Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Arias, Krista
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
How is it possible for diasporic Indigenous women and mothers, to remember, recover and restory what has been lost in the last five hundred years of colonization? How can mothers who have been displaced from land, language, and culture as a result of colonization participate in cultural restoration, their own and that of the collective. How is Trauma involved, relied on, perpetuated, and resolved in order to either maintain or escape patterns of fight, flight and/or paralysis? As a Xicana Indígena mother, existing in the cycle of birth and death, always becoming ancestor, I have searched for an accurate story to pass on to my children, a story that is true but that is also a truth-telling. I address and explore problems of authentic identity – de- Indianization, appropriation and misappropriation, and hemispheric Indigeneity in order to set up the initial problem. I then move on to consider historical trauma, trauma theory, Indigenous healing practices and paradigms as well as resonant western ones. I then consider histories, issues, and ceremonies related to Indigenous birth and mothering. This project is a Ceremony of restoration, of decoding remnants, of generative gestures, and stitching stories. It offers guiding principles and ceremonial protocols that allow for the product of ceremony, vision, to emerge. A large part of this dissertation consists of imaginal, dream-crafted, poietic, and performative output and it is supplemented with an exhibition and a published collection of poetry. I share my vision, a personal transformation and an offering, a generative gesture of In Xochitl In Cuicatl – poetry and prayer that honors Indigenous holistic dualism as a way forward through trauma . . . into freedom.
The Earth is My Elder: by Krista Arias BA, Evergreen State College, 1996 MA, St. John’s College, 1997 MA, University of Toronto, 2001 MA, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2017 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) August 2021 Krista Arias, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: The Earth is My Elder submitted by Krista Arias in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy . Tania Willard, Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Ashok Mathur, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Monica Morales-Good, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Fiona McDonald, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences University Examiner Estrella Torrez, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University External Examiner iii Abstract How is it possible for diasporic Indigenous women and mothers, to remember, recover and restory what has been lost in the last five hundred years of colonization? How can mothers who have been displaced from land, language, and culture as a result of colonization participate in cultural restoration, their own and that of the collective. How is Trauma involved, relied on, perpetuated, and resolved in order to either maintain or escape patterns of fight, flight and/or paralysis? As a Xicana Indígena mother, existing in the cycle of birth and death, always becoming ancestor, I have searched for an accurate story to pass on to my children, a story that is true but that is also a truth-telling. I address and explore problems of authentic identity – de-Indianization, appropriation and misappropriation, and hemispheric Indigeneity in order to set up the initial problem. I then move on to consider historical trauma, trauma theory, Indigenous healing practices and paradigms as well as resonant western ones. I then consider histories, issues, and ceremonies related to Indigenous birth and mothering. This project is a Ceremony of restoration, of decoding remnants, of generative gestures, and stitching stories. It offers guiding principles and ceremonial protocols that allow for the product of ceremony, vision, to emerge. A large part of this dissertation consists of imaginal, dream-crafted, poietic, and performative output and it is supplemented with an exhibition and a published collection of poetry. I share my vision, a personal transformation and an offering, a generative gesture of In Xochitl In Cuicatl – poetry and prayer that honors Indigenous holistic dualism as a way forward through trauma . . . into freedom. Keywords: Indigenous Birth and Mothering, Red Medicine, Trauma, Historical Trauma, Indigenous Ceremony, Poiesis, Temazcal, Temazcalli, Rebozo, Xilonen, Somatic Experiencing, Theater of the Oppressed, Archetypal Psychology, Gloria Anzaldúa iv Lay Summary How is it possible for diasporic Indigenous women and mothers, to remember, recover and restory what has been lost in the last five hundred years of colonization? How can mothers who have been displaced from land, language, and culture as a result of colonization participate in cultural restoration. As a Xicana Indígena mother, I address and explore problems of authentic identity, historical trauma, and issues related to Indigenous birth and mothering. This project is a Ceremony of restoration, of decoding remnants, generative gestures, and stitching stories. In it I offer guiding principles and ceremonial protocols that allow for the product of ceremony, vision, to emerge. I share my vision, a personal transformation and an offering, a generative gesture of In Xochitl In Cuicatl- poetry and prayer that honors Indigenous holistic dualism as a way forward through trauma . . . into freedom. v Preface This research project was approved by the Behavior Research Ethics Board (BREB) at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Certificate #H17-02815 This project was funded by the University of British Columbia Okanagan: Graduate Entrance Scholarship, Aboriginal Graduate Fellowship, University Graduate Fellowship, Graduate Student Travel Grant. I am solely responsible for the design and carrying out of this research project, the creative praxis, poetic composition, related exhibitions and writing of the dissertation. My project supervisor, Tania Willard and committee members Ashok Mathur and Monica Good have reviewed this manuscript. Publications: Xingona Girl Smoke, the pace and posture of permission; Tlatolli Café-Press, excerpts from chapters 4-7. vi Table of Contents Abstract iii Lay Summary iv Preface v Table of Contents vi List of Figures x List of Supplementary Materials xi Acknowledgements xii Dedication xiii 1: Opening 1 Lineages : identity 1 Re-search Questions 6 Organization 8 Xicana Indígena Identity 10 Xicana Indigenous Identity and Mestiza Consciousness 11 De-Indianization, Syncretism, and Neo-Re-Indigenization 18 Hemispheric Indigeneity, Authenticity, Appropriation 27 Xicana Indígena Trauma & Healing 37 Decolonizing Damage-Centered Trauma Narratives 40 Indigenous Trauma and Healing Practices and Paradigms 47 Marginal/Resonant Healing Practices and Paradigms 51 Xicana Indígena Birth and Mothering 60 Reproductive Justice 62 Indigenous Birth Practices 65 Xicana Indígena Birth Ceremonies 68 2: Ceremony Protocols 73 Xicana Indígena 10 73 Ceremony 74 Elements 75 Symbol and Ceremony 77 A Word about Indigenous Psychology 79 Xicana Indígena Methodologies 81 vii Ometeotl 82 In Xochitl In Cuicatl (XochitlCuicatl) 83 In Lak’Ech 85 Nepantla 86 Temixoch 87 Centering Indigenous Methodologies 90 Resonant Western Methodologies 92 Arts-Based Ethnography : Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart 92 Phenomenology of Gesture 94 Emic Action Research 97 Research-Creation 102 Ethics, Strengths and Limitations 104 3: The Ceremonies 109 Xochiquetzal’s Bed 111 Laying on the Earth :: preparations 111 Exhibition 114 The Indígena Project 121 The Residency 122 Relationality 127 The Earth is My Elder 130 Xochiquetzal’s Bed 130 Susto & Limpia 132 Eating our Ancestors 133 Final Exhibition :: Poetry Collection 136 Threshold 140 4: Temazcalli 141 The Ceremony Continues 142 Indigenous Holistic Dualism (expanded) 149 The Imaginal 152 womb : woman : waters 157 Moon Lodge 164 My First Sweat Lodge 168 Temazcalli Waters 172 Tears : Cihuacóatl 172 viii Blood : Tlaltelcuhtli 176 Milk : Xochiquetzal 180 5: Rebozo Remnants 186 Part I 189 jibberish :: poetry :: logic 190 earth :: prayer :: cosmos 193 idle talk:: truth-telling :: manifest destiny 195 Part II 198 échos-monde :: love :: chaos-monde 199 exile :: errancy :: belonging 203 recognition :: witness :: exclusion 207 Part III 210 authentic :: ceremony :: fake 211 body :: earth :: language 213 birth :: rebozo :: death 216 6: Xilonen :: Xalaquia 221 directions 224 Ité . . . or Mexican though 226 Mole…. is a direction 228 earth 230 Incarnation 232 Everheart 234 smoke 237 White Painted Woman 238 Instead, Smoke 240 Xingona Girl Smoke 241 tomorrow 243 gender: blood 244 Debt of Blood 245 (M)Etzli :: Moon : Blood 247 death 249 susto & limpia 250 Eating Our Ancestors 253 7: Closing 257 ix the pace and posture of permission 259 Questions & answers 262 freedom 263 Bibliography 270 x List of Figures Figure 1. Poster for Alternator Exhibition 116 Figure 2. Xochiquetzal Goddess Blanket in Progress 117 Figure 3. Xochiquetzal and her Babe 118 Figure 4. Images from the Xochiquetzal’s Bed Exhibition 119 Figure 5. Gestures 120 Figure 6. Indígena Project Poster 125 Figure 7. Indígena Project Performance Poster 126 Figure 8. Xingona Girl Smoke Poetry Collection Cover 136 Figure 9. Exhibition Altar with Tobacco, Rose, Pomegranate 137 Figure 10. Susto & Limpia projected at Open 138 Figure 11. Xochiquetzal’s Bed Projected at Open Space 138 Figure 12. Eating Our Ancestors projected at Open Space 139 Figure 13. Poetry from Xingona Girl Smoke at Open Space 139 Figure 14. Contemporary Temazcal in Mexico 155 Figure 15. Xochiquetzal’s Push/Pull Gesture 183 Figure 16. My Push/Pull Gesture Embodiment 183 Figure 17. The Xicana Indígena 10 Poster 269 xi List of Supplementary Materials Video 1. The Indígena Project Promotional Video 124 Video 2. Xochiquetzal’s Bed Video-Poem 130 Video 3. Susto & Limpa Video-Poem 132 Video 4. Eating Our Ancestors Video Poem 133 xii Acknowledgements My wonderful (and finally found) doctoral committee: Tania Willard, Ashok Mathur, and Monica Morales-Good Indígena Project Residency Participants: Carlie, Kat, Ceci, Rebecca, Casandra, Xilo, & Rose The Bread Flesh and Ink collective: Lindsay Harris and Toby Lawrence. My precious mentors/colleagues/friends/sisters who contributed in so many different ways – conversations, collaborations, contributions: Joanne, Toby, Lindsay, Monica, Juana, Kamee, Ishtar, Cheyne, Martha, Layli, Sherry, Barbara, Sandra, Erenia, Armida, Janessa, Claudia, Sue, Tracey, Michelle, Laura, Mackenzie, Holly, other Barbara, grandma Barbara, Lisa, Fran, Toni, Tula, Karen, Astrid, Mary, Susan, Helene, Nuria, Alejandro, Caroline, Mai'a, Gio, Nelson, Sandy, Diane, Rita, Angelina, Dayana, Basil, Francesca, Madrona, David, Cher Bear, Oona, Tela, Phil, Kelly, Kelly, Leah, Elin, Jen –the girl who gifted me Rilke's Letters, and that monk. My parents: Ronald & Judith My small family: Papa-Wapa, Fia, and Xoco (I love you) Land Acknowledgement Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place. ~ Rumi We are all here from different places, different Indigenous territories. Many of us are aware and learning about the original inhabitants of our current homes. In acknowledging them and their histories, let us also ask ourselves this non-material spirit question: How can I be the soul of this place? May it be it a prayer of connection and listening, a practice of becoming and transformation. I currently live and work in Diné and Ndeh territories. xiii Dedication to all the lost ones who take great care . . . and for my Xicanita hija Felix Kalypso (Xochitl) Arias may you re-member for us all with your plants and pigments and sweet incantations xiv The Earth is My Elder Elders are considered to be integral to the preservation, maintenance, and revival of First Nation, Métis, and Inuit cultures. It is important to note that “Elder” does not necessarily indicate age. In First Nation, Métis, and Inuit cultures, an Elder is designated as such having been deemed to have acquired significant knowledge about essential teachings in their culture and to have gained the wisdom drawn from experience that enables them to share their insight with others… The term Elder refers to someone who has attained a high degree of understanding of... traditional teachings, ceremonies, and healing practices. Elders have earned the right to pass this knowledge on to others and to give advice and guidance on personal issues, as well as on issues affecting their communities and nations. ~ Dr. Nicole Bell 1 1Nicole Bell, “Elders,” Deepening Knowledge, last modified June 18, 2012, www.oise.utoronto.ca/deepeningknowledge/Teacher_Resources/Curriculum_Resources_(by_subjects)/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities/Elders.html. 1 1: Opening Lineages : identity I am part of lineages, of land, and of story. Ancestors on my father’s side migrated from the edges of traditional P'urhépecha2 territory as well as from the Chihuahua side of Ndeh borderlands and Rarámuri, or Tarahumara, territory. We are often called Mesoamerican, Mestizo/a, Chicano/a, and/or Xicano/a, all attempts at describing the complex identity of people of Indigenous and Spanish colonial ancestral mixing.3 I also have ancestors on my father’s side from Italy, Spain, and Greece. On my mother’s side, I descend from British-German missionary stock. From these lines we are European. From the age of twenty-one, my mother, exiled from her family for having a brown child out of wedlock, raised me alone with very limited resources. I found and met my father when I was forty-five after much ceremonial support from community and Elders. I embrace my obligation to identify and offer myself to the process of decolonization with respect to the colonial imprints I inherited both culturally and ancestrally from all sides. I work to stitch together fragments from broken hearts, and nations that lay dormant in the lap of the earth as neo-colonial borders begin their dissolution. I have two children, Felix Kalypso Xochitl Arias and Allium Xocoatl Arias, who pull from me all the good things I am meant for: dreaming, awakening, laying on the earth, sisterhood, truth-telling, and listening to the light holders that have come before me. As I traverse the space 2 P'urhépecha is a language / culture group located mostly in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. 3 More explanation about the distinctions, complications, and history of uses in Part 1: Xicana Indígena Identity. 2 between descendent and ancestor, as my children grow toward the threshold of maturity, it is my obligation to prepare them - equip them with the support of their ancestral traditions; to discover and create ways for Indigenous wisdom to flow and grow with them as they step forward into creating a more just world. In Xochitl In Cuicatl is the ceremony of poietic emergence and creation, an interface between land and dreams, self and other, poetry and prayer. The Temazcalli is a ceremony of purification and visioning. The Rebozo is a profound tool for ceremonial shawl healing. Xilonen is an ancient coming of age ceremony for young girls. It is my hope to re-member and pass these, and other, ceremonies forward to my children as a way for them to approach themselves and their world. I offer my gratitude and a prayer here at the outset of my journey: May wisdom arise among us here in a good way. Generations of colonialism, migration, denial and hiding have left me, and many other Indigenous mothers, scattered and disconnected –bereft of cohesive community and Eldership. We exist in racialized brown bodies often without access to traditional knowledge keepers, healers or culture bearers who might offer guidance and training in traditional ceremonies of healing and protection, in language, and in earth medicine. This lack of access to cultural resources, and community Eldership, creates a vacuum of alienation as well as a silent longing. It is my intention to set out on this journey with the humility of an involuntary exile returning home, the integrity of a lost daughter, and the patience of earth as well as the strength, fortitude, and confidence of ancestors to find my way. In this re-search ceremony, The Earth is my Elder, I seek, and greet, a grassroots methodology for remembering, decoding, recovering, restoring and restorying Indigenous culture, connection, 3 and healing. More than a defense of my Indigeneity, or apology for my positionality, this is a ceremonial prayer. I make this journey, prepare this ceremony, primarily for myself, as a mother –in the face of much confusion, alienation, insecurity, shame, and exile. And as I have delved and deepened, it has also become an invitation, an instruction, to the possible and the necessary, as a way forward not only for those of us with Indigenous ancestry, but for all people returning to right-relationship with land, language, cosmos, and each other. In this creative exploration, I consider issues of identity and cultural misappropriation, personal, collective, and ancestral trauma and healing, as well as issues of Indigenous birth and mothering. My methodology, the structure for this ceremony, is fundamental to how this “research” unfolds and intersects with the reader, the community and world. Its purpose is to create psychic and cultural limits that allow vision to emerge, that allow poiesis to embark and instruct. In my pursuit, I work to build on the work of Jeannette Armstrong, Patrisia Gonzales, Leanne Simpson, Linda Smith, Susy Zepeda among others by using ceremonial remnants, Elder epistemology, and community relationality as regenerative tools in creative cultural restoration and restorying. I employ Zepeda’s theoretical method for constructing decolonized memory and knowledge by enacting forms of remembering through art. In the same way that she identifies collaborative sacred ceremony across generations as a means by which hidden stories are remembered, I identify the same phenomenon among and across diasporic Indigenous women.4 In this process I also cling to the cultural/ceremonial remnants I carry, the resonant training I have received in healing paradigms, and my experience as a free-birthing mother as generative in 4 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012); Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Susy J. Zepeda, “Queer Xicana Indígena Cultural Production: Remembering through Oral and Visual Storytelling,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (2014): 119-141. 4 my emergent theories of cultural reclamation. I propose that ancestral memory is uncovered in the performance of ceremonial trauma resolution, or trauma-driven performance protest.5 The recovered ceremonial gestures then lead to further re-membering of ceremonial wisdom that holds the potential to restore and revitalize healing practices of new generations of Indigenous mothers and, as a result, their diasporic communities.6 As a Xicana Indígena (Mesoamerican Indigenous woman / mestiza), I also identify as a Split Feather. Split Feathers are Indigenous people who have been separated from ancestral people, lands, language, and culture7 through myriad practices of colonial genocide, including geographical displacement, intergenerational trauma, Indian adoption policies, cultural shame, residential and boarding schools, globalization, NAFTA, dispossession, outright massacres and the current forced (im)migration of people south of the Mexican border heading north.8 Even when Split Feather people do uncover evidence of Indigenous ancestry, we often face the difficult journey of tribal/community reconciliation and belonging. Shifting politics of naming and identity can heavily influence whether one feels invited, welcome, excluded, accused or triggered as the trauma of alienation and exile resurfaces in the face of resistance to inclusion as well as to the pressure to include those who assume rights, benefits, and participation. From my experience those who are careful are expelled along with those who are not, precisely because they are careful. Despite all this, and I will explore these dynamics in more detail further on, I 5 Diana Taylor, “Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1674-77. 6 Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García, eds., Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 7 Carol Locust, “American Indian Adoptees: Split Feathers Study,” Pathways 13, no. 4 (1998), http://splitfeathers.blogspot.ca/p/split-feathers-study-by-carol-locust.html. 8 Nantawan B. Lewis, Remembering Conquest: Feminist/Womanist Perspectives on Religion, Colonization, and Sexual Violence (New York: Routledge, 1999); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012). 5 believe Split Feather Indigenous women carry a distinctly Indigenous ontological and epistemological memory, despite physical and cultural separation from their Indigenous ancestry.9 While also working to understand the complicated and layered ways that belonging is negotiated, allowed and disallowed,10 I work to clarify this ontological and epistemological memory and put it into practice in combination with trauma healing, creative praxis / art, and recovering generative remnants that allow for Indigenous resurgence and restorying. My research crosses disciplinary boundaries between cultural studies and applied medical anthropology. It is predominantly rooted in creative praxis, poiesis, philosophy and depth psychology. My research is fundamentally personal, and process based.11 I follow in the footsteps of scholars pursuing highly personal work in excellent and inspiring ways such as Bell Hooks, Leanne Simpson, Gloria Anzaldúa among many others. My work aims to creatively expose personal process and emotion. Some might call my work self-reflexive or autoethnographic, and while this would be accurate, I tend to prefer the regular language of ceremony. We are in ceremony. Together. 9 Anne Waters, ed. American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 107. 10 I look more carefully at current appropriation call-out culture and how it complicates and protects Indigenious belonging more on page 37 in my section titles: Hemispheric Indigeneity, Authenticity, Appropriation. 11 Kathleen E. Absolon, Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2012); Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera; Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011); Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2008). 6 Re-search Questions In the vein of Shawn Wilson’s “Research is Ceremony,”12 I center the search. I engage, as a seeker, in a personal and genuine inquiry. Questions, inside and out of academia - where this text is being initiated and received, are most often raised in order to be answered rather than circled around. They are required to end the search rather than guide it, over and over again in a circular re-search. My questions in this re-search, this searching again, this cycling through domains of darkness, are offered not as items to be concluded and put away in a static sense of knowing, but rather as wonderings to be visited repeatedly. I had a professor who once told me, “There are no bad questions, but there are good ones.” In fact, a good question is one that cannot be answered finally. It is one that rests in impossibility, and infinity, in the back and forth between sides of every polarity. Furthermore, as a poet, my practice is to unearth, to truth tell, to excavate truth, vulnerability, and to scour the unknown, the yet to be, emergent, the poietic – ποίησις– transmutation that never ends, but blossoms forth each season of inquiry. I struggle to articulate the core inquiry for this research, my deepest question, the one that haunts me because it is my own personal life’s inquiry. It certainly begins with the overarching question; Can I rely on the Earth as my Elder/teacher/cultural transmitter in order to discern between empty protocols and generative culture? Of course, I posit in my title that the answer is yes – as I have been taught by many living Indigenous Elders that the earth is our true source of wisdom. So, it is more of an assertion, or hypothesis, that the following questions help me consider its validity. As I have written and re-written my questions, I have come to know these 12 Wilson, Research is Ceremony. 7 questions at the heart of my quest: How did my ancestors, the ones before all the traumatic fragmentation, create the culture of which I now have only remnants? This segues into the question: If culture is not only transmitted via socio-cultural influence but originally through things like listening to land, ceremonial vision, dreams, et cetera, how can we distinguish true vision/apprehension of healthy culture from imagination/fantasy - given the reality that we are all affected and influenced by the destructive dominant narratives and by the historical trauma of the last 500 years\? And further, when listening to cultural/ceremonial remnants, what distinguishes cultural misappropriation from the kind of honest appropriation necessary in re-storying? I further wonder, how does personal, collective, and ancestral trauma prevent, interrupt, or enhance the restoring and restorying of healing culture? Furthermore, how does this affect the cycle of ancestors so basically represented by birth and mothering? And finally, how does the earth communicate with us as an initiated wise Elder? Out of deep and expansive listening to these quest-ions, I intend to propose an honest and humble way forward and follow with an autoethnographic exploration of the implementation of what I discover, always cycling around and re-searching these quest-ions. To summarize, my re-search ceremony responds to the following quest-ions; How is it possible for diasporic Indigenous women and mothers, to remember, recover and restory what has been lost in the last 500 years of colonization? How can we distinguish true vision/apprehension of healthy culture from imagination/fantasy - given the reality that we are all affected and influenced by the destructive dominant narratives? When listening to cultural/ceremonial remnants, what distinguishes cultural misappropriation from the kind of honest appropriation necessary in restorying? How does personal, collective, and ancestral trauma prevent, interrupt, or enhance the restoring and restorying of healing culture? 8 How does all this affect the cycle of ancestors so basically represented by birth and mothering? Organization My dissertation is organized into seven chapters: this introduction and theory chapter, a methodology, a methods chapter, three research chapters, a conclusion and bibliography. It offers a brief introduction and history background and theory as well as this outline of chapter organization. Chapter 1 provides a foundation, an exploration, and a context for subsequent chapters and includes the generation of a set of guiding principles that I call the Xicana Indígena 10 (XII0). In order to understand my creative process further on, it is important to apprehend the complexities related to Xicana Indígena identity, the colonial trauma at its root and how it affects Xicana Indígena birth and mothering. These three chapters are divided into three main sections: Xicana Indígena Identity, Xicana Indígena Trauma and Healing, and Xicana Indígena Birth (and Death). In Chapter 2, I ask questions such as, what is a ceremony? How are the stages of ceremony akin to a research? I press the ontological status of the is in Shawn Wilson’s “Research is Ceremony,” and propose a theory of the inverse – Ceremony is Research. I re-visit Joanne Archibald’s elements of Indigenous storywork along with personal experience in Indigenous ceremony to tease out a series of phases and protocols for my ceremonial research. I then outline the elements I will proceed to rely on in this ceremony as research rather than the other way around doing research as ceremony. This chapter includes a discussion of the various mesoamerican Indigenous “methodologies” I draw upon and that form the ceremonial protocol for my re-search as well as resonant Western ones. I review critical analyses of Participatory Action Research and propose an emic and creative solution to some of the issues raised. I also 9 cover Ethics, Strengths, and Limitations at the end of this chapter. Chapter 3 describes and reflects on ceremonies/activities of this project: the residencies, performance protests, phenomenological generative gestural enactment, exhibitions, gatherings, visits, conversations, and publications that have occurred as part of this research ceremony. Chapters 4-6 form the core of my poietic, culturally restorative discoveries that circle around the major themes in the more historical and theoretical chapters relating to issues of identity, trauma, and birth/mothering. In this creative praxis, I correlate these themes with three Mesoamerican Indigenous ceremonial practices/realities, the temazcalli (Mesoamerican sweathouse), rebozo healing (Mexican shawl healing), and Xilonen (coming of age ceremony). Further, drawing on the legacy of curanderismo, Mesoamerican folk medicine, and other Indigenous healing practices I work to restore and restory an Indigenous paradigm of relational, personal, fluid, dreamtime, circular, process-based, affective, poetic, embodied and holistic methodologies for the recovery of Indigenous identity. As a result, my research engagement with the restoration of the temazcalli, rebozo healing, and Xilonen coming of age, as preventative, restorative, and re-generative practices is central to my decolonial work. Out of this intervention, and in relation to resonant healing paradigms, I propose a ceremonia structure for honest cultural restoration among Split Feather women and mothers. Chapter 7 is my conclusion that summarizes the journey, and offers a potential path for understanding, listening for, and carrying permission - through the reconciling what I must do and what I can't do.13 13 Jeanette Armstrong, “Sharing One Skin,” Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, December 2006, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/sharing-one-skin. 10 Xicana Indígena Identity In Part 1, I begin with a review of the literature related to issues of Xicana Indígena identity.14 I examine the history and theory of de-indianization, syncretic cultural resilience and cultural restoration or neo/re-Indigenization and examine how the concept of mestizo/a has both oppressed and liberated those claiming Indigenous identity. I go on to unpack the concept of Indigenous non-discrete non-binary holistic dualism and argue that it is key in moving forward with cultural restoration of de-Indianized Xicana women. I argue that Xicana Indígena identity, as it stands today, is paradoxical -- it has been both completely decimated socio-culturally and remains continuous through syncretic traces and blood memory, and that this ontological memory of non-discrete non-binary holistic dualism is an invisible, yet critical, remnant for restoring and restorying. Xicana Indígena identity is particularly complicated by the conditions of diaspora and displacement that relates to issues of authenticity and appropriation. People with Indigenous ancestry, but little or no cultural embeddedness, often exist in a precarious positionality within dominant culture arenas especially if not white passing. They are most often considered neither Indigenous (since they have no socio-cultural connection) nor non-Indigenous (since they also are not white) and tend to exist as involuntary exiles in all racial groups. In response to this, I make an investigation into current discourse around cultural appropriation in particular the sentiments relating to displaced, diasporic and Split Feather sense of entitlement or exclusion from Indigenous cultural reclamation. This section outlines the debate over whether “de- 14 Mexican, Mestizo/a, Chicano/s, Xicano/a represent a progression of Indigenous identity reclamation, Mexican signifying the least Indigenous identity awareness and Xicano/a carrying the most. I explain my choice to use Xicana Indígena in detail in the following section. 11 Indianized”15 people have the right / obligation to re-claim Indigenous identity after being de-Indianized and/or disconnected from land, language, culture, and community. It is also a contemplation on permission and responsibility to particular Indigenous communities and how this is complicated by the reality of diaspora and displacement and other forms of disconnection. This exploration is characterized by, and culminates in, my creation of a set of ten principles for safeguarding cultural restoration of Indigenous birth and mothering practices (and all culture and ceremony for that matter) – the Xicana Indígena 10. I go on to use these principles extensively in designing and carrying out my methodology for this research and offer them as a guide to others doing similar work. Xicana Indigenous Identity and Mestiza Consciousness Where do I belong? This question has haunted me since childhood when I was repeatedly asked if I was adopted, when I was called poop brown, since the time I knew that my skin color was the reason. . . It continued into adolescence and early adulthood when my claims to being Mexican were most often met with bizarre comments like, You’re just white. I was simultaneously forbidden entrance into whiteness, and Mexican-ness - by white people. This placelessness was my existential home for as long as I can remember, though it was accompanied by a quiet prayer that I might one day find home. The following section is my grappling with the question of home-place, ancestral and contemporary. By asking history to collaborate with my longing, I 15 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 23-45; Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, trans. Philip A. Dennis (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 41-58. 12 attempt to anchor myself in a cohesive and honest restored identity that includes the complexity of displacement, diaspora, racial mixing, and integrity. The contemporary grassroots California organization LaRED Xicana Indígena16 sums up the problem of Xicana Indígena identity as it relates to cultural restoration well: . . . Xicano and MeXicano peoples [are] a pueblo made up of many indigenous nations in diaspora who through a five hundred year project of colonization, neocolonization and de-indianization have been forced economically from their place of origin, many ending up in the United States. Politically, we recognize that we stand with little legal entitlement to our claim as indigenous peoples within America; however, we come together on the belief that, with neither land base nor enrollment card -- like so many urban Indians in the North, and so many displaced and undocumented migrants coming from the South --, we have the right to "right" ourselves; that is, to attempt to put la Xicana Indigena back into balance with her origins and work vigorously from that site toward the decolonization, economic independence and cultural integrity of our communities.17 Here we see a humble, yet strong, statement of Indigenous identity in the face of, and in response to, much resistance and criticism. It was clearly written in response to objections to Xicano/a claims to Indigeneity. Primary objections to contemporary Xicano/a claims to Indigeneity are based on the following assumptions, realities and mindsets: 1) that borders represent actual physical and cultural divisions, 2) that we are legally and culturally bound within these national borders, 3) that federal markers for Indigenous recognition/inclusion are sufficient, 4) that the notion that land and Indigeneity are inseparable, and 5) that political leverage in land sovereignty claims are threatened by inclusion of non-reservation, ethnic or DNA Indians.18 This is not an 16 Xicana Indigenous Woman’s Network. 17 Cherríe Moraga and C. H. Rodríguez, “Mission Statement,” La RED Xicana Indígena, accessed April 16, 2016, http://www.freewebs.com/laredxicanaindigena/. 18 Duane Champagne, Karen Jo Torjesen, and Susan Steiner, eds., Indigenous Peoples and the Modern State (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2005); Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 13 exhaustive list, but covers the main objections/contributions in the Indigenous authenticity debate.19 In contrast with Native people of the United States, and First Nations people of Canada, who have long been measured and counted through government programs of inclusion and exclusion20 that expand and contract according to colonial desire,21 until quite recently Mexico had no method for, or interest in, tracking “Indians” and therefore no legal definition for them.22 Though there has been tracking and identification since 1983 when the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI)23 was founded in response to Zapatista pressure to recognize Indigenous peoples in Mexico, there is a distinct history and process in Mexico that has resulted in less regulation and also less recognition of Indigenous people in Mexico in comparison with the USA and Canada. According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “The Azteca Del Norte... compose the largest single tribe or nation of anishinaabeg (Indians) found in the United States today.”24 Even if we accept this as fact, we must still address the troubled history of mestizo/a identity construction as part of the colonial process and project of de-Indianization/assimilation 19 Batalla, México Profundo; Hugo De Burgos, “Contemporary Transformations of Indigenous Medicine and Ethnic Identity,” Anthropologica 56, no. 2 (2014): 402; Vivian Delgado, You’re Not Indian, You’re Mexican (Broomfield, CO: Turtle Island Press, 2007); Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkely: University of California Press, 2003); Dylan A. T. Miner, Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2014); TallBear, Native American DNA. 20 M. Bianet Castellanos, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, and Arturo J. Aldama, eds., Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 118; Garroutte, Real Indians; TallBear, Native American DNA, 56–57. 21 Inclusion/exclusion fluctuates depending on whether how it serves government interests to have more or less officially recognized Indians - for example government desires fewer Indians when it comes to tax breaks and healthcare vs. desiring more Indians in order to exclude them from civil, human, and land rights. 22 Batalla, México Profundo, 19. 23 Agrifood and Fisheries Information Service, “Creación del INEGI,” Gobierno de Mexico, February 20, 2020, https://www.gob.mx/siap/articulos/creacion-del-inegi. 24 Jack D. Forbes, Aztecas Del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1973), 23. 14 and erasure of Indigenous people.25 Arguably, a constructed category, the mestizo/a (mixed Spanish and Indigenous), is the site of much debate and denial of Indigenous ancestry. As Dylan Miner puts it in his book Creating Aztlán, Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island, While mestiza consciousness has considerable merit, performing an undeniable role during the 1990s, it also serves to disenfranchise Xicanos as an indigenous people. . . Xicano history must be understood as an indigenous history.26 Here Miner is respectfully referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic and revolutionary text, Borderlands / La Frontera, The New Mestiza, where she embraces the terms mestizo/a and mestizaje within her borderland consciousness as a liminal and generative space of hybridity, hybridity of the colonizer and the colonized within one body/psyche. Miner is responding to the continued use of mestiza as a site of Indigenous erasure even if it is superimposed by a partial Indigenous identity. However, Anzaldúa clearly asserts in Borderlands that “my identity is grounded in the Indian woman's history of resistance.”27 I see Miner’s rejection of the terms not as rejecting liminal consciousness, but rather the cognitive dissonance created by the Mexican colonial project that these terms represent.28 This leads to the question of whether a body is colonizer or colonized - especially as whitening occurs over generations - often as a result of pressure to pass in order to survive. Are people who present as racially obvious (Indigenous) more Indigenous than white passing/presenting bodies 25 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 33; Batalla, México Profundo, 37; Castellanos, Nájera, and Aldama, Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas, 279, 318; Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, 20th Anniversary ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 9, 13; Miner, Creating Aztlán, 7. 26 Miner, Creating Aztlán, 7. 27 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 43. 28 Miner's argument also supports a similar Métis identity stand in the face of current community and legal challenges. 15 in the same position? And are white passing/presenting individuals who have remained culturally embedded more authentic than racially obvious ones who have not? The complications are myriad, and any conclusions must take them into account rather than relying exclusively on superficial lines drawn by the demands of power relations. Narrow definitions often exclude those who ought to be included and vice versa - broad ones often include those who really ought not be included. When we dig into these complexities / juxtapositions the question of racial and cultural identity begins to dissolve and becomes replaced with more universal considerations of guilt and innocence and the fact that neither ought to burden anyone without the other. Human beings have the capacity for both guilt and innocence. What is the benefit of remaining innocent? What is the cost? The movement toward honest reclamation of indigeneity is not an isolated phenomenon existing only for Xicano/a people. In Returns, James Clifford refers to an essay by Rosalva Aido Hernandez Castillo in which she describes the reclamation of Mam Mayan-ness by local people who, for generations, had lived within a mestizo/a individual and community identity. Clifford writes: Erosion of the Mam language has been severe, and until recently individuals tended to blend into the Spanish-speaking “mestizo” populace, their social and cultural assimilation seemingly assured. A finer grained ethnographic lens reveals a history of negotiated adaptation with communal distinction sustained through changing political climates.29 In order to understand this further one might consider the concept of ancestral or blood memory and its contestation. Many Indigenous people claim that such cultural realities as Indigenous 29 James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 36. 16 medicine, are “an “essence” indelibly written in their biology… an ancestral gift.”30 Take for example the Indigenous practice and discipline of dualism, as expressed by Donald Fixico in The American Indian Mind in a Linear World. According to him, dualism is a profound and fundamental need and commitment for many Indigenous people. For Fixico, this need, and commitment comes from a lifetime of cultural immersion within an Indigenous community. However, the idea that one must be a full blood Indian and have been raised within a tribal community to embody dualism is complicated by the work of Ann Waters. As she calls it in her essay, Language Matters — A Metaphysic of NonDiscreet NonBinary Dualism, “ontological memory,”31 that has been obscured since European domination, but remains intact in the linguistic rubble of post-colonial Indigeneity, may not be limited to those who have been raised tribally nor to those who have learned and speak their Indigenous language. By non-discrete non-binary holistic dualism, she means something very close to, if not the same as, what Fixico refers to as the circular thinking of the Indian mind. She surmises from this that Indigenous bodies/minds inherit the ability, in fact the necessity, for non-discrete non-binary holistic dualistic thinking despite blood quantum and/or cultural immersion. She calls this ontological memory that I associate here with blood memory / ancestral memory. Waters also refers to the finding that “[m]any Indigenous gender categories are ontologically without fixed boundaries” across North America and are related to linguistic realities.32 This distinction is held linguistically in Indigenous languages and, as Waters found, in the ontological memory that survives today despite colonial genocide. 30 De Burgos, “Contemporary Transformations of Indigenous Medicine and Ethnic Identity,” 404. 31 Waters, American Indian Thought, 101. 32 Waters, 107. 17 That American Indians have, against incredible odds, maintained this different ontology is a marvel and a wonder. The presence of this ontological memory suggests that a vital malleability and animation of gender worldview may be preferred by Indigenous people over a categorically fixed, sharply bifurcated, limiting worldview. If this is the case, we can expect to encounter a general shift in disciplines that engage Indigenist thought and ontology; they will need to move toward comprehending a continuum of binary, nondiscrete, dual metaphysical systems.33 For migrant populations who, some over many generations, have left their Indigenous homelands and languages, ontological/blood memory holds promise for cultural restoration and revitalization even from a distance. Furthermore, according to Waters, holistic dualism is an ontological reality shared by many Indigenous nations hemispherically. Blood memory, including ontological memory, is in turn contested by those committed exclusively to socio-political measures of Indigeneity. If we recall the definition of syncretism as simply “the combination of different systems of philosophies, religions, or worldviews”34 we find ourselves at a quite paralyzing impasse in which we feel called by ancestral memory and reminded of our Indigeneity through syncretic layers of coded meaning while also feeling the pressure of voices that remain committed to perpetuating colonial amnesia. The question remains: How do displaced, dispossessed, and dislocated, people with Indigenous ancestry participate authentically in personal, as well as collective, cultural restoration without misappropriating? In the following section, I tease out deeper principles to support re-Indigenizing women in their search for authenticity and belonging. 33 Waters, 107. 34 Roberto Cintli Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 205. 18 De-Indianization, Syncretism, and Neo-Re-Indigenization In order to grapple with cultural restoration or re-Indigenization, we must first understand de-Indianization, or the loss of Indigenous identity. In his book México Profundo, Reclaiming a Civilization, Guillermo Bonafil Batalla asserts “[g]enetic continuity and the fact that the immense majority of us have somatic traits that loudly proclaim Our Indian [sic] heritage does not in itself prove the continuity of Mesoamerican civilization. Culture is not inherited like the color of the skin or the shape of the nose.”35 Batalla continues on to argue that reclamation of Indigeneity is possible, but in his opinion, it is not as straightforward as genetic, blood, or birthright. Batalla argues that the terms mestizo/a and mestizaje are not what they appear. Rather than seeing them as an expression of simple racial mixture, or completed assimilation, he claims that in fact the construction of the category is in fact a form of ethnocide. He calls the process of convincing large portions of the Mexican people that they are mestizos, not Indians, de-indianization. Dark skinned Indigenous people are allowed entrance into this category, but only by renouncing their right to be “Indian” at least at face-value. Though the Zapatista movement in the late 1900s resulted in Indigenous communities and practices gaining recognition,36 this is a relatively new national consciousness for Mexico. This renunciation must be complete even while a person maintains Indigenous lifeways.37 This bizarre defunct by decree mentality, at the individual level, creates the cognitive dissonance or double consciousness Anzaldúa refers to as Borderland consciousness, the same one described so 35 Batalla, México Profundo, 15. 36 Lynn Stephen, “The Zapatista Opening: The Movement for Indigenous Autonomy and State Discourses on Indigenous Rights in Mexico, 1970 −1996,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1997): 2–41, https://doi.org/10.1525/jlca.1997.2.2.2. 37 Batalla, México Profundo, 17. 19 aptly by W.E.B. Du Bois in his classic psychological work, The Souls of Black Folk. In it he describes the experience of colonized peoples looking at themselves through the eyes of the colonizer and the gradual erasure of their actual experience. He sees it as a kind of multiple personality disorder, but also as a resource. In fact, maintaining multiple psychic realities is a literal survival skill, whether of one’s physical or psychic life, when under the kind of colonial control mechanism, I am describing here. Furthermore, under the colonial medical model, we medicate instead of healing the trauma at root. I will argue further on that only a resurgence of Indigenous healing ceremony can resolve this cognitive dissonance, or maybe more specifically, healing trauma and ceremonial resurgence form a duality, a polarity. When this polarity of traversed we move toward true liberation. For the moment, and in order to further my point, I want to hold both these realities of mestiza “double” consciousness, mestiza as generative liminality and mestiza as Indigenous erasure,38 in mind as I proceed. Given the dangerous negotiations required of Indigenous people during colonial occupation, it is understandable that many agreed, at least on the surface, to go along with this program of erasure. As Cherrie Moraga puts it, in A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: “[P]eople attempt to identify themselves through and in spite of a bitter Colonial history of government-imposed definitions of what is ‘Indian.’”39 Batalla writes, One of the ways of avoiding the problem of Mexico's Indian identity has been to ideologically convert one sector of the national population into the repository of the remnants that, in spite of everything, admittedly remain from the foreign past. “The Indians,” generically labeled, thus resolved the absurdity of a civilization declared defunct by decree. What remains of all that was? Only this: the Indians.40 38 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), xiii-xiv. 39 Cherríe L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010 (Durham: University Press Books, 2011), 31. 40 Batalla, México Profundo, 19. 20 Here the “Indian” becomes a placeholder for a nostalgic and lost past that is at once reified and deplored.41 It also guarantees the loss of Indigenous people’s “right to make decisions related to. . . natural resources, social organization, knowledge, symbolic systems, motivations, and so on.”42 Instead the Indian, with one cognitive sweep, becomes a mestizo and forever loses rights to sovereignty. "De-indianization has been achieved when, ideologically, the population stops considering itself Indian, even though the lifeway may continue much as before. Such communities are now Indian [sic] without knowing they are Indian [sic].”43 Again, this is the classic definition of cognitive dissonance and, I argue, the result of the trauma of colonization. Batalla makes a point of contrasting the colonial project with the kind of subjugation practiced by pre-contact Mexica peoples: "A common civilization makes possible the subjugation of a people without implying the negation or illegitimacy of their culture.”44 Here Batalla argues that making Indian culture illegitimate is what sets the Spanish colonial project apart from practices of “a common civilization.” De-indianization, for the sake of material exploitation of Indigenous lands,45 was of course made possible through the coercive implementation of costs for non-compliance in renouncing one’s culture. Apart from threat of outright massacres and individual death, there were tribute, and the virtual slavery of encomiendos, staged as clear, and close, consequences for any, and all, visible resistance.46 This “history of negotiated adaptation” has become a psychic pattern that operates 41 De Burgos, “Contemporary Transformations of Indigenous Medicine and Ethnic Identity,” 402. 42 Batalla, México Profundo, 18. 43 Batalla, 46. 44 Batalla, 75. 45 Batalla, 88. 46 Batalla, 89. 21 within and between diasporic Mexican and Mexican American / Xicano/a people undermining the opportunity to re-Indigenze themselves and their communities.47 Moraga asserts: ...a country built on the shaky ground of a duplicitous and strategic amnesia, resultant of a five-hundred-year history of invasion, beginning with the first European colonizer-settlers and their wholesale theft of native lands. The historical trauma of invasion is carried by both victim and perpetrator, while further acts of invasion are daily perpetrated to throw more displaced bodies between remembering and ourselves.48 This is not to say that the remnants are not there if we are willing to undo the amnesia. In Our Sacred Maiz is Our Mother, Roberto Rodriguez quotes Inés Avila’s Grandpa Raymond as saying, “The ceremonies, the language, the songs, the dances are not lost. We are lost; they are where they have always been, just waiting to be [re]called.”49 How is this possible if ancestral blood memory is not by itself sufficient for remembering Indigenous reality? Many authors consider decoding syncretic cultural systems to be one method. “Syncretism is the combination of different systems of philosophies, religions, or worldviews.”50 Consider the conscious acts of the citizens of Tenochtitlan, the famous Aztec city conquered by Cortéz and his Indigenous allies: In a famous proclamation… Cuauhtémoc, the last ruler of the Aztec Empire, put forth a desperate plan to preserve what he could of his people’s spiritual and cultural beliefs. He told them to destroy their ballcourts, their places of learning, their sacred temples, and their power places and to take everything that they considered a treasure, everything that was precious and important to them, and place it deep within their hearts…until the time when their prophecies foretold that their sun would rise again.51 47 Clifford, Returns, 36. 48 Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, 27. 49 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother, 53. 50 Rodríguez, 205. 51 Inés Hernández-Avila, ed., Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2005), 297–98. 22 They did this through teaching the most sacred knowledge to their children as well as coding meaning into the overlaid culture of the colonizer.52 Rodriguez argues that a considerable amount of traditional Indigenous knowledge was maintained and shared through “oral traditions, agricultural practices... and seasonal ceremonies of Indigenous peoples. It was also evident in the preparation and consumption of food and medicines, in song, danza, music, corridos (ballads) murals, art, dichos (sayings), theater, myths, and stories.”53 According to Batalla, Thus, the so-called syncretism may be understood not as an indiscriminate amalgam of elements from different backgrounds, a sort of devotional collage, but, rather, as the product of a complex process of appropriation. Diverse Indian societies have taken the signs, symbols, and practices of the imposed religion and made them their own by reorganizing and reinterpreting them within the core of their own religious beliefs. Thus, although the colonial situation required the acceptance of these ideas, they have been subordinated within a framework that is not Christian and that has its origins in Mesoamerican religion.54 The existence of such intricate layering of appropriations is echoed by Patrisia Gonzales in Red Medicine, “In writing of her Yaqui grandmother, Polita inverts a common paradigm by arguing that Indigenous peoples colonized the colonizer by Indigenizing Catholicism.”55 Thus, it is arguable that Mexican Catholicism remains, as do many other cultural remnants, a repository of Indigenous knowledge waiting to be de-coded. Ana Castillo, and others,56 note the longtime missing voices of Indigenous women speaking for themselves: Since Anthropology is traditionally based on the objectification of its subjects, I found at best ethnographic data that ultimately did not bring me closer to understanding how the Mexic Amerindian woman truly perceived herself. 52 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother, 20, 205. 53 Rodríguez, 133. 54 Batalla, México Profundo, 136. 55 Patrisia Gonzales, Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), 214. 56 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 45; Batalla, México Profundo, 157. 23 Furthermore, to my mind, the Mexic Amerindian woman had been gagged for hundreds of years... the censorship that results from double sexism, being female and indigenous.57 Cherrie Moraga writes of the reversal of this reality and the emergence of mesoamerican Indigenous women’s voices: In recent years, indigenous women throughout the world have begun to find their voice through the United Nations permanent Forum on indigenous issues as well as through hemispheric gatherings… Xicanas, although often displaced from our native Mexican herencia by many generations, have been brought to the table of these encuentros. For us, the indigenous movement in América remains the one viable politic for ensuring a radical oppositional consciousness and practice against the genocidal policies of the United States and México.58 Clearly one of the primary tasks for Xicana women is to reclaim what has been stolen, erased, and repressed in us, and in our families and communities. According to voices in the recent anthology, Fleshing the Spirit, Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives, we need to ‘heal the colonial-modern, patriarchal separation between flesh and spirit’59 and insist on the inclusion of spiritual activism (spiritual self-reflection combined with a social justice emphasis) in academic discourse. In the eighties, we rose above our disenchantment with “male-dominated Latino politics, [and] began to develop our own theories of oppression. Compounding our social dilemmas related to privilege and race were gender and sexuality.”60 Castillo offers the term “Mexic Amerindian”61 as an alternative to X/Chicana and to clear even more space for the voice of Indigenous mesoamerican women. 57 Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 6–7. 58 Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, 30–31. 59 Elisa Facio and Irene Lara, eds., Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 11. 60 Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 9. 61 Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 9. 24 Here, I choose Xicana with an X resonant with our Mexic ancestors and Indígena, maintaining the Spanish as a way of speaking back to the colonizer, while acknowledging positionality within the Mesoamerican diaspora. Anzaldúa writes of the Xicana warrior waiting for her time of voice, “She waits till the waters are not so turbulent and the mountains not so slippery with sleep. Battered and bruised she waits, her bruises throwing her back upon herself and the rhythmic pulse of the feminine.”62 And when the time is right for restorying the remnants - her first step is to take inventory... She puts history through a sieve, windows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of… This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths… She strengthens her tolerance (and intolerance) for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct.63 From the literature surveyed thus far, I want to tease out a set of principles that promise to begin the unraveling of the problem of amnesia that lives beneath the dissonance I have laid out in this section. I would like to further outline a vision of reclamation, of beginning and of continuing, the decolonial work of de-coding texts of land and body and soul. As a result, I assert that Xicana Indígena identity is inseparable from these principles. I call them the Xicana Indígena 10 (XIIO). For the first principle, I begin with Anzaldúa’s idea that “The Physical world is not the only reality”64 combined with the almost ubiquitous idea that our methodologies are rooted in listening to mind-body-spirit.65 This forms an ontological ground to keep us steady as we reach beyond the 62 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 45. 63 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 104. 64 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 29. 65 Melissa K. Nelson, Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2008), 67, 154–57; Facio and Lara, Fleshing the Spirit, 39; Sylvia Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 2 (2009): 41-43, https://doi.org/10.2979/fsr.2009.25.2.25; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 4. 25 materialist story pervading current dominant culture. I continue with the second principle - Cherrie Moraga’s idea of “remembering earth” as mother ground in continual reciprocity.66 This earth as literal mother ground further expands on the ontological ground of mind-body-spirit to include earth; mind-body-spirit-earth. Patricia Gonzales refers to the cosmologic of bodyspiritplacetime67 and beyond that becomes the third principle. The fourth principle is the commitment to question tradition, to define and to invent ourselves.68 This principle is far from carte blanche permission, but rather the responsibility to “dare to go out” and then “return to speak to those waiting to recognize themselves.”69 We do this in reciprocity and with permission. Here Clarissa Pinkola Estes reminds us of our obligation to the greater community. Again, we turn to Gloria Anzaldúa in the fifth principle of honoring the “Aztec female rights of mourning” of defiance and protest.70 This call to the iterations of death itself, the coming apart and coming back together, the remnant restorying, the mourning, the defiance and the protest, remind us of our mortality and in relation to it, our immortality, our life. We cannot overlook death, and mourning, we must walk with it. We honor the duality, equality, and balance between female and male, and protest the demotion and denigration of the feminine.71 66 Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, 31–32. 67 Gonzales, Red Medicine, xix, 16, 226. 68 Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 11; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 51. 69 Renée De la Torre Castellanos and Cristina Gutierrez Zuñiga, “El Temazcal: Un Ritual Pre-Hispánico Transculturalizado Por Redes Alternativas Espirituales,” Ciencias Sociales y Religión/Ciências Sociais e Religião 18, no. 24 (2016): xvii, https://doi.org/10.22456/1982-2650.63841. 70 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 43. 71 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 43; Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality,” 35–41; Donald Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2013), 49, Kindle; Waters, American Indian Thought, 97-112. 26 From here we move onto the sixth principle of duality, equality, and balance between female and male (and all other earthly polarities), to protest the demotion and denigration of the feminine.72 The seventh principle calls us to trust our ancestors by looking and listening to the signs and symbols they have left for us to find in order to affirm our Indigenous identity. This includes: stories, food, body, land, Indigenous language, medicine, emotions, place, architecture, religion, dances, ceremonies.73 The eighth principle instructs us to develop in ourselves a tolerance for ambiguity, plurality and transformation.74 As we approach our re-membered selves, we must resist reacting, resist succumbing to our triggers and, instead, process them as parts of the whole that aid in our growth that leads to the ninth principle: “Nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns ambivalence into something else.75 Finally I consider Anna Castillo’s comment carefully as I contemplate the tenth principle in this list. She writes, “I propose that by using mother as our model to guide us in place of an abstract, material, distant father God... it may be possible to have a vision of a truly nurturing Society.”76 Cherrie Moraga speaks in a similar vein: Indigenism (north and south) gives shape to the values with which I raise my children; it informs my feminism, my sense of lugar on this planet in relation to its creatures, minerals, and plant life. Ideally, it is a philosophy, not of a rigid separatism but of cultural autonomy and communitarian reciprocity in the twenty-first century.77 72 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 43; Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality,” 35–41; Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World, 49; Waters, American Indian Thought, 97-112. 73 De Burgos, “Contemporary Transformations of Indigenous Medicine and Ethnic Identity,” 201; Miner, Creating Aztlán, 194; Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother, 12. 74 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 104. 75 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 101; Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World, 49; Waters, American Indian Thought, 97-112. 76 Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 14. 77 Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, 31. 27 And out of this, the Xicana Indígena maternal, I generate the tenth principle: Mother is the central image, the reality that informs our creation of the new Xicana Indígena that is rooted in the remnants left by our Indian mothers. Here are all ten principles in list form: Xicana Indigena 10 1. “[T]he physical world is not the only reality.” Our methodologies are rooted in listening to mind-body-spirit. 2. We are committed to “remembering earth” as mother ground. 3. We honor our ancestral cosmologic of bodyspiritplacetime. 4. We question tradition and invent ourselves in reciprocity and with permission. 5. We honor the “Aztec female rights of mourning” of defiance and protest. 6. We honor duality, equality, and balance in particular between female and male, and protest the demotion and denigration of the feminine. 7. We trust our ancestors by looking and listening to the signs and symbols they have left for us to find in order to affirm our Indigenous identity. This includes: stories, food, body, land, Indigenous language, medicine, emotions, place, architecture, religion, dances, ceremonies. 8. We develop in ourselves a tolerance for ambiguity, plurality and transformation. 9. “Nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. 10. Mother is the central image, the reality that informs our creation of the new Xicana Indígena that is rooted in the remnants left by our Indian mothers. I leave this list, the Xicana Indigena 10 (XI10) open to changing and evolving as my re-search ceremony continues, offer it as a guide to others, a start, and commit to honoring it as I proceed. Hemispheric Indigeneity, Authenticity, Appropriation As we see from the last section, we cannot rely on any single Indigenous identity marker to rely on exclusively in personal and/or collective Indigenous cultural restoration. In this section I explore issues of authenticity and appropriation as a way of considering ethical and respectful 28 cultural restoration while also gently challenging some of the current assumptions about what makes a “real” Indigenous person. According to Andrea Smith the cornerstone violations of Indigenous women within the United States colonial project are boarding school abuse, rape of land, reproductive violence, and spiritual appropriation.78 As consciousness of Indigeneity rises and Indigenous people continue to search for an authentic path to their Indigenous selves, appropriation becomes an important topic to address. Contemporary discourse on cultural appropriation turns on many different issues from authorized use of restricted religious symbols and ceremonies to commodification of Indigenous design and culture, without consultation, for ultimate Settler gain. Indigenous people are calling for transparency and accountability. Some cases of cultural theft are straightforward and clear. However, things become complicated quickly within Indigenous communities when accusations of appropriation begin to surface. In her article, Inappropriation, Samia Madwar tackles some of the consequences of appropriation policing for Indigenous people, their communities and the evolution of living culture. She reviews the work of award-winning solo Inuit Throat Singer, Tanya Tagaq who was accused of misappropriation of Inuit culture by Inuit elders and community. Madwar writes of Tagaq, “To her critics… she’d adulterated an artform that… is deeply rooted in Inuit culture. To Tagaq, what she’s doing is clearly not misappropriation: she is Inuk, and so her music is still Inuit art.”79 78 Andrea Smith, “Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence,” Wicazo Sa Review 20, no. 1 (2005): 97–111. 79 Samira Madwar, “Inappropriation,” Up Here Publishing, June 2014, https://www.uphere.ca/articles/inappropriation. 29 It is commonly held that cultural appropriation from a dominating group to a dominated group is called assimilation and appropriation from a dominated group to a dominating group is cultural exploitation when there is no permission or compensation.80 This definition limits the possibility of appropriation to socio-political measures of power. It sidesteps the possibility of misappropriating one’s own culture, as Tagaq was accused of, since power imbalance would ostensibly not be present within and across Indigenous communities and nations. The UN declaration on Rights of Indigenous people states Indigenous peoples have the right to their cultural inheritances, to use them according to their own criteria,81 but of course these still may be critiqued within Indigenous communities and beyond. Furthermore, it also glosses over the complex dynamics of oppressor and oppressed and the reality that everyone operates in intersectional spheres of agency relative to context and positionality in the world in general and in the particular place and moment. As a result, it seems improbable that there are no unequal power relationships within indigenous communities and therefore it would be possible to misappropriate one’s own culture. Furthermore, it does not take into consideration the issue of diaspora and those living in cultural exile as a result. For example, in 2019 Zapotec/Ch’orti’ academic Jessica Hernandez wrote an article titled How the Chican@ Discourse Silences Indigenous Peoples from Mexico + Central Americans that sparked a nascent debate into full public discourse. Her argument goes something like this: The United Nations Statement on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples declares that one’s Indigenous identity (or lack thereof) depends not on who you claim, but on who claims you – therefore X/Chicano/a people who do not know where they are from, who are not claimed by a particular 80 Bruce H. Ziff and Pratima V. Rao, eds., Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 109–12. 81 United Nations, “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” September 13, 2007, 11, http://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf. 30 tribal group, are not Indigenous but rather of Indigenous ancestry.82 An article confirming/defending her position, Thoughts on Indigeneity, from the Perspective of an Indigenous Person followed soon after. The author, Romario Bautista writes: I do have a huge problem when folks who are “reclaiming” their roots begin to identify themselves as an indigenous person. Umm, NO, you absolutely do not get to do that and let me tell you why. The Chicanx “identity” has taught all “Mexican” folks that they are “indigenous” and they need to “decolonize” themselves from the European identity. Like I said, y’all are more than welcome to learn about your roots and where you come from. But if you have no family history of what tribe you come from and begin associating yourself with the “Mexica/Aztec” identity and begin to claim “Aztlan” and start giving yourself a “Mexica/indigenous” name, you need to take a step back and check yourself.83 In essence, both Hernandez and Bautista chastise Mexican American’s who claim Indigeneity and prefer they instead be considered of Indigenous ancestry. These assertions did not go unchallenged. There was at least one response. Miguel Quimichipilli Bravo — 5th generation Chicano-P'urhepecha, coming from outside academia, writes, But these Native critics with their more competent Indigenous self awareness are pushing this harmful concept that there’s a difference between an Indigenous Person and a Person of Indigenous Descent. It basically denies those of us Indigenous Mexicans healing and recovering ourselves of our Indigenous identity. Some of these critics apparently have some status in academia so I guess they feel their word has more legitimacy.84 He goes on to argue that Hernandez and Bautista’s articles are “problematic because those who are not yet confident in their Indigenous selves might actually believe these critics’ 82 Jessica Hernandez, “How the Chican@ Discourse Silences Indigenous Peoples from Mexico + Central Americans,” Medium, February 18, 2019, https://medium.com/@jessicabhdz/how-the-chican-discourse-silences-indigenous-peoples-from-mexico-central-americans-b72b5897ad26. 83 Romario Bautista, “Thoughts on Indigeneity, from the Perspective of an Indigenous Person,” Dichos de un bicho, February 24, 2019, https://dichosdeunbicho.com/my-thoughts-on-indigeneity-as-an-indigenous-person/. 84 Miquel Bravo Quimichipilli, “Chicanx, Indigeneity, and Mocosxs,” Sixth Sun Ridaz, February 28, 2019, https://sixthsunridaz.com/chicanx-indigeneity-and-mocosxs/. 31 condescending commands and flawed logic.” He worries for the young ones who are just “finding confidence and stability” in being Indigenous. Commenter MadXicano furthered this position, Some...stake a claim by dissing/downing the previous group. Maybe that's part of our colonial trauma; some decolonization work to do. I also, proudly remember MEChA conferences when I was a kid (late 80's) always had a panel/workshop on CENTRAL AMERICA, the Sandinistas, FMLN solidarity and the Nueva Canción movement, and in the 90's Central Americans were a part of MEChA's, UCLA Hunger Strike, and Zapatista and many other youth movements. That's just me: I choose to remember the relationships and bridges built. Let's continue to discuss, and also BUILD. Work is medicine.85 It is ironic that the Xicano/a community that pushed back on this logic to claim their Indigenous identity, then went on to mount a major campaign to ban non-Indigenous midwives from teaching rebozo techniques.86 I am not arguing against this move. I am pointing out the complexity of Indigenous identity claims. In this case, individuals who themselves have tenuous claim to Indigenous identity in turn challenge others in the same manner and tone they have been challenged in the past. MadXicano’s assertion, “Maybe that's part of our colonial trauma; some decolonization work to do” seems apt. What if the way out of the Indigenous identity bind relies on resolving the trauma that keeps us recapitulating colonial harm? This sentiment was in stark contrast by my experience attending a sweat in California with my daughter and another Xicana Indígena woman and her daughter. The sweat leader had not met us before, nor did he know who we were, where we were from, nor our ancestry. Seemingly from nowhere, he addressed us throughout the sweat without mentioning us or speaking directly to us. 85 Quimichipilli. 86 Montse Olmos, “Petition · Removing Rebozo Teachings from Doula Trainings,” Change.org, March 19, 2021, https://www.change.org/p/doula-training-organizations-individual-trainers-removing-rebozo-teachings-from-doula-trainings 32 He spoke of the young girls attending their first sweat and how important it is for the Indians of the south to connect with the sweat in order to reclaim their Indigeneity. He told a story of a young man who asked and asked, who dreamed and dreamed, until he found the one Indigenous relative able to mentor him in the old ways. How he became re-united. This sweat teaching was in balance, it wasn’t carte blanche right to entry, but it also honored what is, as Anzaldúa alluded to, Xicano/a are a tribe in and of themselves. How carefully we grapple with and honor the remnants is what is ultimately most important. In order to delve into this more deeply, I want to consider a hemispheric Indigenous studies approach and how it relates to considerations of ancestral memory, syncretism, appropriation and misappropriation. M. Bianet Castellanos makes a case for hemispheric Indigenous studies in his edition, Comparative Indigeneities of the Americas. He claims that there are historic hemispheric similarities of “colonization, genocide, and racism” that merit side by side consideration. This analysis looks at Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas including Metis, mestizo/as, and Afro-Latino/a identities in a decolonial project of reclaiming Indigeneity. Along with James Clifford, in Returns, Forte pushes this decolonial project even further edging it ever so closely into a universalist/essentialist perspective of Indigeneity. Forte describes one re-Indigenizing woman, Guanaguanare’s, “Indigenous approach to universality”87 that relies on the “delinking Indigenous from Land, especially land as property. In this manner, she reaffirms a classical indigenous, anti-capitalist ethos that land cannot be owned 87 Maximilian C. Forte, ed., Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century (New York : Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), 24. 33 by anyone, while freeing up the indegene to move and travel and leave the land.”88 Here Forte teases out the possibility of delinking from particular land but maintaining general relationality with whatever land one is presently occupying – such that one maintains "Indigenous" or maybe "Indiginist" connection with land as opposed to colonial control and possession of it. The essays in Indigenous Cosmopolitans in general consider cosmopolitan, transnational, and globalized realities. Rather than resist or contest them as de-Indigenized forms, as is common, these works attempt to engage them as characteristically Indigenous creative alternatives that cross boundaries of old-new, insider-outsider, self-other binaries that have come to predominate intellectual as well as popular discourse. Here we are reminded of Anzaldúa’s “Deconstruct. Construct.”89 Like Anzaldúa in many respects, Forte, aware of the certain criticism likely to be discharged against his view from those who remain attached to land-as-property-based claims to Indigeneity, Forte challenges us to “rethink everyone's claim to ownership of land.”90 He continues characterizing Guanaguanare’s perspective: [I]t is not a challenge to land-rootedness or territoriality as much of it as it is a challenge to all parties to subvert the institutionalization, route to not routinization, diffusion, and translation of capitalist proprietary relationships to land. As a philosophical and moral position, it is true that her position does not pay much regard to political practice and political consequences–which is not to say that it is above politics, as much as it is to recognize that she was thinking on a different plane than that on which the particular political contest of the day are situated…. Guanaguanare’s perspective is, arguably, more attuned to the contemporary conditions of dispersion and loss of land that forces many indigenous peoples to become Urban persons… The discourse of territoriality is thus also very problematic, having lost residents with a great many persons who like most other members of the working class, have no birthright to land.91 88 Forte, 24. 89 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 104. 90 Forte, Indigenous Cosmopolitans, 25. 91 Forte, 25. 34 Similarly, in Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, scholar James Clifford pushes the field of Indigenous Studies by modeling a historical position that focuses on lived experience rather than current political discourse relating to land and territory. He is more interested in how Indigenous people interact with the worlds around them, whether rural or urbanized, authentic, and/or respond to stereotypes of who they should be. He writes, ‘Colonized people . . . have always sustained multiple subjectivities for dealing with different occasions of recognition and control’ ... ‘If interpellation provides ways to think about being solicited, convoked, called into social existence by power, articulation keeps us attuned to historical processes of connection and disconnection, making space for performative politics.’92 Rather than seeing the incorporation, or outright use of, mis-appropriated elements and colonial essentialisms of erasure, by Indigenous people, Clifford remains open to possibilities of being Indigenous as practice of radical uncertainty and risk that perform not for the colonial gaze, but for creative living, generative culture. As we see, hemispheric approaches to Indigenous studies bring us face to face with important questions about if/when/how to engage in the commodification of culture - especially when it comes to spiritual practice and ceremony. The potential individual and collective paralysis, from feeling like a fraud, that threatens to perpetuate de-Indianization as generations continue to enact erasure of self and other is daunting. This brings me to an obscure article I discovered titled, Feeling like a Fraud by Peggy McIntosh. In the article, after describing the now familiar phenomenon of the Imposter Syndrome, she asserts that feeling like a fraud is, not surprisingly, much more common among women than men. She describes feeling “apologetic, undeserving, 92 Clifford, Returns, 302–3. 35 anxious, tenuous, out-of-place, misread, phony, uncomfortable, incompetent, dishonest, guilty.”93 However, she does not conclude that women need to buck up and see their worth, nor seek to confirm their validity nor assert their right to speak. Rather, she suggests that “[w]hen we apologize in public, we are at some level making a deeply wise refusal to carry on the pretense of deserving and feeling good about roles in conventional and oppressive hierarchies.”94 Circling back, we are reminded of Clifford’s call for us to embrace uncertainty, the uncertainty that arises when we step outside the established hierarchies that much of the discourse on cultural appropriation inadvertently emulates and perpetuates. Similarly, Forte et al go so far as to assert that we are all (red, yellow, black, and white) Indigenous and Castellano shows us ways in which formerly de-tribalized peoples, including mestizos south of the US-Mexico border, are successfully decolonizing their identities. Of course, this is a contentious assertion and one to be followed with care, if at all. Many argue that this idea, that all people are Indigenous, can be used to subvert important Indigenous rights especially in combination with the idea of delinking Indigeneity from land in favor of a globalist Indigene rather than a discrete local ancestral connection. Forte acknowledges the pitfall: One must acknowledge that the universalist on indigeneity is politically problematic for common indigenous discourses that tie identity and rights to land, and that the deterritorialization of indigeneity undermines the articulation of notions of indigenous difference rooted in land . . . and contrast starkly with indigenous political projects of decolonization and self-determination that aim to regain control over land.95 93 Peggy McIntosh, “Feeling Like a Fraud,” Work in Progress 18 (1985): 1. 94 McIntosh, 2. 95 Forte, Indigenous Cosmopolitans, 26. 36 It certainly calls upon those of us who have been disconnected to take great care and have extreme patience as we assess and follow our path toward the XI10 principle: “We question tradition and invent ourselves in reciprocity and with permission” as well as: “We honor duality, equality, and balance…” Perhaps particular and universal form a duality that we must practice traversing, never allowing one side to dominate the discourse. Furthermore, Xicana Indigena women are, from my perspective, taking the risk to, as McIntosh puts it, “shift from the Moebius strip message ‘We must not let them make us feel like frauds’ to the other Moebius strip message which is contiguous yet apparently opposite: ‘Let us continue to spot fraudulence in the roles we are made to play in the hierarchies of power.’” Andrea Smith warns, On the one hand, it is necessary to engage in oppositional politics to corporate and state power by taking power. Yet if we only engage in the politics of taking power, we will have a tendency to replicate the hierarchical in our movements. So it is important to “make power” by creating those structures within our organizations, movements, and communities that model the world we are trying to create.96 While my Xicana Indígena 10 might also tend to de-link Indigeneity from property, it maintains connection to earth / land (and other relations) while also adding multiple protective dimensions as we move forward in uncertainty, but with intention and care to avoid persistent misappropriation as we re-claim our Indigenous selves and communities. In Part 1, I traced the history and theory of Xicana Indígena Indigenous identity including the various complications that result from displacement, diaspora, cultural decimation - how Mesoamerican colonization created a double, sometimes liminal, consciousness that is both 96 Smith, “Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence,” 187. 37 limiting and potentially liberatory. I have also taken pains to unearth various pathways to restoration via ontological, or blood, memory, syncretic de-coding, implementing generative remnants, and embracing appropriation and sharing within and across Indigenous communities. I have identified and addressed the psychic shame associated with feeling like a fraud when attempting to reconnect with one’s Indigenous cultural identity within the context of cultural appropriation call-outs. As a way of both resisting and honoring such call-outs, I have offered a gathering of remnants in the context of the Xicana Indígena 10 as a guide for Indigenous cultural restoration when community and Eldership is lost or unavailable. In the following section, I segue into an investigation, and discussion, of the trauma associated with losing one’s culture over generations as well as methods, practices and paradigms of trauma healing and expression. Xicana Indígena Trauma & Healing When I was sixteen, and again at nineteen, I became aware of an intense and terrifying trauma I carried in my body. I came to understand it through its frightening emergence when triggered by being in the wilderness, in the haunting dark crevices of open skies and towering evergreens. I was hunted. I was running for my life. I was in terrible danger. How can I be with earth when it causes such pain to arise within me? The day I say my tantruming two-year-old daughter echo the same terror and tremor in her small body was the day I stopped feeling crazy. I thought, “If I passed this to her, then it was passed to me.” I no longer felt like I was born broken. Something had happened, if not to me, to one of my ancestors and it had been passed to me in the same way I had then passed it on to my child. I knew that I needed to heal this wound, this gaping trauma-trace, if I was to know who I truly am. There are plenty of stories, personal and collective that 38 might explain my trauma. For example, my great grandmother was married at fifteen to a forty-five-year-old Spaniard. There is no record of her divorce, or her marrying the one my dad called grandpa. She crossed at Juarez/El Paso alone not long after her marriage. What was she running from, toward? How do we recover? How do we start? This restoration. This return. This responsibility? What if the gap between our colonial recapitulation, where we protect and project, and decolonial liberation, where we re-member and restory, is a trauma-gap? What if our unresolved traumas trap us in patterns of predator and prey? When I was young, and into young adulthood, I grieved the lack of a way, the lack of a method, a process, a medicine that could solve my despair. For many years I gave up, surrendered to brokenness. Until. Until I came to understand that this trauma is not from my lifetime. I have no memories or family stories to give it sense. This trauma holds me back. I return to my research question: How does personal, collective, and ancestral trauma prevent, interrupt, or enhance the restoring and restorying of healing culture? Historical trauma has gotten more and more attention over the time I have been working on this project. Many say restoring culture and ceremony is necessary to heal this, and all, trauma. I wonder, as Mad Xicano asserted above, if some of the bickering over Indigeneity is not built on the trauma of colonization, we all carry rather than on generative restoration. What if instead of railing against each other, we had access to the healing necessary for restoration and reunion, in a good way. At this point, I consider issues of trauma and recovery in order to contextualize my creative/restorative work in future chapters. Many of the Xicana authors cited in the previous 39 section refer to the historical traumas of colonization as the root cause of de-Indianization. It certainly seems from here that trauma-healing is critical in maintaining/restoring Indigenous cultural and ceremonial integrity. I begin by surveying relevant topics in decolonizing trauma theory and then segueing into a look at marginalized Indigenous healing practices. I then offer an alternative interpretation to the Mesoamerican concept of susto and limpia, often correlated simply with trauma and healing respectively.97 A limpia is a form of ceremonial spiritual healing and susto is only one of many conditions addressed by curanderismo. I posit that while the soul loss of susto may correspond to the concept of trauma as currently held in trauma theory, limpias are nothing like contemporary treatments for trauma. Drawing on the recent work of Indigenous scholars Joseph Gone, Eve Tuck and Natalie Clark who critique trauma theory as it has come to be deployed yet another tool to perpetuate colonial domination,98 I further trouble the location of trauma solely in the individual by asserting an oppositional socio-cultural focus. More importantly, I explore the need for a from-the-ground-up re-membering and re-imagining of traditional Indigenous ceremonies that were outlawed, decimated, displaced instead of exclusive, or predominant, appeal to the western medical model of trauma treatment. I then consider contributions of resonant marginal healing practices such as archetypal, community, somatic, ancestral, and performative processes in order to gain an understanding of trauma beyond current constructions of damage-centered trauma narratives. 97 Elena Avila and Joy Parker, Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), 127; Gonzales, Red Medicine, 177. 98 Natalie Clark, “Shock and Awe: Trauma as the New colonial Frontier,” Humanities 5, no. 1 (2016): 1; Laurence J. Kirmayer, Joseph J. Gone, and Joshua Moses, “Rethinking Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (2014): 299-319; Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 409-27. 40 Decolonizing Damage-Centered Trauma Narratives Since the time of Freud an overarching theory of trauma has been slowly mounting. The current definition of trauma is “the effect of an experience which the mind is unable to process, assimilate, and assign to the past. A traumatizing experience, therefore, is defined not by its intrinsic properties but by the mind’s response to it.”99 Traumatic neurosis and the phenomenon of literal dreams and flashbacks have been studied and explored theoretically since Freud by various authors. I want to highlight an anthology entitled, Trauma, Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth. For Caruth, meaning is not created inside the psyche as understood by Freud, but rather the psyche is bombarded repeatedly with the literal historical event.100 In traumatic remembering one 'goes back' to the time and place one left before knowing it, before one attached language and therefore meaning to it. One returns to the time and space one never knew. The temporal delay of traumatic memory urges us to understand freshly the relationship between memory and the events we remember, between memory and history.101 It is through traumatic recall, that we are brought out of the present alone and into the presence of the past in the present. However, Caruth also acknowledges that a simple rejection of Freud's assertion that meaning is internal to the psyche misses an important insight. ....the debate concerning the location of the origins of traumatic experience as inside or outside the psyche may also miss the central Freudian insight, that the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time.102 In the trauma literature based on studies and interviews of people who have survived documented trauma, people do not clearly and linearly recall traumatic events. According to 99 Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 100 Caruth, 5. 101 Caruth, 10. 102 Caruth, 8–9. 41 Laura Brown in Subversive Dialogues: Theory in Feminist Therapy, it is widely agreed that "intrusive recall of trauma exists, side by side and in the same person, with post traumatic amnesias and memory deficits, peritraumatic dissociation, and posttraumatic dissociative phenomena.”103 Cathy Caruth offers a theory in which the communication of the kind of memory that is not traditionally shared (continuous, sensory, and dynamic) is viewed as a resource. In remembering trauma, the victim is taken out of the stable context of present time and space as well as outside of language. Caruth writes, This speaking and listening--a speaking and listening from the site of trauma-- does not rely, I would suggest, on what we simply know of each other, but on what we don't yet know of our own traumatic pasts. In a catastrophic age . . . trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not a simple understanding of the pasts of others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from ourselves.104 Here, Caruth is suggesting that the key to realizing the communication between cultures rests in the sharing of literal traumatic history outside language. This perspective is strongly critiqued by contemporary postcolonial literary theorists for its Eurocentric “exclusive focus on the event-based model of trauma [and] individualistic orientation” as well as a grounding in “Freudian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist deconstruction.”105 103 Laura S. Brown, Subversive Dialogues: Theory in Feminist Therapy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 310–11. 104 Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 11. 105 Irene Visser, “Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects,” Humanities 4, no. 2 (2015): 252–53. 42 According to Visser, contemporary trauma theory is Eurocentric because it is based primarily on Holocaust studies, the study of a relatively contained event that does not persist into the present. Visser notes that DSM is already broadening its definition of trauma to “ include vicarious trauma, such as that incurred by Witnesses or other recipients of traumatic events, as well as removing the emphasis on individual traumatization.”106 However, from where I stand, the understanding of the Holocaust as something that appeared out of nowhere, without a long and difficult history of anti-Semitism, and that ended abruptly with the end of World War II reflects a profound misunderstanding, and perhaps denial, of the long history, and continued (though complicated) reality, of anti-Semitism. Still, I think it is worth considering trauma theory as it has been passed to us with a critical eye for colonial underpinnings and perpetuations and I appreciate Visser’s final recommendation that we include the: . . . investigation of spiritual and religious traditions and ceremonies that are employed in non-Western cultures in therapeutic engagement with traumatic experiences and their aftermath. The respectful engagement with these indigenous modes of address will demand nuanced attention to Western preconceptions and their interference with indigenous, culturally specific ceremonies and ritual.107 A relatively recent emergence on the theoretical trauma scene is the concept of historical trauma. Understood as a kind of ancestral memory of the traumas of past generations, historical, or intergenerational, trauma has become a common part of the rhetoric of colonized peoples. Joseph Gone, a member of the Gros Ventre tribal nation, challenges the notion of American Indian Historical Trauma (AI HT) as being ambiguous at best and a result of a “striking dearth of theoretical diligence that has oversimplified and overgeneralized uses of history to account for 106 Visser, 252. 107 Visser, 263. 43 present day realities in [American Indian] communities.”108 He is also critical of trauma theory in general: I strongly object, however, to the essentialist implications that many or most contemporary AI’s as traumatized-––wounded, weakened, disabled––by history, and that many or most AI experiences of colonization––including adjustment to and resilience in the face of these processes––were more uniform than diverse in terms of their past impacts on indigenous communities throughout North America.109 Here Gone is referring directly to key theorists of American Indian Historical Trauma (AIHT) such as Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Eduardo and Bonnie Duran. According to Gone, both Brave Heart and the Duran’s theories are deeply influenced by conceptions of “health status –– especially, mental or behavioral health status as well as the psychiatric category of PTSD –– a recognized form of individual psychopathology that invokes a causal logic in which a psychologically overwhelming event or experience results in subsequent dysfunction or disability as centrally mediated through processes of individual memory.”110 Gone’s work accomplishes two things. First, he exposes the underlying motivation for the adoption of AIHT, namely “to contextualize Indigenous health problems as forms of postcolonial suffering [rather than inherent and essentialized characteristics of American Indian (Indigenous) people themselves], to de-stigmatize Indigenous individuals whose recovery was thwarted by paralyzing self-blame.”111 Second, Gone wants to further circumvent the essentialist impulse toward binary constructions of reality, ie. “simplistic and polarized race relations, in which all previous generations of Euro-Americans are presumed to have been guilty of oppressing AIs, 108 Joseph P. Gone, “Reconsidering American Indian Trauma: Lessons from an Early Gros Ventre War Narrative,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (2014): 402. 109 Gone, 403. 110 Gone, 389. 111 Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses, “Rethinking Historical Trauma,” 300. 44 and in which no previous generations of AIs are presumed to have been guilty of oppressing others throughout their own histories (Gone 2013, 403).”112 Gone also points out that by locating trauma in the individual, and even collective, Indigenous body we do not actually avoid the problem of self-blame / victim-blame that originally motivated the embracing of trauma theory in the first place. In her article, Trauma and Women’s Rights . . . According to whom? Decolonizing the psychological trauma narrative, Emma Tseris speaks of “...the violation that occurs when attempting to understand traumatised women as though they are the subject of a science experiment.”113 According to Dian Million in, Therapeutic Nations, Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights, when troubled realities, individual and/or collective, are understood as the product of colonialism, the result is that Indigenous peoples become conceived as exclusive victims. Million argues that this sense of victimhood fundamentally undermines the Indigenous movement for self-determination and repatriation of land when not combined with an analysis of unequal power distribution between First Nations people and the nation state.114 Gone, along with Hartmann, in American Indian Historical Trauma: Community Perspectives from Two Great Plains Medicine Men, specifically point to the fact that by locating trauma exclusively inside the AI community we “drive [a still] essentialist form of person-centered “diagnosis” with an accompanying emphasis on the need for “healing”” and we thus avoid shining the light on “socio-structural change.”115 112 Gone, “Reconsidering American Indian Trauma,” 403. 113 Emma Tseris, “Trauma and Women’s Rights...According to Whom?: Decolonizing the Psychological Trauma Narrative,” Feminism & Psychology 25, no. 1 (2015): 37, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353514562820. 114 Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014). 115 William E. Hartmann and Joseph P. Gone, “American Indian Historical Trauma: Community Perspectives from Two Great Plains Medicine Men,” American Journal of Community Psychology 54, no. 3-4 (December 2014): 276, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-014-9671-1. 45 Natalie Clark’s conception of decolonizing trauma through the development of wise practices that emerge from “truth telling in an intimate relational space of Indigenous witnessing”116 rather than evidence-based best practices that come out of what she calls a “shock and awe” campaign that “continues to create a colonial subject who requires intervention, support and saving” is also noteworthy.117 Eve, in her article Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities, offers a critical perspective on the assumed theory of change that leads to “damage-centered research and damaging research.” While acknowledging that there is a time and place for exposing the damage that was done, and is being done, to Native peoples during colonialism and neo-colonialism, she argues it is time for this to end as a binary approach. She proposes Desire as a third space outside of damage from which to complicate and interrupt “the closed-circuit of an irreconcilable binary.”118 At this point, I want to briefly consider contributions of medical anthropology to the project of decolonizing trauma. I want to mention Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good’s Culture and Depression, Studies in the Anthropology of Cross Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. The text effectively distinguishes between contributions to, versus constructions of, knowledge and demonstrates that cultural relativity is an important consideration in both the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorder, but also in the construction of the categories of deviance. The text challenges the assumption that neurobiological realities are a priori to affective and socio-cultural ones and posits ritual as a peoples’ expression of their understanding of themselves in relation to world in order that conflicts are confronted within and against limiting 116 Clark, “Shock and Awe,” 3. 117 Clark, 5. 118 Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” 419. 46 cultural realities.119 Similarly, Marvin K. Opler’s Culture and Social Psychiatry, demonstrates that "social and cultural environments produce, and could mitigate, the kinds and amounts of mental illness existing in the world.”120 Culture and Social Psychiatry promotes a bio-social model of understanding mental and emotional deviance, one that integrates anthropology, sociology, psychology and social psychiatry to create behavioral science. Allan Young’s Harmony of Illusions, Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a groundbreaking exposition of the construction, as opposed to discovery, of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) within a broader socio-political and economic context. He asserts, “The disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilize these efforts and resources.121 Tracing the history of memory, Young makes a case for re-thinking the motivations and usefulness employing trauma and PTSD as leverage for economic and political gain. Editors of Critical Trauma Studies, Understanding Violence, Conflict and Memory in Everyday Life, Monica J Casper and Eric Wertheimer, agree and propose an anti-essentialist definition of trauma as including the effect of social realities and cultural understandings upon the production of trauma, by including the effect of race, class, gender etc on both individuals and groups, but 119 Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good, eds., Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 120 Marvin K. Opler, Culture and Social Psychiatry (New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2007), 273. 121 Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 5. 47 also by acknowledging that the concept of trauma itself is a performative construction. One author in the edition, Maurice E. Stevens writes: ‘[t]rauma’ functions as a kind of state servant and ideological apparatus, because it helps to perform the work of shunting affect into ‘appropriate’ and state supporting practices” (31-32). Stephens claims this is necessary because the complexities of social life “constantly challenge the myth of individuality, independence, and isolated ego, to a degree that essentially requires the emergence of a cultural concept that can do the work of recuperating this myth that is collapsing under contemporary realities.122 As we can see, trauma remains a sticky narrative construct, one that relies on eurocentric cultural realities that are hard to extricate. In their article, Decolonizing Liberation, Toward a Transnational Feminist Psychology, Kurtiş, Tuğçe and Glenn Adams agree and argue that: ...a transnational feminist psychology constitutes a response to Fanon’s (1963) call to “work out new concepts” and imagine new models of the person. This response attends to subaltern voices (Spivak, 1988) in marginalized, majority-world settings as a resource for more inclusive, relational, sustainable, and human(e) models of the person. These models have the potential to liberate (feminist) psychology from its neocolonial residues and provide an alternative imagination for the creation of other, better worlds.123 My question is, how might we consider, as urged by Irene Visser, Indigenous healing practices, ceremonies, spirituality, and rituals as a way of seeing through these constructions.124 Indigenous Trauma and Healing Practices and Paradigms In this section I employ a hemispheric perspective with an emphasis on Xicana and mesoamerican trauma-healing practices in order to critically analyze the way restoration of Indigenous birth and mothering practices might be possible after the trauma of colonization, de- 122 Monica J. Casper and Eric Wertheimer, eds. Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict, and Memory in Everyday Life (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 27. 123 Tuğçe Kurtiş and Glenn Adams, “Decolonizing Liberation: Toward a Transnational Feminist Psychology,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3, no. 1 (2015): 405–6. 124 Visser, “Decolonizing Trauma Theory,” 263. 48 Indianization and de-tribalization. Gloria Anzaldúa uses the oral tradition relating to the Aztec goddess of the moon, Coyolxauhqui, to speak about trauma healing. For Anzaldúa, the Coyolxauhqui imperative is a process of recovery after traumas of all kinds. She writes: “Coyolxauhqui imperative”: a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos resulting from woundings, trauma, racism, and other acts of violation… The Coyolxauhqui imperative is the act of calling back those pieces of the self/soul that have been dispersed or lost, the active mourning the losses that haunt us.125 Here we see the necessity of calling back the lost pieces of the soul through active mourning. Susto is the soul loss that results from fright. Essentially, when frightened a person’s soul leaves the body. In my opinion, this fright might loosely be associated with trauma as known within current constructions of trauma theory. This is not uncommon and easily remedied in the context of a balanced healthy person, i.e., a normal Indigenous person who participated in many other regular cultural ceremonies and realities. Coyolxauhqui is the goddess who is torn apart and must put herself back together: The process of falling apart (the Coyolxauhqui process), of being wounded, is a sort of shamanic initiatory dismemberment that gives suffering a spiritual and soulful value. The shaman’s initiatory ordeal includes some type of death or dismemberment during the ecstatic trance journey. Torn apart into basic elements and then reconstructed, the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to help the community. To be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart. The healing occurs in disintegration, in the demotion of the ego as the self’s only authority. By connecting with our wounding, the imaginal journey makes it worthwhile. Healing images brings back the pieces, heal las rajaduras.126 Here Anzaldúa refers to the Shamanic reality of falling apart. We see in this a fundamentally different perspective on the results of trauma than that of the western tradition. Here trauma is viewed as an opportunity for gaining power, not losing it. Espanto is considered an extreme form of susto where it becomes more difficult for the soul to return to the body.127 Although Anzaldúa 125 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 1-2. 126 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 29. 127 Avila and Parker, Woman Who Glows in the Dark, 67–69. 49 equates susto and espanto with the results of trauma, there is a significant difference in treatment/cure for susto/espanto versus PTSD because the Indigenous healing ceremonies are inextricably interconnected with all things within mesoamerican culture including principles of the Xicana Indígena 10. As Hugo De Burgos notes, “In principle, medicine’s primary function is to procure health, alleviate suffering and heal the body and soul. In practice, however, medicine is not always bound to medical concerns. The ethnographic record shows that neither the pragmatic nor the symbolic functions of medicine are restricted to health concerns.”128 Susto and its more serious version espanto, defined as the result from shock that depends on the degree of balance of the individual, is not unlike the current understanding of trauma and resilience. Trauma is understood to come from a single shock or from a compounded series of smaller shocks and a person is weakened with each shock if the equilibrium is not restored, making them more susceptible to future shocks small and large. Elena Avila in Woman Who Glows in the Dark, also refers to the collective nature of the individual body. She writes, “Maestro Seguro used to say, “Life is a danza, danza is life. You dance as the universe dances” … In the danzante the individual is really not who is doing the dancing, it’s the community. You have to let go of your local self, and dance in your quantum self.”129 Patrisia Gonzales refers to the diagnosis of “susto pasado” or extended impact of trauma. She writes, “Mayan pulsadores (pulse readers) of Tenejapa, Chiapas, hold that the deeds of the ancestors can be detected in the blood…”130 Therefore susto may not only be individual, but communal and ancestral despite Joseph Gone’s concerns referenced earlier that the logic of it fails. I would argue that Gone’s concern about Historical Trauma is rooted in a need to perform within colonial binary logic 128 De Burgos, “Contemporary Transformations of Indigenous Medicine and Ethnic Identity,” 401. 129 Avila and Parker, Woman Who Glows in the Dark, 112. 130 Gonzales, Red Medicine, 202. 50 when what is needed to embrace it is the Indigenous logic that resides in the ancestral stories, in the remnants our ancestors carried in their hearts and stitched carefully into the new Catholicism as well as in our Indigenous bodies and psyches. Curanderas refer to the susto of migrants under current conditions. Again, Indigenous people use a completely different paradigm of healing that functions outside the medical model. The simple treatment for susto is a limpia. According to Elena Avila, Curanderismo is also adaptive and evolving under the pressure of colonialism. Colonialism caused such immense susto that its remedy, the limpia, has become one of the most powerful medicines in curanderismo. “Curanderismo... developed, in large part, from the incredible healing that took place from the encounter between Europeans, Indians, Africans, and their offspring.”131 To varying degrees limpias reflect accumulating knowledge. When limpias are enveloped in robust ceremonial practices or emerge out of a spiral of actions based on the interconnectedness of life, they represent Indigenous knowledge that can help other ceremonies to return as people establish a relationship with sacred powers of life through nature, energies, and unseen powers.132 According to Gonzales, the Limpia is a form of Indigenous Knowledge that can assist in the re-membering of other ceremonies. Through the performance of limpias we come to know the interrelationships of energies in the seen and unseen worlds. Although I have mentioned specifically that the Limpia as the healing method for Susto, the reality is that Susto always occurs in the context of the greater cosmo-logic. It relies on many daily cultural realities as well as intermittent ceremonies and rituals. 131 Avila and Parker, Woman Who Glows in the Dark, 28. 132 Gonzales, Red Medicine, 209. 51 As part of this exploration, I consider how cultural restoration interacts at the interface of different cultures and transcultural possibilities. Mario Incayawar et al.’s edited volume, Psychiatrists and Traditional Healers: Unwitting Partners in Global Mental Health is a conversation between established western psychiatry and Indigenous “folk” medicine. Its message is that an interdisciplinary cross-cultural/spiritual approach, that considers issues of socio-political realities and economic sustainability, is needed in order to address the “mental health needs” of the world. It acknowledges that marginalized western alternative paradigms are becoming more and more accepted and viable especially in the area of psychological health. In Border Medicine, a Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo, Brett Hendrickson looks at the phenomenon of mesoamerican folk healing in and around the borderlands, especially its transcultural power to heal across culture. Rather than seeing curanderismo as a superstitious yet “timeless and mysterious Mexican magic,”133 he takes it seriously as a medicinal form. He argues that through New Age appropriations of curanderismo into western culture of the average American living in the borderlands, as well as syncretic integration of Catholic influences, a hybridity exists making it possible for cures to function transculturally. Marginal/Resonant Healing Practices and Paradigms As a way of embracing transcultural possibilities for restoration, I review here a selection of western marginal healing paradigms that function outside the realm of accepted western 133 Brett Hendrickson, Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo (New York: New York University Press, 2014), xii. 52 psychologies and which are resonant with Indigenous healing ceremony. The definition of resonance is: “Intensification and prolongation of sound, especially of a musical tone, produced by sympathetic vibration”134 This sympathetic vibration is what I look for in a healing paradigm or modality I might include in my research methodology. I argue that these modalities resemble, or approximate, an Indigenous paradigm and hold potential for meaningful transcultural sharing and transformation. I explore the creative combination of these alternative healing/protest modalities (as alternatives to cognitive, behaviorist, psychoanalytic, and psychiatric treatment models) as a complement to existing Indigenous Knowledge as well as within a restoring and restorying process of generating a Xicana Indigena research and healing paradigm for re-membering authentic Xicana Indigenous futures. However, from personal exploration and experience, I have come across paradigms that promise to contribute to the re-Indigenization of Xicana Indígena girls, women and mothers. These will include archetypal, somatic, community, ancestral and performative practices, namely James Hillman’s Archetypal psychology, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed (TO), Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE), Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellation processes (FC) and Diane Taylor’s Trauma Driven Performance Protest. Most of these modalities have historically not been included in academic research in mainstream psychology and psychiatry. Where they have, they have often been disparaged. As a result, the following section is based on my own experience participating in and facilitating these healing paradigms before beginning this project. I will explore these theoretically in this section in preparation for using them in my methodology and methods in the following chapters. 134 Wordnik, s.v. “Resonance,” accessed August 12, 2021, https://www.wordnik.com/words/resonance. 53 Gloria Anzaldúa is clear, in her posthumous text, Light in the Dark, that post-Jungian Archetypal psychology has much potential and overlap in resonance with Xicana understanding of healing, not just as a return to the normal, but as part of powerful human transformation and becoming: Little encounters, traumatic happenings–arrebatamientos such as illness, loss, depression, dislocations, accidents, and the like–can function as initiatory ordeals; they trigger imaginal musings of the sort put forth by post-Jungian archetypal or “imaginal psychology,” in which the imagination (the psyches image creating faculty, the power to make fictions or stories) and “active imagining” (an interactive dialogue with imaginal realities) are central when we consciously interact with them.135 Here, Anzaldúa’s reference to post-Jungian archetypal psychology points to the work of James Hillman. Archetypal psychology is characterized by a poetic and imaginal reinterpretation of the language of psychology’s damage centered narrative as well the inclusion of death as a necessary symbolic presence in human life. In fact, Water’s holistic dualism requires that we embrace life and its polar-opposite, death. This duality is characterized in the Mexican Indigenous diety of Ometeotl which I will discuss in more detail in the Indigenous Methodologies section of chapter 2. In The Myth of Analysis, Hillman makes a deep and poetic argument for the re-visioning of the language of psychology.136 In the chapter On Psychological Language he writes, “The language of psychology insults the soul.”137 He calls upon the arts as a metaphor for the kind of language we need in order to save psychology. He writes: …the language of this imaginal realm is nearer to the language of the arts than it is to the language of concepts… Therefore, a language that would be a speech of the lost aspect of the soul may require forms given by the muses. Psychological language may thus have to find its kinship, not with the logics of scientific reason or with the exercises of a behaving will, but with the arts.138 135 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 35–36. 136 James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972). 137 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 121. 138 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 180. 54 The Art of Inquiry, A Depth Psychological perspective, by Joseph Coppin and Elizabeth Nelson, is a call for an archetypal return of the western mind to its roots, to the posture of humility and inclusion of the unseen and imaginal ways of knowing. Coppin and Nelson see the imaginal as a healing balm for a dying culture. This is a call to nothing short of death itself, a death that runs counter the therapy of growth American materialist culture currently stands for. Coppin and Nelson write, "... growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favors the death experience to usher in change."139 According to Hillman, this is what the Gods require of us.140 Death. This is reminiscent of the heart of Hillman’s imaginal principle, “Entering into the Divine archetypal core of the complexes, we can be cured of what ails us by what ails us.”141 The wound is not only the problem. It is the solution as well. Hillman refuses to stop at diagnosis and sees it as an escape route away from real engagement. For Hillman the wound contains the possibility for deepening and becoming in contrast with success and growth that modern day psychology is set on. Thus, archetypal psychology views historical trauma, not as a damage center, but as a location of potential through its repair. It is not just as a location of pain and obstacles to cultural restoration, but the profound location of Hillman’s memoria, the mythic sensibility that honors the what is of the soul, its visual memory, its evolving narrative, its connection to the myriad forms of psyche, its fantasy, dreamtime and imaginal reality. Hillman writes: Perhaps the phenomena of the so-called unconscious which do not fit into our definition of consciousness and therefore have become “pathological” and “un”- 139 Joseph Coppin and Elizabeth Nelson, The Art of Inquiry: A Depth Psychological Perspective, 2nd ed. (Putnam, CT: Spring Publication, 2005), 50. 140 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 174. 141 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 197. 55 conscious are better conceived as twisted paths into memoria, as a way leading back into lost areas of the soul, its imagination, and its history.142 This seems akin to ancestral / blood memory. He continues, “A myth is a description of a process; it is itself a process. It unfolds, moves, and at its different joints leads off into various possibilities, which lead into other mythemes. Its structure is dramatic; myths resolve themselves. The pathology and the cure are there together.”143 Here we see the honoring of dual opposites in the pathology and cure existing together, as in a two spirited person. As dual gender is complementary so are rupture and repair. This is reminiscent also of Waters holistic dualism introduced in Part 1 of this chapter. Waters writes: If concepts of personal autonomy and equality are linguistically interdependent in Indigenist languages, this may help explain something about ambiguous and multi-gendered identities and humanly lived relations. And if this is the case, then gender may be a more kaleidoscopic and protean concept that Euro-American culture has yet to imagine.144 Water’s articulation of Indigenous ontological memory, Hillman’s mythic sensibility and creative use of language as well as his call to make our offering to the Gods through death and its myriad psychic forms is what is necessary in order to maintain, what depth psychologists Helene Lorenz and Mary Watkins describe as creative cultural restoration, and avoid its opposite, normative cultural restoration. Lorenz and Watkins write, In what we are calling “creative restoration,” it is not a restoration to an idealized past – a golden age – that is sought or that is possible. By creative restoration we mean psychologically minded cultural work and culturally-minded psychological work that crafts psyche and world in the image of the deeply desired; that provides a healing context where what has been torn can be re-imagined and sutured in concert with others. Such restorative work is an act of love and care 142 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 175. 143 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 195. 144 Waters, American Indian Thought, 112. 56 that has both human and spiritual dimensions. While it can be suffused with wrong turns and misreadings, sometimes it breaks into moments of grace and communitas that allow desired transformations.145 As we navigate the repair of the “chaotic ruptures in Indigenous ontology.”146 we may also cling to them as points of entry. Another point of entry is the community model of Theater of the Oppressed (TO), as conceived by Augusto Boal, and evolved by many since its inception as a community-based model for personal-political action. TO is used in many Participatory Action Research projects and my current interest in it is grounded in its accessibility, community commitments and potential for transformation of oppressive structures. “One knows how these experiments will begin but not how they will end, because the spectator is freed from his chains, finally acts, and becomes a protagonist. Because they respond to the real needs of a popular audience, they [TO methods] are practised with success and joy.”147 According to Boal, the oppressed are liberated from inaction into action through his de-Bourgoisied theater methods. While not explicitly considered a “healing” model by Boal but rather a political one, its therapeutic merits have been considered by some. The resistance to conceiving TO as a healing process is commendable insofar as it therefore resists damage-centered narratives. Boal did view the political as personal making individual transformation not impossible within his paradigm. However, I feel the disengagement of theorists from TO’s therapeutic value is problematic as 145 Helene Shulman Lorenz and Mary Watkins, “Depth Psychology and Colonialism: Individuation, Seeing-through, and Liberation,” in Psychology at the Threshold, ed. Dennis Patrick Slattery and Lionel Corbett, (Carpinteria, CA: Pacifica Graduate Institute Publications, 2002), 297. 146 Waters, American Indian Thought, 102. 147 Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 120–21. 57 facilitators are often untrained in this aspect, and therefore unable to support, contain, and process much potential and emergent psychic content. In order to articulate my point about TO losing opportunities for individual healing I will consider how Somatic Experiencing (SE) works with the wisdom of the body to repair rupture at the individual level. According to Peter Levine, titration is “the gradual, stepwise process of trauma renegotiation.”148 The idea is that re-traumatization (or at least little to no therapeutic effect) is likely when a trauma is re-experienced, or re-enacted, at the same or similar rate that it was originally imprinted. This has to do with complicated neuro-biological explanations but does seem to function well in practice. Because of this I see SE as being more able to facilitate individual transformation as the rapid pace of TO risks re-traumatizing people if used as a trauma resolution method. I am particularly interested in how SE and TO, might intersect and complement the practice of Family Constellation (FC) and then how these might work with Archetypal psychology and trauma-driven performance protest. FC was developed by Bert Hellinger after he left over thirty years as a priest in Africa and trained as a psychotherapist. I believe that his work reflects a combination/integration of psychotherapy, in particular psychodrama, with his connection with the Indigenous culture he was immersed in while living in Africa. Family Constellation, as developed by Hellinger and viewed through the writings of a mentor, FC facilitator, community scholar, author, and member of the Shoshone Indigenous nation, Francesca Mason Boring, is a form of actual (as opposed to symbolic) lineage repair. It is a place where ancestors are invited 148 Peter A. Levine, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010), 82. 58 and consulted in order to liberate individuals from intergenerational entanglements. This is done through the dynamic employment of the concept of the knowing field - the agency of space surrounding individuals and groups, animals, plants and objects. The FC process is like TO in that it is a community process. However, it differs in that TO only tangentially acknowledges the existence of a knowing field and does not require an understanding of it, or connection to it, for participation. It is recognized in SE though it is not centered. Shortly before Levine formally retired, he acknowledged that his work had essentially emerged from a dream. He wrote that he had felt the need to understand and articulate his dream-time initiation in the language of western science and psychology, that his whole body of work was rooted primarily in non-scientific, and Indigenous, worldviews. Perhaps this is why I find such resonance in SE trauma healing and have trained and worked in the field for over ten years. Similarly, in her book Connecting to our Ancestral Past Mason Boring writes of FC: “When I first encountered Constellation work, I had the sense that I was remembering something that I had already known, something that had almost been forgotten. The feeling I had, watching the facilitator, reminded me of the Bear Dance… When I encountered Constellation work, I could feel my soul and the soul of my grandmother doing the Bear Dance together…”149 This is an apt description of the resonance I refer to in identifying resonant western paradigms and methodologies. Francesca Mason Boring has pushed Family Constellation further to include an even deeper level of lineage repair. She works with a form she calls Nature Constellation that 149 Francesca Mason Boring, Connecting to Our Ancestral Past: Healing through Family Constellations, Ceremony, and Ritual (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012), 11–12. 59 relies not only on the human participants (contemporary and ancestral) and the knowing field, but also plants, animals, earth and elements as relatives.150 There is a tempo difference in these three modalities, SE, TO and FC. TO tends to happen at regular or quickened speed, to circumvent head-only thinking, and it often intervenes at the core site of traumatic experience over and over again without a change of pace. SE, on the other hand, employs a slow titrated motion at the periphery of traumatic memory sites and FC occurs at an even slower tempo where even the slightest gesture is potentially chock full of energy and information. Differing facilitation tempos, I hypothesize, may allow varying access to different trauma sites, ie. faster tempos correspond to community sites of trauma, medium speeds allow access to individual traumatic imprints and slower tempos open us up to the transcendent world of cosmos, earth, and ancestors. I also believe that the experience of the field becomes more evident at slower tempos and that is why it is more apparent in FC and SE than in TO. I will revisit these healing paradigms again when I discuss the methods I employ. In this section, I have focused on decolonizing trauma narratives as well as trauma treatments and therapies to understand how we might proceed in healing the traumas that keep us stuck in shame, repeating colonial patterns, and/or misappropriating the cultures we seek to reclaim and honor. I have surveyed foundational Xicana Indigenous healing practices of the Coyolxauhqui imperative and the limpia as generative foundational processes that re-ignite the process of re-membering Indigenous Knowledge, culture and ceremony. I then explore marginal, yet resonant, healing paradigms as a way of stitching together generative Indigenous ceremonial healing 150 Francesca Mason Boring and Kenneth Edwin Sloan, eds. Returning to Membership in Earth Community: Systemic Constellations with Nature (Pagosa Springs, CO: Stream of Experience Productions, 2013). 60 remnants as well as resonant western healing paradigms. Almost imperceptibly, the domain of this re-search, this quest, is shifting from my personal drive to restore the story of my own lineage to offering space for others to do the same. In the next section, I shift gears a bit and explore the history and context of Indigenous birth and mothering with a focus on the Xicana Indígena experience. I explore modalities for empowering Indigenous women's identities, and the healing of trauma (and/or what is possible as a result of healing trauma) through an exploration of Indigenous birth and mothering practices, their history and current status. I wrap up the historical-theoretical sections and set the stage for the methodological, poietic portion. Xicana Indígena Birth and Mothering My children were born in my home. The first with full care from a midwife and the second pretty much unassisted – without outside/medical intervention. Whether it was from my trauma or some sort of intuition, I was able to avoid the medical system and experience birth in the instinctual dark quiet of home. Midwives will tell you that when a woman’s body becomes fully open, ready to separate from her baby for the first time, she will want to die. She will beg the fates, she will question everything, and prefer death to life. She will feel she cannot go on. This is how the midwife knows, without measure nor intervention, that she is close. Birth is imminent. Death visits. sits on her shoulder. Rebirth. 61 For women, the traumatic experience of colonization through generations is often related to their sexuality, their children and therefore their children’s births. Some argue that medicalized birth reduces Indigenous mother’s agency, ability, and connection since it erases traditional birth practices. These sites of trauma are related to the colonial project – the policies and practices that displace, dispossess and assimilate Indigeneity. Part 3 is a review of some of the relevant literature in the area of Xicana Indígena birth and mothering. I begin with a look at the history and current state of reproductive justice for Indigenous women. Many, perhaps most, Indigenous women living today have lost access to traditional living ceremonial culture through the myriad practices of colonial genocide discussed in pervious sections of this chapter. The resulting lack of access to cultural and community resources reduces an individual's resilience in the face of traumatic experience and in coping with the stress of motherhood. Here resilience relates not only to the ability to withstand trauma, but also to access the cultural tools that allow for it to be a source of power and creative transformation. Of the wisdom that has been lost, much of it is women’s wisdom of birth and mothering. By centering ceremonies relating to birth and mothering in the restoration process I ascribe a protective function to them. I rely on the final point of the Xicana Indígena 10: Mother is the central image, the reality that informs our creation of the new Xicana Indígena that is rooted in the remnants left by our Indian mothers. In this way we move forward slowly and with respect in the project of cultural restoration. 62 Reproductive Justice Traditional living birth wisdom has been lost and almost completely replaced by modern technological medicalized birth practices. While genocidal practices have been occurring in the United States since contact, this shift away from traditional practices, took deepest root in the nineteen fifties when Indian Health Services (IHS) took over care of pregnant and birthing women on America’s Indian reservations. At this time IHS had a policy of forcibly sterilizing Indigenous women when they came in to give birth.151 Speaking of birth in the context of Canada’s history of colonization, Keisha Charnley says: "Part of what colonization tried to do… was compartmentalize certain things in our communities which were… more fluid… things like birth, sexuality, and gender," Today, policies remain that limit Indigenous women’s sovereignty. For example, Indigenous midwives are not legally allowed to work on reservations.152 Another example: because midwifery is outlawed in Yuwita Win’s community, birthing mothers have only one choice: …we have one doctor that comes from Pierre, and he schedules the women’s births based on his schedule and induces them. So, I would say like at least 90 percent of the women in Cheyenne River who have babies are scheduled on his schedule. And that’s not—it’s not right for our children to be born that way.153 In her book Reproductive Justice, The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women, Barbara Gurr makes it clear that Native American Women must negotiate a set of barriers to access needed care. She also portrays the reality of substandard health care for Native women who are essentially pawns of imperialism due to IHS’s funding shortages and mismanagement. 151 Jane Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000): 400. 152 Keegan Gibbs, “The Midwives of Standing Rock,” Vimeo, 2017, video, 4:00-4:15, https://vimeo.com/192739803. 153 Yuwita Win, Melissa Rose, and Carolina Reyes, “Midwives at Dakota Access Resistance Camps: We Can Decolonize, Respect Women & Mother Earth,” Democracy Now, October 18, 2016, video, 55:20. 63 This substandard quality of healthcare in general translates into substandard prenatal care, lack of access to contraception and abortion as well as post-sexual assault care. In Mexico, the history of treatment of Indigenous women is no better. In their edited volume, Terrorizing Women, Feminicide in the Américas, Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano work to expose the history and present reality of femicide that both represents and reproduces fundamental consequences of patriarchal racialization under the oppressive structures of late capitalism. They assert that perpetrators of femicide operate above the law as "no crime committed by common outcasts would remain in complete impunity for this long"154 Within this overarching climate of misogyny and danger, Indigenous women who receive government subsidies, as a result of national and international policies that marginalize Indigenous people, risk losing these benefits if they give birth anywhere but in the hospital.155 In their article, Labor and delivery service use: indigenous women’s preference and the health sector response in the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico, Midiam Ibáñez-Cuevas, Ileana B. Heredia-Pi, Sergio Meneses-Navarro, Blanca Pelcastre-Villafuerte, and Miguel A. González-Block speak to the reality that in Chiapas, an area with over 25% Indigenous people (the state with the second highest Indigenous population),156 the maternal mortality rate remains high despite national attempts to lower it. The state is working to decrease maternal mortality by attempting to address intercultural barriers by allowing Indigenous practices such as vertical birth. However, this did not sufficiently increase use of medical facilities by Indigenous women who prefer to maintain 154 Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, eds., Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2010), 73. 155 Rosalynn Adeline Vega, “Commodifying Indigeneity: How the Humanization of Birth Reinforces Racialized Inequality in Mexico,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2016): 501. 156 “Población. Hablantes de Lengua Indígena.” 64 their traditional birth practices. When interviewed by the authors, women described economic, geographic, linguistic and cultural limitations to accessing the medical system as well as resistance to opposite gender practitioners and the standard use of obstetric maneuvers such as vaginal examination, episiotomy, administration of oxytocin, etc. Attendants described lack of autonomy and unwillingness of medical staff to collaborate with them as further barriers to access.157 On top of all this, public hospitals are usually located in cities, far away from Indigenous communities. Across the Americas, Indigenous women are frequent victims of what I call here violent-birth via interventions including required positioning, ultrasound technology, induction, forceps/vacuum, unnecessary cesarean birth, and forced or coerced sterilization. Patrisia Gonzales agrees and adds that the truly traditional Indigenous midwives have all but disappeared in North America. The obstetric model of care, with which these interventions are associated, does not respect a woman’s right to choose where, how, and with whom, to give birth. Interestingly, these violent interventions are not considered problematic by the medical profession in general and are employed in the general non-Indigenous population within dominant culture without much resistance. However, it is arguable that First Nations / Native American / Indigenous women are at greater risk for these interventions without true consent and that their use constitutes fundamental human rights abuse due to their lack of “Cultural Safety.”158 On top of this many Indigenous communities are plagued with extraordinary rates of diabetes, low birth weight, and 157 Midiam Ibáñez-Cuevas et al., “Labor and Delivery Service Use: Indigenous Women’s Preference and the Health Sector Response in the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico,” International Journal for Equity in Health 14 (2015): 1, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-015-0289-1. 158 Alison Reid, “Cultural Safety in Childbirth for Indigenous Women of Mesoamerica: Using the Florentine Code as a Guide” (BA diss., University of Queensland, 2013), 13; Amber D. Skye, “Aboriginal Midwifery: A Model for Change,” International Journal of Indigenous Health 6, no. 1 (2010): 30–31. 65 intervention from Child and Family Services.159 Compounding this reality is the fact that research targeting Indigenous populations is extremely limited so it is hard to say exactly what the current state of Indigenous birth is. This fact only echoes the marginalized nature of Indigenous lives and communities within dominant culture across the Americas. Indigenous Birth Practices In Commodifying Indigeneity: How the Humanization of Birth Reinforces Racialized Inequality in Mexico, Rosalyn Adeline Vega identifies and articulates the mechanisms by which humanized birth with a midwife (aka natural birth, holistic birth, home-birth) actually, though inadvertently, reinscribes colonial hierarchies that perpetuate the marginalization of Indigenous people and culture.160 Although many liberal affluent western proponents agree that this kind of birth is inherently peaceful and therefore resolves the problem of violent-birth as I described in the last section, in fact, it simply shifts the target of the violence from themselves (well-educated affluent westerners of the “global north”) onto Indigenous people – ironically whom they claim to be emulating in their birth practices. Vega articulates this phenomenon well: When ―indigeneity is invoked in the realm of humanized birth, the object is fetishized, separated entirely from its cultural, socioeconomic, and geographical context, and repackaged for consumption among affluent couples. The great irony of the humanized birth movement in Mexico lies in parents’ perspective of themselves as critics of late capitalism; all the while, their very rejection of consumerism bolsters ongoing commodification of culture, reinscription of racial –“hierarchies,” and (false) appropriation of indigenous midwifery practices.161 159 Skye, “Aboriginal Midwifery,” 28. 160 Vega, “Commodifying Indigeneity.” 161 Vega, 500-501. 66 Vega goes on to unpack a picture of traditional Indigenous midwives caught between the obstetric (violent) demands of the state and the visiting foreigners hungry to consume their (peaceful) performed Indigeneity. Here, when I refer to performing Indigeneity I refer to performance that is contrived and theatrical as opposed to performance that is ritualistic or ceremonial, that performs with, that enacts rather than performs for.162 Vega makes her case well with examples of this struggle in Indigenous lives as well as the bizarre almost comical condescension proffered on the actual traditional Indigenous midwives by those who purport to want to “learn from them.” These two forces, repression (by the government) on the one hand and demand (by the humanist natural birth commodifiers) on the other create an almost impossible burden on the shoulders of Indigenous midwives and therefore birth. Furthermore, the two spaces, the space of the humanist-midwives and that of the Indigenous midwives, “represent disparate lived realities and signal differential access to power, and, thus, the unequal production of discourse and representations on a global stage.”163 Here we see two opposing philosophies of birth, obstetric-medical versus humanized-natural, that ignore the fact that they actually have a major influence in common. They share the same enemy, death. Is peaceful-birth actually the opposite of violent-birth or just another way, as Vega suggests of perpetuating an equally, or possibly more, pernicious evil? Hillman proposes that war (violence) and peace are inextricably linked and prefers to accept this as human reality, even 162 Arguably all acts / gestures can be read as performative (mothering, birthing, grappling with identity) and also intentional ones (such as ceremony, witnessing, enacting rites). The distinction of contrived and theatrical tend to exist / emerge under the pressure of the gaze of the audience with respect to imbalanced power relations. Much of my work aims to resist this kind of contrived performativity in favor of a more ceremonial performance, or here, enactment. 163 Vega, “Commodifying Indigeneity,” 502 67 cosmic necessity.164 He asks, “would it not be better to give death the place in actuality and in our thoughts which properly belongs to it?”165 I ask: What if death were not horrible? What if death were an honor? What if death were a liberation? What if we didn’t need to fight against, control and resist death? What would become of war? What would become of punishment? What would become of global power that turns on the fantasy of outsourcing death? I believe that a radical sovereignty is necessary for Indigenous women and traditional midwives to recover their right relationship to birth through being able to openly face and welcome death. Right now, many Indigenous people worldwide are trapped inside the medical model of birth while performing Indigeneity under the gaze of those who oppose the medical model without centering actual Indigenous voices and reality. Vega writes, “…what interests me more is the context within which women weigh reproductive decisions, sometimes leading them to make choices that are deemed – “risky” and – “dangerous” by the biomedical system and the Mexican government”166 Vega delicately suggests that Indigenous people may put their babies’ lives at risk under the biomedical, colonial gaze that wishes to outsource death through the lie that unnecessary death can be eradicated. I argue that unnecessary-death is an invented category deployed in order to perpetuate colonial structures of domination. Again Vega touches on this subject: “…giving birth with a –‘traditional midwife’ exemplifies the refusal of indigenous women to be racially discriminated against in government hospitals, and socialized as ―appropriate pregnant 164 James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1997), 40–41. 165 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 38. 166 Vega, “Commodifying Indigeneity,” 512 68 ‘subjects’ whose bodies are ― ‘sites of risk’.”167 I propose that the courage to perform these acts of refusal, or sovereignty, are made available to these Indigenous women at least in part because of their Indigenous relationship with death. When we face death, we are free to refuse to participate in colonial and patriarchal hierarchies. Xicana Indígena Birth Ceremonies Oración Salvaje With the Bible in hand / they burned our codices / and all the documents they could find / but they could not burn our oral tradition / let alone / this marvelous universe / that is a single verse. ~ Daniel Caño168 Daniel Caño’s poem, translated into English from Spanish that is in turn translated from Q’anjob’al – a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala and parts of Mexico. It operates as “negotiations of differences between identity constructions and linguistic codes.”169 Moving 167 Vega, 501 168 Amy Olen, “Review: Juxtaposing Epistemologies, Inscribing Maya Poetics,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 107, https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.1.1.0107. 169 Olen, 107. 69 between Indigenous language, and the languages of the primary colonizers of the Americas, the Spanish and the Anglos, Caño’s poem, Oración Salvaje offers itself as a suture, as a reminder, that across borders, decoloniality as reconnection with what is held in land and cosmos recreates and heals. Dylan Miner speaks of “the process of giving spirit back to an indigenous people denied indigenous sovereignty through settler coloniality.”170 Here we see a Métis man, artist, and scholar, giving voice to Xicano/a Indigeneity in a hemispheric and transcultural gesture of repair. It is my hope to offer a poetic and generous contribution to this work in the area of Xicana Indígena birth and mothering. In Red Medicine, Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing, Patrisia Gonzales places Xicana Indígena within the paradigm of Indigenous medicine and elucidates the way in which ancestral Indigenous knowledge is integral to the present through a generative relationship with the past. She focuses on “the ‘Indian-ness’ within the culturally mixed, detribalized Indigenous—also known as Mexican and/or Chicano—people and communities, as well as Mexican Indian communities in various stages of Native reproduction.”171 She considers her writing to be a sacred “intervention in the preservation, replication, and return of curative knowledge(s)”172 Because of the susto sustained by Indigenous people of the Americas over the last five hundred years, Indigenous birthing in most places, has almost completely lost its ceremonial dimensions. Gonzales shows us that the loss of soul, of land, of language, of ceremonies can be overcome. She shows us the ways in which we have not lost our potential for Indigenous connection to the world, to the universe that is a single verse. So too with birth and 170 Miner, Creating Aztlán, 9. 171 Gonzales, Red Medicine, xxv. 172 Gonzales, 11. 70 mothering. Gonzales is clear that we cannot just repeat her descriptions of birth ceremonies, but also that the basic elements are generative gestures if we just begin. From the work of Patrisia Gonzales and others, I have created a list of the woman-centered ceremonies as sites of potential restoration within the principles of the Xicana Indigena 10: birth as a ceremony, placenta ceremonies, bathing / naming ceremonies, piercing ceremonies, milk ceremonies, xilonen ceremony (green corn, menarche / coming of age ceremony), menstruation rituals, fertility, pregnancy, birth and postpartum practices including herbalism, womb massage, rebozo (shawl), ropes, tobacco, hammocks and others, temazcalli (mesoamerican sweat house), limpias (ceremonial spiritual cleansing), dream medicine, tatua (tattoo) -medicinal and ceremonial and menopause ceremonies.173 In a presentation at the 2002 Bioneers conference, Katsi Cook said, “In my vision… reproductive justice and environmental justice intersect at the nexus of woman’s blood and voice; at the very centrality of woman’s role in the process and patterns of continuous creation. Of the sacred things that are to be said about this, woman is the first environment; she is an original instruction… In this way we as women are earth.”174 At the nexus of blood and voice… Cook refers to a woman giving birth as coming “to her own blood and voice in the creation of her reality… It’s about transformation 173 Markus Eberl, “Nourishing Gods: Birth and Personhood in Highland Mexican Codices,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23, no. 3 (2013): 453-376; Brad R. Huber and Alan R. Sandstrom, eds., Mesoamerican Healers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Gonzales, Red Medicine; Jeanne L. Gillespie, “Birthing War: Aztec Midwives and Warriors Prepare for the New War Season in Each Others’ Regalia,” 2010, https://www.academia.edu/445406/_Birthing_War_Aztec_Midwives_and_Warriors_Prepare_for_the_New_War_Season_in_Each_Others_Regalia; Geoffrey G. McCafferty and Sharisse D. McCafferty, “Back to the Womb: Caves, Sweatbaths, and Sacred Water in Ancient Mesoamerica,” in Flowing through Time: Exploring Archaeology through Humans and Their Aquatic Environment, ed. Larry Steinbrenner et al. (Calgary: Archaeological Association, University of Calgary Press, 2008), 26-33, http://www.academia.edu/210223/Back_to_the_Womb_Caves_Sweatbaths_and_Sacred_Water_in_Ancient_Mesoamerica; Star Hawk Lake, Hawk Woman Dancing with the Moon: Sacred Medicine for Today’s Woman (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1996). 174 Nelson, Original Instructions, 156. 71 and restoration.”175 Woman’s body is our first environment, our first earth. Patrisia Gonzales’ writes, “blood powers—bleeding and birthing—provide the sometimes clotted and sometimes flowing fluids of ancestral memory.”176 Woman is earth and therefore an original instruction, a source of knowing. She is an original instruction, a verse in herself, that can guide our way in constructing decolonial healing knowledge that re-matriates us back to our home-place on earth. The reality that the body and the earth comprise an inseparable nondiscrete nonbinary holistic dualism is echoed in these words of Okanagan community member and scholar, Jeanette Armstrong: “it’s not just that we’re part of the vast system that operates on the land, but that the land is us.” In the Okanagan language, “the word for bodies contains the word for land… every time I say that word I refer to myself.”177 As women we must look to our bodies to provide a blueprint for sacred ceremony. While our traumas may occlude this blueprint, as we heal our traumas and offer the performance protest, the gestural enactment that emerges, we clear the way for ceremonial restoration for ourselves, our community and our world. In this section, I began by considering reproductive justice in Indigenous communities. I outline the loss of traditional birthing practices, the lack of access to quality culturally safe care, the rise of femicide and the advent of violent-birth practice. I then look at the bizarre misappropriation of Indigenous birth practices that are sold to the west as a humanist natural birth commodity that in turn end up altering the original practices through economic pressure to perform Indigeneity rather than enact it. I have often made the distinction for myself between performing and enacting ceremony that complicates my use of the term performance protest. I consider performing ceremony to be an 175 Nelson, 163–64. 176 Nelson, xxv. 177 Nelson, 67. 72 empty replication, a theatrical performance of a show before an audience where I consider enacting ceremony to be the actual engagement of those interrelated energies of the seen and unseen and the enactment of world178 with the community of all relations human and non-human. I consciously use enact world, rather than enact the world. The world is more of a sociological reality, and I am referring to an ontological reality not limited to this world but all worlds - enact world. This idea of enacting world is also generatively related to Indigenous concepts of world building and creative sovereignty.179 This will be picked up in later chapters and relied on heavily in re-membering how to enact world ceremonially - and avoid as much as possible the trap of performing-for. In the next chapter, I move into outlining the ceremony protocols - my methodology. Expanding on my ceremony is research paradigm, I clarify and elucidate the phases and protocols of ceremony as a way of laying the foundation for later stages of this project. I then introduce the Indigenous, and resonant, western methodologies I rely on and end with a consideration of ethical concerns. 178 I consciously use enact world, rather than enact the world. The world seems to be more of a sociological reality where I am referring to is an ontological reality not limited to this world but all worlds - enact world. This idea of enacting world is also generatively related to Indigenous concepts of world building. 179 Jessica Johns, “Indigenous World-Building at the Vancouver Art Gallery,” Canadian Art, December 19, 2019, https://canadianart.ca/essays/indigenous-world-building-at-the-vancouver-art-gallery/. 73 2: Ceremony Protocols Xicana Indígena 10 In the last chapter I offered the Xicana Indígena 10 as a guide for careful cultural restoration of Indigenous birth and mothering practices. Here in chapter 2 and 3, I apply these principles in the creation of my methodology - or in my case - in creating my ceremony protocols. Ceremony protocols are an important part of ceremony. There must be enough common understanding, action and gesture for the process to have cohesion and effect. Participants do not always follow every aspect of protocol to the letter. There is space for mistakes. There is space for innovation. There is space. And there are protocols that we follow. Here is the Xicana Indígena 10 in a re-orderd, clarified, and condensed form as it encompasses a myriad Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies: 1. We question tradition and history and related universal truths. 2. We are committed to remembering earth as mother ground. 3. We invent ourselves in reciprocity and permission. 4. We honor the Aztec female rites of mourning of death defiance and protest. 5. We honor our ancestral cosmologic bodyspiritplacetime / mind-body-spirit-cosmos-earth 6. We honor night and day-dreaming. 7. We honor duality, equality, and balance between female and male, and protest the demotion and denigration of the feminine. 8. We trust our ancestors by looking and listening to the signs and symbols left for us to affirm our Indigenous identity. This includes: stories, food, body, land, Indigenous language, medicine, emotions, place, architecture, religion, dances, ceremonies. 9. We develop in ourselves a tolerance for ambiguity, plurality and transformation. We sustain contradiction and use ambivalence creatively. 10. We acknowledge Mother as central image, the reality that informs the new Xicana Indígena and from her - worlds. 74 These are the principles, the Indigenous technologies, the wisdom that forms the foundation of my inquiry into Indigenous maternal cultural and ceremonial restoration from whatever remnants we, as descendants in exile, may find along our path and share with each other. In this chapter I also consider a few resonant Western methodologies and critically review the popular Participatory Action Research methodology and propose what I call Emic Action Research as a potential remedy in pursuing this ceremony/creation-as-research exploration. I also consider Ethics, Strengths and Limitations at the end of this Chapter. Ceremony Shawn Wilson talks about the researcher in a research ceremony being a storyteller on a journey to answer an authentic, and usually personal, question.180 He also elaborates on the necessity of relationality with others, with land and cosmos and with ideas. For Wilson this relationality provides the foundation for accountability with others in a defined community. His account does not go much further into exploring the elements of ceremony outside what’s needed to adjust academic research toward an Indigenous paradigm. Reading Research is Ceremony immediately got me contemplating the question, what would it mean to propose that not only is research ceremony, but also that necessarily ceremony is research? I also wonder, how does accountability work when you do not come from a life experience of cultural embeddedness in one’s ancestral community? 180 Wilson, 32 75 In Research is Ceremony, Wilson asserts that research=ceremony. He writes, “research isn’t just like a ceremony, it is a ceremony.”181 If this is true the proposition can be reversed to read ceremony =/is research. I would argue that if research is taken as an epistemology (a way of coming to know) and ceremony = research, then ceremony is a valid way of coming to know, a relevant epistemology equal to academic research. This move allows me to maintain integrity in my re-search quest-ioning and leads to the questions, what is a ceremony? What is its purpose and what are the necessary elements, phases, and protocols of ceremony? I would like to lay out an initial framework from my experience in various, albeit limited, Indigenous ceremonies combined with my experience healing the traumas I carry in my own body, supporting the healing of others, as well as my exploration of resonant Western healing paradigms. Elements My experience participating in ceremony over the last 35 years has given me with a, now intuitive, sense of what elements make up a ceremony. Like a story, ceremonies have a limited time frame. ie. a beginning, middle, and end. They have an opening, a central process or ordeal, and finally a closing. The central ordeal, a psychic form of death, for the participant is facilitated by an intercessor – one who has been initiated into bridging the divide between seen and unseen and all the healing polarities/dualities available to the incarnated. For Xicana Indígenas, this is the work of the Nepantlera182. The basic structure of ceremonies is designed to create an altered, perhaps more real, state of consciousness in the participants and supporters often drawing on plant medicine, heat, physical exertion, dancing, cleansing smoke, sound - often song, bells, 181 Wilson, 124. 182 The concept of Nepantlera will be covered in the Xicana Indígena Methodologies section later in this chapter. 76 drums – etc. The result of the ceremonial process is that the participant is cleansed and receives a vision. Surrounding and supporting the ceremony is the preparing and sharing of food, the exchange of gifts, and trading of sacred and valuable objects such as tobacco, mezcal, precious stones, and jewelry. My theory is that ceremony works at least in part by creating resilience in the participants. The core of ceremony revolves around the enactment of an ordeal, an intentional and closely held trauma and the supporting of its full and complete resolution, and healing integration thereby building / creating resilience and strength in the participants. This altered state combined with strength creates the space for a vision to be received and shared / offered with / to the community. In my experience the enacted ordeal, the intentional trauma, works to dissolve ego boundaries and constraints that results in participants seeing more/further/deeper than they can in everyday waking time and space. This forms the crux of my hypothesis that trauma healing is essential in the restoration of authentic earth-based-listening culture and ceremony. This is more than a trauma-informed therapeutic process. It is a trauma healing process and an understanding of how/where ceremony overlaps, is resonant with, trauma theory especially within the modalities I introduced in Chapter one, Somatic Experiencing, Theater of the Oppressed, and Family, or Systemic, Constellation. In my own ceremonial healing work over the past fifteen plus years, I use the terms Myth Mending for one-on-one work, and Constellation Ceremony for group processes. I have found that as the gestures of pain and trauma are healed through these ceremonies, new (and ancient) gestures emerge of psycho-somatic renewal and resilience that, I believe, have the potential to contribute to cultural restoration. Thus, my methods are really a series of ceremonies, of performance protests, that enact world, trauma healing and ultimately 77 cultural repair. In chapter 4-6, I use the ceremony/process/methodology/paradigm of In Xochitl In Cuicatl, poiesis, flower and song, throughout as generative method for delving into ceremonies of birth and mothering in particular - the temazcal, the rebozo, and the xilonen. Symbol and Ceremony Perhaps it’s wise to take a moment and consider what culture is and what I mean by cultural restoration, repair, and restorying. Community psychologist Anthony J. Marsella defines culture as: . . . shared learned behavior and meanings that are socially transmitted for purposes of adjustment and adaptation. Culture is represented externally in artificats (e.g., food, clothing, music), roles (e.g., the social formation), and institutions (e.g., family, government). It is represented internally (i.e., cognitively, emotionally) by values, attitudes, beliefs, epistemologies, cosmologies, consciousness patterns, and notions of personhood. Culture is coded in verbally, imagistically, proprioceptively, viscerally, and emotionally resulting in different experiential structures and processes.183 Culture is shared learned behavior and meanings that are socially transmitted for purposes of adjustment and adaptation. Culture is represented externally in artificats (e.g., food, clothing, music), roles (e.g., the social formation), and institutions (e.g., family, government). It is represented internally (i.e., cognitively, emotionally) by values, attitudes, beliefs, epistemologies, cosmologies, consciousness patterns, and notions of personhood. Culture is coded in verbal, imaginal, proprioceptive, visceral, and emotional ways resulting in different experiential structures and processes. 183 Anthony J. Marsella and Anne-Marie Yamada, “Culture and Psychopathology: Foundations, Issues, Directions,” Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology 4, no. 2 (2010): 105, https://doi.org/10.1375/prp.4.2.103. 78 This definition, “shared, learned behavior and meanings that are socially transferred in various life-activity settings” of culture is widely shared by cultural psychologists and anthropologists alike. However, it makes a serious ethnocentric assumption about the nature of reality and where culture originates. Marsella’s statement “Cultures… shape and construct our realities” assumes that culture constructs reality rather than reality, at least possibly, constructing culture. What if culture is not always a social construction? What if culture, at least in the case of Indigenous culture, is the actual apprehension of earth-ancestor-cosmologic-(etc)-wisdom that guides people to live in a good way? Sioux author, theologian, historian, and activist Vine Deloria goes to great length, in the “Negative Primitive” and “Positive Primitive” chapters of his book C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, to counter Jung’s assumption and assertion that participation mystique results from an underdeveloped projection of the primitive psyche onto the world. Instead he asserts that Indian culture and life-ways are not symbolic representations of the psyche overlaid onto the world, but rather real relational apprehensions of the living earth, the ancestors, the cosmos etc.184 This sentiment is resonant with Bagele Chilisa’s articulation of relational epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies.185 In fact this can be construed as a reversal of Jung’s thinking that western science is the developed, civilized, reliable method for understanding the world as an actual apprehension of reality in contrast with participation mystique being a projection of the psyche onto the world. I believe, with Deloria, that the opposite is true, that the positive primitive 184 Vine Deloria Jr., C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature and the Primitive (New Orleans: Spring Journal, 2009), 33–63. 185 Bagele Chilisa, Indigenous Research Methodologies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011). 79 as understood by Deloria,186 is the actual apprehension of reality and perhaps western science the “cultural construction” described by Marsella. Deloria posits a reversal of the usual inquiry of why the primitive remains uncivilized: “What has happened to Western Civilization to move it away from a more unmediated life and into the callous, restrictive perspectives it presently takes as natural? The positive primitive offers a formidable critical position, rich with insights into many things that have been suppressed during the journey of our species toward the industrial state.”187 A Word about Indigenous Psychology Indigenous psychology is a broad term used to describe (lump together) various psychologies that are in conflict or contrast with Euro-western psychology including analytic, cognitive-behaviorist and medical psychiatry. As I have argued, there is some evidence that Jungian (Archetypal) psychology has bridging potential from western to Indigenous psychology.188 Before going too far in examining existing, and possible, definitions of Indigenous psychology, I want to point out the problematic nature of defining Indigenous practices of preventing curing and maintaining balance with all things as a “type” of psychology at all. This move inherently centers psychology and all its history with ties and commitments to colonial/rationalist/empiricist/scientific/etic/objective/outsider ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies and metaphysics –among other things not even categorized by western science that 186 Deloria, C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, 47–63; Eduardo Duran, “Medicine Wheel, Mandala, and Jung,” 7th Direction Pscyhotherapy, accessed February 6, 2017, 3-4, http://soulhealing16.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Medicine-Wheel-Mandala-Jung-Dr.-Eduardo-Duran-1.pdf. 187 Deloria, C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, 63. 188 Deloria, 16; Duran, “Medicine Wheel, Mandala, and Jung,” 4–8. 80 remain invisible and unimaginable to the western mind. In fact, it seems to me that the division of these things into discrete categories as if they can possibly function independently is somewhat absurd. That said, I would like to assert that Indigenous healing practices (Indigenous psychologies) are embedded in a non-discreet non-binary holistic dualism,189 a relational matrix of all things seen and unseen, a gendered/polar cosmology, and a dynamic/verbed reality in which the living and waking worlds do not supersede, in value, that of the dying dreaming one. It is almost impossible for the western mind to enter this reality at all, let alone enough, to assess its value or credibility. Indigenous healing practices function outside the western belief in causality rooted in a linear space-time chronology of events. Trapped in a system of causation and strict static either-or binaries, most psychology remains inhospitable and incomprehensible to the Indigenous mind. Faced with a world in which “psychology” prevails and foregrounds Indigenous sense of belonging and well-being in dominant culture it is no wonder it is so often rejected. Both Deloria and Duran assert that, within the paradigm of western psychology, Jung came the closest to piercing the veil and understanding a true shamanic practice of the wounded healer who through his own ordeal is initiated into a “new song.”190 Duran also asserts that Jungians who inherited his legacy function more like medicine-men who receive teachings passed down through the human transmission of culture. 189 Waters, American Indian Thought, 97-112. 190 Duran, “Medicine Wheel, Mandala, and Jung,” 5. 81 Xicana Indígena Methodologies I begin this chapter by presenting a series of Indigenous methodologies I intend to rely on in my research ceremony including my foundational methodology of laying on the earth. I prioritize Indigenous methodologies such as: relationality, reciprocity, non-discrete non-binary holistic dualism, poeticality, storytelling, dreaming, ceremony and prayer. My research methodology is grounded in the recovery/restoration/resurgence of Indigenous epistemological, methodological, ontological realities. I highlight the Nahua-Mayan191 ontological-epistemologies of Ometeotl, Xochitl Cuicatl, In Lak’Ech, Nepantla, and Temixoch. I put particular emphasis on blood, ontological, or ancestral, memory as reliable when used in the context of the Xicana Indígena 10. I also include a discussion of resonant non-Indigenous research methodologies such as arts-based ethnography, anthropology that breaks your heart, and phenomenology. My approach also employs what I call Emic Action Research (EAR in contrast with PAR: Participatory Action Research). In this chapter I also discuss ethical concerns of traditional anthropological research and continue to provide an analysis of Shawn Wilson’s assertion that research is ceremony and my inspiration to go one step further and center ceremony as epistemology rather than center traditional academic research as this project moves forward. It was my hope to maintain my positionality within ceremonial reality and assert that ceremony is itself, independently, a way of coming to know just as research is. 191 Nahuatl is an Indigenous language/culture from central Mexico, and Mayan is group of Indigenous language/culture groups from southern Mexico and Latin America. 82 Ometeotl Teotl is the Nahuatl word for the highest level of reality, of the creative energy of the universe. It is used in ancestral and contemporary ceremonial practice of the Nahua-Mexica people. It is considered an extremely sacred utterance. According to Nahua-Mexica tradition, ultimately, everything is Teotl, you and me, the grass, the buildings, the seas, the wildcats and the cosmos. However, in Nahua philosophy, “teotl presents itself primarily as the ceaseless, cyclic oscillation of polar yet complementary opposites”192 of being and non-being, life and death, hot and cold, wet and dry, active and passive, self and other. In this earthly form it becomes Ometeotl. According to Mexica philosophy, this highest level of heaven is a place of duality and the word Ometeotl is the literal combination of two poles of the most primal human duality: male and female.193 This corresponds with Ann Water’s non-discrete non-binary holistic dualism that is clearly present in the pre-colonial Mexican linguistic ontology expressed in/by Ometeotl. This reveals an essential Eurocentricity in the contemporary discourse of breaking binaries. Binaries need to be held together as true at once, not broken, dispelled or collapsed into utopic onenesses. Ometeotl is literally two-gods and one of the gods in this dualism is a god and the other a goddess. Thus, for the Mexica supreme reality is a duality. Ometeotl is the invocation of the discipline of dualism. Within an Indigenous frame, this discipline of dualism is the foundation for balance and well-being and transformation.194 192 James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 9. 193 Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality,” 35; Zairong Xiang, “The (De)Coloniality of Conceptual Inequivalence: Reinterpreting Ometeotl through Nahua Tlacuiloliztli,” in Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures, ed. Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 40, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93358-7_3. 194 Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World, 49; Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 101; Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality”; Xiang, “The (De)Coloniality of Conceptual Inequivalence,” 40. 83 . . . balance is not achieved by synthesis; it is not a static condition acquired by result resolved in up position, attention that exists when two forces encounter each other had long and are not reconciled but teeter on the edge of chaos. This balance is not that of the highest good as the golden mean. One pole cannot exist without its opposite, as Westerners would like to think, seeking good without evil, pleasure without pain, god without the devil, love without hate. But la chamana stands at the juncture of opposing forces and moves between them.195 In Xochitl In Cuicatl (XochitlCuicatl) According to Nahua logic, Noble speech, Flower and Song or walking in xochitl, in cuicatl, in poetry and prayer, is the methodology of the teotized heart.196 “In xochitl, in cuicatl was an epistemological practice embedded in a Nahuatl ontology conceived of philosophical, religious, and social practices that were interwoven in the cultural habitus of Nahua warriors.”197 A prerequisite for this station is that one must be related to Tlalticpac (that which is on earth). In Xochitl In Cuicatl emerges as a unique temporary and fleeting intuition and expression of truth out of the earth-embodied heart. When you go deep inside yourself to your most authentic, connected and emergent knowledge and you give rise to that expression, when teotl discloses itself to you -then you are expressing something into reality. You are making it so. Truth is created as we express flower and song (flor y canto) - constructive, connected and in balance between the rhythmic oscillating dualities of the world. “[I]n Curanderismo…the mother tongue is poetics. The healer is an artist. The invisible worlds are palpably felt and acknowledged directly along with the consensual reality.”198 195 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 32. 196 Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 101. 197 Arnold Farias, “In Xochitl, in Cuicatl (the Flower, the Song): Analysis of Colonial Cultural-Social Transformations through Nahuatl Metaphor,” (MA Thesis, University of Texas, 2013), iii. 198 Avila and Parker, Woman Who Glows in the Dark, 2. 84 XochitlCuicalt is sometimes referred to as Noble Speech, almost as an ethic of utterance that is reminiscent of oral tradition in general. Jo-Ann Archibald talks about the place of prayer in storywork by quoting Lee Maracle: oratory full: place of prayer, to persuade. This is a word we can work with. We regard words as coming from original being - a sacred spiritual being. The orator is coming from a place of prayer and as such attempts to be persuasive. Words are not objects to be wasted. They represent the accumulated knowledge, cultural values, the vision of an entire people or peoples. We believe the proof of a thing or idea is in the doing. Doing requires some form of social interaction and thus, story is the most persuasive and sensible way to present the accumulated thoughts and values of a people.199 For Archibald storywork is relational pedagogy and epistemology where teller and listener are active participants in the context of an emergent story. Archibald offers profound insight into the relationship between orality and literacy and through the lens of western scholars. She critiques their reliance on Greek oral tradition or non-Indigenous perspectives on Indigenous oral traditions and articulates a psychodynamics of Aboriginal orality.200 Although Anzaldúa uses the Coyoxauhqui imperative to describe her writing, I think it is also apt for the process of storytelling. She writes, “The Coyoxauhqui imperative is the act of calling back those pieces of the self/soul that have been dispersed or lost, the active mourning the losses that haunt us… Each irritant is a grain of sand in the oyster of the imagination. Sometimes what accretes around an irritant or wound may produce a pearl of great insight, a theory.”201 I believe, sometimes what accretes is a healing story. 199 Jo-Ann Archibald, Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 26. 200 Archibald, 15. 201 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 2. 85 In Lak’Ech In translation the Yacatan Mayan greeting in Lak’Ech means yo soy otro otro como tu or I am other, other like you. When experienced in the context of the Aztec ontology of Teotl, the cosmic oneness of substance running through all things that are essentially expressed as Ometeotl, the perpetual duality (including self and others) this looks something like a dialectic. This ontological dialectic reality (as opposed to mythology) for many Mesoamerican people constitutes a fundamental psychosocial need. Because of this ontological reality the body is always a collective and trauma is more about the relational rupture of this collective body, between the iteration of self and others (including human and non-human relations) rather than simply the individual personal rupture. The concept of relationality is shared by many Indigenous people of the Americas, For example Jo-ann Archibald outlines the Indigenous epistemology of interconnectedness, relationship and reciprocity in the relationship between story, storyteller, and listener(s). Shawn Wilson also employs an implicit relationality by writing parts of his book as letters to his three sons. This relates to my own reflection on Indigenous mothering, my sense of mothering and my experience as a mother. Much of this project is rooted in my personal challenge to understand myself as a woman and mother in order to pass a story, woven from remnants, on to my children. Wilson states “[a]n idea cannot be taken out of this relational context and still maintain its shape.”202 I gather my remnants and carry them forth, weaving a context, finding the shape of our story. 202 Wilson, 8. 86 Nepantla Nepantla is a term used by Gloria Anzaldúa to describe an experiential reality that allows for deep transformation and bridging between the chaotic polarities characteristic of Ometeotl. If Ometeotl is the equivalent of non-discrete non-binary holistic dualism, then Nepantla is the process of navigating it for the sake of healing traumatic fragmentation. A Nepantlera practices Nepantla. Nepantleras “mediate between life-giving and life taking forces, bring the opposites together in some meaningful fashion. They seem to perform a balancing act by standing above the contest and mastering both sides.”203 Anzaldúa says that consciously engaging nepantla, as a nepantlera, “is an act of will, an act of love, an attempt toward compassion and reconciliation, and a promise to be present to the pain of others without losing themselves to it.”204 The nepantlera accepts witnessing pain as essential to reconciliation. In This Bridge We Call Home Anzaldúa writes: “To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being wounded.”205 Later in life she describes nepantla in this way: Perceiving something from two different angles creates a split in a witness that can lead to the ability to control perception, to balance contemporary societies worldview with the non-ordinary worldview, and to move between them to a space that simultaneously exists and does not exist. I call entering this realm “nepantla” - the Nahua Word for an in-between space… This liminal space 203 Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 32. 204 Anzaldúa and Keating, 4. 205 Anzaldúa and Keating, 3. 87 facilitates the bridging and joining of these worlds through ritual transformation.206 Nepantla is a creative process of bridging and balancing polarities. Rather than resting exclusively in one side of a duality (is this not what a “binary” is?) a nepantlera must traverse and hold both poles as true and valid at the same time even as she can only experience one side at a time. She is in constant generative balancing motion between contrast and instead of calling it chaos, she recognizes its potential and necessity for ceremonial transformation of individuals and communities. Temixoch When we say the Okanagan word for ourselves, we are actually saying “the ones who are dream and land together.” That is our original identity. Before anything else, we are the living, dreaming earth pieces. Dream is the closest word that approximates the Okanagan. But our word doesn't precisely mean dream. It actually means “the unseen part of our existence as human beings.” It may be the mind or the spirit or the intellect. We are mind as well as matter. We are dream, memory, and imagination.207 The sleeping dream, as separate from the waking dream, is called Temictli in Nahuatl. This is the unconscious dream and is in contrast with Temixoch, the blossoming warrior way of dreaming that interfaces, unfolds, blossoms one realm into the other. Not as a gimmick, or an occult spectacle, but as a way of life (and death). For as the sleeping dream relates to the waking dream, so do the death realms relate to the living realms. “For many Indigenous cultures dreams are both the site of knowledge and a way of knowing it, as well as a method for organizing experience, 206 Anzaldúa and Keating, 28. 207 Armstrong, “Sharing One Skin.” 88 interpreting data, and diagnosing illness and diagnosis.”208 I consider dreaming, as did my Indigenous ancestors, not only something of the dark, quiet sleeping body but rather “a simultaneous co-creative process that involves the body spirit and life-moving power in which there may or may not be borders between flesh, mind, spirit, cosmos, or place.”209 Jo-Ann Archibald includes dreams as evidence in her work recovering Indigenous storywork, “I have come to appreciate that dreams can be a source of indigenous knowledge and that they can provide guidance for indigenous research methodology.”210 I would say that dreams themselves are part of a Xicana Indígena methodology and my own dreams received during this project have inspired parts of this work. I also view ceremony as a kind of dream. The Huichol, or Wixárica, people assert that their ceremony of peyote-dreaming maintains the equilibrium between the seen and unseen worlds. "I'm going to tell you one very important thing, you're never going to understand this, because we, the Huichols, don't fully understand it. To be that, which belongs to this land. To be that, which belongs to this culture,” explained the mara'akame's son. “You have to realize, we're talking about two worlds, the real world and the spiritual world.”211 The potential for vision exists at the intersection of all things, when we can perceive it. It is the place of Anzaldúa’s Nepantla, a borderland poietic consciousness where reality is not only discovered but created. I use this dream potential like an archimedean point from which cultural restoration flows. As we remember that dreams are more than messengers, but realities that instruct, realities in which our 208 Gonzales, Red Medicine, 171. 209 Gonzales, 172. 210 Archibald, Indigenous Storywork, 2–3. 211 Nathaniel Janowitz, “Inside a Massive, Illicit Peyote Ceremony During Mexico’s COVID Lockdown,” Vice World News, January 14, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgz55a/inside-a-massive-peyote-ceremony-during-mexicos-covid-lockdown. 89 gestures and motions have consequence, we also see clearly how “[t]he spaces of Indigneous knowledge(s) can be limited by Western paradigms that reject Indigenous understandings of sacred space in which knowledge is received,”212 and embodied across time and space. “Maestro Seguro used to say, ‘Life is a danza, danza is life. You dance as the universe dances’… In the danzante the individual is really not who is doing the dancing, it’s the community. You have to let go of your local self, and dance in your quantum self.”213 This danza reality is also the dream reality and the more one reclaims and steps into this reality, the dreamier waking life becomes and the more real dream life a simultaneous co-creative process that involves the body spirit becomes. I think the main challenge for anyone doing dreamwork are counterfeit images, the ones that our minds insert whether waking or sleeping. There is a new age colonial fantasy of too often, too perfect, too lovely dreams that come to the stoic Indian when in fact true visions do not come every day, they come in small moments and then we work for days, months, years perhaps even lifetimes to live into one’s visions, or as Basil Brave Heart suggests, walk them into the world. Linda Smith also alludes to this issue when speaking of how her grandmother taught her traditional culture: although she developed in me the spiritual relationships to the land, to our tribal mountain and river, she also developed a sense of quite physical groundedness, a sense of reality, and a sense of humor about ourselves. It may be those qualities that make me skeptical or cautious about the mystical, misty-eyed discourse that 212 Anzaldúa and Keating, This Bridge We Call Home, 171–72. 213 Avila and Parker, Woman Who Glows in the Dark, 112. 90 is sometimes employed by indigenous people to describe our relationships with the land in the universe.214 We must take care and not rush into interpretations of our sleeping or waking dreams. When the earth said to me, "You need to lay on me for one year... I will absorb your pain. I will take it, as nourishment, like food. I need your pain like a mother needs the pain of her weeping child across her lap,” I sat with it for a year and a half gestating, wondering, dreaming, integrating what I had heard in a thousand different permutations. Then, one day I knew what to do, how to do it and where. All the supports came together and that one verse from the earth has unfolded into myriad complementary and related understandings and appreciations and returns - slowly and carefully. Centering Indigenous Methodologies I believe that it is the restoration of holistic dualism of Teotl’s earthly reality, in part through in Xochitl in Cuicatl, the embodied reconnection to the poietic and prayerful, the flower and the song that the creativity of an Indigenous cultural renaissance will be unleashed. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains, it requires changing rather than imitating Eurowestern concepts. Teotl will not abandon us, but we must restore ourselves, our inherited ability to hold the pulsing oscillation of opposites true at once and the swaying back and forth between them as the Nepantlera instructs. It is this practice and ability, not a critical space outside us (as opposed to a third space), that represents an epistemic restoration (not shift) of Indigenous reality. We must re-connect what the trauma of colonization has broken in us, take up the marginalized pieces and give them expression through our “returning selves.” 214 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 13. 91 Leanne Simpson explains that biskabiiyang, our return to ourselves, does not literally mean returning to the past, but rather re-creating the cultural and political flourishment of the past to support the well-being of our contemporary citizens. It means reclaiming the fluidity around our traditions, not the rigidity of colonialism; it means encouraging the self-determination of individuals within our national and community-based contexts; and it means re-creating an artistic and intellectual renaissance within a larger political and cultural resurgence.”215 David Garneau writes: The coming generation of Indigenous scholars, curators, and artists is more interested in sharing than being accommodated…They are more excited about learning, embodying, performing, producing, and presenting… First Peoples are turning to positive production, to non-colonial activities, to reviving Aboriginal epistemologies, ontologies, metaphysical, and material practices and adapting them to contemporary lived realities.216 And Linda Smith: The act, let alone the Art and Science, of theorizing our own existence and realities is not something which many indigenous people assume is possible. Franz Fanon’s call for the indigenous intellectual and artists to create a new literature, to work in the cause of constructing a national culture after liberation, still stands as a challenge.217 Similarly, Shawn Wilson resists engaging in simple contestation of western methodologies, but rather uses his book, Research is Ceremony, itself to model another way, an emically restored approach to research. In many ways, art is an integral part of Indigenous ceremony and, I think, an important bridge between Indigenous and western epistemologies and methodologies. These, along with the Xicana Indígena 10, will be our guide. 215 Simpson, Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back, 50. 216 David Garneau, “From Artifact Necropolis to Living Rooms: Indigenous and at Home in Non-Colonial Museums,” Cornell University, August 21, 2018, video, 1:15:54. 217 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 30. 92 Resonant Western Methodologies Arts-Based Ethnography : Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart In this section I want to outline my method for an arts-based methodology that moves beyond findings from the field being performed as a method of dissemination. I propose to embrace creativity, poetics and performance-gesture as ceremony, as an integral part of my ceremony-as-research project. Rather than art being a manner of reporting, I intend to center art as epistemology in a “coperformative”218 critical and creative engagement. I commit to offering “critically reflective narrative[s] representing [my] personal and political intersections/engagements/negotiations with others in culture/history/society”219 as I. In an auto-ethnography guided by “the intentional and critically reflexive connection of [my] narrative to the politics, pleasures, and pains of other people.”220 As I proceed, I am particularly interested in considering Aldama, Sandoval and Garcia’s notion of moving “beyond the by now de-politicized and all-too-familiar cultural theory of the twentieth century and beyond so-called “radicalized” examples of aesthetic production to unravel how culture is performance.”221 In the new transcultural field of Borderland Performance Studies situated in emancipatory aesthetics, politics are traded for transformation and connection across the boundaries of otherness. When taken together with Tami Spry’s assertion that "autoethnography fails” if we isolate it from the reality that literary-aesthetic quality are 218 Tami Spry, Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2011), 39. 219 Spry, 53. 220 Spry, 126. 221 Aldama, Sandoval, and Garcia, Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, 1. 93 generative and connected to power relations, an ethic (or methodology) of performance begins to unfold.222 Centering the personal as generative (rather than merely a method of communicating gathered data) of reality and as transformational for researcher and participants while maintaining literary and aesthetic rigor is well displayed in works like The Vulnerable Observer by Ruth Behar and Pedagogies of Crossing by M. Jacqui Alexander among many others. What happens when the researcher allows herself to be broken hearted and moved into the sacred through this kind of rupture of, or wound in, regular relationships? I assert that what happens is a centering of the female gaze, centering the reality that female, especially maternal, abjection (strong emotion) is a profound location for knowledge production. According to Kelly Oliver, the knowledge produced from this location of abjection is a knowledge that can reverse the generations of assumptions about “the mother-child dyad”223 being pathological. “[I]f we consider that the context within which maternity . . . takes place is in fact patriarchal, then we must investigate the associations between the violence attributed to this situation and the patriarchal social context within which they are experienced and represented.”224 Like Aldama et al., Simpson, Garneau, and others, Oliver also recommends stepping away from the politics of identity and recognition that fail to escape the patriarchal gaze and remain in an either-or divide (a discrete binary). Receiving (or giving) recognition is tantamount to legitimizing hierarchal patriarchy. Like Caruth, Oliver posits witnessing as a method beyond recognition that traverses the gap between the autonomous self and the other thereby decentering both self and other.225 Perhaps witnessing is ontologically like nepantla, the ability to open deeply to holistic dualism. 222 Spry, Body, Paper, Stage, 109. 223 Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 80. 224 Oliver, 80. 225 Oliver, 8, 20. 94 Perhaps by seeing the polar extremities of binaries as part of essential wholeness, we might find return to the transformational praxis of Nepantlerisma , the traversing of Ometeotl, rather than mere accumulation of facts, information, and theories. Phenomenology of Gesture Phenomenology of Gesture, as I call it, provides a resonant frame/methodology/ceremony to In Xochitl In Cuicatl: The identity of the thing through perception experience is only another aspect of the identity of one’s own body throughout exploratory movements; thus they are the same in kind as each other.226 Gestures are the ordinary way in which we carry on meaning, as the etymology of the word (from gero = I bear, I carry on) implies. Complete gestures are those in which new meaning is synthetically acquired.227 I am interested in considering this resonant phenomenology of gesture, in particular human gesture as enactment of world both responsively (is only another aspect of… one’s own body) and generatively (new meaning is synthetically acquired) with the non-human world. This relates specifically to my intention to re-member the remnants of Indigenous ceremonies that in large part consist of a series of gestures in relation, acts and motions offered in community according to ceremonial protocols. These gestures are not arbitrary, inconsequential, nor random and are credited with healing, purification, weather modification and other occurrences usually relegated to the supernatural. My question of how to right ourselves such that we again can receive these gestures non-sensationally, and with integrity requires both openness and discernment. For 226 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), 215. 227 Giovanni Maddalena, The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists’ Incomplete Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 9. 95 Merleau-Ponty, things themselves, and their being perceived, are the same in kind. Gestures, or exploratory movements, are the ordinary way we carry on meaning. This phenomenology of gesture is resonant with my experience of Xicana-Nahua traditional ceremony. In Nahua cosmology the human body exists as an interface with el cielo and la tierra and the epistemological reality and requirement of in xochitl in cuicatl. This resembles Merleau-Ponty’s human gestures and our deep inhabitation of the place world, our gestures’ intimate association with the ‘flesh of the world.’ We move primordially and elementally embedded and embodied. Our bodies, as they move, express and create waterways, windy respirations, fiery inspirations and earthly formations (supernaturally). For Stephen J. Smith, Flesh speaks to our bodily relations with the elements of a more-than-human world…the felt imperative to these relations where, as Merleau-Ponty put it, ‘all distance is traversed’ and wherein movement arises not specifically in the body, but in the nexus and intertwining of bodily engagement with the world. There is a primacy to movement that registers in the living body in its carnal ties to the elements of the world’s flesh. The ‘radical reflection’ on the ‘flesh of the world’ to which this analysis aspires in turn bears upon the general field of gestural reciprocities and connections, providing the insight that intimate gestures of the flesh, such as the embrace, are primordial attunements, motions of rhythm and reciprocity, that emanate from the world in identification with it. The embrace is fundamentally, elementally, a gesture of landscape dwelling. A phenomenology of elemental motions provides the textual reminder that to be at home in various landscapes means to know what it is to be embraced corporeally, sensually, within the human and especially the more-than-human folds of the world.228 As a way of exploring gestural potential in ceremonial cultural restoration, I have embarked on three phenomenological, poetic audio-visual presentations that reflect and generate my understanding of phenomenological gesture as ceremony, ritual that enacts world as opposed to performing for the world. In a similar vein as Smith’s look at the embrace, I take a visual, 228 Stephen J. Smith, “Gesture, Landscape and Embrace: A Phenomenological Analysis of Elemental Motions,” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 6, no. 1 (2006): 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2006.11433914. 96 kinesthetic, and an in xochitl in cuicatl, look at the gestures of constructing the memory of being Xicana Indígena. My distinction between performance and enactment does add a wrinkle in my reference to, and employment of the term performance protest. I am not making a case here for a new disciplinary distinction between performance for and performance, rather I am pointing out that one already exists in the distinction between professional performance for an audience and performance art that enacts world in other words, ceremony. I would like to highlight a distinction made by James Maffie regarding the difference between Heideggerian ontology of Being and a Nahua ontology of Becoming.229 Heidegger’s Dasein defaults to a universalist prioritizing of being in relation to beings precisely in its attempt to collapse the dual nature of embodied reality. While Heidegger proposes that being is embodied, his actual ontology tends to prioritize being over beings. This would conflict with Aztec dialectic polar monism as described by Maffie and Xiang and others. In this way, I push phenomenology toward deeper resonance with the fundamental Indigenous epistemology of holistic dualism by maintaining the priority of Beings alongside Being. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of material imagination, as opposed to modern material representation, reflects this ontology of becoming by including both poles of a duality (in alignment with nondiscrete, non-binary holistic dualism) and not succumbing to and either/or collapse. It is the re-inclusion of the body in thinking and thinking in the body of resonant phenomenological exploration, reflection and analysis that I incorporate in my primarily Indigenous methodology. 229 Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 46. 97 Emic Action Research I begin this section with a consideration of Indigenous sovereignty and the politics of outsider help in a review of critical responses to the use of Participatory Action Research (PAR) as well as examples of decolonial uses of PAR. I then look at Research-Creation as an alternative and resonant methodology and propose a new model for engagement, Emic Action Research that I employ, along with autoethnography, within my own community of racially obvious, but culturally/locationally/linguistically disconnected Indigenous girls, women and mothers using selective tools and methods from the western academy. Some have argued that Participatory Action Research (PAR or PRA), currently functions to reinscribe coloniality despite its attempts to the contrary. For example, Linda Smith articulates an essential bias not addressed by PAR: “belief in the ideal that benefiting mankind is indeed a primary outcome of scientific research is as much a reflection of ideology as it is of academic training. It becomes so taken for granted that many researchers simply assume that they as individuals embody this ideal and are natural representatives of it when they work with other communities.”230 The fact that PAR remains a form of “research” for the “benefit of mankind” has the potential to limit PAR. Furthermore, according to Giles Mohan, PAR is infected by “a subtle Eurocentrism [that] shapes the interventions of non-local development workers despite claims to the contrary.”231 Mohan continues, “participatory research methods tend to re- inscribe relations of authority between the outside facilitator and the grassroots.”232 “[T]he ethnographer-researcher assumes that the people being researched lack the capacity for self-analysis and that 230 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 2. 231 Giles Mohan, “Beyond Participation: Strategies for Deeper Empowerment,” in Participation: The New Tyranny?, ed. Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari (London: Zed Books, 2006), 8. 232 Mohan, 1. 98 only s/he can truly ‘decode’ and ‘interpret’ reality for them.”233 From my own experience reading research, even research employing PAR, is that the biases of outsider researchers are not resolved simply by using PAR. The PAR section of Bagele Chilisa’s text Indigenous Research Methodologies, opens with this quote. “Research with the Indigenous community is a commitment that extends well beyond the final report, dissertation, peer-reviewed article submission, or conference presentation. It is a lifelong relationship and commitment.”234 It seems to me that Chilisa’s call to a lifetime commitment to research subjects is itself a kind of admission to the very gap that exists when outsiders enter communities to learn from and/or help them. Further on in the PAR section Chilisa articulates a section on healing PAR methods that points to the fact that there is healing to do. In this section, Chilisa makes assertions like “Research with postcolonial subjects, indigenous peoples, and oppressed groups can be viewed as a ‘life changing ceremony’235 in which indigenous practices of healing are incorporated in the research process through use of various forms of symbols.”236 It could be argued here that Chilisa is recapitulating colonial foundations and frameworks by incorporating Indigenous healing practices rather than centering them. Her insertion of the brief quote into her overall assertion as a rhetorical move that not only allows for, but might encourage, Western guided integration of symbols and healing practices into research rather than what I take Shawn Wilson to be calling for, namely that research = 233 Mohan, 13. 234 Chilisa, Indigenous Research Methodologies, 225. 235 Wilson, Research is Ceremony, 61. 236 Wilson, 246. 99 ceremony. Again, it follows that if research is ceremony, then also ceremony is research and ceremony = research de facto without addition or integration. It does not need to be interpreted into a western frame of understanding so that the academy can learn something about Indigenous people. This leads to another point from Giles Mohan: Western models of cognition assume knowledge is mediated by language but most knowledge is non-linguistic, tacit and generated in practice. The weakness of PRA is that it relies heavily on linguistic representation of knowledge… In this way research is biased away from local knowledge from the start, because only the opinions of locals who are conversant in such media are heard… Goebel (1998) argues that for PRA to move onwards it needs to allow local people to generate their own categories, concepts and criteria for understanding and changing their lives.237 Even the small turn of phrase “for PRA to move onwards it needs to allow local people to . . .” suggests that PAR is again centered and doing the allowing. Mohan continues, “In discussing ethnography in Africa, Kanneh argues that the production of ‘the text’ gives legitimacy to the subconscious knowledge of the informants. In doing this the ethnographer-researcher assumes that the people being researched lack the capacity for self-analysis and that only s/he can truly ‘decode’ and ‘interpret’ reality for them.”238 In the beginning of Linda Tihuwai Smith’s book, Decolonizing Methodologies, she articulates why for many Indigenous people Research is seen as a dirty word. It has been used for generations to gather information for the decimation and assimilation of Indigenous people all over the world.239 With this long history care must be taken in when, how, and with whom, 237 Mohan, “Beyond Participation,” 12. 238 Mohan, 12–13. 239 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 7. 100 research is done with, for and/or on Indigenous people. In Rethinking Participatory Research with Indigenous Peoples Métis scholar Janice Cindy Gaudet argues: It is evident that participatory ethics must go beyond a normative set of guidelines to help outside researchers politely maneuver their way through indigenous communities consulting and including indigenous voices, images, and knowledge merely as ingredients to the next mixing bowl of research findings can undermine the subtleties of local historicity, conditions and wisdom.240 I have myself witnessed many examples of PAR projects that follow all the guidelines of PAR, but still maintain this mixing bowl mentality. For example, when people outside a community or culture decides to conduct research by adding a little of this and a little of that according their own values and comfort rather than a member from the community starting with, and centering, the “voices, images, and knowledge” that truly represent the core values and comfort of the community itself. Linda Smith describes the ongoing experience of the exclusionary nature of etic research methods, “When I read texts, for example, I frequently have to orient myself to a text world in which the center of academic knowledge is either in Britain, United States or Western Europe; in which words such as we, us, our, I actually exclude me.241 Gaudet speaks of how these methods create, and contribute to, damage-centered narratives: At one point on my journey, I wondered, whoever said we were broken? It was a moment of awareness that emerged after a fasting ceremony. Somewhere in my consciousness I’ve come to believe we were broken as people, and that I needed to be repaired. The knowledge, the prayers, and the experiences that emerged out of ceremony revealed otherwise.242 240 J. C. Gaudet, “Rethinking Participatory Research with Indigenous Peoples,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 1, no. 2 (2014): 84. 241 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 37. 242 Gaudet, “Rethinking Participatory Research with Indigenous Peoples,” 84. 101 This is all not to say that PAR can never be used as a central, or peripheral element, of research and is in fact used by many Indigenous scholars who have adapted and/or integrate PAR within frameworks that can be made to work for them including Shawn Wilson, Django Paris, Samy Alim, Terese McCarty among others. Out of this review of PAR, I propose a new kind of action research: Emic Action Research. Similar to Anishinaabe scholar Cindy Peltier’s engagement of Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s Two Eyed Seeing that “adds to existing qualitative methods . . . in the bridging of Indigenous and participatory Methodologies,”243 EAR is a complement to, or version of, PAR in which we center ourselves in ways that we are actually and already participants in spheres where otherness is regularly being traversed, our own lives and communities. This is reminiscent of the distinction between performing for and performing with, or enacting world, or participating in ceremony itself. Ethnographic refusal is a practice by which researchers and research participants together decide not to make particular information available for use within the academy.244 I would push this refusal methodology further and argue, with David Garneau and Leanne Simpson, that Indigenous people do their own emic research, do their own ceremonies as research, of transformation and recovery in the wake of colonialism. Wilson suggests that research “is a ceremony for improving your relationship with an idea.”245 Thus I do not emphasize or center understanding through interviewing informants, but rather... by 243 Cindy Peltier, “An Application of Two-Eyed Seeing: Indigenous Research Methods with Participatory Action Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 17, no. 1 (2018): 1. 244 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words Refusing Research,” in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2014), 223-48; Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 173-93. 245 Wilson, Research isF Ceremony, 110. 102 participating emically in my own life, family, community, culture and connections. “It takes place every day and has taken place throughout our history.”246 I propose and adhere to the methodology of Emic Action Research, from the ground up based on Indigenous Knowledge and Technologies as they are known and recovered in the process of implementing them. Since I am always a subject and my analysis is, and will always be, subjective, I also embrace the method of autoethnography as a response to this ethical concern. Witnessing voices in relation rather than recording them, pointing to “the other” rather than harvesting from them. This means a significant departure from research as it is known under the western academic paradigm - research as a method of data collection, interpretation and analysis. It means surrendering the role of interpreter by refusing to do work on others. Research-Creation In this project, I am choosing to re-member marginalized Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies and stand in them, even when the space of relationality is one of incommensurability or dwells in the “irreconcilable space of aboriginality.”247. It is no longer my/our job to make everyone understand. Instead, we make an offering in our own way, from our own emic perspective, while still traversing inevitable otherness that exists in all communities. 246 Wilson, 110. 247 Garneau, “From Artifact Necropolis to Living Rooms,” 4. 103 This ceremony as research is somewhat akin to, or resonant with, research-creation. In some ways, research-creation falls into the realm arts-based and Indigenous research methodologies. For example: Calls for the “indigenization” of research in the social sciences seek out innovative methodologies that resist colonial dynamics and empower communities to determine what and how knowledge is produced . . . Artistic practices may offer one avenue towards current decolonization movements; just as Vizenor encouraged an aesthetic of resistance within Native literature, Sto:lo scholar Jo-Ann Archibald, or Q’um Q’um Xiiem, promoted an “indigenous storywork” methodology in the social sciences that recognizes indigenous expressive and aesthetic ways of knowing . . .248 According to Communications scholars Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk, there are “four modes of research-creation: ‘research-for-creation,’ ‘research-from-creation,’ ‘creative presentations of research,’ and finally ‘creation-as-research.’”249 The final category creation-as-research provides some context for understanding my project here of ceremony-as-research. Creation-as-research is a complex method of knowledge production through creation that, like Tami Spry’s performance described earlier, moves beyond the simple incorporation of artistic practice or the use of creative dissemination of research results. In contrast, research-from-creation involves an iterative process of going back and forth between creation and reflection or knowledge development, creation-as-research redefines the very concepts of theory, creativity, and knowledge. It is a hands-on form of theoretical engagement at the same time as it acknowledges the processes of analysis and articulation of new concepts that are potentially part and parcel of artistic creation. Knowledge is produced as creative work, and not simply through their analysis and interpretation. It is in this sense that such creative work can be 248 Hammond et al., “Arts-based Research Methods with Indigenous Peoples: An International Scoping Review,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 14, no. 3 (2018): 261, https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180118796870. 249 Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk, “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances,’” Canadian Journal of Communication 27, no. 1 (2012): 5. 104 understood as a strong form of intervention, contributing to knowledge in a profoundly different way from the academic norm.250 Research-Creation, in particular creation-as-research, is aother resonant Western methodology that helps translate my ceremony-as-research paradigm. In Xochitl In Cuicatl (poiesis), a ceremony in itself, forms a major anchor in my ceremony/creation-as-research exploration. Ethics, Strengths and Limitations I want to begin this section by acknowledging publications that have broken ground in the area of Xicana and Indigenous mothering: Smith Silva’s Latina/Chicana Mothering, Caballero’s et.al The Chicana Motherwork Anthology, and Lavell-Harvard and Anderson Mothers of the Nations: Indigenous Mothering as Global Resistance, Reclaiming and Recovery. The strength of this project is in its creative focus, in pressing the boundaries of academic discourse and blurring the distinction between art and ceremony, between methodology and creative process/praxis. While this scope necessarily has limits, I see these limits as opportunities for future exploration, collaboration, and creative production. I also want to acknowledge the limits of this work in terms of contributing to accumulated knowledge in a way that is accessible to those who prefer the language and processes of the Social Sciences. Again, the privileging of Indigenous ontologies and methodologies, as well as phenomenological and poietic emergence is part of what makes this project unique and compelling. At the same time this creates a simultaneous limitation that I want to acknowledge. 250 Chapman and Sawchuk, 24-26 105 This ceremony-as-research exploration does not include direct quotes from interviews. I did meet with friends, relatives, contacts, and community members to discuss issues related to this project. Though I did record some, I had a visceral resistance to revisiting the conversations outside my memory, to listening to the recordings and performing all the coding and arranging and splicing and quoting. This felt stilted and choppy. John Creswell offers that ideally ethnography ought “to be systematic in recording this information through note taking, recording and cameras… [to] engage in constant interaction between observation and interviews.”251 The methods of note taking, audio, video and photographic recording are fundamentally bound to the Eurocentric views of research and as the project progressed and ceremonial elements claimed and clarified, the accepted process of ethnography felt more and more out of place. I chose to honor authenticity and experience over data collection and information, not as a complete denial of their value, but in line with Visser’s suggestion outlined in Decolonizing Damage-Centered Trauma Narrative in Chapter 2 that we bring Indigenous ceremonial and spiritual practice into academic praxis. There were further complications relating to the University ethics review requirements of lengthy consent documents full of academic language that made it difficult to include interviews of those outside this domain. This process made me aware of how much current academic Indigenous Studies must be missing voices from those who are not interested/willing/able to agree to the language in the ethics review consent forms. The truth is there were many individuals I did not even approach for an interview because I was embarrassed that I would have to share the consent 251 John W. Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2013), 217. 106 form that required the inclusion of language about mental health issues among other potentially triggering items. I finally decided to move forward, in integrity toward the ceremony of In Xochitl In Cuicatl, or poiesis, as the core of my ceremony-as-research inquiry. In fact, during the process of this project I switched focus and moved from an anthropology rooted unit into an artistic praxis rooted one that included an almost total change in my supervisory committee. It has made all the difference. All the conversations are still a part of me, but I am not using them anthropologically. Rather, I allow them to influence and transform me and from this I listen differently. These are my friends, my fellow seekers and my colleagues, not my informants. I ceremonially invite each voice to join me, my memory to offer me the fragments in spirit’s time, rather than pursue the ethnographer’s objective fantasy. I have found poiesis, performance (enactment), and visual representation to be the most honest ways for me to express what I have discovered and am always still discovering. There are certainly limits that come from this choice. There is the potential of erasing these individuals from the story here. I have been careful to not use any raw material taken from recordings and use only my autoethnographic experience of the conversations and talks and gatherings. The strength in this decision is that there is less privileging of academic Indigeneity over non-academic, regular, Indigenous reality. I do include memories from before the official start of this project. I weave teachings I received as a young woman, lecture notes, workshop impressions, and experiential memories into the text and do my best to honor sources without divulging inappropriately. 107 My acknowledgements contain names of those I owe a debt of gratitude to for contributing to this work in large and small, but always profound and important, ways. Indigenous relationality is often evoked in academic discourse. However, its dimensions tend to be limited to the human realm. For the most part this is a personal story from a place of exile. In this exile the truth is I have often been left with few to no human relations to turn to for cultural/ceremonial mentorship and guidance. As a result, this project is one of exploring relationality not only with other humans, but also (and in particular) with land, cosmos, ancestors, animals, water, weather, stones and all the other non-human relatives. I ask – what does it mean to have the earth as an Elder? I hope this work will contribute to the embracing of all our relations, rather than only human ones. I look forward to putting this work out into the world and receiving feedback, pursuing collaborations, and growing more deeply into relational connection for this work to continue and thrive. I look forward to encouraging others to pursue their own creative and scholarly projects and explorations. In this chapter I elucidated my theory of ceremony as equivalent to research that included an account of what a ceremony is; its purpose, elements, phases, and protocols. I began by outlining the methodologies I relied on for The Earth is My Elder research ceremony. Inspired by, and applying, the Xicana Indígena 10, I outlined the foundational Xicana Indígena epistemologies/methodologies of Ometeotl (holistic dynamic dualism), In Lak’Ech (relationality), Nepantla (bridging dualities), and Temixoch (dreamtime). I provided an argument for centering these methodologies and went on to identify western methodologies that I find resonant with Indigenous ones. I then introduced and discussed them briefly and articulated my 108 commitment to what I call Emic Action Research and Research-Creation. I also considered the strengths and limitations of this project. I will now shift into laying out and describing the ceremonies I participated in, my specific methods, for carrying out this project of personal and cultural re-membering and restoration, of repairing the remnants. 109 3: The Ceremonies In this section I describe and discuss the three parts of this project. In Part I, I began with a contemplative autoethnographic phase of laying on the earth, listening, planning and then installing an exhibition that helped me deepen my methodology and praxis. In Part II I hosted and facilitated a four-day residency for Indigenous women and mothers to gather with the aim to relationally restore and restory our Indigenous identities and connections with culture and community from our collective remnants, even the smallest fragments – using the Xicana Indígena 10 as a guide. This phase also included conversations with some participants after the residency, as well as with other women and girls about issues of Indigenous identity, trauma and healing. In this section I also outline the Phase III of this research ceremony, the writing and presentation of my visions (findings). 110 You need to lay on me for one year... I will absorb your pain. I will take it. I need your pain like a mother needs the pain of her weeping child across her lap. ~ verse from the earth 111 Xochiquetzal’s Bed Laying on the Earth :: preparations In preparation for creating this academic research ceremony, I took some time to lay on the earth and listen as if life, the world, were living me rather than the other way around. I waited… in the same way I wait for ideas when I write, the way I listen to unopened books, the way I sleep with them for protection, for guidance even without deciphering the semiotics of the written page. My mind began to wander, and I started to wonder, or notice the pain in my back. I thought about its origins, its pervasiveness in my life, my sense of hopelessness about it and about how it peaked after my first child was born. As I lay there with these thoughts coming and going, rolling around in my head, I heard a voice within me: You need to lay on me for one year... I will absorb your pain. I will take it. I need your pain like a mother needs the pain of her weeping child across her lap. Without much consideration of who/what the voice was or symbolized or where it came from, I listened. At first I negotiated, How about I just go barefoot sometimes? Apparently, this was not an option. Or, how about I do it part time but for three years? Again, the answer was, no. I waited a few more minutes and thought about the possibility of lying on the earth for a whole year. All kinds of resistance emerged in the form of ideas about how this couldn’t possibly ever happen in the context of my life, of school, of my family. Necessary… and impossible, I thought. Still the idea of this remedy, of the earth metabolizing my pain as a mother metabolizes the pain of her children was compelling. Though I felt there was no way I could lay on the earth for a full 112 year, I did make a start. I began by sleeping with plants, with the roses I had bought my kids for Valentine’s Day. As I plucked and dried and put the petals under my side of the bed, I was reminded of my most recent time in Mexico (in 2015), again hoping to find an Elder. I traveled to Mexico to sit in the Temazcalli.252 I thought the maestra of the temazcal, la Temazcalera, might be an Elder for me, but this did not turn out to be true. I was still without an Elder… Or was I? I remembered my original, and profound, encounter with the sweat house when I was an adolescent. Here is a piece from my journal: 1989: The medicine woman leading the sweat ushered us inside and in the hot damp darkness she began the first round with a prayer. She thanked her ancestors, explained the womb-of-mother-earth reality of the lodge and then passed the talking stick to the next woman. As each woman spoke, I could feel my own prayer spinning into being, building its girth and particular heft. When my turn came, something strange and foreign emerged from my body. It was a song in gutteral tones and words I did not recognize. It was not planned in any way but was an irresistible and spontaneous gift and while my body opened to release the song, I felt a confidence and strength, a power that was at once unfamiliar and deeply resonant. I knew this was the way I was supposed to feel in the world. I had had a glimpse. I had heard the voice of my ancestors through the Earth-Mother. I was terrified by the power of sitting in that lodge, but also always listening for clues to the day I would be invited and initiated back into her womb. Over the years (nearly thirty), I have patiently waited for a teacher, my Elder, who will do something magical and strict so I can step again into the lodge. I am not sure exactly when it happened, but the call to the temazcalli and the call to the earth merged into a knowing in my core. Since I first heard what the Earth asked 252 I will delve deeply into the temazcalli in the next chapter, but for now it’s important to know that the temazcal or tamazcalli is the mesoamerican sweat house similar to the inipi or sweat lodge of the north. Traditionally there was a temazcal in most every home and was used for physical and spiritual cleansing. 113 of me, I had not forgotten her call. She has given me clear guidance of what she needs and what is needed of me. I do have somewhere to turn, a trustworthy Elder of my very own. It clicked: The Earth is my Elder –my mother, my elder, my hope... shifting from generic mother earth, our mother, whom I still also share with all my siblings and family from stones to stars across borders inherited or imposed. My mama… my medicine carrying MOTHER who is literally (not just symbolically as the anthropologists have assumed) here for me, holding me, ready to share and instruct. In response to accepting the Earth as my Elder, I committed to being involved relationally with the Earth, that I take seriously the idea that the Earth is an agent, a full participant in the community of the world, that humans are not the preeminent and only real actors in the drama of the world. I offered an Indiginist relational alternative that includes land as well as all other living and non-living participants in a serious, non-token, way. During this time, I came up with questions and intentions, while also remaining open to what The Earth might share with me and ask of me. In this ceremony I listened to the earth as informant and employed a phenomenological auto-ethnographical approach in contrast with the dominant anthropological paradigm of participant observer and objective ethnographic interpretation. I listened for an emergent and relational phenomenology of the sweat house common to Indigenous communities in the western hemisphere, of the earth as a source for recovering and restoring ceremonies related to coming of age, birth, and mothering, and of ceremonies for Split Feather re-Indigenization. I emerged with poems and generative ceremonial gestures. 114 Exhibition Xochiquetzal’s Bed and was/is a somatic, performative, community exploration of Xochiquetzal, Aztec goddess of birth and mothering. Xochiquetzal’s Bed was a multidisciplinary exhibition installed at the Alternator Gallery of Contemporary Art. Practically, my method was to ceremonially create a stitched blanket of the Mexica goddess, Xochiquetzal, as a performative act. The blanket was then used as my blanket for laying on the earth. The accompanying video-poem, titled Temazcalli,253 is a prayer for understanding and permission to follow my call to the temazcal through exploring the gestures of Xochi. When I was away from my laying-on place, I carried my rebozo for needed laying-on stints. My basic agreement with the Earth was, and still is, that I spend most of my time with her. She was/is my place of origin and of return. I was also influenced by a healing treatment that is briefly mentioned by Elena Avila in Woman Who Glows in the Dark: It “involve[s] digging a hole in the earth, burying the woman with her head sticking out in the direction of the north, and letting the earth absorb her pain, ground her energy, and heal her.”254 However, Avila realized that she could not provide such treatments due to “policies and procedures that bound [her] to only certain types of treatments.”255 Together these concepts and influences combined to create a profound praxis for supporting Indigenous resurgence. 253 I have called it both Temazcalli and Xochiquetzal’s Bed. I provide a viewing link to the video-poem along with the others in Part III of this chapter. 254 Avila and Parker, Woman Who Glows in the Dark, 113. 255 Avila and Parker, 113. 115 Artist Statement: Xochiquetzal's Bed is a part of my year long performance ceremony The Earth is My Elder :: listening to earth as Indiginist methodology for rematriation. I lay on the earth as a decolonial/Indiginist act of restoration at the generative edge of lineage repair and remembrance of stories emergent in body-earth relationality. My laying-on-place will be presenced in the gallery as one of its many installations through the year. More than a space or site, it is a place, an altar, an offering, a piece of ceremonial regalia. It is a gesture of public home-place making as a way of involving a greater community in the performance of a very personal and process-based ceremony. It is a multi-media presence centering Xochiquetzal, goddess of birth, mothering and female sexuality, and my life story of diasporic identity as a mother. I position my story in relation to Xochiquetzal's gesture of holistic dualism as it relates to the dual-process of decolonizing and Indigenizing birth and mothering as we recover from the traumatic age of colonialism and genocide. 116 Figure 1. Poster for Alternator Exhibition 117 Figure 2. Xochiquetzal Goddess Blanket in Progress 118 Figure 3. Xochiquetzal and her Babe 119 Figure 4. Images from the Xochiquetzal’s Bed Exhibition 120 Figure 5. Gestures 121 The Indígena Project Somewhere down my mother-line, the women relatives sang as their sister, daughter, niece, and granddaughter drank down wináwizi čík’ala, wild licorice root, and hummed the baby down. Instead, I was the lone buffalo, moaning in the grass–grass covered in my blood and my water. I think even my blood wanted to know–where did the women go? What’s happened? In the tender days after birth, I felt significantly the discordance and disease which plagues my heart, my center, and the hearts and centers of my fore-mothers. All I knew, and know, is that this way, is NOT our way. And like the buffalo, who are being returned to their homelands by the ones who hear the call to remember their allegiance to protect and preserve, I too am being called to return birth and motherhood to their homelands. Why does this matter? Why is this my, our, most crucial beginning and end? Because the women in my family are terrified of birth. The women in my family experience debilitating post-natal depression and anxiety. Because total spiritual, psychological trauma and isolation almost brought my life and the life of my screaming infant to an end. Because of the inner conflict seething within my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother when they tried to raise their children in Honor, only to meet the whip of shame, intolerance, and forced assimilation. When and if my daughter chooses to birth, she will NOT be alone in the grass, bleeding. She will not raise her children in isolation. She will not doubt her wisdom to the point of collapse. I will sing to her the sweet gutturals of our mother tongue, and wipe her brow with cloth washed on the rocks of the river. ~ Rebecca Lee, Indigena Project resident-participant-collaborator 122 The Residency My ongoing enactment of The Earth is my Elder as a performance ceremony of enactment serves as the fundamental context and methodology for this research ceremony. The acceptance of, and surrender to, the Earth as my Elder guided my creation and facilitation of an Indiginist ceremony circle titled: Indígena :: remembrance, recovery, restoration (The Indigena Project). The Indígena Project was a curated storywork circle, based on the work of Joanne Archibald in her book Indigenous Storywork,256 as well as concepts in Fancesca Mason Boring’s Connecting to Our Ancestral Past,257 processes from Theater of the Oppressed as well as a group Constellation Ceremony. The group was made up of 8 Indigenous women who have lost connection with their ancestral indigenous community, landscape, language and culture and lasted four days. Out of our healing ceremony time together, we co-created a public multi-disciplinary and performative remembrance story, or performance protest, world enactment, reflecting the issues surrounding our lost, and our recovered, Indigeneity. In this residency, I employed a collaborative SE, TO and FC method with groups against the backdrop of Hillman’s Archetypal, imaginal, psychology as well as living into Diane Taylor’s “trauma-driven performance protest,”258 - a combination of performance art, grass-roots community activism and Indigenous healing ceremony. “Without pitting individualized experiences and treatments of trauma against collective ones, I propose here that trauma-driven performances offer victims, survivors, and human rights activists ways to address the society- 256 Archibald, Indigenous Storywork. 257 Francesca Mason Boring, Connecting to Our Ancestral Past: Healing through Family Constellations, Ceremony, and Ritual (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012). 258 Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” 1674. 123 wide repercussions of violent politics and also, indirectly, to relieve pain.”259 Taylor’s look at how performance of critical gestures mobilizes personal and collective trauma into the domain of activism demonstrates a possibility for expression of trauma that Cathy Caruth and Kelly Oliver might consider a witnessing of how “trauma opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility…. trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures.”260 What if this call to activism is, in the context of witnessing the wound’s impossibility, tantamount to a call to ceremony? Furthermore, through this work and in a restorative transcultural move, I have attempted to articulate an Indigenous paradigm that is translatable to the Euro-Indigenous mind-body-spirit –however buried and forgotten it might be. This includes the Euro-Indigenous mind-body-spirit I inhabit as a result, for good or bad, of the mixing of peoples in both beautiful and subversive / oppressive ways. As an act of personal responsibility for my lineage, I hope to bridge a chasm, first by paying close attention within a closed system of Indigenous relatives, and then by bridging from self, other and community across cultural divides in an act of solidarity in which no one is considered exclusively damaged or resilient, but all are considered within the context of rich and collaborative expression of our whole dual selves as we create them, poietically, into the world. In Hillman’s words, “Experience reverberates with memories, and it echoes reminiscences that we may never actually have lived. Thereby our lives seem at one and the same moment to be uniquely our own and altogether new. Yet to carry an ancestral aura…”261 259 Taylor, “Trauma and Performance,” 1674. 260 Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 10–11. 261 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 177. 124 Video 1. Indígena Project Promotional Video, Indígena Project Video Viewing Link 125 Figure 6. Indígena Project Poster 126 Figure 7. Indígena Project Performance Poster 127 Relationality During the course of my research, and while organizing the Indígena Project, I was also traveling around meeting with Indigenous mothers, birthkeepers, midwives, and midwifery students and exhibiting my work and presenting my research. I arranged and carried out presentations, interviews, and conversations with some Indígena project participants as well as many others. I attended, as a learning participant, a temazcalli workshop in Mexico City with temazcalera Rita Navarrete. I came away with much inspiration for this project. I also attended, and presented, Temazcalli: Earth Womb Medicine at the Decolonizing Birth Conference in Brooklyn, New York where I connected with birthworkers working to decolonize birth and mothering. I was able to bring my Xochiquetzal laying-on-the-earth blanket and have attendees share stitches and stories. Having handwork available along with the conceptual presentation grounded the presentation and moved it from performance to enactment, or in other words to ceremony. I also presented Gramma’s Guadalupe: in Xochitl in Cuicatl, Trauma, and Resilience at the Indigenize Now! Panel of the Storying Solidarities: Sites of Autonomy and Alliance in Indigenous Literary Arts Conference in Calgary. Contemplating and sharing my paternal grandmother’s role in my story of reindigenization was foundational to much of my creative work with the Mexica Goddesses. Later in my process, I attended a week-long immersion midwifery / rebozo training with Indigenous midwife, Angelina Martinez Miranda in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I learned so much at this training. Conducted exclusively in Spanish I had to struggle to keep up. I had to ask for help and I had to learn a lot from body language and gesture. Around the same time, I presented The Earth is my Elder: An Indiginist Methodology for Re-indigenizing Women, Mothers and 128 other Lost Relatives at the Canadian Anthropological Society Annual Conference in Ottawa. This was a learning experience. I was reminded how entrenched the colonial borders are in individual and collective consciousness and found myself feeling isolated and alone despite being invited to participate. In 2017, I attended the annual Indigneous Birthworkers Gathering in Washington State with my, at the time, twelve-year-old daughter. This was a difficult experience as it reinforced my sense of exile and was marked by as much discord as connection. This gathering did mark an important threshold despite the troubles we encountered. My daughter came into her moontime without noticing during that gathering. We were swimming and peeing behind trees so there was no sign of it until we returned home. I often rely on this coincidence, this accidental coming of age ceremony, so unplanned that we almost missed it to remind me of the distinction between gestures of performance for and gestures of enactment . . . but also as a reminder that the first performance, even if awkward and even appropriative, can be an important first step in moving from remnant to restoration. The gathering was filled with energy or performance for but was essential for my daughter and I in our performance with. I spent time traveling to, and through, ancestral homelands and migrant landmarks in Texas, and Mexico seeking, listening, letting. During this time, I wandered into a museum in Mexico City and came across images, seemingly inserted as an aside, of contemporary Mexican people striking poses, imitating gestures, of pre-hispanic statues. There were narratives of how they felt imitating their ancestors and I found it to be a fascinating version of what I was working with in relying on the gestures found in cultural remnants to trigger somatic memory. Whether 129 presenting at a conference or traveling with my family, I sought out opportunities to contemplate, integrate and share my experiences and research. I presented Eating Our Ancestors: Indigenous place, diasporic space and the always uninvited guest, and premiered my film Eating Our Ancestors, at the Indigenous Studies Association Conference in Puebla, Mexico, and presented Susto and Limpia: Decolonizing Trauma Narratives from Indigenous Ground at the Philosophy Across the Americas: Thinking La Frontera conference in McAllen, Texas. Both these presentations allowed me to bridge border consciousness by interfacing with Canadian, Mexican and American culture of identity - Indigenous or otherwise. I presented Stitching Stories: a ceremony of cross-cultural psycho-narrative restoration as well as The Earth is my Elder: An Indiginist Methodology for Re-indigenizing Women, Mothers and other Lost Relatives at the Society for Community Research and Action Conference. These many relational interactions allowed me the opportunity to share my process and findings and hone my methodology and methods as well as my creative praxis. Admittedly, I struggled immensely through most of these experiences and mustered courage to refuse the identity of exile without compromising my integrity. I draw on all these relational experiences in my research ceremony and have written about them transparently in various places in this text. In other places, they live within me implicitly and inseparable from my own consciousness, as do the voices I carry from my lifetime of inquiry and learning. 130 The Earth is My Elder As I neared completion of this project, this ceremony cycle, I began to gather the pieces of work to share in my final exhibition. I exhibited iterations in multiples forums including as a part of the Bread, Flesh & Ink collective performances along with Lindsay Harris and Toby Lawrence in Kelowna and Kamloops, British Columbia and in Portland, Oregon, in a screening at the Canadian Indigenous/Native Studies Association conference in Puebla Mexico, as well as in a solo exhibition at the Open Space gallery in Victoria, British Columbia. Here are the three of the many video-poems created during this project. Xochiquetzal’s Bed Video 2. Xochiquetzal’s Bed Video-Poem, Video-Poem Viewing Link 131 I become involved in things with my body, they co-exist with me as an incarnate subject, and this life among things has nothing in common with the elaboration of scientifically conceived objects. In the same way, I do not understand the gestures of others by some act of intellectual interpretation [...] The act by which I lend myself to the spectacle must be recognized as irreducible to anything else. I join it in a kind of blind recognition which precedes the intellectual working out and clarification of the meaning.262 Xochiquetzal is the goddess of sexuality, birth and motherhood - the goddess of love. I explore a particular image of this goddess remnant more in Chapter 4. In the image Xochiquetzal‘s left hand holds her suckling baby close to her body (yes, pull) while her right hand stretches in front of her, palm up (no, push) toward the tree of life/knowledge growing and in full flower. In my poetic film I begin with an “exploratory movement,” and embodiment of the gesture of Xochiquetzal’s push-pull. As I began, carefully, receptively, “in a kind of blind recognition,” I began to feel the generative power of this gesture. From it emerged another gesture, that of pouring flowers and then of breaking silence with the Eagle feather gifted to me when I was ceremonially adopted at the Sundance. I teach these gestures to my daughter as part of her coming of age preparations and imagine her creating a dance of her own push-pull woman-hood from it. This is how we can restore culture rather than just repeat an ossified “traditional” version. This is what can be discovered on the bridge between phenomenology and Indigenous ontology and ceremonial remnants. 262 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 215–16. 132 Susto & Limpia Video 3. Susto & Limpia Video-Poem, Video-Poem Viewing Link Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world. ~ Merleau-Ponty 263 This film, Susto & Limpia, emerged from contemplating the traumatic traces I carry in my body, the ones that make no sense, the ones that still haunt me sometimes. These are the same ones I wrote about in Chapter 1, the ones I mysteriously passed on to my daughter. This film and poem center this experience/not-memory and overlays it with trauma theory and images of 263 Goodreads, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes,” accessed August 12, 2021, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/118600.Maurice_Merleau_Ponty. 133 Coyolxauhqui and her essential gesture of falling apart. I am embarrassingly familiar with this gesture, this collapse and scattered self. In this film I consider the surrender that comes with allowing oneself to fall apart, the primordial silence, that protects - but also draws out the interruption, the story, the truth-telling that is more than telling the truth, it is a world arising from broken silence, from broken hearts, from every brokenness, every trauma. Speech-gesture-from-silence . . . Eating our Ancestors Video 4. Eating Our Ancestors Video-Poem, Video-Poem Viewing Link 134 Traditionally, it is said that a gesture is a ‘‘natural sign’’ and the word a ‘‘natural convention’’. Gesture aims at the sensible world of actions (perception, body and emotion) while speech aims at an already constituted, sedimented system of meanings (conditioned by language and culture).264 In my travels tracing family migration stories, being an uninvited guest on my own ancestral homelands in traditional P'urhépecha territory, I took great pause to process and integrate the liminal space of home-not-home through my presence during traditional Juriatikua Uariri (Day of the Dead) ceremonies. As a member of the Xicana diaspora my connection to Indigenous land, language and culture has been broken over generations of migration arising as necessity from colonial structures. My greatest resource in cultural recovery, of finding belonging even in the liminal space of home-not-home, has been my own body-as-earth connection and awakening. Finding home in my own brown body and listening to ancestral-earth intuitions allows me to participate at the site of my flesh as a we rather than an I. Juriatikua Uariri an Indigenous ceremony of the P'urhépecha people, honors the recently deceased ancestors and calls on them to visit our table, our altar, our home. The altar bread and tobacco and spirits, now imbued with the threshold wisdom of the dead, visits our bodies and beings as we make the gesture of ingesting them. In turn, they (and their wisdom) become a part of us. In the video-poem Eating Our Ancestors, I offer a multi-media performance of my respectful embodied intrpretation of this sacred gesture of my ancestors. I ask them to bless and assist me, and us all, as I offer and imbibe, the bread and tequila and tobacco from my first Day of the Dead ceremony on ancestral P'urhépecha lands in Patzcuaro, Mexico. 264 Jennifer Bullington, The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective (New York: Springer, 2013), 42. 135 Again, the process of embodying these gestures and then of further putting them into poietic Noble Speech and visual form was a generative process in which my sense of being an always uninvited guest was transformed into an inquiry, or prayer, for becoming Indigenous. I ask the ancestors to “whisper to me the songs of all directions” and acknowledge that the ancestral stories are not lost. They are lost-not-lost, a dynamic process rather than some sort of static discovery or “an already constituted, sedimented system of meanings.” Through the making of this film I found my way to articulating the connection between poietic language and exploratory embedded gesture. 136 Final Exhibition :: Poetry Collection Figure 8. Xingona Girl Smoke Poetry Collection Cover 137 In addition to the main three phases, or as part of them, I produced the series of video-poems with multidisciplinary and performative elements that express the process and insights emergent in this project of cultural restoration of Indigenous ceremonial practices of birth and mothering. My dissertation defense will coincide with two exhibitions (Open Space & FINA Gallery) of the video-poems in performance-installation as well as the launching of a book length collection of poetry completed during my research ceremony. My commitment to understanding and restoring the ceremonial roots and underpinnings of creative praxis and cur(e)ation influence and propel this work forward. Figure 9. Exhibition Altar with Tobacco, Rose, Pomegranate; Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski 138 Figure 10. Susto & Limpia projected at Open Space; Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski Figure 11. Xochiquetzal’s Bed Projected at Open Space; Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski 139 Figure 12. Eating Our Ancestors projected at Open Space; Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski Figure 13. Poetry from Xingona Girl Smoke at Open Space; Photo Credit: Kyra Kordoski 140 Threshold As I outlined at the outset of this chapter, the result of a ceremony is both a cleansing and, springing from that, a vision. These visions correspond to, but are not equivalent to, findings and they overlap with the central ordeal of the ceremony. They are part of the ceremony/creation-as-research paradigm and cross over conventional linear phases of research. These visions exist in the material world, but also in the dream world and are excavated through Xochitl Cuicatl, Flor y Canto, flower and song, poetry and prayer as well as all the principles of the Xicana Indígena 10. For the purposes of this defined project, I have chosen to share my three visions, each in an area of cultural/ceremonial restoration in a series three chapters each devoted to a ceremonial restoration process. Each chapter progresses toward a poietic expression of XochiCuicatl, moving from the experimental chapter 4 to the creative non-fiction of chapter 5 to the full blooming of poiesis on chapter 6. The first, covered in the next chapter, relates to the temazcalli (mesoamerican sweathouse). The temazcalli, like ceremonial limpias, is at once preventative, restorative and re-generative and offers a theoretical frame for continued cycles of cultural and ceremonial restoration. The second, relates to the rebozo (mexican shawl healing) itself an object of maternal sabaduría (wisdom). The third, covered in chapter four, relates to the Xilonen (green corn - coming of age) ceremony and my struggle to regain my own womanhood and Indigenous identity while preparing for my daughter’s Xilonen coming of age ceremony. 141 4: Temazcalli crying, bleeding and psycho-politics of water, womb and woman 142 The Ceremony Continues The next three chapters, chapters three through five, present a shift in tone and purpose. We are at a juncture in this research ceremony. We have come to the end of the opening. Following the phases of ceremony I outlined above, I begin my transition from the description, explanation and analysis that composed the opening into a progressively more altered state of consciousness that characterizes the middle – central process / ordeal, a psychic form of death for the participant, and also of the expression of the ceremonial vision received. I am your facilitator, Nepantlera and guide. The main tool I will employ in this process is XochitlCuicatl, poiesis, or poetics. Gradually you will be guided into my creative process and method for restoring ceremonial protocols, prayers, and gestures that enact world. After we make it through the ordeal, and witness the visions, I will guide us into the closing of the ceremony, the end, the conclusion - always another beginning. Let us proceed. 143 we are going to enter the womb to provoke a rebirth the darkness, each other, the plants and our breath will be our helpers we are our own healers by releasing the emotions attached to our patterns and pains we will be free, liberate, ourselves so that we can live out our calling in and for the world we can recover our belonging our voice, our power, our compassion and our connection we can be a gesture of love and justice right now before we enter, think of a trauma, an obstacle or a pain or sickness in your body think of the emotion that is connected to it now we will enter the underworld where transformation occurs hand in hand we help each other. . . ~ from my notes from Rita Navarrete’s Temazcal workshop (November 2015) 144 When I was nineteen a non-Indigenous friend invited me to a “gathering” and I went without knowing what I was about to step into. It was an Indigenous healing gathering in British Columbia, Canada. It was 1989. There was drumming, singing, and smudging. I witnessed an intense public healing. I stepped into a world completely outside my experience, but also into a world that immediately recognized and embraced me. I was seen for the first time in my brown-ness, in my whole-ness with that long line of Indigneous ancestors standing behind me. Something in my core was activated that weekend. I heard Indigenous Elders share about the horrors of residential schools. I attended moon lodge teachings. I sat at the feet of Elders who seemed to have very special powers of vision and healing, who spoke to me of my lifetime purpose and obligations. I left the weekend gathering in an altered state of both deep knowing and utter confusion. The same friend invited me to attend another gathering shortly after. It was the Sun Dance265ceremony in Oregon that was being restored after being outlawed for generations.266 There I participated in a women’s sweat lodge raised to cleanse the land in the days before the main ceremony began. The time I spent in the sweat changed me forever, awakened and humbled me. In the darkness of the sweat house, I received my own vision, a vision I have been living into ever since. As I fell asleep the evening after my time in the sweat, to the sound of all night drumming, as I watched the silhouettes of young dancers around the fire, I felt my place in the order of things. A knowing so solid and complete had visited me. For the first time in my life, I understood life, and power, prayer, and purpose. I didn’t speak of these experiences until very recently. Instead, I carried my time in the sweathouse like a medicine bundle, allowing it to work 265 I elaborate on the purpose and meaning of the Sundance ceremony in Chapter 4. 266 PBS, “The Buffalo War: The Sun Dance,” accessed May 2, 2021, http://www.pbs.org/buffalowar/sundance.html. 145 on me, allowing it to resonate for no other reason than to direct my path. My clarity and direction was astonishing. At the same time, I did not know how or where or when I would/could possibly live fully into what I was shown. I also understood that what was shared with me was sacred, not to be flaunted willy nilly. I had grown up with so little information about my Mexican culture and ancestry. Having never met my Mexican relatives, I had no idea where to turn. I had started my search for my father as soon as I was old enough to make my own decisions and travelled to Mexico alone chasing the small clues I had been given. While I was there I learned to make masa from whole corn and I learned to make tamales from the masa. I received healings from a woman wise in bone-cracking medicine. I remember going to her village with her and experiencing the dust, dust, dust, and her hands, and the chickens scratching, the house built of sticks, the pretty extreme poverty of the Mexican urban outskirts and that she wasn't speaking Spanish. While I was in Mexico that Winter, I visited Oaxaca, known as Indian country. Oaxaca has the largest Indigenous population in Mexico many of whom still speak their Indigenous language. Finally, and at once, I was among people who looked like me. Flat, full-moon, faced and stalky in stature, I gathered another strand in my search. Still, I had nothing but fragments, small corners of cultural resonance, and still no kin, no Elders to bring me into the wise ways. I Dipped in and out of the search over the next almost-thirty years. I held my sweat-house knowing as a sacred secret and waited, mostly, patiently for a way, a sign, a connection. I watched others, more privileged and perhaps less discerning than me, travel the world looking 146 for medicine people and shamans, harvesting Indigenous knowledge like it was owed them. I remained still and quiet about my search. Part of my silence was plain old humility. Regardless of how I look, or what my mother told me, the fact was I really had no proof of ancestry let alone connection to ancestral community of any kind. As a result, I was not willing to claim Indigenous ancestry without evidence - even though I knew, I also know I am fallible. I remained patient for the arrival of some material evidence. Life went on, and I had all but given up, and all those sweat house inspirations and obligations grew faint. I also had children at that time and the desire to give them a story of their place in the world that made sense with their experience of having me, a brown woman, as a mother pushed my search forward. I wanted something more than brown as an ancestral identity (or not-white unless a white person felt it in their best interest to inform me of my white-ness). Motherhood pushed my search to the forefront. It became central and my whole family participated and supported me. I had a dream - before classes started. Before I found my father. I dreamed that I was searching for my tribe, for my place, my root. I dreamt that I was traveling along mountains, up and down. Just as I arrived in the valley of the place of my ancestors there was suddenly a massive wave. It came crashing up and over and down on everything in the valley where my tribe lived. The wave decimated everything and all that was left was a single sign-post. The sign had only one letter left. It was an X. 147 Eventually I did find my father. I met my grandmother before she died. I have a brother . . . and a sister, and all kinds of aunties and uncles and cousins. My children have seen the faces of the people who look like us. I learned the stories of where our ancestors came from - Chihuahua, Pénjamo . . . I scoured the maps that have begun being made and circulated. This is Rarámuri (Tarahumara), Ndeh (Apache), and P’urépecha (Tarascan) territories. Maybe. I know more. And. I keep my humility. I visit and listen . . . and dream. As I write this chapter, I realize I have come full circle - back to the sweat house, to my call to heal with the lodge, to offer healing to others, to sing, to dance and to lay on the earth, not in a hippy dippy syrup-y mother-earth cliché, but as a return, as a beseeching, as a prayer. This chapter is all about the Temazcalli, about my tentative steps toward it, my eventual surrender, my long-awaited melting into an intimate and sacred partnership with the earth, the fire, the stones, the community and the cosmos. In this chapter, I offer a performative exploration of the Temazcalli where I explore water, womb and woman as decolonial and (re)Indignenizing sites for healing trauma in the wake of a global age of colonization and genocide. I explore temazcalli remnants, the place where blood, tears and milk emerge within the body of woman and earth to propose a theoretical framework and methodology for restoring and restorying Indigenous culture and ceremony of birth and mothering. I mix this theoretical exploration with personal struggles, insights, and experiences along the way to reclaiming the temazcalli. I start out with a deeper look at Indigneous non-discrete, non-binary, holistic dualism and how ontological (blood) memory anchors cultural and ceremonial restoration. I then introduce and 148 defend an imaginal analysis before segueing into my main argument. In this chapter, I argue that woman as earth expressed in the ceremonial temazcalli provides a theoretical model of water in womb as archetypal, a priori, foundational healing practice. What I am coming to understand is that the remnants of the temazcalli point to the female body, and her waters, as original instruction. There are corollary political dimensions that can help us reconsider how we value and express our relationship to terrestrial waters on a global scale. This call to re-membering of the female body, the mother’s body, as first environment, as original instruction, encourages the restoration of female ceremonies that provide a foundation for the recovery of temazcalli medicine that re-members a living Indigenous paradigm. Beyond an academic analysis, I offer a performative emergence of the neo-Indigenous, or Indiginist, Temazcalli where I explore water, womb and woman as a decolonial and (re)Indignenizing process of healing trauma in a global age of colonization and genocide. Drawing, and building, on the work of Susy Zepeda in Queer Xicana Indigena Cultural Production: Remembering through oral and visual storytelling267 and others, I draw on embodied and community embedded interpretations of traditional culture and story as articulated by Leanne Simpson as Biskaabiiyang in “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellions transformation268 as well as a methodology of refusal that reverses the Eurocentric gaze on water, land and people and directs it back at the perpetrator as a creative artist/activist subversion. This article uses the place where blood, tears and milk emerge within the body of woman and earth (temazcalli) to propose a theoretical framework and methodology for considering the larger context of the psycho-politics of water. I argue that the emergent 267 Zepeda, “Queer Xicana Indígena Cultural Production.” 268 Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy.” 149 decolonial-feminist psycho-politics of water re-members grief, wounds and relationtionality within the Indigenous paradigm of dynamic holistic dualism. Indigenous Holistic Dualism (expanded) dividing a pueblo, a culture running down the length of my body, staking fence rods in my flesh splits me splits me me raja me raja This is my home this thin edge of barbed wire. ~ Gloria Anzaldúa As I introduced in chapter two, Anzaldúa’s borderland consciousness is an expression both of cognitive dissonance, but also of liminal borderland consciousness, specifically Indigenous holistic dualism, that has been obscured since European domination, but remains intact in the linguistic rubble of post-colonial Indigeneity. In her chapter “Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary Dualism” in American Indian Thought,269 Anne Waters uses an analysis of the linguistics of gender, and the sexed body, in multiple Indigenous languages to tease out a cutting 269 Waters, 97-115. 150 edge (and ancient) view of gender and, through it, of Indigenous nonbinary (but still dualist) consciousness itself. She argues that linguistic elements of a nondiscrete and nonbinary dualist reality, (in contrast to the classic Euro-American division of reality into discrete bounded opposites that “diminish aspects of the other when used together”270 exist across Indigenous languages of the Americas. The seemingly cognitive inability of some Euro-Americans to acknowledge a different ontological system, represented by Indigenous thought, continues to perplex and befuddle many American Indians. It has historically been in this context of blinded Euro-American vision that many American Indians have been denied the learning/use of Native languages; and in this way have sometimes been prevented from safeguarding their ancient sacred knowledge including their healing ceremonies.Waters’ emphasizes the massive rupture the theft of Indigenous language has had on Indigenous culture. This theft of Native language, and with it, sacred knowledge, led to many painful losses that remain unhealed today. The losses create gaps of understanding of the Indigenous worldview and ontological being in that world. Retaining sacred knowledge, and the ceremonie that are inseparable from it, would have nourished Indigenous people during half a millennium of painful colonization. Yet it was denied to most of those American Indians who survived the genocide.271 The temazcalli itself is an embodiment of dualism insofar as the temazcalera, the chamana or sweat house facilitator, “stands at the juncture of opposing forces and moves between them.”272 Waters outlines the linguistic and ontological basis for her assertion and then describes her curious experience with teaching logic to Native American students. She found that retention rates and grades increased when she introduced a nondiscrete nonbinary dualist frame into her classes. For example she informed her students, before introducing formal logic, that they would be “working with binary logic systems [that] could be thought of as a game of imaginary binary 270 Waters, 99. 271 Waters, 98. 272 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 32. 151 dualities.”273 She added that they might be used in cases such as working with computers. Most logic courses introduce these logic games as the foundational (and therefore hierarchically more valuable) structure of universal innate human reasoning. Native American students tend to drop out or fail these courses. Waters “discovered that in leaving the box of ontological tools open… students could more quickly grasp the intuitive, creative problem solving of conceptual pragmatic manipulation.”274 She found this to be the case even for her many Native students who had never learned or heard their ancestral language. From this, Waters surmised that Native student’s had what she terms, ontological memory, of nondiscrete nonbinary complementary holistic dualism. I believe this ontological memory is a large part of what makes it possible to recover and restore the temazcalli ceremony as the ceremony itself embodies, encourages and restores holistic dualism. Nondiscrete nonbinary complementary dualism means that grief does not exclude joy and hate does not exclude love, yes does not exclude no. These dualities are not opposing binaries, but complementary dualities. They mix and merge and relate to each other while also maintaining a separateness, or a dynamic dualism. Waters writes of the Zuni Twin War Gods, the Evening and Morning Star: “Twins share a single breath of life that animates them both separately and together, providing a model for the Zuni to cast other perceptions of the natural and created universe as being all of a piece.”275 This distinction is held linguistically in Indigenous languages and, as Waters found, in the ontological memory that survives today despite colonial genocide. That American Indians have, against incredible odds, maintained this different ontology is a marvel and a wonder. The presence of this ontological memory suggests that a vital malleability and animation of gender worldview may be 273 Waters, American Indian Thought, 105. 274 Waters, 105. 275 Waters, 104. 152 preferred by Indigenous people over a categorically fixed, sharply bifurcated, limiting worldview. If this is the case, we can expect to encounter a general shift in disciplines that engage Indigenist thought and ontology; they will need to move toward comprehending a continuum of binary, nondiscrete, dual metaphysical systems.276 Waters speaks of the horror and theft of colonialism that led to the giving up of indigenous language: “To transgress the hypersensitive boundary in the presence of the colonizer was to flirt with death.”277 By reclaiming the temazcalli in relation to the original instructions of the female body in the temazcalli ceremony, we stop hiding from death. The Imaginal In order to consider this further, I spent time contemplating three Aztec Goddesses, Cihuacoatl, Tlaltecuhtlé, and Xochiquetzal as imaginal sources of contemplation for Indigenous epistemic and ontological recovery of the non-binary holistic dualism. If I am working here to recover ceremonial practice of the temazcalli using apriori women’s blood rites, then in a way I am looking at what Anzaldúa and Hillman would consider psychological processes. Archetypal, or imaginal, psychology is characterized by a poetic and imaginal reinterpretation of the language of mainstream psychology based on fictions or stories. This rootedness in story reminds us of the Indigenous prioritizing of storytelling as epistemic and ontological reality and resource. As discussed previously, Archetypal psychology further identifies death itself as a necessary presence in human life, as one half of the polarity consisting of life and death. Making one half of a polarity taboo functions to occlude its corollary that in turn interrupts the possibility of practicing the balance required in a holistic dualist system. In this respect, Anzaldúa and Hillman 276 Waters, 107. 277 Waters, 111. 153 offer a similar analysis to Waters: Taboos interrupt the practice of dualism. Waters argues that dualism, as Indigenous paradigm, needs to be respected and restored through ontological memory and Anzaldúa and Hillman offer a resonant imaginal method for this restoration. For Hillman, and Anzaldúa, the creative, as opposed to purely rational, process is the lost resource that psychology must recover. I would argue that the imaginal, with its storied and creative processes, is resonant with the “taboo” Indigenous paradigm of ceremonial healing and female blood-logic. There is a kind of creative humility here that disarms the dominance of hierarchical rationality. This right-relationship, one of holistic dualism between creativity and rationality, has been interrupted for centuries, even in Indigenous communities. Similarly, female blood-logic has been repressed, through the adoption of the nuclear family that isolates women from each other. After a brief girlhood, when women are allowed to connect with each other profoundly (remember the days when you bled with your best girlfriends), women are expected to perform domestic and maternal duties independently of other mothers. It is not the single female voice that needs recovery, but that which emerges when women are connected enough to each other that we bleed at the same time, when we gather during this time and collectively listen for visions to emerge. I consciously use non-academic sources, such as Wikipedia and blogs found through internet searches, as fertile beginning rather than exclusively delving into the archeological and anthropological texts. Referencing anthropological, religious and/or archeological texts that are most certainly written from colonial perspectives, as is accepted in academic discourse, is in fact a type of gate-keeping. I consciously refer to these kinds of marginal sources as a way of 154 challenging the assumption that the archeological and anthropological record somehow contain less fantasy and more truth than individual and community generated sources. The core of my project, at this stage, is not to provide evidence, but rather to gather remnants. Colloquial accounts contain remnants from colonial syncretic erasure that resonate with contemporary living Indigenous people. Furthermore, I employ the research tool most available to re-Indigenizing diasporic women at a grassroots level, the internet. Despite scholarly prohibition of using sources unvetted by its self-referential mechanisms, grassroots perspectives function as research in a way that allows for a strategic de-centering of western colonial assumptions and gate-keeping. While internet search engines also have biases perpetuated through algorithms that operate to manipulate readers rather than inform or educate them, I am specifically confronting the ingrained belief that ordinary people have less access to truth than academics unless they consult them. Poor and marginalized women, who do not have access to academic articles and research in general, must start with what they have access to. In the following contemplations, I center the female body, my own, in collaboration with popular/accessible influences, and emergent community perspectives as a way of modeling a research framework that is imaginal rather than rational. In order to strike a balance, I synthesize both academic and non-academic sources in my process of moving from remnants to generative ceremony and in turn to the generation of culture. 155 Figure 14. Contemporary Temazcal in Mexico 156 :: DREAM :: MEXICO CITY :: 2015 :: in the airplane all night. no sleep. arrived to warmth unimaginable Atole, tortillas, yogurt. slept all day. headache. dreaming crying and bleeding from walking mystery as if we were chasing it, or calling it into existence with our presence. we would start walking on paper, like a pattern, a mandala and then it would appear underfoot in sand in out then crying eyes and bleeding feet llorando y sangrando crying and bleeding 157 womb : woman : waters I was there for 8 days, in a gathering of twelve women (and a man), to learn the Temazcalli ceremony. I was one of the first to arrive, early, and after a sleepless all-night flight. After sitting down at a long community table to drink hot Atole (an Indigenous corn-based drink), I was led to a quiet place to sleep. During this time, I dreamt that all of us were walking around in the sand. Each step, the touch of our feet to the earth, revealed an emergent pattern piece. It was known by us all in the dream that we were creating a pattern of sorts, an archetypal blueprint, a network of ancient connections between ourselves, our feet on the earth, and each other. The dream let me know that it is not only oral tradition that stores our ancestral stories, but the earth herself, and these stories are revealed through our bodies as we make contact with her. We kept on and the pattern grew and grew. We were only allowed to stop, to rest, after we were crying and bleeding. It was as if the whole could not be revealed, attained, enacted, until we reached the threshold of tears and blood. I woke up awash with this imaginal reality, this mandala, this map for my time immersed in the remnants of the temazcalli ceremony. I was there with a diverse group consisting of half white American women and half re-Indigenizing diasporic Mexican American or Xicana women, including myself, whose families were currently state-side. I would sit naked shoulder to shoulder with these sisters in the dark womb of the earth and on a bed of rose petals, Mexican tarragon, Aloe Vera and Spanish moss, where we sipped fragrant herbal tea and released traumas only the earth can hear without flinching. The traumas of historical and present colonization, slavery, rape of land and women, displacement from ancestral land language and culture, broken families and communities, lurk 158 beneath the surface of the lives of Indigenous women. The further trauma of isolation from our protective and healing ceremonies as a result of generations of their destruction, leaves us with few ways to return to our whole-selves. In my experience, traumas, when released in the process of healing, tend to intimidate mainstream practitioners of dominant-cultural psychology, and so traumatic release is often blocked rather than supported. The earth, on the other hand, is unlimited in her ability to absorb and transmute our pain. She is our mother and it is her essence to need our pain. According to Atikamekw tribal member, Daveen Moar, in A Tribe Called Red’s The Manawan Session: "The drum represents the Mother Earth, and when you ask something to our Mother Earth, it’s like a newborn asking his mother something... just like a baby he has to scream and cry when he asks his mother for help. That is why we sing in this way.”278 Like the drum, the temazcalli represents our Mother Earth. When we enter her womb, she invites our pain, all of it. It is our obligation to give it to her as her children. The Temazcalli is a traditional Mexica steam bath,279 or sweat house280 (Karttunen, 222). This trip was a pivotal part of my performed re-search ceremony of re-membering the Mexican Indigenous sweat house. As a brown body, as a diasporic descendant of Indigenous people, as a grandchild of Settler missionaries, as a mother, and as a woman I came to the temazcalli for healing, physical, spiritual and ancestral and I view it as part of what Susy Zepeda refers to as a process to “construct decolonized knowledge”281 and memory, enacting forms of remembering through “art to regain cultural memory and story. Often times, it is through collaboration and ceremony across generations and with sacred elements that the stories are formed and hidden 278 The Halluci Nation, “A Tribe Called Red – The Manawan Session,” YouTube video, 00:25, June 21, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0e4d1yt7x8. 279 Fermin Herrera, Nahuatl-English English-Nahuatl (Aztec) (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2003), 152. 280 Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 222. 281 Zepeda, “Queer Xicana Indígena Cultural Production,” 1. 159 histories are unearthed.”282 My experience in the sweat lodge carried remnants and was performed in the spirit of creativity and presence. As I sat on the earthy floor touching plantas sagradas, wailing out my pain, from when? from before my life even began, I allowed myself to come apart, as Coyolxauqui imperative embraced me, or I embraced her. As I sipped the herbal tea in the final round, smelt the burnt orange enveloping, I felt myself being restored to whole-ness. What was this nearly lost medicine? What was it teaching me? In the 1787 book, The History of Mexico, Francesco Clavigero wrote that, “[t]he temazcalli is so common, that in every place inhabited by the Indians there are many of them.”283 Even as recently as the late seventies, the temazcalli was common in many areas of Mexico.284 However, according to many, the sacred ceremonies have been lost to most. In the last decade or so there has been a resurgence of the temazcalli and an attempt to reconnect it to its spiritual dimensions. In Border Medicine, Brett Hendrickson describes being told by Mariscal Gonzales that “…at the time of the Conquest, the Aztecs brought knowledge about the temazcalli to the ‘lands of the north’ and arranged that the knowledge would be returned south when it was able to be ‘reborn.’”285 From my perspective, this hemispheric sharing promises to be a profound tool that fills the gaps in traditional knowledge across and between Indigenous peoples and is categorically distinct from misappropriations. The temazcalli was used traditionally as a cleansing and purification ceremony by my Indigenous ancestors. In what was Mexica territory, and now called Mexico, Latin America and 282 Zepeda, 1. 283 Mikkel Aaland, Sweat (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1978), 179. 284 Aaland, 181. 285 Hendrickson, Border Medicine, 212, 149. 160 the American Southwest, the sweat house has been nearly erased after generations of colonialism. The Spanish conquistadores were careful to clear the Mayan and Mexica sweat houses of all spiritual/religious meaning and significance including its connection to the female traditions of birth and midwifery. Once this was done the baths were more readily acceptable by Europeans despite the fashion of the age being to bathe as little as possible.286 Here is one description of the temazcalli written by a conquistador: This is a picture of the baths of the Indians which they call ‘temazcalli.’ At the door is an Indian who was the mediator for illnesses. When a sick person took a bath he offered incense, which they term copal, to his idol and stained his skin black in veneration to the idol Tezcatlipoca. Many Indians, men and women, stark naked, took these baths and committed nasty and vile sins within.287 This image of vile sins being performed in the temazcalli is an instructive one, one that demonstrates the taboo formed around the temazcalli and perhaps insight into what was colonially erased from the ceremony, at least as viewed through the lens and words of the colonizer. The Indian’s ceremonial culture of protection and healing, rooted in female rites of birth and midwifery, was deemed sinful simply for functioning outside the Christian paradigm of sin and salvation. I suspect that the vile sins, the burning of copal, the nakedness, the body paint, the sitting on bare earth, the participation of male and female together in the ceremony, represented a dangerous (to the patriarchal-colonial project) matriarchal honoring of female-ness, “. . . the cave-like connotations of the lower body allude to the temazcal (sweat lodge). . . For the Nahuas the temazcal was a therapeutic place, but for the Spanish the building had connotations of 286 Aaland, Sweat, 177. 287 Aaland, 177. 161 “promiscuity, sodomy, and cross dressing.”288 Sharisse D. McCafferty and Geoffry G. McCafferty argue that: [j]ust as the vagina is the place of emergence for female fluid, caves are often regarded as a source of terrestrial waters. . . To summarize, the concept of the earth as feminine force is common throughout mesoamerica, and in fact is found in many Native American belief systems. By extension, entrances to the Earth or metaphoric portals into the female body and water that comes from the earth is conceptually related to feminine fluid.289 Perhaps the crying and bleeding from my dream-time speaks of these sins that lay at the heart of ancient Temazcalli ceremony. In my dream, there was no stopping until we were crying and bleeding. Llorando y Sangrando. According to Brett Hendrickson, in Border Medicine, even today “… a majority of Mexican and Mexican American healers are women.”290 The Mayan word for the Temazcalli is Zumpul-ché and refers to “a bath for woman after childbirth and for sick persons used to cast out disease in their bodies.”291 In a presentation at the 2002 Bioneers conference, Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook said, “In my vision… reproductive justice and environmental justice intersect at the nexus of woman’s blood and voice; at the very centrality of woman’s role in the process and patterns of continuous creation. Of the sacred things that are to be said about this, woman is the first environment; she is an original instruction… In this way we as women are earth.”292 I wonder if Cook’s reference to blood and voice might correspond to the bleeding and crying in my dream. When a woman gives birth she cries out in pain. When her child is wounded she too cries out in pain. When we approach the earth, or the 288 Ezekiel G. Stear, “Beyond the Fifth Sun: Nahua Teleologies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2015), 75. 289 McCafferty and McCafferty, “Back to the Womb: Caves, Sweatbaths, and Sacred Water in Ancient Mesoamerica,” 27. 290 Hendrickson, Border Medicine, 3. 291 Aaland, Sweat, 177. 292 Nelson, Original Instructions, 156. 162 drum, we also cry out in pain. Our blood and voice is the song of justice, a justice that follows the process and pattern of continuous creation. Cook refers to a woman giving birth as coming “to her own blood and voice in the creation of her reality… It’s about transformation and restoration.”293 It is not only about reproductive and environmental justice, it is also about the creation of a personal justice. Cook tells us that woman’s body is our first environment, our first earth. Woman is earth. She is therefore an original instruction, a source of knowing. The temazcalli, then, is also a woman’s body and a woman’s body is the temazcalli. It is an original instruction that can guide our way in constructing decolonial healing knowledge that re-matriates us back to our home-place on earth - specifically the foundational home-place of the female body, its mysteries and its honored position as life-source. This reality that the body and the earth comprise an inseparable non-binary duality is echoed in these words of Syilx Nation knowledge holder, elder and scholar, Jeanette Armstrong, “it’s not just that we’re part of the vast system that operates on the land, but that the land is us.” In the Okanagan language, “the word for bodies contains the word for land… every time I say that word I refer to myself.”294 Here we see that within the reality of woman and mother, as earth, the beginnings of a model is exposed for a recovered and renewed relationship with the justice of our global water system. This knowledge, ancient and Indigenous, has been forced underground over generations of prohibition. It is now in a time of resurrection and resurgence. On July fourth, eighteen eighty five, Métis revolutionary leader, Louis Riel, stated: “My people will sleep for one hundred years, 293 Nelson, 163–64. 294 Nelson, 67. 163 but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirits back.”295 This sentiment circles back to Zepeda’s assertion that art, creative process, and ceremonial practice are foundational for cultural restoration and re-membering. I believe the current resurgence of interest in the temazcalli promises to be a part of Indigenous consciousness re-awakening to itself. In Our Sacred Maiz is Our Mother, Roberto Rodriguez quotes Inés Avila’s Grandpa Raymond as saying, “The ceremonies, the language, the songs, the dances are not lost. We are lost; they are where they have always been, just waiting to be.”296 Linda Hogan shares a similar sentiment in her book, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: The cairns and markers have been taken away and broken. Who knows where to step, where to find wholeness? It's not that we have lost the old ways and intelligences, but that we are lost from them. They are always here, patient, waiting for our return to their beauty, their integrity, their reverence for life. Until we do, we will have restless spirits.297 In recovering sacred ceremonial traditions, there is also need to recover their living fluidity. Leanne Simpson aptly and generously shares her perspective on this in Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellions transformation: Biskaabiiyang does not literally mean returning to the past, but rather re-creating the cultural and political flourishment of the past to support the well-being of our contemporary citizens. It means reclaiming the fluidity around our traditions, not the rigidity of colonialism; it means encouraging the self-determination of individuals within our national and community-based contexts; and it means re-creating an artistic and intellectual renaissance within a larger political and cultural resurgence…Elder Gdigaa Migizi… explained Biskaabiiyang in terms of a “new emergence,” noting that he lives his own interpretations of the teachings he received from his Elders, just as my generation has the responsibility of finding meaning in the teachings our Elders share with us.298 295 Manitoba Metis Federation, “Louis Riel Quotes,” accessed April 16, 2016, http://www.mmf.mb.ca/louis_riel_quotes.php. 296 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother, 53. 297 Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 14. 298 Simpson, Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back, 51. 164 Through research-creation, I am interested to explore the emergent properties of this creative process while also honoring tradition. Women’s bodies, in creative relation to the earth, are a hopeful site for this new emergence. The emergent faculties and frameworks will allow us to un-earth the stories, ceremonies, and strategies needed for today. Moon Lodge When I was nineteen, I had the blessing of sitting with Yurok Elder, Tela Star Hawk Lake.299 In a circle of women, she offered teachings about moontime (menstrual cycle) and the moon lodge, the ceremonial place of female bleeding. She offered individual guidance as well. I feel blessed and grateful that I learned early on about the power and beauty of a woman’s moontime – in contrast with the dominant narrative about women being on the rag. Around this time, I wrote a first-year anthropology essay called, Moontime: The Anthropology of Menstruation which I pulled out recently. In it I related the findings of Thomas Buckley who did research with “Yurok Indians.” He found a significant discrepancy between the story of a woman he interviewed and later research into the ethnographic record. The interviewee explained that she had been adopted and her adoptive family taught her that menstruation was shameful, a woman’s punishment. Once she reunited with her Yurok relatives, she learned the Yurok moontime teachings. She recounted that she and other women in her family were secluded for ten days during their moontime in order to avoid distraction by men, family, cooking, or household obligations while they were in the height of their power. She explained that women need to focus all their energies 299 Tela Star Hawk Lake has written a book on women’s medicine: Star Hawk Lake, Hawk Woman Dancing with the Moon: Sacred Medicine for Today’s Woman. 165 on prayer and meditation in order to find the purpose of their lives. Buckley also reported that all the women in the village would menstruate at the same time and the men, left back in the households would go for sweat lodges – using heat and hard work to receive the same benefits.300 The gap between this description and what Buckley discovered in the ethnographic data astonished him. The data reported that the Yurok considered menstrual blood to be a “dire poison,”301 even to menstruating women themselves. Menstruating women were believed to cause men spiritual and psychic damage. Therefore, they were isolated, ate separately, and bathed in contaminated water because of their dangerous state.302 Out of my received teachings, my study of the anthropological record, and my experience as a menstruating woman I began to develop a story - from memory, and through my own understanding over time in the context of other teachings and herstories, like biskabiiyang, of how the first moon lodge started: As is common among women everywhere on earth, the women of the not-too-large village all bled together each month. It was natural for them to gather during this time, and they began to do this in the moon lodge, a simple dome structure sitting in and emerging from the earth. Moontime was a time when the 300 Thomas Buckley, “Menstruation and the Power of Yurok Women,” in Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, ed. Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 189-190. 301 Buckley, 191 302 Buckley, 188-193 166 veil between worlds became thin and the women would gather and pray, receive visions for their families and the greater community. The elder women would cook and care for the younger ones who were bleeding and praying. After some days the women would return to the village and share their visions with everyone. Now, while the women were still in the moon lodge all the men were left in the village twiddling their thumbs. They became so bored and jealous that they decided to make their own moon-lodge-like thing. So, they built a moon-lodge shaped dwelling of their own and devised a system of heated rocks to thin the veil between the worlds so they too could purify themselves and receive visions. As this story has lived with me through the years, it deeply affected the way I felt about my body, my blood and my power as a menstruating woman. I saw the “bitchiness” so often associated with women’s bleeding time as distorted power rather than weakness or aggression. When a woman’s natural internal rhythm of purification and sacred connection are thwarted, her visions are seen as bitchy simply because they do not fit into the rules of patriarchy or perhaps, they shift into the domain of aggression precisely because they are not honored. Mainstream culture socializes women to perform a femininity that erases their inherent psycho-biological reality in favor of a confused and sterile version of themselves. We pretend we don’t bleed, that our inner and outer worlds do not revolve around our bleeding, that we are pretty wo-men. Because I come from the margins of this socialization (in great part due to the intervention I received at the moon lodge when I was a young woman), when I bleed, I am generally unable and unwilling to conform and perform. To protect myself, I have learned to separate my visions from the gaze under which they live, the gaze that deems such breeches of socialization bitchiness. I teach this to my daughter, but I also teach her how to keep herself safe from the accuser. If I were in a matriarchy, where my insights as a female were apprehended as equal and complimentary opposite to male-ness, I would be able to simply speak within a community of other bleeding women and then together out into the greater community. Women’s blood times 167 would be considered a fundamental resource for community and cultural creation. Since that teaching circle, I have known the power in bleeding even if I had to hide it. Each bleeding time I take the weight of patriarchy in on myself and do my best to listen to the boiling fury that ignites inside me, the fed-up-ness with every man and every structure of oppression. This rage is not my natural female state, but one that is produced by, and within, the binary system that attempts to erase my blood-logic through the dominant culture’s menstrual taboos. Reclaiming the temazcalli in relation to the original instructions of the female body is the re-matriation that restores the power of many of our ceremonies by giving them back their female root. In Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Cherríe Moraga speaks of the temazcalli: Inside the sweat lodge, my tears fall effortlessly. All the quiets my raging heart is the press of dirt beneath my palm. City dirt, rocky and brittle dry. This is woman's country. There is location for me here, here in this relationship with the used and broken, here in the unprejudiced world of the darkness and dirt. I pray the litany of our loss, in the effort to unearth what will not be spoken outside the dark womb of this rite.303 She goes on to articulate how Native men have capitulated to patriarchy and have forsaken Indigenous women’s wisdom in favor of patriarchal women’s gender roles and her struggle to raise up her son within this paradigm. Though I too have learned that it is still not safe to speak my insights in many spaces, I can at least speak them to myself and to my sisters. I can refuse to turn them inward. I can teach this to my daughter and be one who listens and affirms, and I can inscribe it here, as a call and remembrance that beneath temazcalli remnants, is the moon blood of silenced Indigenous women. Like the temazcalli taboo of vile sins, moon-blood vileness is actually power. 303 Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, 62. 168 The assertion of female blood-logic as apriori healing paradigm is what I am interested in drawing out here. This Elder-epistemology, along with my returning to ourselves biskabiiyang-like dream-time vision of crying and bleeding across the archetypal sweat lodge is instructive. This is a connection between the bleeding in my dream and Katsi Cook’s blood of childbirth, and I posit a possible relationship between my dream-time crying and Cook’s voice. Perhaps as women’s bodies recover their relationality with earth, and with the crying and bleeding of temazcalli medicine, they come to voice as described here by Cook. The voice, of childbirth is not one of civil society, but rather it is an outward sound of a single body splitting into two. It is a crying out, a coping, a roar. According to Cook, it is also a personal and transformational coming into selfhood. It is my hope here to share my embodied (and somewhat rebellious) understanding with the greater hemispheric Indigenous community for feedback and insight as we work together outside the Eurocentric gaze, outside the colonial methods of division, toward the creative sovereignty304 of inclusion and a collective ancient future. My First Sweat Lodge Soon after my moon lodge lessons, I met another Elder, Cher Bear Lyons, who initiated me in the sweat lodge, another women’s healing circle. I witnessed lodge teachings as they emerged from her lips and merged with the ancestral knowing in my body. Here is the piece from my journal again: 1989: The medicine woman leading the sweat ushered us inside and in the hot damp darkness she began the first round with a prayer. She thanked her ancestors, explained the womb-of-mother-earth reality of the lodge and then passed the talking stick to the next woman. As each woman spoke, I could feel my 304 Garneau, “From Artifact Necropolis to Living Rooms,” 2. 169 own prayer spinning into being, building its girth and particular heft. When my turn came, something strange and foreign emerged from my body. It was a song in gutteral tones and words I did not recognize. It was not planned in any way but was an irresistible and spontaneous gift and while my body opened to release the song, I felt a confidence and strength, a power that was at once unfamiliar and deeply resonant. I knew this was the way I was supposed to feel in the world. I had had a glimpse. I had heard the voice of my ancestors through the Earth-Mother. Somewhere in my mind and my heart, I made contact with the ancestors who have sat with me even when I pushed their voices deep underground, and I became the knowing again. I was the knowing of earth as mother, as my very own body, as the bloody battleground of menstruation, birth and re-birth. I crawled into the lodge a child and I left a woman, knowing the earth as myself, as my own voice. The dark heat, the circle of women, their prayers, the smoke, the smells, the feeling of the cry-prayer-song spinning itself into being as the ceremony proceeded: these things reminded me of something I could hardly understand let alone speak or explain. I felt like I had come home. My first childhood dream is a recurring dream that I am being chased by cartoon Indians, the horror of it, the disgusting caricature, the frightening setting of a stolen self against myself, of being hunted through an image, a funny storyline. In my dream these stereotypes and misunderstandings threaten me with annihilation. I was born brown into a white world, constantly reflecting back, with subtle and not so subtle words and gestures, my un-belonging. My sweatlodge prayer was for my mother, the woman who birthed me into her white world without a trace of my true belonging to this stretch of land. Instead I was hunted by stereotypes and spectres - the cartoons segueing into all the rest; the lazy, the stoic, the savage, the stoned . . . When I sat in the lodge, my body on the bare earth, in the womb of the lodge, amidst the prayers 170 and songs, I was instantly put back together, shown a view of what I might find if I turn and face these stereotypes and listen through them to hear my call home. My cry of abandonment became a beseeching, a cry of return and homecoming to myself. The land transformed my crying into a song. Inside the lodge, sitting on the earth, I experienced the singing of the land through me, of the ancestors who, through my body as earth, translated her voice into sound and song. Like Daveen Moar teaches, we must come to the earth like a crying baby when we ask of her, when we pray. This was also my own true voice in right-relation to earth and to my-female-self-as-earth. The song that came from me was more of a cry than a song, or it was that kind of cry-song Moar refers to as the rightful way to approach a mother. Aesthetic judgements of “Native singing” amount to a patriarchal colonial logic that perpetuates female erasure, that erases men’s ability to bow to the earth and her resources, that erases men’s ability to bow to bleeding women’s insights by calling them bitchy. Still, the cries remain. Women have not stopped, and will not stop, bleeding. Blood-logic is more than a ceremonial remnant. It is an original instruction, one that can restore Indigenous culture including the temazcalli. These cries wander among us and through them we may utter each other into being, first among women and later men who, like Moar, understand their proper posture with respect to women and female vision and power. This is the power of the land, of mother earth, of grief and of voice. This is the power of the water that emerges as life cleansing waters of purification in the context of the female body. From a creative hemispheric re-constructive approach, this is what temazcalli ceremonial remnants tell us. This is re-matriation of the temazcalli itself. 171 These watery taboos of the temazcalli, tears and blood, are core female healing powers. I now offer an imaginal contemplation on three Mexica Goddesses, Cihuacóatl, Tlaltecuhtlé, and Xochiquetzal as a path of reclamation of female matriarchal power and as an articulation of what needs to be reclaimed in order for the waters of the world to also be freed from colonial perversion of undisturbed natural water into sinfulness while uplifting the patriarchal notion of water as resource. 172 Temazcalli Waters Tears : Cihuacóatl Cihuacóatl :: La Llorona :: La Malinché Serpent woman, known as Cihuacóatl, the goddess of origins, whom you think of as la Llorona and sketch as a half-coiled snake with the head of a woman, represents not the root of all evil, but instinctual knowledge and other alternative ways of knowing that fuel transformation. – Gloria Anzaldúa305 In Aztec mythology, Cihuacóatl, snake woman was one of a number of motherhood and fertility goddess aspects of Coatlique. Cihuacóatl was especially associated with midwives, and with the sweatbaths where midwives practiced. She is also the mother of Mixcoatl, whom she abandoned at a crossroads. Tradition says that she often returns there to weep for her lost son. Childbirth was sometimes compared to warfare and the women who died in childbirth were honored as fallen warriors. Their spirits were depicted with skeletal faces like Cihuacóatl.306 Cihuacóatl, goddess of the earth, childbirth and the sweat house, is the foundational Mexica figure who lives, layered over like a palimpsest, by the 1500’s folktale of La Llorona. Originally a Nahua goddess of instinctual female knowledge characterized by birthing woman as warrior, under colonial syncretic re-interpretation she has become the frightening specter of La Llorona who steals children and drowns them. Some say the folktale is actually a telling of the story of La Malinche who betrayed her people by assisting conquistador Hernán Cortéz as his translator, diplomat and consort. It is said that after La Malinche realized what she had done in helping him to ravage her people, she left Cortéz and took her children. Cortéz then came after La Malinche 305 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 121. 306 "Cihuacōātl," Wikipedia, last modified May 27, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cihuac%C5%8D%C4%81tl. Adaptation by the author. 173 to take their children back to Spain with him and she murdered them rather than release them to him. This story reminds me of one recounted by Francesca Mason Boring in her book Feather Medicine: Walking in Shoshone Dreamtime: A Family Systems Constellation, about her ancestor who smothered her crying baby at her breast to protect her community from oncoming murderous Indian-hunters.307 I found a clue to what was erased in one obscure virtual community telling of the folktale: La Llorona was a beautiful woman who drowned her children in a nearby river out of despair and revenge when she saw her husband with another woman. Once she realized what she had done she began searching for her children. Now, she roams the Mexica waters, from the American Southwest into the depths of Mexico, and can be heard crying out to them “wailing from the pit of her soul. She is doomed to live eternity in “the in-between”—not quite on Earth, not quite in the afterlife”308 for she is not allowed back into heaven until she rescues the souls of her children. While this telling speaks nothing of female warrior power as it might be expected to be portrayed, it does draw out a very taboo female instinctual power, that of weeping. Perhaps weeping is a warrior’s tool. A woman’s weeping is a powerful cleansing tool. Rather than forfeit this power, women might embrace grief and use it to maintain clear vision that results from an uncluttered heart. This story also relates to death, specifically murder, and the taboo around a woman’s connection to the life and death of her children specifically relating to childbirth. The current climate for 307 Francesca Mason Boring, Feather Medicine: Walking in Shoshone Dreamtime: A Family Systems Constellation (New York: Aeon Publishing, 2004), 62. 308 Theresa Finney, “La Malinche, La Llorona, La Virgen: My Mother’s Ghost Stories,” The Hairpin, June 30, 2014, https://www.thehairpin.com/2014/06/la-malinche-la-llorona-la-virgen-my-mothers-ghost-stories/. 174 women’s reproductive rights echoes what has been erased from this story, that women stand at the threshold of life and death as gate-keepers to this world. This power is constantly undermined, first by erasure of ancestral Indigenous female wisdom of plants and remedies and also by legislative assaults on reproductive rights. Currently in the United States there are 30 states in which a woman can be tried for murder if she simply has a miscarriage. Because there is no clear way to discern a spontaneous miscarriage and many kinds of induced miscarriages, women are at risk of being prosecuted for murder even for a natural miscarriage. For example, in 2015 an Indiana woman who used abortion inducing drugs was convicted of feticide and given a twenty year sentence. While the original conviction of feticide was downgraded to neglect after an appeal, and she was released after eighteen months,309 the original conviction and sentencing contributes to collective female reproductive consciousness. According to Gloria Anzaldúa, la Llorona is the one who calls from the realm of deep instinct, from the underworld of the dark mother into the story of what is possible. La Llorona is Lady Death who “turn[s] the baby in the womb…guides the hands of the midwife… open[s] the pathways of the mother’s milk in the breasts, as well as… comfort[s] anyone who weeps alone.”310 La Llorona cries and cries and cries. I have dreamt of her since childhood, of her particular unending and desperate anguish. I had not heard the story until recently, but I recognize her pain- 309 Molly Redden, “Jailed for Ending a Pregnancy: How Prosecutors Get Inventive on Abortion,” The Guardian, November 22, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/22/abortion-pregnancy-law-prosecute-trump; Associated Press, “Judge Says Purvi Patel Should Be Freed Immediately After Feticide Conviction Overturned,” The Guardian, August 31, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/01/purvi-patel-freed-immediately-feticide-conviction-overturned. 310 Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 143. 175 in-me and how it relates to the pain of separation between mother and child. From childhood, I have a recurring nightmare where I cannot find my mother and experience an impossible and brutal grief. I was born in 1970 when few women had access to abortion. She could not spare me physical existence, and in order to keep me, her bastard brown child, safe she had to metaphorically drown me. She had to teach me compliance with victimization, and silence in the face of hypocrisy, such that my grief could only show up in my never-ending liminal dream life. The way out of the eternal in-between of the folktale back into the warrior birthing goddess is by rescuing the souls of our children, in particular our girls who we have metaphorically drowned in order to protect them from literal death. As moderns, Indigenous or not, we rarely allow ourselves the release of this kind of grief. Even when triggered we have devised slippery ways of avoiding it. La Lorona didn’t completely erase Cihuacóatl. Remnants remain. La Llorona’s grief, her impossible and brutal weeping, when released in the temazcalli, or better yet, in powerful communal female bleeding times, is the re-matriation that will show us how to relate to death and our role as threshold warriors, midwives of culture, modern matriarchs. Proper grief arises spontaneously among bleeding women. Woman’s moon-blood taboo includes the taboo on grief. Thus, grief is a secondary taboo, after blood. 176 Blood : Tlaltelcuhtli Tlaltecuhtli :: Hungry Goddess Tlaltecuhtli is the monstrous Aztec God/dess of the Earth and the one most hungry for human sacrifice. If you listen you might hear her crying out at night for human blood to quell her pain from being split in half. Tlaltecuhtli has both male and female attributes, though she is most commonly referred to as female. Her name means "The one who gives and devours life", and she represents the earth and the sky. According to the Aztec creation story, as Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca began to create the world, the monster Tlaltecuhtli destroyed it all as soon as it was created. In resistance, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca transformed into giant serpents wrapping their bodies around Tlaltecuhtli until they tore her into two. One piece of Tlaltecuhtli's body became the earth, mountains and rivers and the other became the sky-heavens.311 This story tells us that blood is the first requirement in our relationship to earth. It is also the first taboo. As we have seen, making the temazcalli taboo was part of the colonial project. Temazcalli remnants show it to be the womb of grief and blood. Thus making blood taboo was also a part of the patriarchal colonial project. I was born into the body of a woman and so I am no stranger to blood… each moon my body bleeds from between my legs, my hips ache, my tears flow and my heart rages. In my blood, I become Tlaltecuhtli, I become earth. I become aware of myself as earth, as bloody sacrifice. In fact, every birth is a re-enactment of Tlaltecuhtli’s body being split in two and the sacrifice-separation of mother and child that is everyone’s inevitable first wounding. This separation also speaks to the weeping of La Llorona, the existential trauma of maternal initiation. There is a deep grief in the death of self that is a part of every birth. According to Tlaltecuhtli's story, there is also grief in the separation of male (heavens) and female (earth). This story is somewhat reminiscent of the story of (Cihuacóatl) Eve’s curse on 311 “Tlaltecuhtli,” Wikipedia, last modified July 1, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaltecuhtli. 177 the world and the shame that separates sexes. Tlaltecuhtli represents the primal wound between male and female, a wound that the blood taboo keeps us from exploring. Wounds, the source of our tears, the bloody memoria of the necessary, the intentional and the random traumas that we traverse, are sometimes successfully resilience-building and sometimes devastatingly damaging. They are the site of great possibility and great despair. Like Cihuacóatl (the Weeping Woman), Tlaltecuhtli, torn asunder, cries out to us for our sacrifice, for our blood. She is broken and angry. She is roaring her demand for blood to ease her own pain of separation from whole-ness, her own division into male and female, heaven and earth, celestial and heavenly waters. Her pain is assuaged by human blood. Blood is the water of the wound, and also of the creative female body. According to the story, our pain can only be constructive and generative when it is offered to the earth for her consumption. Women’s blood can only be constructive and generative when it is similarly offered. This right-relationship to wound/moon blood will help us all find our wholeness even in our fundamental separation. The chasm (wound) between the sexes, the separation between mother and child that is not reversible or changeable might be made whole instead. While Cihuacóatl wants our grief, Tlaltecuhtli wants the very wounds that lay beneath even the grief. She needs our wounds, like a mother needs the weeping of her child across her lap. She will consume our pain. It is her food. Our pain quells her pain. We are so concerned with stopping pain, we have forgotten its purpose. We hide, then flush, our menstrual blood down the toilet. We are a world of addicts and consumers. We put on happy faces despite internal despair and global collapse. Imaginal contemplation on Tlaltecuhtli’s need for blood of human sacrifice, 178 of human wounds, helps us come out from hiding that colonization required, and still requires, of us, that the fear of Indian hunters inscribed on our psyches, and that the taboos and stereotypes perpetuate. For example depression is not a state of grief or anger, or jealousy or fear, but rather results from the repression of fluid emotion. It is the lack of emotion that creates the numb trance that characterizes our age. If we thaw out our frozen selves in the heat of the temazcalli, we might recover our ability to feel, to come alive and embrace the myriad shades of human emotion. When I hold my child after a fall, or while he cries or in the middle of the night, and I really absorb his pain I am changed. I am transported from mundane reality into a sacred flow, a universal realm. This is in contrast with the alternative feeling when I ignore his pain, one of mild frustration and a desire to make him feel better as quickly as possible, to fix him. This fix-it culture is what mothers are pressured to adopt by men within patriarchy and it is what mother, as an original instruction, resists. For example, when I feel disappointment, it’s a mix of grief and shame, and a man immediately tries to cheer me up rather than listen to my pain, I am forced to repress these feelings and hold them in my body. The temazcalli has the power to cleanse us of this toxicity, as does childbirth, and a women’s blood cycle. This is why mothers, along with bleeding women, must be re-centered in themselves and their voices heard in all things. This may require a temporary strategic centering and amplification of female voices as they re-member and re-assert their current under-produced and under-performed perspectives. So far I have explored two kinds of water that emerge in the temazcalli, tears and blood, as they came to me in my dream-time vision and in combination with an imaginal contemplation on 179 three Nahua Goddesses. Certainly in my time in the temazcalli, there was plenty remembering of wounds, of entering them until blood and voice, tears and anguish of the sisters sitting knee to knee, heart to heart, were released with all the toxicity stored with them in our bodies. Since this journey, starting with a dream, mixing with memoria and Elder epistemology, has led us deeply into the realms of female fluids, there is one more water I would like to explore. In a search for the psycho-political properties of milk, I will engage a third Mexica goddess, Xochiquetzal. 180 Milk : Xochiquetzal Xochiquetzal :: Eve Xochiquetzal, a Mexican Indigenous Deity, ascends to the upper world to seek knowledge from “el árbol sagrado,” the tree of life, que florecía en Tamoanchan. In another Garden of Eden, Eve snatches the fruit (the treasure of forbidden knowledge) from the serpent’s mouth and “invents” consciousness-–the sense of self in the act of knowing.312 Xochiquetzal is the goddess associated with fertility, beauty, and female sexual power, serving as a protector of young mothers and a patroness of pregnancy, childbirth... Xochiquetzal is always depicted as an alluring and youthful woman, richly attired and symbolically associated with vegetation and in particular flowers. By connotation, Xochiquetzal is also representative of human desire, pleasure, and excess, appearing also as patroness of artisans.313 Xochiquetzal is the goddess of sexuality, birth and motherhood. According to the internet, she is usually dressed lavishly and is portrayed as young and beautiful. “Xochiquetzal is the Aztec goddess of love, del amor; her name means ‘Flor Preciosa, Precious Flower’ or more literally ‘Pluma de Flor,’ and her cult descended from los toltecas.”314 Xochiquetzal is in milk. Her breasts are flowing with the water of life, the tears of her blood, the milk of ages. Breast milk is produced by the female body from nutrients in the blood stream. Midwives will tell you that on the day a woman’s milk comes in she will cry. She will cry for herself and for her child. She will mourn her failure as a mother and as a woman. She will cry and cry and cry believing that she will never make milk, that she will never be a true woman. And then as she sleeps, or bathes, or hears her infant cry, her milk will stream and fill and gorge her breasts. According to Katsi Cook, 312 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 121. 313“Xochiquetzal,” Wikipedia, last modified June 4, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X%C5%8Dchiquetzal. 314 Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 237. 181 “From the bodies of women flow the relationships of those generations, both to society and to the natural world. In this way, our ancestors said, the earth is our mother. In this way, we as women are the earth.”315 She continues: Because nursing our infants are at the top of the food chain, they inherit a body burden of industrial contaminants from our blood by way of our milk; thus we are part of the landfill, colonized…wherever you go on this earth, you’re going to find toxic contaminants in mother’s milk. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not safe to breast-feed. Our policy in our community is that breastfeeding is the safest route in this environment.316 Of course, contaminated mother’s milk also has all the benefits of nutritional complexity and balance that her body makes just for her nursing infant. In fact, its nutritional content changes according to time of day, length of feeding, health of the child, demand of the child, and developmental age of the child.317 On top of this, breastfeeding is profoundly relational. This instruction in relationality is extremely foundational for Indigenous cultures extending into its core epistemological and ontological underpinnings. This original instruction, the lesson of relationality offered in the breastfeeding dyad, is far more powerful than the destructive force of the toxic load found in many mothers’ milk today. Leanne Simpson echoes this sentiment when she contrasts political conceptions of relations between nations allegedly contained in legal treaty documents with the Indigenous conception of treaty. According to Simpson: 315 Nelson, Original Instructions, 156. 316 Nelson, 159. 317 Alex Mlynek, “6 Magical Ways That Breastmilk Changes to Meet Your Baby’s Needs,” Today’s Parent, December 5, 2018, https://www.todaysparent.com/baby/breastfeeding/magical-ways-breastmilk-changes-to-meet-your-babys-needs/. 182 Canadians are taught that treaties are legal agreements through which Indians ceded our lands for cash… Indigenous Peoples, however, have a different history in treaty making… Breastfeeding is the very first treaty. Edna explained to me that breastfeeding is where our children learn about treaties, the relationships they encode and how to maintain good treaty relationships…. Nursing is ultimately about a relationship. Treaties are ultimately about relationship. One is a relationship based on sharing between a mother and child and the other based on sharing between two sovereign nations. Breastfeeding benefits both the mother and the child in terms of health and in terms of their relationship to each other. And treaties must benefit both sovereign nations to be successful….”318 Simpson also talks about the importance of balance between the two parties in a treaty relationship and about commitment and compassion when things are difficult.319 Both mama and baby need to be well for the treaty to work properly and when connection is hard, treaties require the perseverance, and open heart, of love. In essence this perspective on politics being rooted in, or built on the foundations of, the relationship between mother and child, is a fundamental challenge to heteropatriarchy and it’s obsession with the language of policy and negotiations, market demand and surplus, national security and international threat… et cetera. It marks a profound shift in thinking from a colonial mindset. If we also include blood and tears, grief and wounds, crying and bleeding in this model we see a picture emerging that is very different from what currently exists in most dominant political and cultural structures. 318 Simpson, Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back, 106. 319 Simpson, 107. 183 Figure 15. Xochiquetzal’s Push/Pull Gesture Figure 16. My Push/Pull Gesture Embodiment 184 At this point, I want to press further into the imaginal, looking again at Xochiquetzal’s relationship with the tree of life, as opposed to her place at the threshold of birth and death. In the image I chose as a point of contemplation, Xochiquetzal‘s left hand holds her suckling baby close to her breast (yes, pull) while her right hand stretches in front of her, palm up (no, push) toward the tree of life/knowledge growing and in full flower. In this gesture, Xochiquetzal deeply expresses the, perhaps ambivalent, ontological holistic dualism embedded in Indigenous Knowledge. Feathers in her hair she is the goddess of flowers; feathers of flight, flowers of earth, and like Tlaltecuhtli, she exists as both heaven and earth. Both. Together. Separate. She is a yes/no to life. She is the overarching duality that contains fe(male). Male, is a sub-category of female. She is Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland consciousness: dividing a pueblo, a culture running down the length of my body, staking fence rods in my flesh splits me splits me me raja me raja This is my home this thin edge of barbed wire.320 Xochiquetzal’s yes/no is also a wound, a chasm of peculiarly female ambivalence. Here we are also reminded of Tlaltecuhtlé, whose body, like Anzaldúa’s body, and my body, are borderlands 320 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 24–25. 185 of split flesh. She represents the essence of Xochiquetzal’s push/pull, her yes/no, her gift to us of self-knowledge, of ego, of needing la Cihuacoatl, the instinctual-ness of grief, of Tlaltecuhtlé and the blood of our wounds, for our transformation. Anzaldúa reminds us Xochiquetzal is also Eve and that woman’s curse of shame and painful childbirth are yet more borderlands, other dualities that we must sustain and traverse. There is nowhere to get to, just the getting there or not, the yes/no of human existence. Remembering the three Goddesses is restorative. Through them we can remember that our wounds, and the grief stored in them, are our true models for re-membering water’s place as the lifeblood of earth. The similar duality of the mother’s body as earth is also a potent site for the Indigenous epistemic and ontological recovery of the non-binary holistic dualism that contests colonial driven systems of knowledge. The female body, in particular the body of the Mother in relation to her child, as original instruction offers an emergent decolonial-feminist psycho-politics of water. Only through restoration of our ability to grieve our wounds in relation to each other will we heal the colonial rupture that breeds the slow violence that surrounds us. It is my belief that the temazcalli, ceremonial womb of healing, is a medicine of repair and a model for re-membering water womb and woman…. blood, tears and all. 186 5: Rebozo Remnants 187 abrazarme ella es una llanta ella she weeps for your heart held )rest; hand mine hago la masa instrumento :awaken( magico estoy contigo la vida is ritmo es corazon solo mi rebozo me abraza 188 Rebozo Remnants re-membering in 3 parts 189 Part I in xochitl in cuicatl poetry :: prayer :: truth-telling 190 jibberish :: poetry :: logic 191 I i I i iwillneveriwillneveriwillneveriwillneveriwillneveriwillneveriwillneveriwillneverberealenough Ifyouwanttoberightwiththe univ erse right-speech//noble-speech//inotherwords:poetry almostasfaras( PRAYER you will discipline your posture/gesture/presence You will recollect amidst sh adows a hint of Teotl. The whole-ité. The prop er attitude thewhat-is-ness that she split in half, a half resemblance Prayer is for the supplicant TEOTL is the light) outside the cave. OMETEOTL allowing you a tastepomegr anate sacrifice. Don’t look back. shadows mean theunityisbroken and this divi s ion is the closest you’ll come. XochiCuicatl arrives. She does n’tstay late or eat all your food. Shewillhaunt you if you will touchthe world like a(n instrument)flute. poetryalmostasfarasprayer is not an option it’s (your obligation(to taste knowledge) to be guilty tobewasteland to be foreverlistening . . . . you you you insongwandering truth ; 192 Poetry matters. Its nobility is in its practice of balance. Poetry is love that traverses sense and nonsense, that allows for miracle(s): “Accident that is not the result of chance [milagro] is natural to poems, whereas it is the consummate vice (the "virus") of any self-enclosed system, such as the computer.”321 The Nahua remnant semantic couplet, in Xochitl in Cuicatl (earthpoetryhumanprayercosmictruthsong) is “perhaps the only truth on earth” and “the only possible way to invoke the supreme Giver of Life.”322 It is at once an ontological, epistemic, metaphysical, and ethical Indigenous reality, a scattered obligation resting amongst the colonial rubble: This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to aIl the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another–from forest to city, from story to computer–at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.323 321 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Anne Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 82. 322 Miguel Leon-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack Emory Davis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 203–4. 323 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 9. 193 earth :: prayer :: cosmos 194 Like love, XochiCuicatl (earth//poetryhuman//prayercosmic//truthsong) is intercessor between heaven and earth, intercessor that must never abandon either being or beings, who shall not default to one pole or the other, who is the measure of world. Poetry's circulation and its action no longer conjecture of a given people but the evaluation of the planet Earth. Here poetic thought safeguards the particular, since only the totality of truly secure particulars guarantees the energy of Diversity. But in every instance this particular sets about Relation in a completely intransitive manner, relating, that is, with the finally realized totality of all possible particulars.324 However, this is only true if we remember the miracle, the accidentnotbychance that makes poetry sacred. Unlike science that transforms language, XochiCuicatl, milagropoetry, invents generates originates language from the particular-earth-song accident. Poetic thought, before or after the accident of the poem, or through it, attempts to set itself up in an axiomatic system . . . The poetic axiom, like the mathematical axiom, is illuminating because it is fragile and inescapable, obscure and revealing. In both instances the prospective system accepts the accident and grasps that in the future it will be transcended. Science transforms its languages; poetry invents its tongues. For neither is it a question of exploring, but one, rather, of going toward a totality that is unrealizable, without being required to say where they will come together–nor even that they have any need to do so.325 Generative poetry is a heading-toward not a guaranteed truth bearer. It requires a discipline of allowing, of discerning between chance and miracle, of keeping logical forms close enough to craft, but also far enough away as not to interfere. It is a somatic (earth) reality, practice, prayer (cosmos). 324 Glissant, 32. 325 Glissant, 85. 195 idle talk:: truth-telling :: manifest destiny 196 “This is what I know from blood: The first language is not our own. There are names each thing has for itself, and beneath us the other order already moves. It is burning. It is dreaming. It is waking up.” ~ Linda Hogan326 326 Linda Hogan, Dark. Sweet.: New & Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2014), 37–38. 197 Truth telling can be faked in a world without poetry. In a world of sense, history of all-knowing(-ité)ness. XochiCuicatl makes a different kind of sense... one that rests and unfolds, that lives, that takes a part of you and metabolizes it... offers it back, and you feel it... but not with your mind. you do not grasp it. you become it. It becomes-you. You become with/for/because:of// the poem. the tr uth of blood and dream and becoming and love the poem cosmos a verse inheritedmiraculously sp(br)oken 198 Part II Relation love :: errancy :: witness 199 échos-monde :: love :: chaos-monde 200 To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is — solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. ~ Rilke327 327 Rainer Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1954), 53-4. 201 The Poetics of Relation is a succulency. It is a world of worlds of polarities in which, I argue, love is the power of movement, of rhythm, of all things. Glissant’s echos-monde328 is a place / space / wonder in relation to/with chaos-monde.329 This world of worlds is a place sanctified by a hol(i)[y]-ness(ité) of becoming. I do not here speak of Plato’s motion (or at least that motion that is ascribed to him) up and out from illusory image to pure form, but of my understanding of the Platonic motion from here to there, from life to death and back again. Again. While he banishes the poets in the Republic, Plato invokes the mythic images of Persephone and Tiresias in the Meno as he describes and outlines the recollective/dialogical, dare I say relational, process of becoming. I am referring to the related generative process of moving between being and beings, the sacred and the mundane, the oral and the written, hot and cold, over and under, this and that – in fact, between all poles that make up the infinite polarities of the world. I am speaking of love’s becoming, of Rilke’s poetic and relational becoming world-love :: 328 Echos-monde: for Glissant - a world of resonance between all things. 329 Chaos-monde: for Glissant - a world that cannot be systematized. “Together, they represent a different kind of totality – a totality as openness and a temporary product of process: ‘what is totality, once again, and through return, if not the relation of each matter to all others?” (Glissant, Poetics of Relations, 16). 202 Perhaps love is the in-between, the rhythmic “simultaneous temporality”330 that arises as we live in the generative back and forth between center and periphery, dynamic and static, whole and remnant. I once watched a film of a woman who had had a near death experience. In the film she described how as the un-embodied next-world became imminent, she was able to locomote, or it’s un-embodied equivalent, using the force of love. I have come back to that image many many times over my life, wondering how I will fare in the next world, if I have properly heeded Rilke’s call to become world. This humility, in turn, creates a motion forward, toward. Love. echos chaos. All / directions; 330 Aníbal Quijano, “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America,” Boundary 20, no. 3 (1993): 149–50. 203 exile :: errancy :: belonging 204 I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using as my defense the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, cunning. ~ James Joyce331 331 Goodreads, “James Joyce,-Quotes-Quotable Quote,” accessed August 12, 2021, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12424-i-will-tell-you-what-i-will-do-and-what 205 Exile is an allowable weapon in diasporic defense. The cavernous silence of exile directs one inward first in a surrendered motion toward the home-not-home of Glissant’s errancy. “While errance is usually translated as ‘wandering,’ ‘errantry’ seems better suited to Glissant’s use of the word, and there is precedence in translation of Césaire. Errance for Glissant, while not aimed like an arrow’s trajectory, nor circular and repetitive like the nomad’s, is not idle roaming, but includes a sense of the sacred motivation.”332 Perhaps the nomad is idle and roaming; perhaps the arrow is linear and errancy is the opportuned reality of both at once, one at a time, at once. Glissant seems to also say two things at once; This should never have happened // This had to happen. Errancy is the navigator of exile and belonging. We must leave our safe-home-land-nostalgia-belonging for exile and traverse its arc away and back again. I imagine this to be what Memmi means by “He [the colonizer] will slowly realize that the only thing for him to do is to remain silent.”333 …he certainly does not conceive… of a deep transformation of his own situation and of his own personality…He invokes the end of colonization, but refuses to conceive that this revolution can result in the overthrow of his situation and himself. For it is too much to ask one's imagination to visualize one's own end, even if it be in order to be reborn another; especially if, like the colonizer, one can hardly evaluate such a rebirth”334 Here Memmi calls for the complete immolation of the colonizer, his death. Re-birth. He calls for a sort of inverse process for the colonized. First, he must immerse himself in the remnants, all of what is left - especially his colonized language. He must fight for this immersion, even use 332 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 211. 333 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 2003), 43. 334 Memmi, 40–41. 206 violence toward “Revolution.” but. He must ultimately also transcend, “rise above his colonized being.”335 He must become a nationalist and then “conquer himself and be free in relation to that nation… free in relation to the religion…[,] past, tradition, ethnic characteristics, etc.”336 I see this as a transcendence into the accidentnotbychance motion of monde-love, the re-membering of that which must be intact such that living traditions are un-earthed, poems stumbled upon, serendipity the result of errant-love//pra(ct)xis. 335 Memmi, 151. 336 Memmi, 152. 207 recognition :: witness :: exclusion 208 Political identity is static and depends on recognition. It calls for recognition, requires recognition. Identity relies on recognition and borders of Other-ness, (ex)clusion. Witness is fluid. It is shape-shifter, visionary. Witness embodies, draws things into somatic resonance. I do not mean here what passes daily in 2019 in the identity politics of (in)clusion that is always also another exclusion. Occlusion. -clusion: to shut (in) )out( Witness is not performative. Witness is enactment. Theories of testimony can “…begin to take us beyond a theory of identity based on recognition and exclusion toward a theory of subjectivity based on witnessing. Laub develops a notion of the inner witness, set up in dialogic relations with the other, necessary for a sense of oneself as a subjective agent. Extreme torture disintegrates the inner witness and thereby undermines subjectivity.”337 Every political inclusion is a political bypass around witnessing. Every exclusion is also an attempt to avoid listening. Witnessing, on the other hand, is a Dialogic Relational Poetic of Love. It coalesces, traverses, delves, grieves, waits. In the literary work of Sandra Cisneros, continual mingling of truth and lies pushes the reader into an uncertain liminal space where he or she starts to doubt what is certain and to be certain of what is doubtful. Not only does Cisneros blur the borders between genres and techniques, she also undermines any fixed dichotomy, thus fostering a more complex reading of identities, races, languages and human relationships.338 Identity must find its un-mooring and if this is from the odd lie, or dare I say - misappropriation, that also opens space for accidentsnotbychance to trip and invite us into their worlds of literal-magic, real magical-ism. What if identity, above and below, were accessible to us, if we were not always gripping at power or claiming our victimhood? In class, after a student clumsily refers to the belly of the boat, another student interrupts, “that is an image from my lineage.” In the 337 Oliver, Witnessing, 85. 338 Mara Salvucci, “‘Like the Strands of a Rebozo’: Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo and Chicano Identity,” RSA Journal 17, no. 18 (2007): 175. 209 culture of social justice “liberation” we have a trained response to such an intervention. We paralyze ourselves and others, the air stops moving, breath collapses. Rather than visit our underworlds, or witness those of others, we shut-up. Descend into not-even-silence or stillness, we solipsistically cycle back through ourselves over and over and over, never traversing the space of, what?, death?//shame?//ego? to the Other, and back. Just back and back and back. selfselfself 210 Part III Rebozo Remnants ceremony :: earth :: woman 211 authentic :: ceremony :: fake 212 The Huichol say that if the peyote disappears the world will end. I pause the documentary and sit up straight. Really?, I ask out loud… wanting the literal answer to be yes. I want it to be true. My want is a knowing. I know it to be true. I can feel the literality in my body as the narrator’s voice reports objectively, the “primitive” belief of the Huichol people. Naive, young, unscientific, wrong . . . but my heart jumps, apprehends the apriori, first, primal truth-ité. Peyote is the vision plant, the one that unearths, that earths, that brings our bodies into rhythm and resonance with all things such that we can see, such that we can be, such that we can listen, such that we can gather ourselves in relation. All things. Relatives. death a character. Mother matriz madrina metzli M(bl)oo(d)n What is there to say? How do the mountain and the wind constitute me such that I can move this person?339 How do I begin. In resonance with the mountain andthesea andtheblood andthesun andthejaguar andthebeetle andtheloaf andthehubcaps andthebudsofdaphne such that I can hear the thing. Open throat. sing open space ? This is ceremony. It is a perplexity, it is death… it is maidenmatrix enactmentwitnesserrantlove “this is a ceremony act accordingly”340 339 Alejandro Vallega. “Decolonial Philosophy” (Class Lecture, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, 2017). 340 Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 96. 213 body :: earth :: language 214 The elders say that Indigenous language comes from the earth gift gesture. I can’t even remember where I first heard it… it is also said that body is earth, that earth is mother and through the mother we are born, and we are re-born in the temazcalli (sweat-house) earthwombmedicine ceremony. Language is the material of relation; it is the extension of earth in psyche. It is ether. Body is matter; body is below. The earth sends herself through a body into sound that resonates into culture. Language comes from the earth, I was taught. She, my/not-my own/earth//body, arises in the sweat assong. When the rocks are hot enough a crack forms between worlds and medicine(language) is received(earth). accidentnotbychance - milagro. “In recovering his autonomous and separate destiny, he immediately goes back to his own tongue.”341 The colonized must immerse himself in every remnant he can find. Only through the sub-terrainian, Glissant’s sub-marine (sea is earth blood), the building of “language with rocks” (rocks is earth) is history recovered. unity. 'Je bâtis a roches mon langage."342 My penciled-in notes on page eleven of The Poetics of Relation say, “remnants are actually more transformational.” “…roots are lacking. We must begin with that.”343 We wander through the patchwork opacity of these remnants into light, from privation, remnantaccident, to love. “…each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other”344 There is only/always other-ness(ité), remnants, rocks, rubbletolove now: 341 Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 134. 342 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xi. 343 Glissant, 11, 211. 344 Glissant, 11. 215 WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota, therein, the question: what did I know about Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces. Until a friend comforted, don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together…. My hope: my daughter understands wholeness for what it is, not for what it’s not, all of it the pieces;345 I gather my remnants, myself a remnant//exile, my body a clue. I lean into XochiCuicatl, pray for a poem//song//word. My body aches from the toomuchcoffee I cannot not. The earth says, I am your mother, I will eat your pain I still can’t lay myself down. It’s too hard. Excuses. One year she asks of me, and I cannot not (not). XochiCuicatl is as far as I can reach speech sp(br)eak. So I call out to XochiCuicatl, like a bard and find “the mystery of mother tongues, languages of the desire whose distant essence, the indeterminate and indeterminable object of every quest, is symbolized in turns by the fin 'amor, the sister, the lady, the queen or the virgin-mother.”346 Lost language is woman… the poem. is. also. (female) 345 Soldier, WHEREAS, 75–76. 346 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 59. 216 birth :: rebozo :: death 217 ciua nequeatlapacholoni :: como toca de mujer (o cosa semejante) how to touch/play a woman347 cenzotl :: centzontilmantli :: blanket of a thousand colors348 “Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone” ~Sandra Cisneros349 347 Rafael G. Córdova, “El Rebozo, Una Prenda de Identidad Mexicana,” Asociación de Amigos del Museo de Arte Popular, August 30, 2014. http://web.archive.org/web/20190206055756/http://www.amigosmap.org.mx/2014/08/30/el-rebozo-una-prenda-de-identidad-mexicana/. 348 Antama, “The Rebozo: Cultural Backgrounds,” February 24, 2019, https://antamashop.com/blogs/antama/rebozo. 349 Guadalupe V. Linares, “Unravelling the Rebozo: The effects of Power on the Body in Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo” (MA Thesis, University of Nebraska, 2010). 218 I am an exile. There is no homeland, only possible remnants, accidental poems of reunion. The pre-colonial backstrap loom, originally used to weave ciua nequeatlapacholoni dates back to at least 1400 BCE. After conquest, new materials and weaving technologies were introduced by the Spanish and many were incorporated into Indigenous culture.350 The Mexican shawl, rebozo, synchretic remnant, palimpsest of sorts, codedinpatternedstrands and forgotten. mostly. The world is a miracle (residiotierramilagro) a relational accidentnotbychance that//who like mountains consecrates. me. I take her //milagrorebozo// in my hands slowly. a river. “Women have no beginning only continual flows. Though rivers flow women are not rivers. Women are not roses they are not oceans or stars. i would like to tell her this but i think she already knows.”351 rivernotriver rebozo she knows. She is that-which-is-played(tocar)touch(ed) by a woman… or something similar. What is similar to a woman? // earth // body birth// 350 Córdova, “El Rebozo, Una Prenda de Identidad Mexicana.” 351 Ana Castillo, Women are not Roses (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1987), 7. 219 There are myriad workshops on using the rebozo for fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, baby wearing/caring and yet most of them until recently have been taught by white women who learned in Mexico or from someone else who learned in Mexico. What does it mean to learntherebozo? Is it an accidentnotbychance a monde-of-any-sort? I have tried to sit through these exotic revivals, the special gatherings where accidents are ignored, viewed as inferior. It is often either critical-awareness free appropriation or desperate self-important claims to lineage… rarely is the poem invoked. Rarely is the rebozo herself felt, heard, followed or touched. Her poetry unheard. We know that becoming-world, love, must traverse dynamic opposites. It must not fall into gaps back into itself but press forward across Otherness. The gap of opacity, of poesis, or accident, of death// 220 Death is inherently linked with the rebozo as well. For centuries, broken-hearted mothers have wrapped their lifeless infants in them for burial and covered their faces with it to signify mourning. The use of the rebozo as a shroud was once so common in Mexico, many artisans created them solely for this purpose, whereas today, only a few remain. These special garments for the dead must also be infused with aroma de luto, the scent of mourning. A multi-step process, some ingredients are woven into the garment, such as spanish moss. Fabric may be exposed to an occasional smoking process where herbs like sage or rosemary that give off a pleasant odor are burned in close proximity. Finally, the threads may be soaked in cloves, rose petals, water lilies and cocoa.352 The rebozo, like mother tongue, herself arises in ceremony, within the Other-gap. She isn’t roses, or river // and she knows it. she is birth//death gather-er soul rupture mother errant love-mond(e). Act Accordingly abrazarme 352 Sarah Troop, “The Rebozo: Fashion, Feminism and Death,” Death & the Maiden, June 4, 2015, https://deadmaidens.com/2015/04/06/the-rebozo-fashion-feminism-and-death/. 221 6: Xilonen :: Xalaquia 222 . . . after a woman had been arrayed as the likeness of the gooddess Xilonen, "she entered at four places" -nauhcampa yn aquja, "or she entered the sand"- anoço xalaquja. Thus the entering at four places is a ceremony which is equated with entering the sand, i.e., the xalaquia ceremony. The Nahuatl text gives the meaning of the ceremony: “it was said 'she enters the sand' because in this way she made known her death -that on the morrow she would die–” ynic mitoa xalaqui, ic quimachtilia yn jmiquiz, in miquiz muztla. ~ Charles E. Dibble353 353 Charles E. Dibble, “The Xalaquia Ceremony,” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 14 (1980): 197. 223 When I began this project my daughter was nine. I knew she would come into her moontime in the next few years. I had already been preparing her. She knows the teachings. She watches. She waits. daughter young corn…354 maiz tobacco nopal 354 Xilonen means young/green corn (maize) - at the threshold of maturity. yellow corn. It is also the name of the resurgent Xicana coming of age ceremony. I draw upon remnants in Charles Dibble's, The Xalaquia Ceremony to dream into the relationship between coming of age and death. 224 0 directions she entered at four places -nauhcampa yn aquja 225 when we drove our car to the place she was twelve she made dolls from leaves and fruits placed them with titles on stumps It’s a mama and baby the usual we don’t fit in something’s different than then. her head aches Mama let’s go “I think I have sun stroke” A woman said, leaving so soon? My you’re a quiet one Mama let’s go tugging on my sleeve like she’s four not-twelve-almost-thirteen the usual we flee . . . 226 Ité . . . or Mexican though what do you mean - Mexican, with your tribal-card fistful of more-ness, of real-ité ité . . . you include First Nations offer them appearance my brown-ité in-your-estimation is the taken-always-as invader I don’t care that this was once Mexican territory I only care that the line, the wound in your head )that I awaken within( is an un-truth-ité “oh yes, the school is full of brown –mostly Hispanic though” though and some Pueblo kids though whispers her disappointment “the food here is a mix of Mexican you know . . .” the line demands Mexican be known :a category Other than “Your people . . .” what do you mean when you say, “you know . . . Mexican” Mexican is known, the known, as opposed to the deserving, the seen, the official the real the enrolled 227 • Before . . . we were all Indians(ios) then state by state, self-declaration, speaking effable-izing the effable-ité of what you call yourselves and yet your ear cannot hear what I might call myself other than Mexican, you know . . . the third world border-ité I am not allowed, unlike you whose parents and grandparents lived in prison camps the third world border-ité is what is different . . . so somehow we get lost according to lines in consciousness mapped out in echos-not-monde I feel you freeze when you sense my claim when I assert my brown-ité Mexican, you know you take another bite of your taco, oblivious of corn – Mexican though 228 Mole…. is a direction East :: chop tomatillos wrappers flying and flapping and we make beginnings conceive a small wish-paper text letters telling a love story unrequited South :: toast fire blackened longing chiles, garlic, onion, take the heat out open wounded breast roasting 229 West :: simmer where are you today, west? I have lost myself drowning like a sister-wife North :: savor today I arrived in a beginning familiar and raw again, like a longing for fire it tastes thick as blood calling out East 230 ONE earth she entered the sand - anofo xalaquia 231 On the way home we argue una llanta we sleep. the nap between blood between grief between shame between longing between her crown a flower her hips a bowl earth offering traces told truth it wasn’t heat stroke 232 Incarnation I incarnated in the brief spaces of eros crevices of thrust open palm reaching I was made from paradoxical flesh hearts yet to be tested like palms cupping water to lips I am an equation of longing and repulsion solved for the variable of flight fight like palms clenched around hips brown girl seed her arms jostling away the heartbreak busy hands palms psalms 233 recorded in secret un-said space impossible existence my certain likeness mirroring that quadratic curve of his length I stay hidden feet off earth and flower I am a calculation for angels spirit waters who speak in tongues confiding the slope of this mongrel revealing the curve of the universe longer broader than my shame. 234 Everheart For my maternal missionary grandmother Blanche Everhart Listen I am not in the shimmering leaves of trees against sky Nor am I an idea of some emotion I am not other than sand and loam not other than blood and salt or the periodic feeling that you’ll never be-long I am not just any heart not every heart I am your heart pivot, turning soft spot in the fontanel of your - longing you wish you were spiritual . . . you wish you could hear the voice of God like a Joan-of-Arc-Geronimo-priestess. even that strict brown-girl-hating grandmother of yours had her own heart maiden name erased in his embrace 235 Germanic feminine inheritance, a sign, a strand tracing back to that one yes her nine grandmothers behind you she stood blonde toes in meadows stone castle eruptions she was named that day raised up to sky touched on earth as offering as quest sacrifice as the last tie to the savage in you the one we cut from our chests 9 nobilities before traversing planet of one sun venus rising child of drums and songs and bells and smoke this is night and I am ever your heart. 236 "many women surrounded the woman [arrayed as the goddess Xilonen] and took her to offer incense at the four places" -cercábanla mu-chas mujeres; llevábanla en medio a ofrecer incienso a cuatro partes. ~ Charles E. Dibble355 355 Dibble, “The Xalaquia Ceremony,” 197. 237 TWO smoke arrayed as the goddess Xilonen - to offer incense 238 White Painted Woman we arrived in the afternoon with tobacco and other Gifts. the Summer before starting classes my family witnessed at the lighting storm small fire, always lit energy swirling coming of age sheoffers ) acatl; piñon; pollen; cacao; corn; copal she dies) atl four waters bloodmilktears– 239 Tetamazoleo - a c a t l - east; cane Necoc-Ixecan - t e c p a t l - north; obsidian knife Atenchicalean - c a l l i - west; house Xolloco - t o c h t l i - south. rabbit 240 Instead, Smoke Frozen, I hint and watch your subtle gestures of confusion the space between us grows becomes chalk like and dense marks on sidewalks in normal neighborhoods normal-ness a longing I will never taste stardust circles and hop scotch grids ankle socks and ribbons I try to just say it, but a hand covers my mouth a silence so familiar so without cause iforget I can talk instead I inhale… swallow smoke You say the American Indian genocide was the biggest in history That Indians don’t drink milk You look through me see only my not-you-ness see only conquistador alien immigrant I was washed from your skin sketches rinsed clean Is Coca cola Indian food? iwonder over and over and over drag after drag my tobacco In every way possible a food, an earth medicine I resist disappearing by disappearing you 241 Xingona Girl Smoke we gather on stoops we laugh with smoke curling dissipating visible to each other Xingona baddass path maker she smokes in the house inhales caminos roads that depart thighs touching, girls whisper secrets and slogans that opposite-of-dissipate . . . that infuse wander dried tiny white flowers crushed between fingertips tongues running along edges papers rolling crinkling laughter and relief are neighbors smoke opens this step stooped beneath us brown girls remember for each other sea sides, grasses, cacti anchors in this exile. 242 "The offering took place on the afternoon prior to her death" esta ofrenda. hacía a la tarde antes que muriese. "This offering was called xalaquia because she was to die the following day." A esta ofrenda llamaban xalaquia porque el día siguiente había de morir. ~ Charles E. Dibble356 356 Dibble, 198. 243 3. tomorrow on the afternoon prior - había de morir 244 gender: blood raw iaskyou to tell me i am beautiful you say it’s not authentic you are abovesuchdisplays i used to kiss you underyoureyes. we used to cross pinkies on mornings after my couldn't sleep-nessmade you redwithrage slowlyistoppedfindingleaks in softplacesmy own refusali am a woman bloodied again andagainandagainby rage misplaced there is salt in blood like tearsandhot hot madnessof a body's requital I quit you iquityou I requite/re-quiet I re-quiet me in a body olderthansalt forevered bloodand the leakingrage of your refusaltowitnessmybleeding your ownbreath I say iwanttobeacourtesan andyousay we should getdivorcedand yet i stay another dayanother 100another 1000 eachday i traverse the eternityofmotherhoodof bloodysilence I am blood andyouare breath incommensurates of skyandearthof bloody afterbirth gender: blood I am not yoursmoothneweternalchildI am the brown-fisted bleedingdragoncavern mybreath fire breathingbleedingyou away 245 Debt of Blood Nothing belongs or inheres to me my blood borrows each atom of its winding riverbed, pebbled fortuitously with speckled white starlight worries, concerns of cosmos next worldy wonder and too-muchness of here Starlight doesn’t actually belong to blood, Its heft is other than not light particle not wave If I lay my head back in my own red path like a teenager on her air mattress floating in viscosity there is no actual light only materiality like grease across my forearm wanting light. It’s a cosmic privation, a necessary loan. If I draw it, it would look like this: (there is a little sketch in my notebook) All sticky thickness, borrowed starlight speckles I am not my own. Light is not an inheritance of blood, at least not my blood. Maybe some girls have faerie magic liquid light cores, but mine is red black and swampy 246 borrowing is a debt. I owe all light to an outside thing, to a something I’m not will never be. My lack in blood, makes me thick, I will never slip across thresholds, slide into center, flow sweetly through channels. No. This body wants to rid itself of light, of the always need to remember, repay, return . . . I lay my head back, dip my black hair into yesterday’s cosmos calm the wanting (a little more here?) now a wanting to be out of debt a strand of subtle light 247 (M)Etzli :: Moon : Blood Nahua moon holds blood Nahua woman carries blood blood makes moon blood in moon moon around blood, before blood Nahua maiden midwife-warrior Cihuacoatl, Tlatlecutlé Tonantzin waters of woman grandmother moon bleeding names into being bleeding food for gods tearing herself in two mother of splitting selves babies bleeding moons names around hearts sangre Meztli daughter of moons. 248 because in this way she made known her death -that on the morrow she would die–” ynic mitoa xalaquia, ic quimachtilia yn jmiquiz, in miquiz muztla.357 357 Dibble, 197. 249 four death she would die - ynic mitoa xalaquia 250 susto & limpia trauma: effect the of an overwhelm not t-u-r-n-e-d m-e-t-a-b-o-l-i-z-e-d symbolic fright the unmetabolized w – a – n – t – i – n – g to be story story ≠ symbol wounds hide are truth’s too-large-for-the-world-ness they sink into waiting, offering hints and quiet calls the real among us, between us 251 ___________________________________________ it she comes to me so quietly at first I do not hear it her between my shoulder blades in the air to the upper front-ish side of my head it moves starts shaking until that spot begins to flee this not-healing isn’t personal it’s trauma’s refusal to show herself publicly to dive into the abyss of “abjection” for she is wise she is food she is reckoning and recompense she is soul-vation an etiquette of beings being. my body cannot forget my body holds it her, the visitor so that my psyche can be free(er) the body extracts a consequence holding spots speak like plants like the unborn, asking ___________________________________________ 252 there is a place I have never been the trees are huge the road is gravel air is damp light dusky I am chased I am trapped the child cannot leave my body. I’m caught everything is underground everything is old everything is still head by earth by our bodies this is not a past life this is not a right this is not ownership my body does its work lost pieces of soul do not last long all we need body-earth-psyche-ness susto will show us how limpia needs to be our bodies can follow again the not-voice-voice of all things you sing you dance yourself you dance your family your world you dance the universe(s) souls you dance the shocks away follow follow follow them . . . 253 Eating Our Ancestors Juriatikua Uariri I hesitate, pretend, apologize Juriatikua Juriatikua Juriatikua Juriatikua Juriatikua Uariri Uariri Uariri Juriatikua Uariri day - juriatikua dead - uariri I type letter by letter I read the tourist information and watch sentences float to meet me, to see me, my shame I sprang forth, blue corn in fields of yellow imitation consecration The dead I do know daily their scent and almost declaration that weeping is threshold that doors between places 254 borders of me-not-me home-not-home mirrors of cenpasuchil tiringuini tsitsiki infecting the day my father’s mother’s mother father’s mother walk, ride, heading away from songs and tears… I know nothing but orange the length of cenpasuchil quills scattering down, like husks I know nothing but the timbre of finality, of return, of dark dictionaries traversing generations I know nothing of red, real indios only taken truths made not-truth, a swerve so small, so necessary as another day, Juriatikua, melts under noon heat, walks across the line roaring her demands… 255 I am song a dischord a breath I am a trying-to unearth this unsightly self the always dying, wanting to die-ness of being between remembering and erasing between wearing red and sharing orange I am seed sifted and sorted and metabolized petals lost, black stalks light as breath planted too deeply or perhaps it was too shallow to settle shifting and wondering which way to catch light I am bread god-eating offering my blood up -– grains of an other god bread of missionaries and priests gold crosses on backs of them down deep soft metals seduce the me from them, inscribed instead in the eucharist, the pan the saint’s visitation 256 I am pulque tequila of back before, of the tomorrow’s emergence in my swallowing of spirits, spirits of the dead uncle, almost-dead father, struggling stranger-friend in drink, in staggering too much-ness of me small sip I am smoke now I listen to your breath in my breath, uncle, father, stranger tobacco cured and rolled inexpertly, but humbly enough for ancestors to speak smoke has wings and lips and tongue to share rescued words making assertions / sentences from nowhere to my throat breath speak I am surrender finally with flower and spirit and song and father again plucking me from fields returning me to my place of darkness Pátzcuaro, kernel of midnight azul I return to learn that it was all lost I beg the hue of flowers breath of smoke sacrifice of bread whisper to me the songs of all directions 257 7: Closing 258 When I introduce myself to my own people in my own language, I describe these things because it tells them what my responsibilities are and what my goal is, what I need to carry with me, what I project, what I teach and what I think about, what I must do and what I can't do. ~ Jeanette Armstrong358 We don’t need permission to be free. ~ Zapatista Army of National Liberation359 358 Armstrong, “Sharing One Skin” 359 Emil Keme, “For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die: Toward a Transhemispheric Indigeneity,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 5, no. 1 (2018): 42, https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.5.1.0042. 259 the pace and posture of permission As I went to sleep last night, I asked for a dream to teach me what I need to know about this place in order to raise up our temazcalli… in a good way. I am growing weary of this question – the tension between the call (what I must do) and the lack of permission (what I can’t do) feels unbearable today. I thought I would conclude this project with a final film, a final gesture, of raising the temazcal. So many pieces have come together – the place, the stones, the saplings, the community. I have even gathered some footage. But the poem resists. Permission has not come. yet. How does-one / do-I know permission has been granted to act, enact, or react? The subtitle of my collection of poetry is the pace and posture of permission. It recalls the four hours that Indígena Project participants spent creating our ceremonial altar before beginning. It remembers the processing of guilt, shame, and confusion. It honors the slowing-down-enough to apprehend and interrupt moments when we rush through/past/over instead of embodying each sacred gesture, when we perform for instead of with. Jeanette Armstrong’s what one must, and cannot, do represents an important interruption of the racing for, or away from, cultural and ceremonial restoration. The rhetoric and method of dream tending so indicative of the New Age is an apt example. This of course is not true in all cases, but I so often overhear individuals reading other people without permission, sharing dreams like 260 they are commodities rather than sacred utterances, or sharing them as if they are anything but completely mundane earth pieces, like they are miraculous super beings giving their bearers permission for anything. Dreams are merely “the unseen part of our existence as human beings.”360 They are not separate from being human they are not more-than-human. They have been made exotic by their erasure and re-invention as supernatural. Dreams are natural. Like people. Laying on the Earth is a question, a request, an invitation. Dreams accept. what one must, and cannot, do, to remember that permission bows. So, last night I could not dream. And I honor something deep in me that says, I cannot, I do not have permission to, ask for a dream in this way. My gut says, pay attention to all things seen and unseen and listen there. This turns out also to be the wisdom of raising the tamazcal, the earth-womb, honoring the pace and posture of permission. 360 Armstrong, “Sharing One Skin.” 261 Never rush because academia requires it. 262 Questions & answers 1. How is it possible for diasporic Indigenous women and mothers, to remember, recover and restory what has been lost in the last 500 years of colonization? • the possible womenremember 500stories 2. How can we distinguish true vision/apprehension of healthy culture from imagination/fantasy - given the reality that we are all affected and influenced by the destructive dominant narratives? • vision is givenfantasy narratives)affect (all) 3. When listening to cultural/ceremonial remnants, what distinguishes cultural misappropriation from the kind of honest appropriation necessary in restorying? • honest remnants re-misaapropriate/ listen 4. How does personal, collective, and ancestral trauma prevent, interrupt, or enhance the restoring and restorying of healing culture? • healing re/re/re/re/re/re and or per/col/anc/ ture 5. How does all this affect the cycle of ancestors so basically represented by birth and mothering? • mother // cycle \\ 263 freedom This closing chapter ends a cycle, and like all closings, opens another. All the complications of identity, all the accusations and call-outs, all the exile and un-belonging – it lives in our somas. The horrors, mark our bodies. recapitulation. the fight. death rescues We are traces of our great-grandmothers and before. Our screams, and our songs convert. We don’t need permission tobefree. 264 Emil Keme argues for a hemispheric claiming of America Abiayla meaning “land in full maturity” or “saved territory”361 while also honoring a plurality of particular, specific, distinct and unique peoples/identities. He proposes this “transhemispheric Indigenous bridge”362 in part to help mend the ways in which we actively or inadvertently participated in “the affirmation of Western values.”363 The gate-keeping of Indigeneity is complicated. In part because of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People’s assertion that we are only Indigenous if we belong to a tribe, if we are claimed. shame. silence. hiding. For as long as I can remember, since my first sweat lodge, since childhood dreaming, since my first visit to Mexico at seventeen, since my first encounter with the northern Elders, since laying on the earth, all this time . . . I have always felt my ancestors. I know it is wrong to abandon them, to not-claim them, to allow the un-belonging to remain embedded in my identity. I mean, is this not the existential echo that haunts so many Indigenous people, un-belonging, piercing remnants of removal, and relocation? All the ceremony I have ever experienced relies on a relationship with ancestors, the ancestors, my ancestors. 361 Keme, “For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die,” 42. 362 Keme, 43-44. 363 Keme, 45. 265 I have been known and claimed. by them. And Earth. there is no doubt . . . this writing releases requirement. Land listens. I speak – gesture world 266 A ceremonial leader told me that the P'urhépecha are people of the fire, like the Maya are people of the corn, we are of the fire, he told me. So, our ceremonies center on offerings to the fire. When I first went to Mexico, alone at seventeen, in search of my roots I ended up in northern Michoacan. It wasn’t until 30 years later that I learned my ancestors were from that part of Mexico, from inside the edges of P'urhépecha territory. In the meantime, I had come to learn some about Aztec culture as this is the general re-Indigenizing cultural offering for Xicano/a people. I always wondered why I didn’t quite feel right in the circle of Aztec dancers. The first time I really connected with P'urhépecha community I immediately felt comfortable. It had been a long road home, but my whole being recognized my arrival. The Elder said to me, “We are not warriors (guerrerros), we are guardianos (guardians).” He spoke of the gentleness and community nature of the temazcal they run and it felt good and right compared to the hot pressured ones of the Aztecs. I soon learned that the P'urhépecha were the only tribe the Aztecs wanted to conquer into their empire but couldn’t. According to Wikipedia, historically the P'urhépecha state was a stronghold against the Aztec Empire. Even the language of the P'urhépecha people is different from those of most other Mesoamerican Indigenous languages364 and they have maintained one of the strongest sovereign communities in all of Mexico. After years of trying to fit into the Aztec cultural restoration project, I suddenly discovered through somatic feedback combined with talking to family, elders and community members, why I felt resistance. I could stop feeling guilty and pressured and redirect my energies toward what my body recognized. It is my intention to use this same sense of body=earth/elements/cosmos in raising of the temazcal. 364 “Purépecha Language,” Wikipedia, last modified June 21, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pur%C3%A9pecha_language. 267 The last time I spent time in Mexico, I spotted two Temazcallis. One I had seen on previous visits, but it was never open when I went by. This time it was open, and I had a brief tour. The entry was filled with hanging baskets - at least a hundred - full of medicinal herbs all carefully labeled. It felt like a way was opening, the feeling was right, the atmosphere inviting. Nothing fancy. A temazcal . . . with a sign out front. That’s it. I made arrangements to return as soon as possible. I have another invitation nearby to learn to speak P'urhépecha and while practicing rebozo weaving. there is no rush. “A bolt of lightning is itself, but at the same time it may mean much more.”365 I quote Leslie Marmon Silko here to point out that even while we are nature, we are also ourselves – and much more. Nature is part of us, and each part of nature is also completely itself. This is the paradoxical-ness of reality. As I raise the temazcalli, I remember this call to balance my individual body and the body of the community, to listen to what feels imperative (what I must do) and to protocol (what I cannot do) and allow the energy formed in the friction between opposites to fuel my forward motion. “Contrary to existing proposals about global Indigeneity, which privilege exchanges primarily in English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese, my proposal intends to operate through an epistemic disobedience (Mignolo) that transcends the linguistic and geopolitical borders and generates alliances that lead us to constitute and materialize—like the Zapatista slogan—a world where many worlds can fit.”366 365 Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,” Antaeus 57 (1986): 884. 366 Keme, “For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die,” 47. 268 If we, as Indigenous people have rights to our cultural legacies, to use them as our own, then we have the right to move and gather, separate and divide. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Willard, Tania
The Earth is my Elder
Text
Moving Image