I coded an interface for “Stories” in which I could begin bringing together multiple relationships from the keywords and transcription in longer written pieces that speak to wider themes of this brainstorming web I’d been creating. As I improved the editor interface for writing these stories, I based it on a model called the “Fresheditor” that a developer posted on the internet that uses Firefox’s “contentEditable” attribute enabling Rich Text editing in HTML (Bold, Italic, etc.) rather than just entering raw text in a box with no markup. As these stories evolved into actual chapters, I became fully committed to using the database as my one central repository and tool for research and writing. Citations now had to come into the mix in order for me to relate the video transcription and keyword web to different literatures. I was already a happy user of Zotero, a sophisticated bibliographic reference tool for research on the web, so I wrote a plugin that would export references from my Zotero collection into my database. In this way, I could find articles and books online, harvest the citations into Zotero, then export them into my references interface of the database and Fig. 4 A pop-up showing the relationship between a keyword ‘Disci- pline of Anthropology and a statement from Jaalen in the transcrip- tion 223 record passages from the source into citations that are tied to the reference. Figure 5 shows the menu item from the plugin for exporting from Zotero and Fig- ure 6 shows the prefilled form in the database, ready to add a new reference record. As I read new sources and re- corded passages in the database, my research process became even more connected. I integrated keyboard shortcuts into the inter- face for the database so that with a rapid succession of keystrokes I could quickly enter new citations from my sources with their page numbers and my own additional comments and keep read- ing without losing the flow of the article. As someone who has faced the challenges of dislexia through- out my education, this was another hand up for me. Figure 7 shows a reference record with the formated bibliographic reference from Zotero Fig. 6 An imported Zotero reference in the database Fig. 7 A book reference with citations in the database Fig. 5 Using the plugin to Export a reference from Zotero to the data- base 224 (using a call to Zotero’s QuickCopy) and the accompanying citations with page numbers below it. Having integrated references and citations into the database, I then needed to connect them through footnoting to the Stories, or chapters, that had developed. Like Zotero’s plugin enabling integration with MS Word, I began the development of an interface to relate in-text footnotes to their page citations in the database. Figure 8 shows the Stories editor with a footnote reference ( FN ) in the text that triggers the footnote pop-up when you click on it. As I wrote the chapters, I was guided by the words of Jaalen, Doña Vicky and Pedro from memory, but also from reviewing the video work that we’d done together. I knew that I wanted to feature their voices centrally in the writing and not just as a text transcription, but more alive in audiovisual format. My friend Jen in Anthropology came up with the answer, an exciting model of text-video integration created at the First Nations House of Learning at UBC by Linc Kesler. The Interactive Video/Transcript Viewer (IVT) (http://fnsp.arts. Fig. 8 The Stories editor showing chapter 4 and a footnote pop-up with a citation from the Canadian Museum of Civilization website 225 ubc.ca/initiatives/interactive-videotranscript-viewer.html) uses the Javascript interface for Apple Quicktime to connect the text transcription of video directly to the video playing in Quicktime through the timecodes recorded in the transcription. The IVT allows videog- raphers to present their transcribed video-clips in a web interface that progresses sequentially through paragraphs of the text transcription appearing below the video player as the video advances. It also allows you to open the entire text of the transcription in a window and use the browser search to find words you’re interested in along with their corresponding sec- tion in the video. Returning back to the video-viewer window, you can select the section in a drop-down menu that advances the video to that topic. This use of an integration of text and video was a revelation to me. By using similar coding and principles to Kessler’s IVT, I was able to connect the transcription subtitles already in my database with video clips exported from Final Cut for the web. This offered the possi- bility not only of embedding video clips directly into the chapters, keyed by timecode to the words one of the participants speak in my quote, but in addition, indexing the video to the text through the timecodes allowed me to add the ability to search the text transcription and then view the search results in a video player cued to the point where the search words are uttered. Figure 9 shows a list of search results with certain subtitles having video clips that can be clicked on to view the moment where the word Fig. 9 Search result showing video clips available for viewing in a pop-up player 226 “quelites” (a very healthy local green plant in Oax- aca), and Figure 10 shows the video player that opens up when a user clicks on the image of Doña Vicky. So the database became an even stronger resource for the ability to index and watch video footage, and even integrate it into my written chapters, building on the text interface for the video transcription that I had already built. (The search already allowed us- ers to read the subtitle in context as shown in Figure 11). Although there are many more links and relationships that I have in mind for the database, by the end I had to prioritize only the most important functionality in order to finish. It was always a balance between the typical work of research, reading and writing that was part of a dissertation on the one hand, and on the other, doing my best to code as much of the database as possible to make it a viable, functional tool. Fig. 11 A transcription search result shown in context within a topic Fig. 10 The video player cued up to play a sentence about “quelites” 227 The relationships that the database enabled no doubt contributed to my thinking on the project. Building a platform for research from the ground up provided an opportunity for me to reflect explicitly and deliberately on the day-to-day practices of scholarly research and how those practices are evolving through the increasing adoption of technology (see particularly my discussion of Diana Taylor and the skeuomorph in chapter 4). In addition, as a metaphor, the relationality of the database allowed me to connect my work to ways of knowing based in subtle relationships that may or may not be evident on the surface. That said, developing an electronic database is certainly a sendentary process pursued while sitting in front of a keyboard and screen rather than cooking, carving or planting fields. I never lost sight of the differences. As a piece, the database is a record of my process, both in the contents that it houses, but also in the way the housing was built and with what goals. Paraphrasing Derrida, in working in the archive, there are the stories the documents tell, but then there is also the story of the archive itself and how it came to organize the documents, saving some, discarding others, and establishing ordering principles. As chapter 4 reveals, it was not possible to submit the database itself as my thesis to the Faculty of Graduate Studies, though for some time I was working under the assumption that that would be my ultimate goal. Instead the video-em- bedded PDF provided the fixed document with unchanging contents whose form satisfies the Graduate Studies archive.1 1 Converting my chapters into a PDF was not a simple operation of copy and paste. Knowing that there would be extensive back and forth with my committee and examiners requiring revisions to the database, I ended up developing an export for the chapters and footnotes from the database into XML. The resulting XML file could then be imported into Adobe Indesign for layout and video integration. In addition, I found a Javascript for Indesign that I was able to customize to convert the embedded XML-tagged footnotes into na- tive Indesign footnotes with formatting like italics. 228 This process of building a database archive has made me reflect on the interactivity that on- line technologies offer, particularly social media, in allowing and promoting relationships be- tween people and objects and stories. Like a Wiki, content on the internet is part of the flow or current of constant interaction and creative production such that materials are changed as they circulate through different social groups and networks. I think of how this connects to Jeff Thomas’ work to open the archive to Indigenous audiences to connect and interact with the collections of images as family portraits rather than ethnographic photographs (see the Epilogue). Perhaps these technologies provide a means to fundamentally transform the archive and the way it is taken up in scholarly practice.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
History
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Caminando y miando : a reflection on academic practice
Text
Moving Image